Monticello was built by Thomas Jefferson between 1769 and 1809. Rejecting the British Georgian architecture that characterized his time, he instead chose to design the main house using neoclassical principles in the 16th-century Italian style of Andrea Palladi. Visitors would enter the house through the tall Northeast Portico, into the Entrance Hall. The East front gives the illusion of a single-story building, but Monticello is in fact a three-story, 33-room home with nearly 11,000 square feet of living space.
Situated on the summit of an 850-foot high park in the Southwest Mountains south of the Rivanna gap, Monticello, whose name derives from Italian meaning "little mountain", was originally a 5,000 acre plantation cultivated tobacco and mixed crops using the labor of enslaved African people. After Jefferson's death, his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph sold the property to Uriah P. Levy who preserved the property and left it to his nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy, who eventually sold it in 1923 to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which operates it as a house museum and educational institution.
National Register #66000826 (1966)
VLR #002-0050
UNESCO World Heritage Site #442
AIA150 #27
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