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Villa Margherita

Centro Lago

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Villa Margherita, at Majolica di Cadenabbia, in the municipality of Griante, was built in 1853 for the Milanese family of music publishers Ricordi. It is private property, but the building, and in part the garden, can be recognised from the road and from the lake: on the pediment the inscription «Margherita», above a clock with two statues.

History

According to the regional record the villa was built in the mid-19th century by the Ricordi family, Giuseppe Verdi’s publishers; the thematic path on villas and music of the same body, and also Wikipedia and myLakeComo, give 1853 and the publisher Giulio Ricordi as the patron, and add that the money would have come from the success of Verdi’s Il trovatore. Giulio Ricordi, born in 1840 according to Wikipedia, was twelve in 1853, and the regional record more cautiously says «the Ricordi family». An engraving by Francesco Ratti of 1858, in the Bertarelli Collections of the Castello Sforzesco, titled «Maiolica: villa Margherita Ricordi», shows that at that date the villa existed.

Here, tradition says, Verdi, often a guest of his friend the publisher, composed part of the arias of La traviata; the regional record uses the formula «it is told». The tradition should be taken for what it is: La traviata premiered in Venice on 6 March 1853, when the villa had only just been commissioned, and we found no documentary proof of the stay. The sources do document other musicians who were guests of the villa: Amilcare Ponchielli, who at Cadenabbia began the long work on I Lituani, the opera commissioned from him by Ricordi and given with success at La Scala in 1874, and Anton Rubinstein, composer and conductor, founder of the St Petersburg Conservatory and teacher of Tchaikovsky. Memoirs tell of «divine evenings», with music played on the spinet in front of the lake.

The villa changed hands several times. An English family, the Lasseters, lived there; then came the Balzarottis, who completed the park, and the engineer Rodio, who enriched it with rare species and nurseries of roses and azaleas. In the end a real-estate company bought it and has restored it (regional record, updated in 2009).

What to see

The central body has a square plan and three storeys, with two small lower volumes at the sides, one opening wide in the façade and open at ground level. In front of the villa projects another volume, semicircular and of one storey, which carries the terrace of the main floor on its roof. A marble balustrade hides the hipped roof.

From the road and the lake one can make out the inscription on the pediment, the clock with two statues on the cornice, probably allegories of Music and Poetry, last traces of a series of vanished sculptures, and the large hemicycle hall onto the garden, once used for small concerts. In the garden, which slopes gently to the water and is partly glimpsed from the road, rare species, azaleas, rhododendrons and roses still grow, as in the Ricordi era.

Practical information

  • The villa is on the Regina state road 51, at Majolica, a hamlet of Griante. It is private property and not open to the public, as the Griante-Cadenabbia tourism site also says: it must be seen from public spaces.
  • Near Griante there is also Villa Greppi and, at Tremezzina, Villa Carlotta.

Sources

On the map

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