In the heart of Canzo, overlooking the Ravella stream, Villa Meda preserves coffered ceilings frescoed and signed in 1701-1702, today transformed into a Civic Library open to everyone.
Built at the end of the eighteenth century as the country residence of the Meda family on a pre-existing structure, the villa was built in Neoclassical style to a design by architect Simone Cantoni, a leading figure of Lombard architecture of the period. The building is arranged around two inner courtyards, the second smaller and more intimate, while the old living quarters once looked onto an Italian-style garden of which only a part remains today, now used as a car park after the area once extended to the far bank of the stream as well.
The interior holds halls with frescoed vaults and coffered ceilings decorated by Luca Roscio da Vill’Albese, a painter from Como whose fine surfaces are signed and dated 1701-1702: a detail that shows how the villa, despite its eighteenth-century appearance, holds even older artistic traces within. The complex also contains an evocative private chapel, now renamed the Baptistery, also used for civil wedding ceremonies, and a room displaying paintings by Salvatore Fiume, who chose Canzo as his home from 1946 onward.
Used as a summer camp and as a barracks during the Second World War, Villa Meda has managed to reinvent itself over time: today it houses Canzo’s Civic Library and several local associations, making accessible to the public a historic heritage that would otherwise remain reserved for guided visits alone.