The Villa del Priorato di Malta stands on the Aventine Hill in Rome, overlooking the Tiber. A fortified Benedictine monastery occupied the site in the tenth century, and it later passed to the Templars and then to the Knights Hospitallers. It was rebuilt radically between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In 1765 Giovanni Battista Piranesi finished the screen of obelisks and steles, the monumental entrance and the redesign of the church of Santa Maria del Priorato. Cardinal Carlo Rezzonico, a nephew of Pope Clement XIII, commissioned the entrance screen. The church may be the earliest Neoclassical example in Rome.
A keyhole in the central gate frames the dome of Saint Peter's Basilica along a cypress-lined avenue. Italy granted the villa extraterritorial status in 1869. It is one of two seats of the government of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and houses the Order's embassy to Italy.
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