In a corner of Villa Torlonia, the park on via Nomentana, there is a house that looks as if it came out of a book of fairy tales: turrets, loggias, porticoes, coloured majolica and windows full of painted glass. It is called the Casina delle Civette, the little house of the owls, and the name comes from two stylised night birds among trails of ivy, designed in 1914 for a stained-glass window.
Today the house is the museum of Art Nouveau stained glass: fifty-four original windows put back in their places after the restoration, another eighteen bought and shown on stands, and more than a hundred preparatory drawings. On Mondays the Casina is closed, and until 29 November 2026 the ticket also includes an exhibition on one of the four artists who designed the windows.
Before you look for the six windows in this guide, it is worth understanding what kind of house you are standing in front of.
What links a house of Art Nouveau stained glass to the emblem of the Italian Republic?
Let’s begin!
From Swiss hut to medieval village
In 1840 the architect Giuseppe Jappelli designed the house for prince Alessandro Torlonia as a Swiss Hut: a rustic retreat, with an exterior of tufa blocks and inner walls painted in tempera to imitate rocks and wooden planks. It was a romantic garden folly, the kind nineteenth-century villas allowed themselves next to the real palace.
From 1908 Giovanni Torlonia junior had it transformed by the architect Enrico Gennari, who turned it into a refined residence, with large windows, small loggias, porticoes, turrets and decoration in majolica and coloured glass. From 1917 Vincenzo Fasolo added the structures on the south front. The prince lived there until his death, in 1938.
There is a misunderstanding to clear up straight away. Mussolini lived at Villa Torlonia, but in the Casino Nobile, the large neoclassical building of the park: the Casina delle Civette was the prince’s house, and the dictator never lived in it.
After 1938 the house began to fall apart. Between 1944 and 1947 the villa was requisitioned by the Anglo-American command, which handed it back devastated; in 1978 the City of Rome bought it, and in 1991 a fire, together with thefts and vandalism, left the Casina almost in ruins. The restoration lasted from 1992 to 1997. To rebuild the rooms, photographs from the thirties and from 1978 were used, along with the reports written in 1944 and in 1947, when the house was requisitioned and then returned.
Look at it knowing this: the rooms you walk through are largely a documented reconstruction, and the stained glass is the part that really went back where it belonged.
1. Cambellotti’s owls, which gave the house its name
The window where everything starts was designed by Duilio Cambellotti in 1914, for the Room of the Owls: two stylised owls among trails of ivy.
From 1916 the documents call the building «Casina delle Civette», and from then on the theme became almost an obsession: owls in the decoration, owls in the furniture, owls scattered in every corner of the house. The most enjoyable game of the visit is to look for them room by room, and you will find more than you expect.
The theme starts before the door. Under the wooden canopy of one of the entrances there is a coloured lunette with an owl on a branch, three young in the nest and a second bird in flight, and beneath it runs an inscription in Gothic lettering: «Sapienza e solitudine», wisdom and solitude. Look up before you step inside, because it is the house’s visiting card.
Inside, in the Room of the Owls, besides the 1914 window there is a second window with owls, again by Cambellotti, from 1918. Compare them: they are the same subject four years apart, drawn by the same hand for the same room.
2. The Room of the Nail, where you understand how a window was born
Stay on the ground floor for the Room of the Nail, which takes its name from another Cambellotti window, of 1914-1915: a large nail wrapped in vines and bunches of grapes.
Who really made a stained-glass window, the painter or the glazier?
Both, and this room tells it better than a label. Here the museum displays the working drawings, which show how an idea became glass: the artist’s sketch, then the full-size cartoon, then the cutting of the coloured glass and its joining with lead. Cambellotti, Bottazzi, Grassi and Paschetto designed; all the windows in the house, though, came out of the workshop of Cesare Picchiarini, who cut the glass, painted it and assembled it.
Remember it for the rest of the visit: every window you see has two authors, and the second is always the same one.
3. Bottazzi’s peacocks, in the Room of the Cyclamens
Umberto Bottazzi designed The Peacocks in 1912, for the Room of the Cyclamens, and among the signed windows in this guide it is the oldest. It is a lunette divided into three: in the centre two blue peacocks face each other on either side of a cup, and at the sides more peacocks, green and brown, fill the half-circle to the edge, with tails full of blue and violet eyes.
Look up at the peacocks and then down at the floor. The room is named after the cyclamens that decorate its floor, and here you understand the principle that holds the whole house together: every room has a theme, and the theme passes from the glass to the stucco, from the majolica to the floors. The swallows, the roses and the clovers you will meet further on are not scattered decoration: they are the names of the rooms.
Notice, too, what the subjects meant. Grapes and ivy spoke of fertility and growth, roses of beauty and passing time, swallows and migrating birds of the return of the seasons.
4. Vittorio Grassi’s Idol, in the prince’s bedroom
Go up to the first floor, into the prince’s bedroom: on its window is The Idol by Vittorio Grassi, from 1918, with figures in the Egyptian taste.
In a house of ivy, roses and birds it is the window that surprises you most, and it says something about Art Nouveau that the others keep quiet: that taste took its motifs from everywhere, from botany to antiquity, and a Roman prince could sleep under an Egyptian idol without anyone finding it strange.
On the same floor do not miss the Little Salon of the Satyrs, an octagonal room with satyrs on the skylight and a Cambellotti window with ivy and ribbons, also from 1918.
5. Paschetto’s Balcony of Roses, and the emblem of the Republic
The windows of the Balcony of Roses are by Paolo Paschetto, from 1920: roses, ribbons and butterflies.
Paschetto is the artist who designed the emblem of the Italian Republic, the five-pointed star on a cogwheel between an olive branch and an oak branch, the one you find on every document of the Italian state. He designed it almost thirty years after these roses, and until 29 November 2026 the Casina devotes to him the exhibition Sotto una buona stella, included in the ticket.
Look at how Paschetto stylises a flower for a private balcony, and then think of the emblem: the hand is the same. By Paschetto, on the ground floor, there is also Ali e fiamme, wings and flames, in the Room of the Clovers.
6. The windows that were never in this house
The last thing to look for is the collection, and it changes the meaning of the museum. Besides the 54 original windows returned to their places in the restoration, the museum keeps 18 acquired windows, shown on freestanding supports, and 105 sketches and preparatory cartoons.
Why does a stained-glass museum keep windows that were never in this house?
Because the Casina does not tell only its own story. With the acquired pieces and the cartoons, the museum documents Italian stained glass of the early twentieth century as a whole, and some of the cartoons are projects that never became glass. In the hall on the ground floor there is Cambellotti’s large cartoon I guerrieri, or Visione eroica, and among the drawings are those for a series Cambellotti never made, L’alba, il giorno e la notte.
Stop at the cartoons before you leave. They are the point where you see the window as its author saw it, before Picchiarini’s workshop translated it into glass and lead. Then look for the workshop’s window with the swallows, from around 1914: black birds flying among white clouds and golden leaves, the same subject that on the first floor, in the Room of the Swallows, is modelled in stucco.
Practical information
Details checked on 21 September 2026 on the official website, museivillatorlonia.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. The ticket for the Casina alone costs 10.50 euros full price and 7 reduced, and until 29 November 2026 it includes the Paschetto exhibition: after that date the price may change. The reduced ticket is for, among others, those aged 6 to 18 and holders of the Roma Pass. The combined ticket with the Casino Nobile, the Casino dei Principi and the Serra Moresca costs 17 euros and 13 reduced, and is not sold in July and August. There is only one ticket office, at the Casino Nobile, so you buy your ticket there before walking to the Casina. Anyone buying online or through the 060608 call centre pays 1 euro booking fee, and those tickets cannot be refunded or changed. Free admission. Since February 2026 residents of Rome and the Metropolitan City go in free on showing a document at the desk, and on the first Sunday of the month free admission applies only to them. Holders of the MIC card also go in free. Opening hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday 9:00-19:00, and last admission is at 18:00. It stays closed on Mondays, on 1 May and on 25 December. Getting there. Villa Torlonia has its main entrance at via Nomentana 70, and the park is open to walk through. The most convenient metro B stop is Bologna. The City’s call centre answers on 060608. How long to allow. The six windows in this guide need an hour. Add half an hour for the Paschetto exhibition, and a whole afternoon if you take the combined ticket and see the Casino Nobile too.
Where to go from here
The rest of the park, with the Casino Nobile where Mussolini lived and the story of the family, is in Villa Torlonia and its enchanted houses. A few streets away is the other great chapter of Roman Art Nouveau, the fantastical buildings of the Coppedè district, which is free and in the open air.
If you are interested in twentieth-century decorative arts gathered in a house, the closest in spirit is the Casa Museo Boncompagni Ludovisi, between couture and furnishings. To find your way among all the city’s museums there is Museums in Rome: the 8 not to miss.
Photo credits: the facade is by Gaux (CC BY-SA 4.0); the side with the gables is by Greymouser (CC BY-SA 4.0); the entrance lunette, the peacocks and the swallows are by Sailko (CC BY 3.0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
