Italy lowers price for 16th century Roman villa after first auction fails

Rome: An Italian tribunal lowered the minimum price for a 16th century Roman villa that boasts Caravaggio’s only fresco after the first auction failed to attract any bids on Tuesday.

The base price for the Casino dell’Aurora will be 376.8 million euros ($427 million), a court official told Bloomberg, when the prized villa comes under the hammer again on April 7. This implies a minimum bid of 282 million euros.

An Italian court ordered that the villa, also known as the Casino di Villa Boncompagni Ludovisi, be put up for auction after the property became the subject of an inheritance fight among the Prince Nicolo Boncompagni Ludovisi’s heirs. It had initially been valued 471 million euros.

The 2,800 square meter (30,000 square feet) villa sits on a 6,000 square meter lot close to the Via Veneto in central Rome. The Caravaggio fresco was estimated to be worth at least 300 million euros alone.

In the last few weeks Italian politicians, academics and regular citizens have appealed to Prime Minister Mario Draghi to scrap the auction. An online petition urging the government to use European funds to protect “what belongs to Italy” reached more than 38,000 signatures within days.