The park of Villa Majnoni, now the seat of Erba’s town hall, holds a Baroque temple that King Umberto I gave to the architect Achille Majnoni: it used to stand at the Villa Reale in Monza.
Villa Majnoni stands in Erba, on piazza Prepositurale, on the foundations of the so-called Castel Nuovo, built in 1351 by the Parravicini family and now vanished. In the eighteenth century it was the home of Canon Carlo Antonio Prina; it then passed to the Mauri and Lainati families of Milan. In 1850 it was bought by Girolamo Majnoni d’Intignano, who ended its use as a silk mill to make it a country residence.
His son Achille Majnoni, a trusted architect of Umberto I who also worked on the interiors of the Villa Reale in Monza, restored and remodelled it in 1880 in Neo-Baroque style. On the facade a sacred fresco by Carlo Fumagalli, dated 1870, still shows the Madonna of the Rosary with the Child. The entrance avenue is lined with cypresses; the panoramic turret that once stood here has vanished.
In the park, which is open to the public, there is a small Baroque temple that Umberto I gave to Achille Majnoni: it stood at the Villa Reale in Monza and was placed here. Inside are the family’s coats of arms, with three stars, a crowned eagle and a lion, together with the lilies of Florence in tribute to Achille’s Florentine wife, Maria Baldovinetti di Poggi. Beeches and cedars of Lebanon grow in the park, and there is a monument to the Alpini by the sculptor Giuseppe Abramini. Today the villa is the seat of Erba’s town hall.
