I recently came across the Villa Sola Cabiati on Lake Como on Vogue.com which featured it as a wedding venue. Turns out that the late Baroque style 18th-century villa vacation home of the Duke Gabrio Serbelloni, also known as La Quiete, has six bedroom suites that can be booked without getting married but other parts of the villa require a tour.

“On the piano nobile of the Villa Sola Cabiati are the magnificent rooms decorated by Muzio Canzio and Francesco Conegliano, both Milanese pupils of Tiepolo. Also on this floor is the family’s private museum that guests may visit upon appointment and only in the presence of a knowledgable family member to accompany and guide them. On display in the museum is the furniture originally from the Napoleonic apartment in Palazzo Serbelloni in Milan where Bonaparte and his wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, had briefly stayed; just days before Milan and Palazzo Serbelloni were bombed in August of 1943, the furniture taken to the Villa for safekeeping. Most of the Palazzo burned to the ground in the ensuing fire but these inestimable treasures, including the bed Napoleon slept in, were fortunately saved from destruction. On the top floor of the museum are the rooms that belonged to Giuseppe Parini, tutor for the Serbelloni children in their humanistic studies and Abbot Paolo Frisi, mathematician, who taught them maths.”

I’m always fascinated by these old historic family homes since we really don’t have anything like them in the US. It would be even more amazing to stay the night in one.