The President of the Provincia di Lecco, Alessandra Hofmann, and the Curator of the House Museum, Anna Ranzi, welcomed the researcher, Andreas Höhn, at Villa Monastero last weekend.

He visited Varenna and the Villa with his wife for the first time, as he wished to know the residence owned by the Kees family from 1898 to 1918.

Mr Höhn has made interesting researches on the Kees family, and in particular on Walter Erich Jacob Kees (1864-1906), the last descendant of the family who bought the Larian residence. The Villa was requisitioned by the Italian State as war debt in 1918. Now, Villa Monastero is owned by the Provincia di Lecco.

The Kees dynasty came from Lindau, on the Lake of Constance, and then moved to Lipsia to carry out business activities at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Johann Jacob, one of the descendants of the Kees dynasty, worked in the mail transport in the Saxony region in the eighteenth century. In the Kees emblem, in fact, there was the mail transport symbol, and this emblem is still placed inside the Villa and outside, along the garden path.