This spectacular book offers a scintillating, visually outstanding tour of more than 65 of the world's most fascinating houses. Massimo Listris' stunning photographs vary between sweeping panoramas of the houses in their glorious settings to close-ups of specific rooms, furniture and design details, and they span homes around the world, from India to France, from Morocco to Sweden, from the USA to the UK. Unprecedented in scope and scale, this book will be devoured by anyone with an interest in interior design and architecture, and those many thousands of people who enjoyed "The Way We Live", also published by Thames & Hudson.

Villa Albani Torlonia, with its collections, the Italian garden, and the hemicycle of the Kaffeehaus, is a sublime testimony of that particular antiquarian taste which came to the fore in the mid-eighteenth century, that for which Rome became a favourite destination on the Grand Tour. The classicist dream of Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692 1779), was preserved thanks to the Torlonia family, who purchased the villa in 1866, enlarging the collection and the gardens and restoring the most important cardinal residence of the eighteenth century. More than 300 images by the great Italian master Massimo Listri recount the history of this extraordinary cultural heritage for the very first time. An immersive journey leads the reader between its collections of ancient masterpieces. Statues, bas-reliefs, and fountains are ensconced between the various buildings and gardens of the villa in a composition of environments, landscapes, and works of art forever waiting to be discovered.