Villa Diodati

The Villa Diodati is a mansion in the village of Cologny near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, notable because Lord Byron rented it and stayed there with Dr. John Polidori in the summer of 1816.

[2] The scandal of his separation from his wife, rumours of an affair with his half-sister, and ever-increasing debt, had forced him to leave England, never to return, in April of that year.

Byron settled at the Villa Diodati with his personal physician, John William Polidori, and Shelley rented a smaller house called "Maison Chapuis" on the waterfront nearby.

[6][note 1] When the rain kept them indoors at the Villa Diodati over three days in June, the five turned to reading fantastical stories, including Fantasmagoriana, and then devising their own tales.

[11] The columnist Taki has written that when he visited the Villa Diodati in 1963 with the Belgian tennis player Philippe Washer it was then owned by the latter's family.