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The Casino di Villa Boncompagni Ludovisi (also known as the Villa Aurora or the Casino dell'Aurora) is a villa in Porta Pinciana, Rome, Italy.Measuring 2.200 square meters, it is all that remains of a country retreat, best known as Villa Ludovisi, established in the 16th century by Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte. The Boncompagni Ludovisi Collection. The most celebrated of the three collections of ancient sculpture displayed in the museum is the Boncompagni Ludovisi marble collection, acquired between 1621 and 1623 by Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi for his villa on the Quirinal Hill.

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The Casino dell'Aurora is the only portion spared from nineteenth-century demolition of the Villa Ludovisi (later Villa Boncompagni Ludovisi) in Rome. Originally the Casino, erected around 1570 and enlarged in the nineteenth century, was a three-story structure on a cruciform ground plan. During the pontificate of Pope Gregory XV Ludovisi the villa and its casino were used mainly for official functions such as dinners for the college of cardinals. The Casino was decorated by paintings on the ground floor and the second floor in the seventeenth century.

The ceiling of the central room on the ground floor was painted by Guercino depicting Aurora on Her Triumphal Chariot. This composition was a deliberate response to Guido Reni's Aurora in the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi in Rome. Guercino's coworker was Agostino Tassi who was responsible for the architecture (quadratura) painted in fresco technique. (Guercino painted in tempera instead of fresco.)

In the Stanza del Caminetto, a room adjacent to the central room, the centre of the ceiling shows a wreath of putti, the documented work by Antonio Circignani, called il Pomarancio (1560-1620). It is framed by four landscape pictures painted by Paul Bril, Giovanni Battista Viola, Domenichino, and Guercino. These were produced in a kind of competition between the four painters.

Casino Boncompagni Ludovisi Roma

The ceiling painting in the former library on the ground floor, painted by Giovanni Luigi Valesio, depicts crowds of putti with intertwining bands whose isolated letters produce Cardinal Ludovisi's name and title.

The ceiling painting in the Sala della Fama, the central hall on the second floor, is entirely allegorical. The central picture is designed as a fictive opening with only a few figures. In the centre hovers the personification of Fame in billowing robes, holding in her outstretched hands an extremely long trumpet and an olive branch as a symbol of peace. In the lower part of the picture space personifications of Honour (Honos) and Virtue (Virtus) are seated on a dark gray cloud.

A tiny and very low room on the second floor, a space that the owner Ludovico Ludovisi used as a 'studiolo,' contains the only wall painting by Caravaggio.

In its combination of heraldic and allegorical elements, the pictorial program in the Casino dell'Aurora anticipates the pictorial idiom later perfected by Pietro da Cortona in the Palazzo Barberini.

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Casino Di Villa Boncompagni Ludovisi Rome

The most celebrated of the three collections of ancient sculpture displayed in the museum is the Boncompagni Ludovisi marble collection, acquired between 1621 and 1623 by Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi for his villa on the Quirinal Hill. Alongside the sculptures in the 17th-century collection, the piece that is probably the most famous is the Ludovisi Throne, recovered in 1887 during the urban development works undertaken in the area surrounding the villa. In 1901, the Italian Government acquired 104 sculptures from the Boncompagni Ludovisi family, and these were exhibited for a lengthy period in the Small Cloister of the Charterhouse in the Museum of the Baths of Diocletian. They were then transferred to the Palazzo Altemps, a setting where they can be shown to maximum advantage, integrated into the elegant rooms of the stately mansion.