The Admirable Admiral’s Villa in Taormina

If you know your history pretty well, you may be aware that one of England’s most celebrated Admirals possessed a rather charming villa in the scenic Sicilian town of Taormina.

Remember the Battle of Trafalgar?  That battle from time past when one Lord Horatio Nelson thwarted one Napoleon Bonaparte’s dastardly plan to invade Great Britain.  Well, the late Lord Nelson just happened to have had more than a few Italian connections, and Nelson was a popular chap with the Neapolitan royal family who welcomed him with wide open arms after he had given Napoleon’s ships a damned good thrashing during the Battle of the Nile.

It was also while in Naples that Nelson met his mistress, Emma Hamilton.  The effect of the romantic Italian atmosphere, one supposes.

Whether or not Nelson and his lover passed time at Villa Nelson is not clear, even if it is a distinct possibility.  The villa remained in the hands of the Nelson family until 1947, before passing into the ownership of  an Italian count.

Now, once more, Nelson’s Sicilian retreat is up for sale, or so I read in the Saturday edition of Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. Read more

Did You Know?

In Italian, the word for ‘cat’ is ‘gatto’, whereas in Latin, or rather, ancient Italian, the word for ‘cat’ was ‘cattus’. This means that the English language word for ‘cat’ is closer to Latin than the modern Italian word ‘gatto’.

Curious what you come across whilst researching the differences between civil and common law legal principles, isn’t it?