In and around Padua, the singer bought several properties, the best known being the Ca' Farsetti, said to have been once owned by Pietro Bembo. He also built an extraordinary neo-Gothic mansion, the Castello Pacchierotti, the ruins of which were much later (1881) described by the English writer Violet Page (alias Vernon Lee): " ... in this remote corner of Padua we stumbled one day into a beautiful tangle of trees and grass and flowers ... and were informed by a gardener's boy that this garden had once belonged to a famous singer, by name Gasparo Pacchierotti ... The gardener led us into the house, a battered house, covered with creepers and amphorae, and sentimental inscriptions from the works of the poets and philosophers in vogue a hundred years ago ... He showed us into a long narrow room, in which was a large slender harpsichord ... which had belonged to ... the singer. It was open, and looked as if it might just have been touched, but no sound could be drawn from it. The gardener then led us into a darkened lumber-room, where hung the portrait of the singer, thickly covered with dust: a mass of dark blurs, from out of which appeared scarcely more than the pale thin face – a face with deep dreamy eyes and tremulously tender lips, full of a vague, wistful, contemplative poetry..."