Italy has never wanted for pleasure palaces. At Silvio Berlusconi’s mansion in Arcore, outside Milan, attendees stripteased and beyond at the so-called Bunga Bunga festivities hosted by the former prime minister, who still insists that nothing untoward ever happened at the “elegant parties.” Five centuries earlier, Agostino Chigi, a financier to popes, had Raphael fresco the walls of his palazzo on the Tiber, a place where princes, cardinals, and courtesans feasted on luxurious banquets, and one another.
But to find Italian history’s ultimate animal house, you have to visit the Rome headquarters of the National Insurance and Assistance Body for Doctors and Dentists. Here, in the Piazza Vittorio section of the city, 13 feet under the gleaming corporate lobby of the country’s leading medical pension fund, are the restored ruins of Casa Caligula.
