Across the facades of this Art Nouveau villa, silkworms, butterflies and mulberry leaves chase one another: a decorative scheme unique in Italy, dedicated to the trade that made its patron wealthy.
Built between 1905 and 1906 to a design by architect Alfredo Campanini, the villa was commissioned by the Milanese engineer Davide Bernasconi, who at the end of the nineteenth century had founded an important silk mill in Cernobbio. It is no accident that it stands at the heart of what was once Cernobbio’s “silk citadel”, surrounded by the administrative buildings of the Bernasconi mill. The free, quadrangular plan, spread over three floors with a panoramic turret, holds inside and on its outer facades a decorative cycle that traces the entire life cycle of the silkworm – from cocoon to butterfly – together with the leaves and fruit of the mulberry tree, the plant that feeds the silkworms: an iconographic theme that makes Villa Bernasconi a rare case in the landscape of Italian Art Nouveau. Master blacksmith Alessandro Mazzucotelli, one of the leading figures of Italian Art Nouveau, worked on the refined stained-glass windows and the wrought-iron decorations.
The villa remained with the Bernasconi heirs until 1955, then passed to the company C.E.T. (later S.A.L.V.I.) and for years housed the Guardia di Finanza, before the Municipality of Cernobbio became its owner in 1989. It long housed municipal offices, then – from the early 2000s – exhibitions and cultural events. After a lengthy restoration completed in 2013, the villa reopened as a public museum on 26 November 2017 with the project “Liberty Tutti”, the first interactive museum dedicated to the Art Nouveau style and to the history of the Bernasconi family: a tour in which the Villa itself tells its own story, through the rooms where the silk that made Cernobbio famous around the world was once designed.