Palazzo Borromeo dell'Isola Madre

On one of the Borromean Islands, a sixteenth-century residence is associated with a marionette theatre, including scenery. Furnished rooms and lake-facing loggias reflect Isola Madre's domestic character in contrast with Isola Bella.

Why it matters

The palace began as a modest structure above the island's church and cemetery and grew over three centuries into the Borromeo family's private retreat. After 1987, the family moved furnishings here from other Lombard properties. The interiors preserve a record of aristocratic domestic life, including bedrooms, dining spaces, porcelain and a Venetian salon, as well as a theatre of marionettes.

What to notice

The ground-floor loggiato has marble statues and medallions. A two-ramp staircase is lined with portraits of prelates, members of the Arese family and Spanish rulers. Rooms include the Sala delle Stagioni and Sala delle Battaglie. In the bedroom of Federico VI Borromeo, a canopy bed with a marble headboard sits beneath a Murano chandelier; the dining room displays an early-nineteenth-century Viennese porcelain service. The Teatro delle Marionette occupies three rooms and preserves painted scenery on wooden frames, mechanical effects including a "cloud machine", and marionettes and scripts. Stagings from around 1830 were designed by Alessandro Sanquirico, scenographer of Milan's Teatro alla Scala. The Salotto Veneziano has trompe-l'oeil columns entwined with painted plants and a Murano glass chandelier.

Context and history

The island, earlier called San Vittore, Isola Maggiore and later Isola Renata, passed from the nuns of San Felice in Pavia — a grant of Emperor Henry II in 1014 — into private hands, and Count Lancillotto Borromeo planted citrus there around 1501. Isabella Borromeo's marriage carried it to the Trivulzio family, and Renato I Borromeo brought it back in 1563. In 1583 he commissioned Pellegrino Tibaldi, the trusted architect of San Carlo Borromeo, to build the palace; construction was slow enough that the last rooms were finished only in the 1800s. The family used the residence through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the surrounding land evolved from an agricultural estate into a botanical garden.