In the air still breathed today at the Mandarin Oriental in Blevio lingers the echo of “Casta Diva”: here, within these walls, Vincenzo Bellini composed for Giuditta Pasta two of the most celebrated roles in all of Romantic opera.
It all began as “Casino Ribiere”, the residence of an eccentric Parisian milliner, Madame Ribier, who at the start of the nineteenth century dressed the ladies of Milan’s high society. In 1827 the property was bought by the soprano Giuditta Pasta, who renamed it “Villa Roda” and entrusted its neoclassical restoration to her maternal uncle, the architect Filippo Ferranti - from whom the villa took the name by which it was long known. Under her ownership, the villa became a meeting place for the greatest composers of the age: Gaetano Donizetti finished the score of Anna Bolena there in the autumn of 1829, while Vincenzo Bellini, who held a genuine veneration for Pasta, wrote La Sonnambula and Norma there, the opera that contains the famous aria “Casta Diva”.
After the singer’s death in 1865, the villa fell into neglect until, at the start of the twentieth century, the Wild family of Turin bought it and, in 1904, had it demolished to build, between 1906 and 1910, the present-day Villa Roccabruna, designed by architect Carlo Formenti. Today, after a careful restoration, the building is the heart of the Mandarin Oriental Lake Como resort, which chose the very name of Bellini’s aria for its earlier identity as the Casta Diva Resort: a thread that still links, two centuries on, the voice of one of the great singers of the nineteenth century to the charm of this lakeside villa.