Read aloud by your device's voice. It sounds different on each device.
Silk
Silk merchants built it, and a fortune was spent on another palace
The Clerici family rose from rural origins to become successful silk merchants. Giorgio Clerici began the lakeside estate in 1690, and it was complete in its first form by 1695. His great-grandson completed the villa in 1745, then spent nearly all his fortune on the Palazzo Clerici in Milan.
A banker
A barber's apprentice who rose to power bought it in 1801
Giovanni Battista Sommariva bought the property in 1801. He was a banker and politician who had risen from barber's apprentice to power in Napoleon's government. When Napoleon chose someone else for vice president in 1802, he retired from public life and devoted his time to collecting art.
The frieze
A frieze made for Napoleon ended up with a self-portrait in it
Thorvaldsen's frieze The Entrance of Alexander the Great in Babylonia was designed in stucco for the Quirinale Palace to mark Napoleon's visit. Napoleon ordered a marble replica, but his fall stopped the work until 1818. The last two figures are a self-portrait of Thorvaldsen and a portrait of Sommariva.
A flood
Canova's Palamedes was broken in a flood before it arrived
Sommariva commissioned the Palamedes from Antonio Canova. In 1805, while it was still in Canova's atelier in Rome, the Tevere River flooded the workshop and broke it into several pieces. Canova restored it himself between 1806 and 1808, and it reached the villa in 1819.
Carlotta
The villa was renamed for a bride who lived to enjoy it only a few years
In 1847 Princess Marianne gave the property to her daughter Charlotte as a wedding present, and the house was renamed Villa Carlotta. Charlotte enjoyed it for only a few years before she died in 1855, at twenty-three, of complications from childbirth.
Day 3, midday
It comes after Villa del Balbianello. Then Menaggio.
More stories from this trip idea
The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Villa Carlotta, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.