Monticello Brianza

In 1820 the Nava family had Luigi Canonica build their villa, and Ambrogio Nava had an idea for the railings: on the pillars that carry the ironwork around the park he had busts placed of Albertolli, Appiani, Cagnola, Manzoni, Monti, Oriani, Romagnosi and Volta. Architects, painters, poets, jurists and one scientist, nearly all of them alive or only just dead, lined up along a garden wall the way saints are lined up on a church front. Anyone passing along the road had before them the pantheon that a nineteenth-century Lombard gentleman had chosen for himself.

Four thousand two hundred and seventeen inhabitants in the province of Lecco, on the low hills of the Brianza. The village was called simply Monticello until 1971, and its earliest record is from 903, when it was among the lands enfeoffed by the Chapter of Monza cathedral by concession of Berengar of Friuli. Torrevilla was from the seventeenth century the fief of a branch of the Sirtori, the family from which the soldier and diplomat Giuseppe Sirtori came. At Villa Bocconi, today a care home, Stendhal stayed in 1818.