The scores of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven all passed through the hands of the family that lived in this Blevio villa for a century: the Artarias, among the most celebrated music publishers in Europe.
Until 1842 the building was the holiday property of the Artaria family, who had begun its construction about a century earlier. Founded in Vienna, the publishing house Artaria & C. printed city views, portraits and maps before specialising, from 1776, in music printing: works by Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Clementi, Rossini, Schubert and even Beethoven came off its presses, making it one of the reference points of European musical life. The founder of the family’s Milanese branch, Ferdinando Artaria, was born right here in Blevio in 1781.
From the Artarias the property passed to Giorgio Mylius, a banker of German origin, who commissioned a major renovation from the architect Giuseppe Balzaretto, turning it into a palazzo with a sober, elegant style. Between 1864 and 1866 a second intervention, by the celebrated German architect Gottfried Semper - the same architect behind the Semperoper in Dresden - renewed it in neo-Renaissance style at the behest of Mylius’s son-in-law, Corrado Cramer, from whom the villa takes the name by which it is known today. The great century-old plane tree and the rare cedar of Lebanon that still rise in the park, with views over Cernobbio and Villa d’Este, are silent witnesses to nearly three centuries of history that have interwoven music, finance and architecture along the shores of the Lario.