Even Leonardo da Vinci puzzled over its mystery: a spring that rises and falls every few hours, described two thousand years ago by Pliny the Younger in a letter to a friend, still flows today in the courtyard of this villa suspended over the water.
It was precisely the fame of this intermittent karst spring - already mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his “Naturalis Historia” and later the subject of a study by Leonardo himself - that prompted count Giovanni Anguissola, governor of Como, to buy the land in 1573 and build the villa there in just three years. The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who stayed here and also denounced the state of decay into which it had fallen in the early nineteenth century, described it as “sovereign, superb with memories” among the cypresses of the lake, while Stendhal, sailing past this point of the Lario, noted how the landscape suddenly turned “gloomy and wild”, with the mountains dropping almost sheer into the water.
Passed in 1590 to the Visconti Borromeo, who completed the building and commissioned an entire essay on the phenomenon of the spring, and then to the Canarisi of Torno from 1676, the villa went through an impressive succession of owners over the following centuries: from the Frenchman Thierres to the Russian princess Anna Wolkonska, from prince Emilio Barbiano di Belgiojoso to the Valperga di Masino, who ceded it to the Ottolenghi family in 1983. Even longer is the list of illustrious guests who passed through here over the centuries: writers such as Foscolo, Byron, Manzoni and Fogazzaro (who set part of his novel “Malombra” here, brought to the screen by Mario Soldati in 1942), musicians such as Rossini, Liszt, Bellini and Puccini, scientists such as Volta and Spallanzani, and sovereigns such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Margherita di Savoia.
After almost thirty years of restoration, Villa Pliniana is today one of the most exclusive resorts on Lake Como, managed by the American group Sereno Properties: amid coffered ceilings, mosaic floors bearing heraldic crests and the splendid Doric loggia facing the lake’s first basin, the intermittent spring continues, just as it did two thousand years ago, to surprise anyone who stops to listen to its ebb and flow.