Born from the conversion of a Franciscan convent and named after its owner’s young bride, Villa Amalia hosted Foscolo, Stendhal, Monti and Parini and was one of the locations of the Taviani brothers’ film “Allonsanfàn”.
The villa’s story begins with the Franciscan convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in the Crevenna district of Erba, built between 1480 and 1489 and consecrated in 1498. After the convent was suppressed, it was bought in 1799 by the Milanese lawyer Rocco Marliani, a key figure of the years of the Cisalpine and Italian Republics, who entrusted the architect Leopoldo Pollack with the project of turning it into a summer residence. The works were finished in 1801 and the villa took its name from Amalia, Marliani’s young wife.
Pollack’s design, by a pupil of Piermarini, kept the structure of the convent of the Reformed Franciscans and some of its elements, such as the oratory with its fifteenth-century marble pulpit and sixteenth-century frescoes, setting them inside a new building with a Neoclassical facade and an Ionic portico topped by a balcony and a pediment. Pollack also redesigned the English-style garden, where statues, fountains, an obelisk and a monument to Giuseppe Parini, with a bust sculpted by Giuseppe Franchi, were added. The five lunettes of the Cappuccina portico, with mythological scenes and episodes from the Odyssey, are attributed to Giuseppe Bossi, who probably painted them between 1805 and 1807.
During the Marliani years the house welcomed men of letters such as Foscolo, Stendhal, Monti and Parini. In 1828 the property passed to Luigi Marietti, of a family of entrepreneurs and bankers; in 1843, after the failure of the family bank, the Marietti had to sell the villa at auction: it was bought by Massimiliano Giovanni Rinaldo Stampa di Soncino, who had it renewed in Gothic Revival style by the architect Giuseppe Balzaretto. From 1940 the villa belonged to the Brothers of the Christian Schools, and since 1962 it has been owned by a local public body, the Provincial Administration.