High in the wooded hills of Fiesole, Villa San Michele looks across the Arno Valley toward Florence.
Originally founded as a Franciscan monastery in the early 15th century on land given by the Davanzati family. Its pale Renaissance facade, completed during an enlargement around 1600, is traditionally attributed to the school of Michelangelo and possibly to Michelangelo himself! it Is certainly carefully proportioned with balanced detailing of pilasters, arched openings, carved stone detail flourishes, and commanding central entrance.
Giovanni di Bartolomeo Davanzati enlarged and renovated the monastery, creating the imposing facade and loggia that define the villa today. Following Napoleon's suppression of religious orders in 1808, the monastery passed into private hands. American banker Henry Winthrop Cannon acquired it in 1900, landscaped the gardens, added greenhouses, introduced Victorian wrought-iron gates, and roofed the former courtyard in glass and iron to make a winter garden. Badly damaged during the Second World War, the estate was restored as a private home in 1950, became a hotel in the 1950s, and was acquired by Orient-Express Hotels now Belmond in 1982.
Interesting facts...
The forest around Villa San Michele lies on the slopes of Monte Ceceri, where Leonardo da Vinci is said to have studied birds of prey and tested his designs for a flying machine a place of early aviation experiments centuries before flight was possible.
Napoleon is said to have stayed at the former monastery after his government dissolved its Franciscan order in 1808.
Its later guest list has included Sophia Loren, the then Prince of Wales, Julia Roberts, Robert De Niro, George Clooney, and Gwyneth Paltrow. The villa's winding interior plan is not a hotel designer's invention but the legacy of its monastic past of former cells, corridors, and communal spaces creating its famously maze-like layout. Even its small doorways and original iron fittings preserve the scale of the fifteenth-century friars.
The terraced gardens were first cultivated by monks, meaning the apparently effortless views across Florence are the result of centuries of labour on a steep hillside.
Location: Via Doccia 4, Fiesole, Florence, Italy
