Villa del Grumello e parco storico

Halfway between Como and Cernobbio, Villa del Grumello keeps one of the Lario's most layered gardens. Rebuilt in the later sixteenth century for the banker Tommaso d'Adda, later home to the Giovio and Celesia families and visited by Volta and Foscolo, it was rescued after 2006 by its association. The romantic park is the estate's defining feature.

Why it matters

Villa del Grumello shows the lake villa as a working cultural place rather than a museum piece. Its pedigree is literary as much as architectural: Foscolo was a frequent visitor to the Giovio household, remembered today by a bust in the garden, and Monti and Volta joined the circle of guests. The romantic park, with its variety of botanical species, is ranked among the Grandi Giardini Italiani, and the estate anchors the Chilometro della Conoscenza — the "kilometre of knowledge" that links the lakeside villas east of the city into a campus of research and culture. After abandonment at the start of the 2000s, the association's recovery project returned the heritage site to public use.

What to notice

Read the architecture as an accumulation of owners. The sixteenth-century core rebuilt for Tommaso d'Adda was reshaped in the seventeenth century by the Cernobbio architect-artist Tibaldo Pellegrini; at the end of the eighteenth the facade was redone by Simone Cantoni, the same neoclassicist traditionally linked with Villa Olmo, to whom the two lateral wings are also due; in 1870 the architect Nessi raised the central block by a floor. The park retains romantic-era structures: the greenhouse on the south-west side looking over a spring-fed pond, the small commemorative chapel the Countess Celesia built for her son, and the bust of Foscolo in the garden. The botanical variety of the romantic layout, celebrated by the Grandi Giardini listing, is the park's real subject — mature species layered over two centuries of garden taste.

Context and history

The estate's documented life begins in the fifteenth century, when records describe it as the Castellazzo — a two-storey rural building set in vineyard, meadow and orchard — later renamed Grumello. Tommaso d'Adda's rebuild in the later sixteenth century made it one of the first suburban residences of the Como patriciate on the Lario, prized for being both green and close to town. Ownership passed through the Odescalchi and the Giovio to the Celesia family from the second half of the nineteenth century; the 1870 restoration and the pond-side greenhouse belong to this period. In 1954 Countess Giulia Celesia Cays di Caselette donated the villa, park and annexes to the Ospedale Sant'Anna of Como, leaving the artworks and furnishings to the Civic Museum. The building then served as a rest home and, from 1970 to 2000, housed the styling office of the Ratti silk firm. After years of abandonment, the Chamber of Commerce of Como promoted the foundation of Associazione Villa del Grumello in 2006, launching a restoration that renewed the estate's cultural role.