Elton John, Sting, Prince, Madonna and Lady Diana were all guests at this yellow villa perched over the lake: for nearly twenty years, Villa Fontanella was Gianni Versace’s secret refuge on Lake Como.
The building, a four-storey yellow palazzo, was built in the first half of the nineteenth century by the eccentric Lord Charles Currie, an English nobleman who, unable to find an existing villa that matched his taste on the lake he had fallen in love with, decided to have one built entirely his own, right on the water’s edge. Later passed into the hands of Antonio Besana, a philanthropist and personal friend of Giuseppe Verdi, the villa remained a relatively secluded residence for decades, until it was purchased in 1977 by the designer Gianni Versace, who found it in a state of total neglect and divided into apartments.
Versace himself personally oversaw, over three years, the restoration that returned the building to its original neoclassical splendour, completed in December 1980. The English art historian and gardener Roy Strong collaborated on the works, redesigning the property’s three acres of ornamental gardens, enriched with three cottages, a tennis court, a private mooring and a lakeside promenade of about 800 metres. Versace personally chose hundreds of paintings and works of art to furnish the interiors, turning Villa Fontanella into a true personal sanctuary that, in the 1980s and 1990s, became one of the most exclusive gathering places of the international jet set.
After the designer’s assassination in 1997, his ashes were initially kept in a tomb in the villa’s garden. Sold in 2008 to the Russian restaurateur and entrepreneur Arkady Novikov, Villa Fontanella remains a private property today, visible only from the lake or by invitation, but it continues to exert a magnetic charm on anyone sailing along this stretch of the Moltrasio shore.