Villa Carlotta is at Tremezzo, in the comune of Tremezzina, on the Greenway route. It combines an art museum with an eight-hectare botanical garden.
History
Giorgio Clerici, of the Clerici marquises of Milan, had the villa built in its first form by 1695; the garden is mentioned from 1699. His great-grandson Anton Giorgio Clerici completed it in 1745.
In 1801 the property passed to Giovanni Battista Sommariva, a banker and politician of the Napoleonic period, who added the balconies and commissioned most of the works of art. In 1843 Princess Marianne of Orange-Nassau bought the villa for 780,000 lire and in 1847 gave it to her daughter Charlotte as a wedding present, on her marriage to Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen: hence the name. Charlotte died in 1855, at the age of twenty-three.
After the First World War the villa was sequestrated; since 1927 it has been run by the Ente Villa Carlotta.
What to see
- Antonio Canova’s Palamedes and the plaster model of the Muse Terpsichore.
- The marble copy of Canova’s Cupid and Psyche, made by Adamo Tadolini in 1834.
- Bertel Thorvaldsen’s frieze The Entry of Alexander the Great into Babylon, thirty-three marble slabs made between 1818 and 1828.
- Francesco Hayez’s The Last Farewell of Romeo and Juliet.
- More than four hundred and seventy plaster cameos by Giovanni Liberotti.
The garden
The park covers eight hectares. It includes rhododendrons and one hundred and fifty varieties of azalea, an Italian parterre with citrus trees and camellias, cedars, palms and sequoias, and a bamboo garden of about three thousand square metres with more than twenty-five species. A former greenhouse has been turned into a museum of farm tools.
Visiting
The entrance is at Via Regina 2, in Tremezzo. For opening hours and the seasonal calendar see the official website, villacarlotta.it.
Along the Greenway
Villa Carlotta is reached at Tremezzo, a hamlet of Tremezzina, after the stretch between Mezzegra and Tremezzo, the most demanding part of the Greenway del Lago di Como. From here the route continues towards Griante.