The privately owned Isola di Loreto rises from the Lake Iseo, north of Monte Isola, in the province of Brescia. The island has been inhabited for many centuries. The historian Gabriele Rosa wrote in the late 1800s that there were traces of “ruins of walls and two square towers”, probably the remains of ancient fortifications and “the outline of a chapel facing east as was the use before 1500”.
At the end of the 1400s the island was owned by the Sisters of St. Clare of Brescia who built a convent there. The structure, however, was already in ruins by 1580. Passing to the Duchess Felicita Bevilacqua La Masa in the 19th century, by the early 1900s a new owner, the Cavalier Vincenzo Richeri, built a castle surrounded by garden of pines that could be reached through a small dock and two lighthouse towers.
The neo-Gothic villa has a rectangular plan and two storeys. It has a small tower, battlements, walls of lightly coloured stone and rises on a rock that has a sheer drop over the lake.
Fondazione Lombardia Film Commission
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