Bought in 1817 by countess Teresa Casati, wife of the patriot Federico Confalonieri, this residence soon passed to a family of silk industrialists who turned it into the beating heart of what would become known as “the Manchester of Italy”.
The origins of the complex go back to the seventeenth century, when its oldest core belonged to the Bonacina family, wealthy leather merchants active in Valmadrera since the sixteenth century. Towards the end of that century, the last Bonacina heir, Maddalena, married the Milanese marquis Giacinto Orrigoni, bringing the house as her dowry into his family, who in the eighteenth century enlarged its structure with a large U-shaped Baroque wing. It was from the Orrigoni heirs, through countess Casati Confalonieri, that in 1817 the brothers Giuseppe Antonio, Egidio and Antonio Gavazzi bought the entire complex, commissioning the Lecco architect Giuseppe Bovara to carry out a major Neoclassical renovation that straightened out the Baroque lines of the facade.
Between 1820 and 1840 the same Gavazzi brothers had a large romantic park laid out around the villa, among the most notable in the whole Lecco area, probably designed by engineer Giuseppe Balzaretto, the same man who would later design the celebrated public gardens of via Palestro in Milan. The complex, spread over roughly 30,000 square metres, still includes today the family’s imposing silk mill, the manor courtyard, the chapel of San Gaetano and a refined nineteenth-century greenhouse, once heated with hot water piped in from the nearby mill through an ingenious system of pipes.
Still privately owned by the Gavazzi family today, Villa Gavazzi exceptionally opens its doors to the public during the regional “Ville Aperte” event, when hundreds of visitors can discover the reception rooms, the gallery, the original furnishings and the nineteenth-century wallpaper of this genuine villa-and-silk-mill, a rare testimony to an era when industry and country living coexisted in the same place.