When Monaghan sold Domino's Pizza to Bain Capital in 1998, the price was reported to be near $1 billion, but he says he anticipated that the combined costs of the housing development and the university would wipe out all of his liquid assets "in another year or so." For the sake of his financial future, and by extension, that of his university, he needs the real estate venture to generate profits—and quickly.

Florida is a state that's accustomed to grandiose development, and the structures imposed on its flat terrain have a way of reflecting the times. In the Gilded Age, an oil baron ran a railway line down the east coast of the state, opening the way for Miami's growth, and in the Technicolor 1960s, the metropolis of Orlando grew around Walt Disney's theme park. Ave Maria is a product of our culture wars. Originally, Monaghan wanted to establish his school back in his home state of Michigan, but he ran into resistance from a zoning board that didn't like his idea of building a 250-foot cross. So in 2001, he contacted a real estate broker named Ross McIntosh, who specialized in locating undeveloped tracts along the Gulf Coast.

McIntosh rented a helicopter, and the two men surveyed the possibilities. As they flew inland, oceanfront mansions gave way to the curlicued streets of new developments spawned by the gathering real estate boom. Then the landscape turned to rows of orange groves and drainage canals. Cypress swamps glistened on the eastern horizon. Monaghan had initially told the broker that 500 acres would be sufficient, but as they took in the view, he kept asking about additional acreage. "It was at that juncture that I realized the scope of his ambition," McIntosh recalls.

When executives from Barron Collier heard that a billionaire was flying around their airspace looking for a place to set down his dream, they could hardly believe their good fortune. Barron Collier is one of the largest landowners in southwest Florida and is so tied to the history of Gulf Coast development that nearly every major institution in the area, from the local phone company to the Fort Myers News-Press, traces its lineage to the firm's founder, a New York advertising tycoon by the name of Barron Gift Collier. In the 1920s, Collier sailed to Florida on his yacht, the Baroness, bought 1.3 million acres, and had them demarcated as a county—named after himself.

By 2001, almost all of Collier County's coastal lands had been developed. The frontier lay far eastward, inland, on marshy agricultural territory. The state legislature had just passed a law meant to encourage the development of the hinterlands while preserving ecologically sensitive areas. For the Colliers, the statute had the happy effect of turning their wetlands east of Naples into a bank of development credits, paving the way for high-density construction on the neighboring farm fields. All the company needed was a catalyst, something to build a town around. Tom Monaghan's university seemed like a godsend.

Barron Collier made Monaghan an irresistible offer: It would give him the land for the university free and be his equal partner in developing the town. (Pulte was later brought in as a third partner; it agreed to gradually purchase swaths of cleared land from Monaghan and Barron Collier and divide them into lots to develop and resell as finished homes.) The possibilities left Monaghan giddy. During one early brainstorming dinner, Monaghan, an architecture buff, scratched out on the tablecloth a design for a vaulted "oratory"—basically a more exalted name for a church—that would fit 3,300, the largest capacity of any Catholic church in the United States. But when design problems drove the oratory's projected cost toward $100 million, the building was dramatically reduced in size (it now seats 1,100), bringing the figure down to about $20 million.