Historic villa linked to the Aguet family and to the presence in San Felice Circeo of Prince Stanisław Poniatowski, who between 1808 and 1822 promoted major urban works in the village, including the heightening of the Templar Tower and the installation of the famous six-hour clock. With Poniatowski’s arrival, San Felice gradually lost its look of a purely fortified village and became a place of noble holidays, of which Villa Aguet is one of the witnesses.
On 20 October 1713 Michelangelo Caetani sold the fief of San Felice to Prince Francesco Maria Ruspoli, who held it until 1718, when the Apostolic Chamber exercised its right of pre-emption over the Circeo.
The Papal States bought the fief for 100,000 scudi and from 1721, at the wish of Pope Innocent XIII, began a series of works to improve the very precarious living conditions of the population, including the excavation to uncover the ancient channel linking Lake Paola with the sea.
However, once the Apostolic Chamber had recovered San Felice, the fief was leased out several times, sometimes to people who used their power entirely to the detriment of the population, who were taxed, impoverished and reduced to bare subsistence.
The situation changed radically on 13 February 1808, when the Circeo was sold to Prince Stanisław Poniatowski for 86,253 scudi.
Although he ruled the Circeo for less than twenty years, his name is deeply rooted in collective memory and in the town’s place names, as Poniatowski was an enlightened promoter of several works that truly improved the lives of the population, which had grown considerably and for which he built new houses in the lower part of the town.
The prince also raised the Baronial Palace, moved the clock from the palace gateway to the Templar Tower and demolished the ruined bastions inside and outside the Historic Centre.
San Felice thus lost the look of a fortified village that had marked it since the Middle Ages, becoming instead a pleasant place to live, as we know it today. The prince, a keen hunter, also built his hunting lodge, surrounded by vegetation, in today’s Aguet park; in fact the villa of the same name was built on exactly the same spot, using the existing structures.
James Aguet, a wealthy Swiss banker, bought the former fief of the Circeo in 1898 and lived there permanently until his death in 1932. One of his main activities was reclaiming the lowland on his estate, and he was among the first to raise the need for a definitive, modern solution to the spread of the marshes in the Agro Pontino.
Villa Aguet lies in the thick wood along the downhill side of Via del Faro, its elegant bulk peeping out through the trees. It rises on three floors decorated with round arches: on the first floor the arches are blind, while on the second they open onto an elegant, airy arcaded terrace.
What makes the villa unique is its wonderful wood of manna ash and elms, crossed by many paths that intersect to form a maze, designed and created by Prince Poniatowski. He also built, further down, an unusual rectangular structure with a large oval window called the “Occhio di bue” (bull’s eye), with a remarkable echo and a wonderful view over the sea and the harbour.