In 1612 the twenty-one-year-old widow Olimpia Maidalchini married the forty-nine-year-old nobleman, Pamphilio Pamphili, and moved to the old manse that had been in his family since 1367.  Pamphilio, who had apparently never married, was forced to put his neck in the noose and marry a rich woman to repair his family’s lost fortunes.

“Of course one must sometimes manure one’s estates,” sniffed one seventeenth-century noblewoman in reference to such marriages.  The manure for the Pamphili estate was to be Olimpia.  She, in return, became a Roman noblewoman.

The house she moved into had an excellent location, on the corner of the Piazza Navona in the heart of Rome.  But it was a decrepit, cobbled-together thing, narrow and unimpressive.  In the illustration at the top right, sketched in 1612, the Pamphili house is shown on the left, separated from its neighbor on the right by a small alley.

But Olimpia, with her money and connections, was not content to live in a house like that.  When her exertions made her brother-in-law a cardinal in 1630, Olimpia expanded the house, buying the two neighboring buildings and combining the three with a harmonious facade, creating a true palazzo triple the size of her previous home.  When Gianbattista Pamphili became pope in 1644, she bought two more buildings and doubled the size of her home again. She now lived in an impressive palace, eighteen windows across, with large rooms painted by Rome's top artists. Her ballroom was a hundred feet long, and her music room sixty feet square.

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