By degrees, insincerity--rather towards himself than towards others--became such a habit of Andrea's mind, that finally he was incapable of being wholly sincere or of regaining dominion over himself.
The death of his father left him alone at the age of twenty, master of a considerable fortune, separated from his mother, and at the mercy of his passions and his tastes.

He spent fifteen months in England.

His mother married again, and he returned to Rome from choice.
Rome was his passion--not the Rome of the Caesars, but the Rome of the Popes--not the Rome of the Triumphal Arches, the Forums, the Baths, but the Rome of the Villas, the Fountains, the Churches.

He would have given all the Colosseums in the world for the Villa Medici, the Campo Vaccino for the Piazza di Spagna, the Arch of Titus for the Fountain of the Tortoises.

The princely magnificence of the Colonnas, the Dorias, the Barberinis, attracted him far more than the ruins of imperial grandeur.
It was his dream to possess a palace crowned by a cornice of Michael Angelo's, and with frescos by the Carracci like the Farnese palace--a gallery of Raphaels, Titians and Domenichini like the Borghese; a villa like that of Alessandro Albani, where deep shadowy groves, red granite of the East, white marble from Luni, Greek statues and Renaissance pictures should weave an enchantment round some sumptuous amour of his.
In an album of 'Confessions' at his cousin's, the Marchesa d'Ateleta, against the question--'What would you most like to be ?' he had written, 'A Roman prince.' Arriving in Rome about the end of September, he set up his 'home' in the Palazzo Zuccari, near the Trinita de' Monti, where the obelisk of Pius VI.