History
Vistorta is an ancient rural village dating back to the middle ages, evidenced by a twelfth century dovecote and a small adjoining chapel from the fourteenth century.
The grounds of the present villa were bought around 1780 by the Brandolini family after their union with the Rota lineage. In the nineteenth century Guido Brandolini Rota started to develop an efficient modern farm dedicated to the cultivation of cereals and silk worms as well as continuing the production of already highly acclaimed wines. The construction of the villa, the great open barn and the stables surrounding the park was finished in 1872, enclosed by a quadrilateral stone wall incorporating the four original turrets of romantic inspiration.
The first planting in the park dates back to the early twentieth century: limes, oaks, magnolias, beeches, elms, swamp cypresses, firs and cedars in a style reminiscent of gardens in the Venetian and Friulian regions bridging the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
After the second World War, Count Brando Brandolini d'Adda began an important restoration of the neoclassically inspired villa assisted by his great friend Renzo Mongiardino, an architect and set designer.
In 1965 Count Brando and Countess Cristiana commissioned the landscape architect Russell Page to reorganize and extend the park.
He introduced rare species amongst the secular trees, taking three years to transform it into “a great romantic, naturalistic park in the style of nineteenth century Russian gardens”. An elegant yet ascetic park, romantic but unpretentious, with lakes supplied by spring water, woods of conifers and deciduous trees, around the rediscovered focal point of the villa. The splendid roses and rare orchids cultivated in the park and greenhouse augment the beauty of the villa inside and out, just as they would have done in the past.
