Villa Bernini Buri

Villa Bernini Buri stands in Verona, a Venetian villa complex whose main house sits among roughly three hundred hectares of open country. A chapel, stables, a steward's house and a barchessa, a broad porticoed barn, cluster around it. A park of about twenty-five hectares reaches the Adige, planted with exotic trees and once home to fallow deer.

The villa took shape in the early seventeenth century for Gian Antonio Spolverini, to designs by Sanmicheli's nephew Domenico Brugnoli. The Buri family, counts under Venetian rule, were in the area by 1574. They emerge as owners in 1738, when the Duke of Lorraine and Maria Theresa of Austria quarantined here during a plague. In 1776 Girolamo Buri married Isotta Spolverini, and their son Giovanni Danese turned the park into an English garden praised by Pindemonte. The family also improved their land, and a local legend about the rosta, an irrigation structure, entered Verona's folklore. After the Second World War, looters stripped the library, archive, art and furnishings, and Caroto's altarpiece went to the city of Verona. About eighty boys boarded here in the 1950s under Mario Mazza, a founder of the Italian Catholic Scouts. From the 1960s the Brothers of the Holy Family ran a seminary and school, digging the basement out by hand. In the 2000s local associations set about making it a cultural park, and the Festa dei Popoli has filled the grounds.

On the south facade you see two wings framing a loggia and a wrought-iron balcony, under the Buri crest, a rearing bear. Inside, frescoes show two muses of music with a violin and a small harp, and games of chess and checkers. The best-preserved works, in the old dining room, are attributed to the Veronese painter Marco Marcola. One shows nobles passing an autumn afternoon in the garden, and another captures the sale of thoroughbred horses.