Parque Lage

This guide to Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro traces the coal fortune behind the mansion's Renaissance-style courtyard, built by industrialist Henrique Lage in the 1920s for his wife, the Italian mezzo-soprano Gabriella Besanzoni, who had shared a stage with Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera. He hired the Italian architect Mario Vodret to remake a nineteenth-century residence, with painted ceilings by the Spanish artist Salvador Payols Sabate. Guests remembered her singing from the terrace above the courtyard pool while the parties carried on below.