Mansions and private mansions to visit Italy

Mr 1 San Babila. This is the Milanese housing of the family of major conductor Arturo Toscanini.

Dating back to the th century, it has a beautiful facade characterized by a wrought iron balustrade and a beautiful, quiet inner courtyard.

Said the Fetta di Polenta, this building, 1884, has the shape of a polenta slice. It is an original achievement of Antonelli, an architect of the Mole.

Also Palazzo Gritti-Pisani. One of the most luxurious hotels in the city. Ruskin stayed there.

The villa, built by Muttoni on a th century building, is decorated with Fresques frescoes. Muttoni was also the architect of the Villa ai Nani.

9 km from Vicenza, this small building designed by Palladio has beautiful frescoes.

Built around 1455 by the Florentine architect Michelozzo, the Medici villa of Fiesole stands on a hillside and enjoys a magnificent view of Florence. It is the very first Renaissance villa inspired by the ancient Roman villas. Built for Jean de Médicis, the youngest son of Cosme l'Ancien, it remained the property of the family until 1671. Unfortunately, you can only visit the terraced gardens (by appointment), the villa being a private property, but this place is ideal for a short meditation with a view of the Tuscan capital.

Built between the th and th centuries.

Faced with the Gesù is the seat of Christian Democracy, this political party which governed Italy for more than thirty-five years and finally sunk under the minirévolution of Mani Pulite or'Hands clean '. Its debris remains under the name PPI.

Through the lane on the right of PPI's seat, we reached via delle Botteghe Oscure, in which this time the Italian Communist Party, which has become PDS since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Passing through the via delle Botteghe Oscure via Coetani, you arrive to the pretty piazza Campitelli.

In the south of Reggio di Calabria and Aspromonte, several villages have been abandoned as a result of the destruction caused by earthquakes, particularly that of 1908. Furthermore, the arrival of the railway of the littoral in the th century promoted the appearance of new villages, which, having settled on the coast, emptied the villages of the mountains. These sites are called paesi fantasmi, or "ghost villages", and their view on a road gives rise to bitterness mingled with fascination. Pentedattilo was one of those towns, and the most characteristic one, but it is no longer completely abandoned. Pentedattilo means "five fingers," because it appears in the shape of Monte Calvario, with the sandstone rock that appears to wrap it. Like Pentedattilo and Brancaleone, they are sinister villages, almost dead, where only a few elderly or shepherds have not emigrated. And yet, in the 2 000 th century, the homes in the village of Pentedattilo were famous for the honey they produced…

Before becoming one of the most productive mining sites in Europe between 1850 and 1960, the Montevecchio region was already known for its wealth of lead and zinc. The Romans and Carthaginians were already mining these metals west of Ingurtosu. The Romans mined the rock in tiny galleries. The Carthaginians would heat it and then freeze it and break it up. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the rate of extraction was increased by the Pisans and Aragonese. Around the year 1850, the Sardinian entrepreneur Giovanni Antonio Sanna obtained from the King of Sardinia the right to exploit the site, where he had a village built for the miners. The miners and their families were paid with a currency that could only be used in the shops and bars of the village, so they remained slaves of their bosses. The men work in the underground galleries, their wives break the rocks and separate the powders from the metals outside. Children also work with their parents, without pay or any form of social security. When the Piemontese Anglosarda company obtained the management of the site, production increased enormously, especially during the two wars, with a pressing demand for materials. In the 1960s, the Montevecchio mines became increasingly expensive to operate and their activity ceased definitively at the beginning of the 1990s. The former miners who worked there are now tourist guides who lead visitors through the mining galleries.