After the Napoleonic expropriation, the Carthusian monastery was acquired by Giuseppe Avena and transformed, after a restoration period, in a hydrotherapeutic institute. The establishment became between the first half and the end of the nineteenth-century a holiday resort able to attract political and intellectual personalities from all over Europe. The princesses Clotilde and Maria Pia di Savoia, who was the last future Queen of Portugal, important politicians like Cavour and Giolitti, and then the writers Stendahl, the Egyptologist Fabretti, and the botanist Burnat stayed during these years in the Pesio Valley.