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Isola Bella Lake Maggiore
"For however fanciful and fantastic the
Isola Bella may be, and is, it still is beautiful."
(C. Dickens, 1844)
In 1632, Count Vitaliano Borromeo began the construction of
the monumental Baroque palace and the majestic and scenic gardens, which have
made the island famous and which to this day bear witness to the splendors of
an era.
The Borromeo family home offers visitors an elegant and
sumptuous setting, and it contains priceless works of art such as tapestries,
furniture, statues, paintings, and stuccoes. It also has an unusual mosaic
grotto, a cool and delightful place.
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Once you have visited the palace, there is access to the
garden for a pleasant walk. The gardens form an extraordinary, flowered monument
laid out over a series of ornate and overlapping terraces, a classic and
inimitable example of seventeenth century "Italian garden". The garden contains
many rare and exotic plants, and the spectacular blossoming is planned to ensure
that it is filled with colours and scents from March until October.
Isola Bella: Tha Palace
The interior of the Baroque palace is charming, and there is a continual and
rich succession of furnished rooms.
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Canvases by famous artists such as the Neapolitan painter Luca Giordano
(1632-1705), Francesco Zuccarelli from Tuscany (1702-1788), and the Flemish
artist Pieter Mulier, known as "Tempest" (circa 1637 -1701), adorn the walls
of the elegant and refined rooms.
The rooms also house valuable furniture,
marble statues, neoclassical stuccoes, and fifteenth century Flemish
sculptures and tapestries. Many of the rooms are of great historical
interest such as for example, the Sala della Musica (the Music Room) where
the Stresa Conference between Mussolini, Laval and MacDonald was held in
April 1935, a conference that should have ensured peace in Europe, and the
Sala di Napoleone (Napoleon's Room), where he often stayed in the company of
Giuseppina Beauharnais (1797).
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After visiting the house, a stroll around the gardens is a must as it is
considered to be the most splendid and grandiose example of Baroque-style
Italian garden. There are many exotic plants in the garden, and
magnificently plumaged white peacocks roam freely amongst them.
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Isola Bella: The Gardens
"When you come out of the tunnel, there is a terrace from
which you can see the Alps to one side, and to the other, the eastern banks
of the lake."
(Ph. Petit-Radel, 1815)
This splendid and magnificent Baroque Italian garden is one of the most
famous and best-preserved examples in Italy.
It was built over several
different periods but it is has nevertheless, maintained its coherence.
It is constructed in the form of a pyramid that ends in a huge statue of a
Unicorn ridden by Love.
The garden is laid out over ten terraces that
descend gradually, and it is adorned with basins, fountains, architectural
perspectives, and a multitude of statues dating from the second half of the
seventeenth century, which represent the personification of rivers, seasons
and winds.
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Many of these "rooms" are bordered by walls and balustrades on which, to
this day, it is still possible to see where the jets of water, fountains,
small waterfalls and plays of water gushed out.
The particularly mild
climate has favored the growth of a rich variety of different types of
vegetation, all of which have found their natural habitat here.
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There are azaleas and rhododendrons, espaliers of grapefruit and bitter oranges,
orchids and carnivorous plants, and there is also a large camphor tree,
which is over two hundred years old.
During the winter season, the exotic
plants are kept in the nineteenth century greenhouse, which can also be seen
during the visit to the garden.
The garden blooms recurrently from March to September, which means that it
is always charming and full of color.
Courtesy of
www.borromeoturismo.it
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(c) 1997-2008 E. Massetti
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