Villa Manzoni

Villa Manzoni was the Manzoni family home for almost two centuries and was part of the vast estates owned by the great writer in the Lecco area. It presents a typically neoclassical structure, soberly elegant, with a façade punctuated by sandstone mouldings and a large park surrounding the building.
The villa, with all the other Lecco properties, was sold by Alessandro Manzoni in 1818 to Giuseppe Scola, a wealthy silk industrialist who lived in Vercurago, just outside Lecco. Scola's successors always maintained, at least on the ground floor, the original appearance of the rooms and even much of the original furniture and furnishings in the same location, allowing scholars and public figures to make pilgrimages to the rooms that saw the gestation of the most famous novel in Italian literature.
This tradition has made it possible to maintain to this day in the rooms of the Museo Manzoniano an evocative atmosphere of a house-museum, of a 19th-century aristocratic residence. In 2019 the Museo Manzoniano was restructured and rearranged according to a new museological and museographic itinerary that, also through videos and installations, enhances Manzoni's writings and in particular I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), showing the great historical, artistic, photographic and cinematographic diffusion and fascination that the novel has had over the centuries. Villa Manzoni is also home to the Modern Art Gallery, with works by important local and national authors from the 17th century to the 1930s, the Photo Library with a heritage of over 4,000 photographs, plates and negatives, and the Specialised Library, with an important Antique Collection containing the original editions of Alessandro Manzoni's works.