The road opposite the gateway leading to the Camp is bordered on the left by the buildings belonging to the Railway Station, beyond which is the entrance to the grounds of the Villa Massimo Negroni, which possessed a delightful terrace, fringed with orange-trees—a most agreeable sunny walk in winter—and many pleasant shady nooks and corners for summer, but which has been mutilated and stripped of all its beauties since the Sardinian rule. In a part of this villa beyond the railway but still visible from hence, is a colossal statue of Minerva (generally called "Rome"), which is a relic of the residence here of Cardinal Felix Perretti, who as a boy had watched the pigs of his father at Montalto, and who lived to mount the papal throne as Sixtus V. The pedestal of the statue bears his arms,—a lion holding three pears in its paw. Here, with her husband's uncle, lived the famous Vittoria Accoramboni, the wife of the handsome Francesco Perretti, who had been vainly sought in marriage by the powerful and ugly old Prince Paolo Orsini. It was from hence that her young husband was summoned to a secret interview with her brothers on the slopes of the Quirinal, where he was cruelly murdered by the hired bravos of her first lover. Hence also Vittoria went forth—on the very day of the installation of Sixtus V.—to her strange second marriage with the murderer of her husband, who died six months after, leaving her with one of the largest fortunes in Italy—an amount of wealth which led to her own barbarous murder through the jealousy of the Orsini a month afterwards.
Here, after the election of her brother to the papacy, lived Camilla, the sister of Sixtus V., whom he refused to recognise when she came to him in splendid attire as a princess, but tenderly embraced when she reappeared in her peasant's wimple and hood. From hence her two granddaughters were married,—one to Virginius Orsini, the other to Marc-Antonio Colonna, an alliance which healed the feud of centuries between the two families.
In later times the Villa Negroni was the residence of the poet Alfieri.
The principal terrace ends near a reservoir which belonged to the baths of Diocletian.
"As one looks from the Villa Negroni windows, one cannot fail to be impressed by the strange changes through which this wonderful city has passed. The very spot on which Nero, the insane emperor-artist, fiddled while Rome was burning, has now become a vast kitchen-garden, belonging to Prince Massimo (himself a descendant, as he claims, of Fabius Cunctator), where men no longer, but only lettuces, asparagus, and artichokes, are ruthlessly cut down. The inundations are not for mock sea-fights among slaves, but for the peaceful purposes of irrigation. In the bottom of the valley, a noble old villa, covered with frescoes, has been turned into a manufactory for bricks, and part of the Villa Negroni itself is now occupied by the railway station. Yet here the princely family of Negroni lived, and the very lady at whose house Lucrezia Borgia took her famous revenge may once have sauntered under the walls, which still glow with ripening oranges, to feed the gold fish in the fountain,—or walked with stately friends through the long alleys of clipped cypresses, or pic-nicked alla Giornata on lawns which are now but kitchen-gardens, dedicated to San Cavolo."—Story's Roba di Roma.
The lower part of the Villa Negroni, and the slopes towards the Esquiline, were once celebrated as the Campus Esquilinus, a large pauper burial-ground, where bodies were thrown into pits called puticoli,[246] as is still the custom at Naples. There were also tombs here of a somewhat pretentious character: "those probably of rich well-to-do burgesses, yet not great enough to command the posthumous honour of a roadside mausoleum."[247] Horace dwells on the horrors of this burial-ground, where he places the scene of Canidia's incantations:—
"Nec in sepulcris pauperum prudens anus
Novemdiales dissipare pulveres."
Epod. xvii. 47.
'Has nullo perdere possum
Nec prohibere modo, simul ac vaga luna decorum
Protulit os, quin ossa legant, herbasque nocentes.
Vidi egomet nigrâ succinctam vadere pallâ
Canidiam, pedibus nudis passoque capillo,
Cum Saganâ majore ululantem; pallor utrasque
Fecerat horrendas aspectu,
. . . . . . .
Serpentes atque videres
Infernas errare canes; lunamque rubentem,
Ne foret his testis, post magna latere sepulcra."
Hor. Sat. i. 8'
The place was considered very unhealthy until its purification by Mæcenas.
"Huc prius angustis ejecta cadavera cellis
Conservus vili portanda locabat in arcâ.
Hoc miseræ plebi stabat commune sepulcrum,
Pantolabo scurræ, Nomentanoque nepoti.
Mille pedes in fronte, trecentos cippus in agrum
Hîc dabat; heredes monumentum ne sequeretur.
Nunc licet Esquiliis habitare salubribus, atque
Aggere in aprico spatiari; quo modo tristes
Albis informem spectabant ossibus agrum."
Hor. Sat. i. 8.