Villa Diodati

The Villa Diodati is a manor in Cologny on Lake Geneva.

It had been provided acquired in 1710 by Gabriel Diodati, a descendant Giovanni Diodatis and with a stately home (Villa Belle Rive ). Here met in 1816 Mary Godwin, the Romantics and Mary's future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, English poet Lord Byron ( George Gordon Byron ) with his pregnant ex-lover Claire Clairmont ( Mary's half-sister ) as well as the physician and writer John Polidori together. The villa had been rented by Lord Byron, as he ( mistakenly ) believed that John Milton had visited there in 1638, the family whose verge deceased childhood friend Charles Diodati. She has since been regarded as an important place in literary history.

1816 was a year without a summer in history, as a result of an eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815, the climate was disrupted world. Due to the extremely bad weather, the friends therefore often unable to leave the house.

In addition to the excessive consumption of laudanum they devoted their time to the disputes of political, philosophical, and spiritualistic questions. Occult phenomena soon formed the main theme of their night-long discussions, including Erasmus Darwin's attempts to bring dead matter to life. Since the round like reading from German ghost tales, Byron suggested, finally, everyone should think of themselves such a story.

From Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's pen the story of Frankenstein arose ( Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus with a theme of John Milton's Paradise Lost) as Percy Shelley and Lord Byron drew a grim tale, which remained, however, fragment. John Polidori named his work Der Vampyr, which was terminated by him later, but let himself thereby influence of Byron's work and the eponymous hero of his story Lord Ruthven was even equipped with Byron similar features. This work was ultimately the trigger for the literary vampire fever, which also Bram Stoker's Dracula spawned.

Both the events at the Villa Diodati and Mary Shelley's story by Brian Aldiss in 1973 were in his novel " The unleashed Frankenstein" interwoven ( in the original " Frankenstein Unbound "). This story was in 1990 Roger Corman as an inspiration for the film " Roger Corman's Frankenstein".

The meeting was filmed in 1986 by Ken Russell as Gothic with Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Natasha Richardson and Timothy Spall.

From 1945 to 1946 lived in the Villa Diodati, the family of the painter Balthus.