Villa Pliniana
The villa, located in a wooded inlet of the lake, took its name from Pliny the Younger, who described an intermittent karst spring present there in a letter addressed to his friend Lucius Licinius Sura.
On 7 July 1472, the Duke ordered the construction of large exploitation works: the mineral was transformed with more modern imported techniques, the low fires and vat ovens were abandoned, in favour of the first blast furnaces of the era by Nicolò Muggiasca).
In 1573 the governor of Como, count Giovanni Anguissola [it], having led in 1547 the conspiracy in which Pier Luigi Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza had died, decided to build a villa-fortress outside the city.
After a daring escape from Paris which caused a scandal at court, between 1843 and 1851 Emilio lived in the villa in the company of his mistress Anne-Marie Berthier, princess of Wagram and wife of the Duke of Plaisance.
Anna looked tenderly at the piano on which Rossini in three days had composed her Tancredi, and on a wall of the loggia she read the page of Pliny the Younger concerning the intermittent spring.
The villa hosted numerous personalities including monarchs, scientists, musicians, poets and writers: Napoleon, Joseph II, Francis I and the queen Margherita di Savoia, Alessandro Volta, Lazzaro Spallanzani, Franz Liszt, Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Giacomo Puccini, Stendhal, Shelley, George Gordon Byron, Ugo Foscolo, Berchet, Alessandro Manzoni and Antonio Fogazzaro, who was inspired by it to write the novel Malombra on which the film Malombra directed by Mario Soldati and shot in the villa in 1942 was based.
They established the Pliniana Real Estate Company, starting a slow historical restoration that lasted about thirty years, and expanding the only access road to the villa.
[11] Due to its isolation and its severe appearance, the villa is still known today for being the abode of ghosts, also because the first owner Giovanni Anguissola died in turn murdered after killing the Duke of Parma.
Anne-Marie, who lived in Paris with her husband, created Duke of Plaisance by Bonaparte, suddenly fled from the French capital together with Belgiojoso, abandoning, in addition to her spouse, a newborn child, and causing a great scandal.
[12] Thus, between the end of the Thirties and the early Forties, they devoted themselves solely to pleasure, in a villa with "rooms full of shade, which look like silent burial chambers of a castle of vanished sovereigns", immersed in a landscape of «sepulchral, tall cypress trees», on «a steep cliff between immense memories of ambushes and blood».
One day, finally, Anne-Marie abandoned him while he was sleeping, to move to Milan, where he will buy a stage at the La Scala, resuming the social life that had already characterized the years preceding the escape with Belgiojoso.
