Most people leave their stamp on a house. They move in with ideas. They buy wood and paint. They make “updates” and “refurbish,” until, one day, their house becomes a little museum of personal tastes. But there are some houses so steeped in the gluey soup of  civilization that they reshape the lives of their owners.

Her Serene Highness Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi, Principessa di Piombino, XIII — better known to Texans and New Yorkers as Rita Jenrette (just call her Rita) — is a victim of such a house.

For the last 18 years, she has resided at Rome’s Villa Aurora, the 500-year resting place of the patrician Ludovisi family — Rita, an American by birth, married the late prince Nicolò Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi in 2009.

It’s very likely the most expensive private house in the world and it’s scheduled to be auctioned by the Italian government on Jan. 18 with a starting bid of roughly $534 million. If it sells for that eye-popping price it will beat out monster deals in Hong Kong and London — and set a world record.

It’s no wonder why. Steps from the Spanish Steps, a penny’s throw from the Trevi Fountain, in the backyard of the Villa  Borghese gardens, Villa Aurora — known by snobs as Casino di Villa Boncompagni Ludovisi — was built from the remains of an even larger estate in 1570 by Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte.

The cardinal, who sold the home to the Ludovisi family, was a patron of that king of chiaroscuro, Caravaggio — who limned his only oil-on-plaster ceiling painting “Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto” in the villa using his own self-portrait for each of the god’s faces. That painting alone is worth a fortune, but the 32,000-square-foot palace’s 40-odd rooms are spritzed with works by dozens of other Renaissance artists including Guercino — who‘s painting “Aurora” gives the house its nickname.

In fact, it’s so layered in historic detritus that  trifles like the Michelangelo sculpture in the garden; the portion of Julius Caesar’s famed Gardens of Sallust under the home; the art-filled “Landscape” room; the 150,000 historic documents, including letters written by Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI; the rosewood table handed down from Ugo Boncompagni, the future Pope Gregory XIII, creator of the Gregorian calendar; the inexplicably unexplored secret passages; and the numerous ghost sightings, barely get a mention in the piles of press the home has received over the last decade.

“Never would I have dreamed that I would have married one of the most illustrious, important princes in the Holy Roman Empire,” Rita, 71, who lives  in the sprawling palace  home with her staff of four and family of  four bichon frises Henry James, George Washington, Mi Lady and Joy,  told The Post. “What an honor this has been. What a golden moment in my life.”

For the last decade, Rita says that the house has been an all encompassing obsession.
When she arrived in 2003 the villa was crumbling. There was water damage from the leaky roof and cracks in the frescos. Peeling plaster revealed glimpses of other artworks yet to be uncovered. “I found a Chinese plate that goes back to the Ming Dynasty,” Rita said of her hunts through the house. “We put a camera through a little hole in the ceiling and discovered a fresco of Pope Gregory XIII reading. In another ceiling we found another painting from the 1570s. There is so much left to discover.”

Asked how many bedrooms and bathrooms are in the villa, Rita admits that she isn’t sure. She thinks there may be 11 bathrooms but some of the house  is still in disrepair or closed off for renovation.  

To save the crumbling masterpiece she helped secure a nearly $11 million grant from the government.  She’s spent the intervening years reverently researching and painstakingly preserving. Her first step was to work with Rutgers University to digitize 1,000 years of paper  archives in the home. She’s lectured on its history at universities around the world to drum up interest in further scholarship. She speaks about visits with Oxford dons and Harvard heavyweights with a bubbly enthusiasm that house guests like Madonna, Bette Midler  and the emir of Qatar just don’t elicit. She even saved the estate’s trees.

“They were trying to cut down one of our trees and I ran downstairs in my bathrobe and said, ‘Don’t you dare touch that tree!’ Henry James sat there. Gogol, Tchaikovsky and Hawthorne were here. Don’t you dare touch that tree!’,” she recalled, noting that in the 18th and 19th centuries the much larger estate was a stopping point on the gentleman’s “Grand Tour” of Europe. “They  said, ‘She’s a crazy American.’ I told them, ‘I’m not a crazy American. I’m a crazy Texan and you’re about to find out what that means.’ ”

But for Rita, owning Villa Aurora is something like Act X in a Technicolor, stranger-than-fiction life story.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, Rita immersed herself in the ultra-square Republican politics of the Nixon era. She worked as director of research for the Republican Party of Texas. She became the opposition research director of the Republican National Committee. In 1976, she married Democratic whip John Jenrette of South Carolina, who went down in the FBI bribery sting Abscam in 1980.

Six months later she popped up laced in lingerie on the cover of Playboy, next to the headline, “The Liberation of a Congressional Wife” — told with picante pictures, of course. The same year she published the tantalizing tell-all “My Capitol Secrets.” Then came minor acting roles on shows like “Fantasy Island,” and tabloid TV jobs on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and “A Current Affair.”

Her next act was New York City real estate, where she was quickly dubbed a “power broker” in the trades. In 1998, she helped sell the General Motors Building to Donald Trump for $800 million.

Then, in 2002, she got a call from  Nicolò. He  was working on a hotel deal in Rome and had read about her in the real estate trades. Rita says there was an instant connection. Just a year later she had moved into his family’s ancestral pile.

“Nicolò was really the love of my life,” she said of her husband who passed in 2018, unleashing an ugly legal battle with her step children over the home that, she said, “makes the show ‘Succession’ look like child’s play.” Rita owns 50 percent of the house and Nicolò’s three heirs own the other half.

“I loved him so deeply and he gave me the chance to show the world this unbelievable jewel. I can go to court for the rest of my life, but I don’t want to. I’m tired. I fought the good fight.”

Now that Rita’s fairytale in Rome is coming to an end, she hopes the palace will become a public museum and a hub for continued scholarship. But the reality is that the home will likely sell  to an ultra-private multi-billionaire.

Government national treasure status should protect the palace from a minimalist makeover by a tech titan or a glaringly glitz sheik’s revamp. But with years more research and preservation work yet to be done, it will take an especially spendy and motivated new owner to keep the work she started alive.

Next year, following the sale, she plans to return to New York — she’s currently dating Madison Avenue’s pricey pasta purveyor Nello Balan. who is on the board of Prince Nicolò von Boncompagni Ludovisi Foundation — keeping a smaller villa in Rome. She promises to continue advocating for the property through her late husband’s charity.

“There’s so many things underneath the ground here, you have no idea,” she said. “There are more paintings to uncover and more secrets. In the late 16th century, Galileo Galilei was here and he gave a telescope to my husband’s family. It’s here. I know where it is. But we have to uncover it. There’s just so many exciting things for the new person to discover if they have a mind to.”