THE CURSE of the CARAVAGGIO

The master's only ceiling mural resides in this grand palazzo, where a dynastic feud between Roman nobility and Texan moxie is the talk of the Eternal City.

- JAMES MCAULEY

Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, seen above, is the crown jewel of the Villa Aurora, where Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi (pictured) is at the center of an epic inheritance squabble.

If Henry James and Larry McMurtry ever collaborated on a novel, the heroine would look something like Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi, née Carpenter. She is the Texan widow of an Italian prince and the current resident of the Aurora, a stunning Roman villa worth half a billion dollars that's now at the center of a bitter family feud. Her story is The Portrait of a Lady meets The Last Picture Show, as if it were Jacy Farrow instead of Isabel Archer who set sail for Europe to seek her fortune in the somnolent splendor of the crumbling old world.

It's also a fable about the dark side of the continental escape, about what can happen if you stay too long. Because just at the moment when the principessa from the Lone Star State seems to have finally proven everyone back home wrong, she is poised to lose it all.