She provided the inspiration for the botanic park on San Pancrazio island: Antoinette de Saint Léger, born in Russia on 20 June 1856 and daughter of Wilhelmine Bayer and (probably) Tsar Alexander II. She married twice before wedding her third husband in 1881, a wealthy Anglo-Irish Lord called Richard Fleming who effectively defined the rest of her life. The young couple moved to Lake Maggiore on 7 July 1885 and acquired – thanks to a large inheritance left by one of Fleming’s uncles, by virtue of which they also gained the titles Count of Doneraile and Baroness Saint Léger – the (as they were known then) Isole dei conigli, which had been abandoned for years and were sporadically covered with vegetation and the remains of an old convent.
