Villa San Donato

Villa San Donato is a Palladian style palace built north of Florence at Polverosa, Italy, for the Russian industrialist Nikolay Demidov, its first stone laid on June 27, 1827 and the building completed in 1831 to designs by architect Giovan Battista Silvestri, who also worked for the Uffizi. The estate covered forty two hectares and included rivers, lakes, churches, a menagerie, a silk factory, a zoo and gardens, along with a private fourteen room museum built to house the Demidov family's art collection. The dome of the palace carries a fresco painted in 1827 by Domenico Morelli and repainted in 1841 by the French painter Jean Baptiste Fortune de Fournier. The palace suffered serious damage during the Second World War, and an adjoining chapel, the Demidoff Chapel of San Donato, is now owned by the Church of Christ. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/