Charlottesville Guide

Charlottesville is a college town in Jefferson’s foothills, and its centerpiece is the University of Virginia’s Academical Village — the Rotunda and the Lawn that Jefferson designed and built between 1817 and 1826, so architecturally important that it and Monticello together form Virginia’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is also, unavoidably, built by enslaved labor: an estimated 4,000 enslaved people worked on the Grounds, and UVA finally faced it with the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, a low granite ring east of the Rotunda inscribed with 577 known names and thousands of dark gashes for the ones lost to history. Downtown, the brick-paved Downtown Mall is one of the longest outdoor pedestrian malls in the country — restaurants, bookstores, and live music — and the surrounding Monticello wine country is Jefferson’s own vineyard dream finally come true.