No one wants the Villa Aurora?
January 18 2022
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Today's auction of the aforementioned Villa Aurora failed to find a buyer. The asking price had been in the region of €471m (with bidding set to start at €353m).* The sale has been rescheduled to April with a 20% price reduction.
According to the article linked above:
Alessandro Zuccari, a history professor at Sapienza University in Rome who oversaw the valuation of the mural, said: “I’m not surprised there were no bids, in fact I would have been amazed if a buyer had come forward. The price is too high. Let’s see what happens in April, but I doubt anyone will come forward then – what would someone like Bill Gates do with Villa Aurora, especially with all the extra costs?”
* - I'm grateful to a reader who has corrected me on this point.
Update - A reader has been in touch with the following idea:
DIVIDE AND CONQUER!
....
Do you remember how Lillie Langtry dealt with that old warship that she was gifted? She divided it up and sold it off in bits and pieces, by category. So, all the hardware/doorknobs/etc in one auction/sale; all the furniture in another; all the armaments in yet another. And she made quite a profit out of that 'white elephant'. THAT is how we would have stage-managed this Villa Aurora business. Those two ceiling paintings can be detached so as to be sold and then viewed in a museum-like setting. (That is exactly what NG/London did with the Tiepolo ceiling painting rediscovered in the Egyptian Embassy in Mayfair in the 1960s).
That is one way to do it, I suppose.
