The name is Italian for little mountain, and Jefferson chose the spot for the view. Monticello sits on the summit of an 850-foot peak in the Southwest Mountains, three miles southeast of Charlottesville, looking out over the rolling Piedmont toward the Blue Ridge. Work on the first version of the house began in 1768. Jefferson moved into the small South Pavilion in 1770 and brought his wife Martha there in 1772. After Martha died in 1782, he served as Minister to France, and the European tour reshaped his architectural ambitions. The Hôtel de Salm in Paris fascinated him. So did the Pantheon in Rome, which he never managed to visit but copied anyway. In 1794 he began rebuilding. The remodel ran through his presidency from 1801 to 1809 and was mostly finished by the time he retired - though Jefferson kept tinkering until the day he died, July 4, 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The house at the top of the hill could not exist without the row of buildings just below it. Mulberry Row ran along a south-facing lane and held the working parts of the plantation: a nailery where enslaved boys made nails for sale, a joinery, a dairy, a washhouse, store houses, log cabins where the enslaved workers who served the household lived. Cabins for the field workers stood farther down the slope. About 150 enslaved people worked Monticello at its height. They cleared the mountain, hauled the bricks, dug the cisterns, planted the terraces, raised the children of the family that owned them. One of those workers, Sally Hemings - Jefferson's sister-in-law through his late wife - lived in a Mulberry Row cabin and later in a room in the south dependency below the main house. The genealogist Helen F.M. Leary concluded that the evidence securely fastens Sally Hemings's children to their father, Thomas Jefferson. Four of their six children survived to adulthood. In 2017 archaeologists identified what is believed to be Sally Hemings's room, adjacent to Jefferson's bedroom. It is now part of the restoration.

When Jefferson died, he was deep in debt. His daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph sold Monticello in 1831 to a Charlottesville apothecary named James Turner Barclay for $7,500. Three years later Barclay sold it for $2,500 to Uriah P. Levy, the first Jewish commodore in the United States Navy. Levy admired Jefferson - especially Jefferson's writings on religious liberty - and spent considerable money keeping the house from collapsing. The Confederacy seized Monticello during the Civil War and sold it; Levy's estate recovered it after the war. His nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy bought out the other heirs in 1879 and continued the preservation work. The Levys held Monticello for nearly a century. In 1909, a woman named Maud Littleton launched a public campaign to have the house taken from the Levys, using openly antisemitic language and lobbying Congress to expropriate the property. Two bills failed. Finances eventually forced Jefferson Monroe Levy to sell in 1923, to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, for $500,000. Littleton became the foundation's first executive director, and for the next sixty years the Levy family's role was largely erased from the official story. Rachel Levy, Uriah's mother, lies buried at Monticello. Her grave was finally refurbished in 1985.

Jefferson called Monticello his essay in architecture, and the house reads like one. The entrance hall doubled as a museum where he displayed Native American artifacts brought back by Lewis and Clark, on whose expedition he had staked the future of the country he led. He painted the floorcloth grass green on Gilbert Stuart's advice, so the outdoors could come inside. He hated wasted space - the dining table came up only at mealtimes, beds folded into alcoves carved into thick walls, dumbwaiters rose through the fireplace, a pivoting serving door rotated dishes from kitchen to dining room without anyone having to walk through. His own bed opens to two rooms at once, his cabinet on one side, his dressing room on the other. The library held the third of his three book collections; the second he had sold to Congress in 1815 to replace the books burned when the British torched the Capitol during the War of 1812. That sale became the nucleus of the Library of Congress.

In 1987 UNESCO listed Monticello as a World Heritage Site - the only private home in the United States with that designation, paired with Jefferson's University of Virginia a few miles to the northwest. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation still runs the property, and recent decades have brought a sustained effort to tell the fuller story. The Getting Word oral history project, begun in 1993, gathered the memories of descendants of the enslaved community. An African burial ground was found on the property in 2000 and 2001 and commemorated with the reading of the known names. In 2003 descendants of Jefferson through both the Wayles and Hemings lines held the first joint family reunion. The Mountaintop Project keeps adding to the restoration - dependencies, cabins, the rooms where the enslaved workers lived and worked. From the air, the small white dome still catches the late light. The terrace runs along the south slope. The clock with its single hour hand still ticks above the east portico, marking time in the rough increments Jefferson considered sufficient.