After Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, his siblings were in a bind. Each—there were seven of them—had been elevated by their illustrious brother into the European nobility, and all of them, in their own way, suddenly found themselves personae non gratae in most of Europe.

Pauline, Napoleon’s younger sister who’d married the Italian prince Camillo Borghese, retreated to the Borghese Palace in Rome for a little while, and then, miserable, began to search around for a more suitable location to while away her later years in relative obscurity.

She finally settled on an 18th century villa (formerly a hunting lodge) in Lucca, Italy, buying the house furnished. She lived there until her death in 1825.

The villa then passed through numerous hands—always selling furnished—until it ended up in the hands of an Italian whose succession of wealthy American wives (the first died, as did the second) paid for major updates in the 1920s and 1930s.

By the 1960s, though, the widower’s money began to run low, “so he sold it to my in-laws,” says Clare Mahon Pardini, an American writer who married into the Italian Pardini family in the 1980s.

The elder Pardinis updated the villa and renovated its limonaia (a greenhouse for citrus plants), turning it into a guesthouse, and the rest of the family grew up on the property, living in different wings of the house. But after the third generation moved out and the patriarch died, it was time, Pardini says, to sell. The family has put it on the market with Italy Sotheby’s International Realty for 8 million euros ($9.8 million).

Remnants of Pauline
Despite the home’s multiple owners, there are still remnants of the villa’s noble owner. “There are gilded Empire-style frescoes in the main salon,” Pardini says. She also points out a P and a B (Pauline’s monogram) in sterling silver on the doors to what was her bedroom.

The main house, which has a horseshoe shape, is about 16,000 square feet, with seven bedrooms and 10 bathrooms.

Living areas are in both wings, while the center has a grand salon, library, and dining room.

First « 1 2 » Next