Leri Cavour

Leri Cavour, formerly Leri, is a frazione of Trino, in the province of Vercelli, once a 900-hectare estate of the Benso family, to which Count Camillo Benso belonged.

From the 11th century the Leri area was drained by Cistercian monks, and over the following centuries it became fertile land for growing rice.

It was part of the grange acquired in 1179 by the monastery of San Genuario (the deed mentions the castrum and the villa de loco Alerii) and included a fortified centre of which no trace remains today.

It was one of the most important of these granges, so much so that in 1457 it became a Cistercian place of worship and towards the end of the 16th century a parish. The area remained important in the following centuries. In the 18th century crop rotation replaced monoculture, and at the start of the 1800s the farming landscape of the whole region changed drastically when the water network was reorganised.

In the 19th century the estate passed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who by a decree of 1807 sold it to his brother-in-law, Prince Camillo II Borghese, as partial payment for handing the Borghese gallery over to the French state. In 1822 Leri was bought by the Marquis Michele Benso di Cavour, father of Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour. The Benso family turned the estate (380 hectares of the main complex, plus 365 at Montarucco and 318 at Torrone) into a farm that was cutting-edge for its time, reworking the oldest buildings. Around it lay about thirty hectares at San Basilio and eighty of the nearby Trino woods.

Text: Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · translated from Italian