The Villa San Donato is a Palladian palace built by Russian industrialist Nikolay Demidov

Nikolay Demidov

Count Nikolai Nikitich Demidov was a Russian industrialist, collector and arts patron of the Demidov family.-Life:...

 on 42 hectares of marshland to the north of Florence at Polverosa which he had bought from the Catholic church, after he was made Russia's ambassador to the court of Tuscany

Tuscany

Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....

. The first stone was laid on 27 June 1827 and construction was completed in 1831. It includes an estates with rivers, lakes, churches, a menagerie, a silk factory, a zoo, gardens and a railway. The designs were by Giovan Battista Silvestri, architect to the Uffizi

Uffizi

The Uffizi Gallery , is a museum in Florence, Italy. It is one of the oldest and most famous art museums of the Western world.-History:...

.

Besides vast private apartments, it includes a private 14-room museum built to contain the huge Demidov collection

Demidov collection

The Demidov collection was a collection of artworks gathered by the Russian industrialist Nikolay Demidov and considerably expanded by his second son Anatole. It was mainly on show at their Villa San Donato near Florence, in which a private museum of 14 rooms was devoted to them...

. The ceiling of the dome over the central rotonda has a fresco of 1827 by Domenico Morelli

Domenico Morelli

Domenico Morelli was an Italian painter, one of the most important Neapolitan artists of the 19th century. He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Naples in 1836. His early works are Romantic and contain imagery drawn from the Middle Ages and Byron...

, repainted in 1841 by the French painter Jean Baptiste Fortuné de Fournier.
It was seriously damaged in the Second World War.

Gallery

Image:Jean-Baptiste-Fortune De Fournier Veduta del salone della villa Demidoff a San Donato (1841) 1.jpg|Central rotonda
Image:Jean-Baptiste-Fortune De Fournier Veduta del salone della villa Demidoff a San Donato (1841) 2.jpg|Central rotonda
Image:Villa san donato 2007 03.JPG|Loggia (2007)
Image:Villa san donato 2007 08.JPG|Villa San Donato (2007)