Villa Carlotta

On the Tremezzo shore of Lake Como, Villa Carlotta joins two experiences that are rarely this seamless: a museum of neoclassical sculpture and Romantic painting, and a terraced botanical garden that tumbles toward the water. Together they explain why this late-seventeenth-century residence remains the reference point for villa tourism on the mid-lake.

Why it matters

Villa Carlotta condenses three centuries of Lake Como history into a single site. The Clerici marquises of Milan had it built in the final years of the seventeenth century, but the collector Giovanni Battista Sommariva gave the villa its artistic core after acquiring it in the early nineteenth century: he filled the rooms with works by Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen. Later still it became the wedding home of Princess Charlotte of Prussia, and its gardens grew into one of the most celebrated spring flowering displays in northern Italy. Few houses on the lake combine an original Canova plaster model with a valley of tree ferns in a single estate.

What to notice

Start in the marble hall, the museum's most imposing room, where a vaulted decorative scheme by Lodovico Pogliaghi unfolds above Thorvaldsen's monumental frieze of Alexander the Great entering Babylon, modelled between 1818 and 1828. In the plaster-model room look for Canova's Muse Terpsichore of 1811, an original plaster model, and reliefs connected with Milan's Arco della Pace. Canova's Palamedes has stood in its room since 1818, and a replica of the famous Cupid awakening Psyche, carved by Adamo Tadolini, represents the composition for which the original is kept elsewhere. Do not leave without pausing at Francesco Hayez's painting of Romeo's last kiss to Juliet, dated 1823, a touchstone of Italian Romanticism. Upstairs, the furniture and private rooms evoke Princess Charlotte, who received the villa as a wedding gift in the mid-nineteenth century. In the garden, notice the citrus tunnels of the Selva Cedrina, which date to the Clerici owners, and the formal axes of the Italian garden, designed when Enlightenment taste favoured geometry over feeling.

Context and history

The villa was raised in the late seventeenth century by the Clerici family, whose formal Italian garden, with balustraded terraces, fountains and clipped box, still anchors the lower grounds. The early nineteenth century brought the Sommariva era of enlightened collecting: Giovanni Battista Sommariva acquired masterpieces by the greatest sculptors and painters of his day, and much of that collection remains in the house. In the mid-nineteenth century the property became a wedding gift to Princess Charlotte on her marriage to George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and the villa took her name. Duke George was a passionate botanist: he planted many of the monumental conifers, broad-leaved tulip trees and planes, and transformed a depression once known as a valley of brambles into the theatrical Valley of Ferns, complete with a stream. The Romantic garden's azaleas, century-old camellias and rhododendrons, blooming from mid-March to mid-April, made the estate world-famous. An agricultural section, mapped with vines, olives and mulberries as early as the nineteenth century, still preserves age-old olive trees, a crop grown on the lake since Roman times.