Villa Bionda (ex Villa Della Casa)

A pink-granite and timber villa of 1875 on Baveno's Corso Garibaldi, Villa Bionda began as Villa Della Casa, the home of the entrepreneur who industrialised the quarrying of Baveno's celebrated pink granite. Designed by Augusto Guidini, it remains one of the most characterful stops on the town's villa itinerary.

Why it matters

Baveno's nineteenth-century villas tell the story of how a granite-quarrying village on Lake Maggiore became a resort for industrialists, aristocrats and touring royalty. Villa Bionda is the most direct expression of that transformation, because it was built by a man who made his fortune in the very stone that decorates it. Nicola Della Casa developed the modern extraction and processing of Baveno's pink granite, and his house is an advertisement for the material: cut granite is combined with timber in a deliberate, assured way that no plastered lakeside villa can match. Its Swiss-chalet styling also marks something unusual in local architecture — an alpine idiom imported to the lake, rather than the neoclassical or neogothic conventions of neighbouring residences. Villa Bionda brings the town's industrial and residential histories together in a single façade.

What to notice

The main façade The carved motto "Labor prima virtus" — work is the first virtue — states the Della Casa firm's creed in stone, a striking example of an industrialist inscribing his work ethic directly onto his own home. Look next at the pairing of materials: pink Baveno granite in the structural and decorative stonework, against generous timber elements that give the villa its chalet character. The combination is the building's central idea, and it works because both materials come from the same landscape — the granite from the quarries above the town, the wood from the surrounding valleys. Round terracotta medallions set into the façade, which portray figures from Italian history and culture; they add a patriotic, humanist note to an otherwise vigorous, almost muscular house. The villa's situation is also distinctive: unlike most celebrated lake villas, this one does not present its face to the water, so appreciate it from the street as its architect intended.

Context and history

The villa was built in 1875 to designs by the architect Augusto Guidini for Nicola Della Casa, the entrepreneur credited with developing the modern extraction and processing of pink Baveno granite — a stone quarried around the town for centuries and shipped across the region for monuments and buildings. Della Casa's business turned that ancient material into a modern industry, and the house he commissioned served both as a family residence and as a statement of what his firm could do. Guidini designed it in Swiss chalet style, a choice that suited both the timber-and-stone palette of the enterprise and the taste of a northern-oriented lakeside bourgeoisie. In later years the building became known as Villa Bionda, the name by which it is now generally called, though its identity as the Della Casa house is preserved in local documentation and in the motto on its façade. It stands along Corso Garibaldi, the road that threads through Baveno between the lakefront and the villas above it, as a piece of the town's working history dressed in residential form.