Villa dei Cedri

Villa dei Cedri is located in the center of the village of Colà di Lazise, within a centuries-old park of several hectares, built between the eighteenth and nineteenth century

Villa dei Cedri is a Venetian villa made up of several buildings, of historical interest also for the stays of famous people such as Charles V in 1530, Frederick VI, king of Denmark and Norway in 1780 and General Erwin Rommel in 1943. The complex is composed of two buildings, one of the XV-XVI century probably built by the Sansebastiani family, which the noble Moscardo took over in the mid-eighteenth century and a nineteenth-century one realized by the architect Luigi Canonica (1762-1844), appointed as a state architect and superintendent of Napoleon, commissioned by the Miniscalchi-Erizzo accounts, whose coat of arms can be seen inside the tympanum in the center. The Miniscalchi family was originally from Bergamo but moved to Verona during the Visconti domination at the end of the 14th century and was related to a Venetian doge. The facade of the nineteenth-century building faces the park and is forty meters long with three large French windows in the middle giving access to the oval hall; at the entrance there are portals in green marble, a fountain in red Verona, statues, traces of frescoes. The oldest part of the villa, dating back to the fifteenth century, is a building with a square plan placed in the main courtyard that maintains the outline of the typical pre-Renaissance manor house, there is an epigraph on the façade in memory of the visit of Emperor Charles V in 1530. Connected to this part of the villa were the stables and the guest house. The park was probably done in the form and design by the Moscardo and completed by the Miniscalchi Erizzo; there are one hundred and fifty cedars of various types and many other species of precious trees, in the middle there is a pond fed from the bottom by a thermal spring.