Villa Pliniana: legends, ghosts and clandestine love affairs.

Villa Pliniana was built in 1573 on the perimeter of a pre-existing but more modest building. The original site probably housed some mills and facilities for wool processing. We are in Torno, on the road connecting Como with Bellagio. The construction of the villa was desired by Count Giovanni Anguissola, governor of Como. The villa lies in an inlet of the lake and owes its name to Pliny the Younger, who praised its karst spring in an aphorism to his friend Lucius Licinius Sura:

I have brought you, instead of a small gift from my native country, a problem worthy of the most profound science of yours. A spring springs from the mountain, descends through the rocks, gathers in a small field suitable for lunch and cut by hand by man. After remaining there for a while, it falls into the Lake Lario. It has a strange nature: three times a day it rises and falls reaching certain elevations and drops. Perhaps a more hidden current of air first opens the opening and channels of the spring and then it closes them (...). Perhaps the intermittence is due to an underground wind or perhaps from an alternating ebb and flow in the spring, like a high and low tide in the sea. You can have a meal and eat it near it, while the water flows with your cup from the spring itself so refreshing. Meanwhile it disappears and then rises again in a regular time.

The spring is dominated by a waterfall about 80 meters high, also mentioned by Leonardo da Vinci in his Codex Leicester.
The construction was overseen by architect Giovanni Antonio Piotti, who finished it in 1577. It was later sold to Pirro I Visconti Borromeo in 1590, who built terracing on the surrounding land, planting vines and chestnut trees.

It was then sold to Francesco Canarisi of Torno, who frescoed the interior and installed portraits of his ancestors and the Plinii. A chapel was also erected in honor of St. Francis. The Canarisi family maintained it until the early 19^th century.
In the centuries to come, the villa witnessed several owners. In 1840 the new owner Prince Emilio Barbiano di Belgiojoso d'Este suggested a total makeover of the decorations.
Then, the villa was bought by the Valperga di Masino family in 1890, who brought here the furnishings from their Masino Castle. Lots of famous people stayed in its rooms: sovereigns, musicians, scientists, poets and writers…. They include also Napoleon, Joseph II, Francis I and Queen Margaret of Savoy, 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 here for his novel Malombra.
In 1983 Emilio Ottolenghi, an entrepreneur from Turin, bought the villa and laboriously completed a patient and difficult historical restoration. The main body has a beautiful sheer facade overlooking the lake with four orders of windows. In the center is a three-arched loggia, while at the back, behind a statue of Neptune with trident, the building turns toward the Plinian spring.

This isolated and severe-looking villa inspired mysterious legends. It is said to be inhabited by ghosts; it is probably the ghost of the first owner Giovanni Anguissola, a condottiere, who died murdered. Or maybe the ghosts are the victims of Anguissola himself, who still find no peace. The legend, however, is also deeply linked to the story of love and adultery between Emilio Barbiano di Belgiojoso and his mistress Princess Anne-Marie Berthier (daughter of Marshal Berthier and Napoleon's chief of staff).
Anne Marie fled Paris, leaving her husband the Duke de Plaisance and their infant daughter. The two lovers took refuge here in Villa Pliniana and lived eight years of total isolation. They devoted themselves solely to pleasure among the rooms thick with shadow, resembling mute burial chambers of a castle of vanished sovereigns, immersed in a landscape of sepulchrals, tall cypress trees, on a steep cliff among immense memories of ambushes and bloodshed.

Here is what was written:

n the evenings, on the midnight chimes, they used to wrap themselves naked together in a sheet to dive from the top of the loggia into the lake, as if to seek relief from the fever of love that united them. The villagers on the opposite shore thought they saw a ghost and became frightened. The daily repetition of the event confirmed their belief..