Monticello

Monticello, meaning little mountain in Italian, sits on a plantation just outside Charlottesville, Virginia, designed and rebuilt in stages over roughly forty years beginning in 1769 by the American statesman Thomas Jefferson as his own home. Trained largely through his own study of European architectural treatises, Jefferson adapted Neoclassical and Palladian principles, most visibly in the house's signature red brick dome, the first to crown a private residence in the United States, and its symmetrical plan organized around a central hall. The house incorporated numerous mechanical inventions and space-saving devices of Jefferson's own design, including a dumbwaiter and a compact staircase, and the surrounding plantation was worked by enslaved laborers whose lives and labor are now a central part of how the site is interpreted. Monticello and the nearby University of Virginia, also designed by Jefferson, were jointly designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.