From 26 March to 26 September 2010, Villa del Principe, the largest and most sumptuous noble residence in Genoa will host the exhibition entitled Caravaggio and the art of flight. Landscape painting in the Doria Pamphilj Villas. Around eighty paintings - some never displayed before - document how the history of the collections and the patronage of the famous Genoese-Roman dynasty has been characterised, throughout its long history, by the construction and decoration of magnificent extra-urban villas, today, acclaimed national monuments.

The collections of Rome and Genoa host great masterpieces of landscape painting. For over twenty generations, prominent representatives of the family have guided the taste and aesthetics of the Italian cultural elite, through extraordinary works of art which, for both number and quality, are of remarkable importance for European art.

The exhibition explores an aspect of this ideal of extra-urban life by collecting, for the first time ever, landscape paintings once conceived to accompany moments of pleasure and relax. The most striking of the works is certainly Caravaggio's masterpiece Flight to Egypt, once situated in the Villa del Bel Respiro in Rome.

The exhibition, which opens with a significant sequence of works from the XVI century Villa Centurione Doria in Pegli near Genoa, displays pictorial cycles painted from the mid 1600's onwards specially for the family villas. A less known aspect of papal Rome will also be explored, through works of a particular landscape genre, such as marine and storm landscapes painted by artists who were highly esteemed at the time.

The palace in Nettuno and the Anzio casino fell under the patronage of Camillo's eldest son, Giovanni Battista, and especially of his grandchild.
The Ripa Grande Villa, the dwelling of the famous Donna Olimpia, also hosted a small collection which completed the project of fluvial villa and garden of delights, along the Tiber. Among the paintings that decorated it, works by Francesco da Ponte, known as Il Bassano, and by the renowned landscapist Herman van Swanevelt.

A collection of photographs, taken for a new extra-urban family building is also on display, expressing the hope that the antique works of art on show may adapt to the needs of contemporary age.