On the evening of 25 August 1970, Milton Gendel – the American photographer, artist and diarist – opened his journal and jotted down details of the most salient moments spent with a party of cultivated bon viveurs exploring the villas of the Veneto countryside. The journey from Rome, he noted, whizzing along the Autostrada del Sole in Gore Vidal’s sports car, couldn’t have been more pleasant. The summer heat was beginning to subside and Gore (despite the tepid reviews of his latest literary achievement, a fictionalised memoir) was on his best behaviour: ‘informed, informative, speculative, gossipy and funny’. In the wee hours they reached Marina Emo’s Palladian villa, where they were staying, but the party was all but over. Next morning, Margaret Anne du Cane, a young British socialite, quietly remarked to Milton as they were downing bloody marys in lieu of breakfast that there were ‘no newspapers or books floating around, nothing casual, no games or needlework left lying’. Unlike English country homes, she concluded, waving a hand towards brocaded furnishings, Italian ones were stuffy and boring. ‘Wait till you see Villa Albrizzi,’ Milton replied.
A tall brick wall surrounding the villa and its grounds separates it from Este’s historic centre – renowned, since the 18th century, for its production of fine ceramics. A monumental wisteria climbs around the portal, setting the tone for what lies ahead: a defiantly eccentric architectural pastiche. The villa, with its hexagonal turret jutting out from one corner, is immersed in a sprawling estate dominated by an Anglified garden punctuated with Neo-Gothic ruins. Though the estate was originally acquired in the 1660s by two brothers descended from the Zenobio dynasty of Venetian merchants, it became the property of the Albrizzi family after the 1783 marriage of Alba Zenobio, the last heir of her family, to a member of the aristocratic Venetian clan after whom the house was named. Adjacent to the house, a painted pavilion was created and furnished to celebrate the wedding. Since then, says owner Alessandro Giannelli Viscardi, Villa Albrizzi has been passed down via the female line. ‘So it was up to young widows or orphaned daughters to keep the ball rolling.’ This is precisely what gives Villa Albrizzi its singular appeal, one that does not conform to the stark rigours of the region’s classic Palladian architecture.
One widow who left a particularly enduring legacy was Elsa de Margarit, a Venetian of Austrian descent. She was very young when her much older husband, Giovanni Battista Albrizzi, died in 1860, leaving her to run the estate alone and care for their two infant daughters. Adventurous and emancipated, Elsa was drawn to technological innovations. In the villa, she set up her very own photographic studio and camera obscura. A passionate sportswoman, she participated in bicycle races, played tennis and competed in clay-pigeon shooting tournaments. Eventually, after acquiring her own Benz Velo, she was celebrated as one of the first female drivers in Italy. It was Elsa who, in 1876, expanded the villa dramatically. The 35 rooms on three floors were infused with an atmosphere of decadent Romanticism thanks to her Orientalist tastes. These, Alessandro says, were inspired by her Russian lover, Prince Grigory Gagarin, an artist and a diplomat who had served as ambassador to Italy. Except for an Ottoman-style fumoir in the hexagonal turret, most of those exotic touches are long gone. But Gagarin’s extravagant Russian chairs, bearing his family crest, remain in the dining room, as do his collection of books and watercolours.
Milton Gendel couldn’t wait to get to Villa Albrizzi on that sunny summer morning of 1970. He hadn’t been back since the early 1960s, when he visited the artist Teddy Millington-Drake, who was at the time renting it. He had first been invited to visit by Alessandro Rubin de Cervin Albrizzi – the current owner’s maternal uncle and a furniture designer – and had ended up staying for more than two years. Several photos in Gendel’s archive show Alessandro Rubin Albrizzi floating around his family palazzo in Venice wearing a long, striped silk dressing gown and smoking cigarettes, with a mane of blond hair and a delightful smile. By 1970, the year these photos were taken, Alessandro was resident in New York and, following the successes of his Rome and London shops, had opened a new one in Madison Avenue, which was enthusiastically praised in the New York Times.
While he was renting the villa, Teddy installed central heating, built a swimming pool and entertained visitors, including his sometime lover the writer Bruce Chatwin. He threw memorable parties and visited Palladian villas, drawing some of them, and began to develop his non-figurative work. On the second floor of the Villa Albrizzi he painted a huge mural, since removed. ‘It’s so ambitious, bold and abstract,’ wrote Milton after observing it at length. ‘It is the best thing [he] ever did.’
Teddy had an exceptional eye for interiors, as can be seen from the houses he went on to own and decorate in Italy, Greece and Britain with his life partner, John Stefanidis. At Este, he painted the library a luminous pearly grey that survives to this day. Alessandro Giannelli says that in their shared quest for simplicity, his uncle and Teddy got rid of numerous belongings and made the interiors more harmonious. What they didn’t dispose of was a small but precious family collection of Este ceramics, which they placed in specially designed glass cabinets.
Alessandro is an interior designer who runs the well-known Milan fabric shop Ca’ Albrizzi. Together with his wife, Angelica, he keeps the villa fresh by reupholstering the occasional sofa or refurbishing the odd bedroom. The restless Anglo-American set attracted to the villas and palaces of the dwindling Italian aristocracy after World War II has long gone. Landscapes have changed, industries have expanded and tourism has burgeoned. In the process, many of those places have lost their charm. Not Villa Albrizzi, though. As Milton Gendel wrote: ‘The more I see of it, the more I like it’.
Villa Albrizzi, Este, Italy, is not open to the public but is available for holiday lets. For details, visit villaalbrizzi.it. Instagram: @caalbrizzi
A version of this article originally appears in the April 2025 issue of The World of Interiors. Sign up for our weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
