Punta San Vigilio is a small promontory along with a peninsula extended in the water, one of the more striking and romantic places in the Lake Garda.
Owned by the noble family Guarenti di Brenzone, it includes a villa, a little church, an historical inn, a small port and the beach "Baia delle Sirene". Visitors of Punta San Vigilio were the duchess of Parma Maria Luigina, the Emperor Alexander of Russia, Winston Churchill and the Price Charles of England.
As regards its origins, the peninsula was certainly populated, as testifies a gravestone, today stored into the Maffeiano Museum of Verona, reporting the existence of a little temple consecrated to Benacus, a pagan god. The story of Punta San Vigilio can easily be assimilated to the one of its Villa, built by a solitary, peaceful and cultivated man whose motto was BEATUS ILLE QUI PROCUL NEGOTII, lucky those who don't worry about material life.
Built between the XVIII and the XIX century by the Marquises Carlotti, when they left their ancient palace in the centre of Garda. When they died, they hadn't heirs, so the villa became propriety of the Marquises of Canossa of Verona in the 1900s. The palace, with a typical 1700 achitecture, was widened in the 1800s. It has a big English park in front of the façade.
Alessandra Ridini, a descendant of the Sicilian Princes Paternò (1876-1931) lived for a long period in the Villa, both during her tormented relationship with the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, and at the end of their loving affair, for a period of solitude and reflection. Being judged badly by the society, she became a nurse and died in a French monastery.
