Villa Diodati

Villa Diodati is a mansion in the village of Cologny near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It is best known for the summer of 1816, when Lord Byron rented the house and stayed there with Dr. John Polidori, and was frequently visited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, later Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont, who were renting a house nearby. Confined indoors by poor weather in June 1816, the group spent several days telling each other ghost stories, an episode that produced two landmark works of Gothic fiction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidori's The Vampyre, considered the first modern vampire story.