Villa Manzoni

Villa Manzoni was the Manzoni family home for almost two centuries and was part of the vast real estate properties owned by the great writer in the Lecco area. It has a typically neoclassical structure, soberly elegant, with a facade marked by sandstone moldings and a large park surrounding the building.

The villa, with all the other Lecco assets, was sold by Alessandro Manzoni in 1818 to Giuseppe Scola, a wealthy silk industrialist who lived in Vercurago, just outside Lecco. The successors of Scola always maintained, at least on the ground floor, the original appearance of the rooms and even many original furniture and furnishings in the same location, allowing scholars and public figures to go on pilgrimage to the environments that saw the gestation of the most famous novel of the Italian literature.

This tradition has made it possible to maintain a suggestive atmosphere of a house-museum, of a nineteenth-century aristocratic residence in the rooms of the Manzoni Museum . In 2019 the Manzoni Museum was renovated and refurbished according to a new museological and museographic path which, also through videos and installations, enhances Manzoni's writings and in particular The Betrothed, showing the great diffusion and historical-artistic, photographic and cinematographic suggestion that has had the novel over the centuries. The Gallery of Modern Art is also located in Villa Manzoni, with works by important local and national authors from the 17th century. in the Thirties of the 20th century, the Photo Library with a heritage of over 4,000 photographs, plates and negatives and the Specialized Library , equipped with an important Antique Collection with the original editions of the works of Alessandro Manzoni.