· 7 min read · by Salimar Boat Tour
Villa Pliniana, the 1573 villa you can only reach by boat
Leaving Como towards Torno, after a few minutes the shoreline opens into an isolated inlet closed in by woodland, with a waterfall coming down beside a 16th-century palazzo facing the water. This is Villa Pliniana, a declared national monument, and no real road reaches it: you arrive by lake, by helicopter, or on foot along the path that starts at the church of San Giovanni in Torno.
The count who killed a duke
The villa was begun in 1573 and completed in 1577 for Count Giovanni Anguissola, governor of Como, on the site of old wool mills. In 1547 Anguissola had led the conspiracy that assassinated Pier Luigi Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza. The design is attributed to Giovanni Antonio Piotti da Vacallo; other sources name Pellegrino Tibaldi or Galeazzo Alessi. The count died in 1578, before the work was finished: his heir Giulio completed it.
It is not a pleasure villa: it is a villa-fortress, built specifically to enclose within its own courtyard the spring that gives it its name.
The spring that comes and goes, from Pliny to Leonardo
The "Fonte Pliniana" is an intermittent karst spring: the flow rises and falls several times a day. Pliny the Younger described it in a letter to his friend Licinius Sura, writing that it ebbed and flowed three times a day; Pliny the Elder also mentions it in the Naturalis Historia.
Leonardo da Vinci saw it a few years before the villa existed and noted it twice: in the Codex Leicester, where he writes of the "Fonte Priniana" that increases and decreases every six hours, and in the Codex Atlanticus.
Who passed through
After the Anguissola the villa went to the Visconti Borromeo in 1590, then to the Canarisi of Torno in 1676, who added frescoes and a chapel. In 1840 it became the property of Prince Emilio Barbiano di Belgiojoso d'Este, and between 1843 and 1851 it was the stage for his scandalous affair with Anne-Marie Berthier, Princess of Wagram.
The list of guests is remarkable: Napoleon, who by tradition considered buying it in 1797, Emperors Joseph II and Francis I, Queen Margherita, Alessandro Volta, Franz Liszt, Rossini — said to have composed part of Tancredi here in three days — Bellini, Puccini, Stendhal, Shelley, Byron, Foscolo, Manzoni and Antonio Fogazzaro, who set his novel Malombra here.
What it looks like
- A 16th-century palazzo on around seven hectares of waterfront
- A lake facade with four rows of windows and a central three-arch loggia
- In the courtyard, a statue of Neptune with his trident where the spring emerges
- A large helical sandstone staircase beneath a painted starry-sky vault
- The waterfall in the valley alongside, about 80 metres high
- Smaller buildings: the Canarisi chapel, Casa Shelley, Casa dei Plini, the Rifugio Da Vinci and the Casa del The
The interiors were partly redesigned by Patricia Urquiola during the 2013-2015 restoration, commissioned by the Ottolenghi family who had bought the estate in 1983 after a long decline.
Can you visit it?
It is not open to the public: it is rented as a whole, managed by Sereno Hotels, with 17 bedrooms, a private dock, a helipad and a spa. Figures in circulation mention a minimum of around 180,000 euros for three nights. From the lake, however, you see it perfectly, and it is one of the most cinematic spots in the first basin.
Ghosts and legends
The villa is said to be haunted, a legend tied to Anguissola the murderer and his own violent death. The better story, though, is that of the two lovers: at midnight Belgiojoso and Berthier would wrap themselves naked in a sheet and dive from the loggia into the lake. From the far shore villagers saw a white figure plunging into the water every night, and were convinced it was a ghost.
