Villa Manzoni

Villa Manzoni will close to visitors from Monday 8 July for redevelopment work.

Villa Manzoni, the summer home of the young Alessandro Manzoni, lies a few yards from the city centre. There, it is possible to become immersed in the rooms where the author passed his youth and admire through the windows the landscape that inspired him to write his most famous novel, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed). 

It was the residence of the Manzoni family for nearly two centuries after the author’s great-great-grandfather moved to Lecco from Valsassina in 1621. It was sold by the writer in 1818 to the Scola family, who later transferred it to the Municipality of Lecco in the nineteen sixties. 

Declared a National Monument in 1940, Villa Manzoni is made up of two parts, the rustic and the noble, and includes a park that once led to vast agricultural lands. It was converted to a museum in the nineteen eighties. 

The Museo Manzioniano, renovated in 2019, combines the two souls of Villa Manzoni in a single visit. The rooms of the museum-house recount the life stories of all those who lived in the villa over the centuries, from aristocrats and the bourgeoisie to servants and farmworkers. The literary museum, on the other hand, offers an immersive experience in family memories, the thoughts and works of Alessandro Manzoni: many objects from those days are exhibited here, such as architecture, furniture, paintings, prints, documents, photographs and antiquarian books. These, in addition to multimedia installations with animated projections of paintings, clips from period films and, in some rooms, even musical settings, create a unique experience through time and space that brings visitors to the Museo Manzoniano in close contact with the writer’s life and the places that inspired his masterpiece.

Villa Manzoni is a literary site of great importance for Italian and foreign tourists, students and teachers and the ideal place to understand the development of Alessandro Manzoni’s thinking and the complex process of writing his novel, unique in the European and Italian panorama of the nineteenth century and forever topical. 

After visiting the museum, we recommend that you follow the Manzoni Itinerary and explore other places linked to the novel The Betrothed, discovering Manzoni’s legacy and being inspired by his vision of the world.