LONDON - Set in the palaces of Mayfair, the London borough of the aristocrats, and in the English countryside of estates and manors, the television series Bridgerton has conquered viewers all over the world with its dances, costumes, scandals and intrigues of court, told with malice by Lady Whistledown.
Waiting for the second season to arrive, we take you to England, precisely to the places where the TV series was filmed and which inspired its Regency atmosphere of the first twenty years of the nineteenth century.
The fiction is a perfectly successful mix of fantasy episodes, many, and real events, very few, but all inserted in romantic and sumptuous locations that are the background to the sentimental adventures of the Duke of Hastings and Lady Bridgerton among the pomp and excesses of London high society, of noblewomen of marriageable age, of disputed dukes and of an African-American queen.
Most of the locations that inspired the series are located in Bath, an elegant spa town in Somerset, famous for its picturesque Georgian architecture: streets, buildings, facades, furnishings are found in the eight episodes of the series, but above all they still allow today to relive that nineteenth-century atmosphere so full of charm that permeates fiction.
The place of inspiration is the Royal Crescent, a large residential complex made up of 30 terraced houses with 114 columns arranged in a crescent;
house number 1 has been transformed into a museum that illustrates the opulent furnishings of the Regency era and which also inspired the interiors for the splendid residence of the Featherington family, friend and competitor of the Bridgertons.
The house number 10, on the other hand, was used to set the apartment of Siena, singer and lover of Anthony, the eldest son of the Bridgertons.
Not far away, in Bath's first public art gallery - the Holburne Museum of Art - the first ball of the season and the exterior of the villa of Lady Danbury, mentor and friend of the protagonist, the charming Duke Simon, were filmed.
Its luxurious ballroom, on the other hand, was taken over by the Assembly Rooms, a building in Bath that still hosts concerts and private parties today.
In the center of the spa town Abbey Green is a street so beautiful it seems unreal: here is the Pickled Greens café with its double bay window, which in the TV series has become the Modiste atelier of Genevieve Delacroix who creates dresses for bridesmaids ready for the debut ball and lengthens the hems on skirts for those who have to present themselves in high society.
It is a bathroom supply store, however, that has lent its exteriors to Gunter's Tea Shop, a meeting place for the ladies of Bridgerton.
Finally, just outside Bath, Prior Park's beautiful garden is the backdrop to numerous outdoor living scenes and family-friendly picnics from the television series.
From Bath we travel to London to find the most familiar locations in the series: the splendid wisteria-draped facade of the Bridgertons' house is Ranger's House, a 1720 Georgian villa in the south-east of the capital, behind Greenwich Park.
The scenes with the great central staircase and the hall of the Bridgerton palace, on the other hand, were shot near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, precisely in the Halton House, a country house that belonged to a member of the Rothschild family, now owned by the Royal Air Force.
Hastings House, the London residence of the Duke of Hastings, is also the result of a large mosaic of locations: the exterior was shot in the Wiltshire countryside at Wilton House in Salisbury, the country residence of the Earls of Pembroke;
the drawing room and morning room were filmed at Badminton House, Gloucestershire, the Duke of Beaufort's principal residence since the late 17th century.
Queen Charlotte's home in London is at St James's Palace, where almost all filming took place except for the exterior which is actually Hampton Court Palace and some interiors which were filmed at Lancaster House in the West End of the capital.
In North Yorkshire is the Duke of Hastings' country residence: it is Castle Howard in York, a beautiful historic building surrounded by an immense park, also open to the public.
Here, inside and outside, the scenes of the home of the Dukes of Hastings and the first weeks of their eventful marriage were shot.
On the way to the castle, the newly married couple stops at an inn: the scene was shot in Buckinghamshire, precisely at Dorney Court, a Tudor manor of almost 600 years ago.
In Hertfordshire, just north of London, stands the beautiful Jacobean-style Hatfield House country manor, where Lady Trowbridge's ball scenes were filmed in her iconic hall of marbles and men-only meetings at Gentleman's Club.
The green scenes of parks and botanical gardens were filmed at Painshill Park in Cobham, Surrey, between ponds and romantic bridges in one of the best remaining examples of an 18th century English landscape park. Two other locations where the lavish balls were set are Leigh Court in Bristol, where parties and ceremonies are still held today, and the garden of the Dundridge Manor Farm in St. Leonards, North West London. Finally, there are the boxing scenes shot at the Normansfield Theater, a Victorian-era building located in Teddington, south of the capital, while in Chatham Dockyard in Kent is the apartment of Will, the friend of Duke Simon, one of the few houses not elegant in the series.