Monticello

Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home on a mountaintop outside Charlottesville, Virginia, is one of the most recognizable houses in America, pictured on the back of the nickel. Jefferson designed it himself, drawing on the Italian architect Andrea Palladio, and spent more than 40 years building, tearing down and rebuilding it, from 1768 until he finished most of the work around 1809. Its dome, gardens and ingenious gadgets reflect Jefferson's restless curiosity about architecture, science and farming.

Monticello was also a plantation, worked by about 150 enslaved people at a time and by hundreds over the decades, among them Sally Hemings and members of her family. Since buying the estate in 1923, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has run it as a museum and, in recent decades, has told the stories of the enslaved community alongside Jefferson's. In 1987 Monticello and the University of Virginia's original Academical Village, which Jefferson also designed, were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

• The Piedmont
  The rolling upland between mountains and coast located in
• Virginia
  The Old Dominion, from the Chesapeake to the Blue Ridge located in