BIGGEST Houses in the World
For the most part, modesty and reasonability in houses seems to be the norm across the world. Then you come across some people who let all of that go right out the window and decided to build themselves mansions we couldn’t even fathom. From giant homes built with more rooms than there is stuff to fill them with, to an entire skyscraper that is a personal residence, you’ll see those and more here. This is a salute to the greedy, the boastful, and those cocky money-flaunting millionaires and billionaires in the world. This is BIGGEST Houses in the World!
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6. Taohuayuan
Oh, baby, this is the most expensive home in all of China, and it seems pretty easy to understand why. The house costs roughly 1 billion yuan, which is about $154 million. The home, set on a private island on Suzhou’s Dushu Lake, which is China’s largest lake, has 32 bedrooms, as well as 32 bathrooms. It has a massive wine cellar, a giant, excellent pool, a mist-covered pond, and much more! The home and property took just over three years to complete, and it’s fashioned in the traditional Chinese style. The Xiangshanbang Traditional Architectural and Building Skills to get all of the brickwork handcrafted, which had to be painstaking as the home covers 72,441 square feet! It is owned by Hongtian Chen, a Chinese real estate tycoon, who purchased it in 2016.
5. The One
Seriously, that’s what they’re calling this super expensive, reserved for the rich, rich, rich house located in Bel Air. It’s made from marble and glass and features things such as four swimming pools, moats, 20 bedrooms, 30 bathrooms, walls and ceilings made of aquariums, a movie theatre, a bowling alley, and a nightclub. It’s enormous, and it makes some of the neighbors’ homes, neighbors like Elon Musk and Jennifer Aniston, look tiny. We guess that’s why the price tag is so amazingly large; the house that can dwarf the mansions of the rich and famous costs a cool $500 million. We’ll see if he can sell it, though; the world record for the most expensive house sold came in at $300 million. We’ll be surprised to see someone put down another $200 million on top of that!
4. Witanhurst
This vast, historical 20th-century Georgian Revival mansion can be found in Highgate, North-West London. It sits on 5 acres of land and is the second-largest home in London with an incredible 90,000 square feet of living space after its most recent renovation. Inside are 63 rooms, 25 of which are bedrooms, and some others include a drawing room, billiard room, and a ballroom. It was built between 1913 and 1920 by architect George Hubbard, and it kept in bits of the Georgian-style Parkfield estate that used to stand on the grounds. Prior to its renovation, the home only encompassed 40,000 square feet, but its current owner, Russian billionaire Andrey Guryev, made a lot of additions. There are now also two basements that hold things like a gym, a sauna, a massage parlor, a movie theatre, and a 70-foot pool, as well as lots of parking spaces. Guryev bought the house in 2008 for just $50 million, and he shows no signs of selling anytime soon.
3. Safra Mansion
Lily Safra, the widow of Edmond Safra, the Lebanese banker, owns what is, at this point and time the second most expensive house there is. Edmond Safra was the founder of the Republic National Bank of New York and had other giant banking operations in places such as Brazil, Lebanon, Switzerland, and Syria. When Edmond passed, Lily assumed ownership of the property, and boy was that a good deal. The home sits on a 50-acre plot of land that houses the 117,000 square foot, 130-room home. The Safra mansion also features two pools, a pool house, a helipad, a giant greenhouse, an outdoor kitchen, and a guest house to rival the size of the mansions of many other rich folks. The property was designed and built by architect Ogden Codman Jr. between 1929 and 1931.
2. Biltmore Estate
This giant estate can be found in Asheville, North Carolina, and it was built between 1889 and 1895 by George Washington Vanderbilt II. The home boasts 178,926 square feet and is still owned by the Vanderbilt family. There are 250 rooms in the house, 35 of which are bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, three different kitchens, 65 fireplaces, and multiple elevators. Considering it was built so long ago, it’s almost a wonder that it has things like centrally controlled clocks, a call-bell system, and forced-air heating, but it does. It also serves as an inn these days and rooms are available for the public to stay in. There are also suites available for those with the money, and those are all named after friends or family members of good old George Vanderbilt.
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Italian Americans | Wikipedia audio article
This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Italian Americans
00:02:45 1 History
00:02:54 1.1 Early period (1492–1775)
00:07:08 1.2 War of Independence to Civil War (1775–1861)
00:11:39 1.3 Civil War and after (1861–90)
00:14:44 1.4 The period of mass immigration (1890–1920)
00:27:26 1.5 1917-1941
00:35:04 1.6 World War II
00:39:05 1.7 Wartime violation of Italian-American civil liberties
00:42:20 1.8 Post-World War II period
00:48:37 1.9 Close of the twentieth century
00:51:49 2 Politics
00:55:57 3 Business and economy
00:56:58 3.1 Workers
00:58:50 3.2 Women
01:04:17 4 Culture
01:07:10 4.1 Literature
01:13:06 4.2 Religion
01:16:56 4.2.1 Italian Jews
01:20:04 4.3 Education
01:21:23 4.4 Language
01:27:55 4.5 Newspapers
01:32:17 4.6 Folklore
01:34:15 5 Discrimination and stereotyping
01:40:52 6 Communities
01:43:01 6.1 New York City
01:46:25 6.2 Philadelphia
01:49:15 6.3 Boston
01:50:19 6.4 Newark
01:52:12 6.5 Saint Louis
01:52:21 6.6 Syracuse
01:53:42 6.7 Providence
01:54:34 6.8 Chicago
01:56:57 6.9 Cleveland
01:58:41 6.10 Milwaukee
01:59:39 6.11 Ybor City
02:00:57 6.12 Birmingham
02:01:39 6.13 San Francisco
02:02:10 6.14 Los Angeles
02:03:29 6.15 San Diego
02:04:43 7 Demographics
02:10:14 7.1 U.S. States with over 10% people of Italian ancestry
02:10:48 7.2 U.S. Communities with the most residents of Italian ancestry
02:13:05 8 Notable people
02:13:14 9 See also
02:13:55 10 References and notes
02:14:05 11 Bibliography
02:14:14 12 External links
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SUMMARY
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Italian Americans (Italian: italoamericani or italo-americani [ˌitalo.ameriˈkaːni]) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans who have ancestry from Italy. Italian Americans are the seventh largest Census-reported ethnic group in the United States (which includes American ethnicity, an ethnonym used by many in the United States; overall, Italian Americans rank seventh, behind German American, African American, Irish American, Mexican American, English American, and American).About 5.5 million Italians immigrated to the United States from 1820 to 2004. By 1870, there were less than 25,000 Italian immigrants in America, many of them Northern Italian refugees from the wars that accompanied the Risorgimento—the struggle for Italian unification and independence from foreign rule. Immigration began to increase during the 1870s, when more than twice as many Italians immigrated (1870–79: 46,296) than during the five previous decades combined (1820–69: 22,627). The 1870s were followed by the greatest surge of immigration, which occurred between 1880 and 1914 and brought more than 4 million Italians to the United States, the great majority being from Southern Italy and Sicily, with most having agrarian backgrounds. This period of large scale immigration ended abruptly with the onset of the First World War in 1914 and, except for one year (1922), never fully resumed.
Further immigration was greatly limited by several laws Congress passed in the 1920s.Approximately 84% of the Italian immigrants came from the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This was the poorest and least developed part of Italy, still largely rural and agricultural, where much of the populace had been impoverished by centuries of foreign misrule, and an oppressive taxation system imposed after Italian unification in 1861. After unification, the Italian government initially encouraged emigration to relieve economic pressures in the South. After the American Civil War, which resulted in over a half million killed or wounded, immigrant workers were recruited from Italy and elsewhere to fill the labor shortage caused by the war. In the United States, most Italians began their new lives as manual laborers in Eastern cities, mining camps and in agriculture.
The descendants of the Italian immigrants gradually rose from a lower economic class in the first generation to a level comparable to the national average by 1970. The Italian community has often been characterized by strong ties to family, the Roma ...