Phong Huynh
English 205
Research paper
Villa Diodati

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 John Polidori in the summer of 1816. Villa Diodati was originally called the Villa Belle Rive, Byron named it the Villa Diodati after his family owned it. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, who was renting a house nearby, is a frequent visitor. Due to bad weather, in June 1816, the famous group spent three days together in the creation stories to tell each other, two of which have been developed into the landmark works of the genre Gothic horror: Frankenstein Mary Shelley and the Vampyre, the first modern vampire story, by Polidori. In May 1816 the poet Percy Shelley, together with Mary Godwin and their son William travelled to Geneva. The journey across the French border and into Switzerland involved travelling through bleak, wintry landscapes. As Mary recorded afterwards in her travel volume History of a Six Weeks: Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817): “Never was a scene more awfully desolate. The trees in these regions are incredibly large, and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness; the vast expanse of snow was chequered only by these gigantic pines, and the poles that marked our road: no river or rock-encircled lawn relieved the eye, by adding the picturesque to the sublime”. The landscape, with its frightening, lonely and bleak aspect, clearly haunted Mary, and she would describe similarly desolate locations in her novel Frankenstein, a book that both begins and ends amidst bleak snowy wastes. Within 10 days of the arrival of Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin in Geneva, Lord Byron himself arrived in a suitably dramatic fashion, drawing up at his hotel around midnight in a Napoleonic carriage fresh from a