The Lante, or Lanti, Del Lante, are an ancient Tuscan family of Pisan origin, with a branch that in the sixteenth century settled in Rome and merging, by marriage, with the Della Rovere gave origin to the Lante della Rovere.
I Lante, also called Lante da Vico, from a place in the Pisan, Vicopisano, where the family once owned a castle, attested since 1190 with Bacciameo Lante who was consul of the Republic of Pisa.
The sources also speak of earlier Germanic origins, however many historians consider the ancestor Michele Lante da Vico, a notary living in 1320 in Vicopisano, who was an elder of the Regiment, Chancellor of the Municipality of Pisa and adviser of Fazio della Gherardesca.
Francesco, son of Michele, entered the Order of Friars Minor and was bishop of Luni, Brescia, Cremona and Bergamo. His brother Pietro was a famous jurist in the mid-fourteenth century. With Alfonso di Agnolo a branch of the Lante obtained in 1612 also the Florentine citizenship.
In 1512, one of the family members, Gerardo Lante (1460 - 1520), bought land on the Gianicolo hill, in Rome. His son Michele (1490 - 1550) was the first member of the family to reside permanently in Rome. The latter ceded part of his father's land to Baldassarre Turini, who built a villa there, the work of Giulio Romano. Michele Lante entered the Roman aristocracy thanks to his marriage to Antonina Astalli.
In 1551, following the death of Turini, the Lante family bought the villa, which became Villa Lante, which was sold in 1817 to the Borghese family.
When, in 1609, Marc'Antonio Lante, Marquis of San Lorenzo and Monteleone (1566 - 1643), nephew of Michele, married Lucrezia della Rovere, the Lante family merged with the noble Roman family of della Rovere, a family that had already expressed the popes Sixtus IV and Julius II and had become Dukes of Urbino. Since then the lineage has the surname Lante Montefeltro della Rovere.
When, one century later, in the early forties of the seventeenth century, the garden of the villa was partly expropriated for the construction of the gianicolensi walls, the Lante, in the person of Marc'Antonio's son, had in exchange from Pope Urban VIII the villa of Bagnaia and the title of dukes of Bomarzo. The I duke of Bomarzo was, in 1646, Ippolito Lante Montefeltro della Rovere (June 15, 1618 - Rome, June 29, 1688).
Starting from the 16th century, some family members also covered an ecclesiastical career. Among them we remember Marcello Lante (1569-1652), bishop of Todi, cardinal and camerlengo, who participated among other things in the conclaves of 1621, 1623 and 1644 and was the son of Lodovico Lante della Rovere and Lavinia Maffei, nephew on the mother's side of cardinals Bernardino and Marcantonio Maffei, cousin of Cardinal Orazio Maffei, uncle of cardinals Gregorio Naro and Tiberio Cenci on behalf of their mother, great-uncle of cardinal Federico Marcello Lante Montefeltro della Rovere. His sister was married to the brother of Pope Paul V. With Marcello Lante, the family reached the highest levels of Roman nobility.
In addition to the Lante villa, the family owned a building in Piazza Sant'Eustachio, in the center of Rome, where it normally resided.
The actress Lucrezia Lante della Rovere belongs to this family.