Villa San Donato

The Villa San Donato is a Palladian palace built by Russian industrialist Nikolay Demidov on 42 hectares of marshland to the north of Florence at Polverosa which he had bought from the Catholic church, after he was made Russia's ambassador to the court of Tuscany. The first stone was laid on 27 June 1827 and construction was completed in 1831. It includes an estates with rivers, lakes, churches, a menagerie, a silk factory, a zoo, gardens and a railway. The designs were by Giovan Battista Silvestri, architect to the Uffizi.

Villa San Donato

Besides vast private apartments, it includes a private 14-room museum built to contain the huge Demidov collection. The ceiling of the dome over the central rotonda has a fresco of 1827 by Domenico Morelli, repainted in 1841 by the French painter Jean Baptiste Fortuné de Fournier. It was seriously damaged in the Second World War. The adjacent Demidoff Chapel of San Donato is now owned by the Church of Christ.

  • Central rotonda
  • Central rotonda
  • Loggia (2007)
  • Villa San Donato (2007)
gollark: "so we'll make everyone immortal, but also have random people with no oversight kill arbitrary people for ??? reasons" - VERY INTELLIGENT PEOPLE.
gollark: That was fictional! It was also really stupid!
gollark: Also, that would effectively just turn over control to whoever writes the objective function/manages the computing stuff involved.
gollark: Doing all governance tasks basically requires AGI. We do not *have* AGI, and if we get it there will be bigger problems.
gollark: And, as someone who knows more about machine learning/AI than you (41025 kilooffense), we cannot actually just sidestep the issue by turning over governance to AI.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.