Here, among the twelve plane trees planted at the wish of architect Giuseppe Balzaretto, Alessandro Manzoni would come to visit his maternal uncle: Villa Rachele holds one of the most illustrious family ties in all of Italian literature.
Standing on a small peninsula facing the Isola Comacina, once known in dialect as “la Puncia”, the villa was built starting in the mid-eighteenth century by the Beccaria family, and completed only in the early nineteenth century because of the uncertainties of the Napoleonic period. It was the residence of Giulio Beccaria, son of the famous Cesare Beccaria - the Enlightenment jurist who wrote “Dei delitti e delle pene” - and maternal uncle of Alessandro Manzoni, who was a fond guest here together with his mother Giulia. The historian and patriot Cesare Cantù, who lived here for a long time after Giulio’s death, described it as a villa that “resembles a good book: it delivers more than it promises”, quoting the Latin inscription carved in a corner of the park that invites visitors to leave envy, quarrels and ambition outside its boundaries.
It is to Cantù’s daughter, Rachele - from whom the villa takes the name by which it is known today - that we owe perhaps the liveliest cultural season in its history: married to Angelo Villa Pernice, a deputy in Italy’s first Parliament, she founded here a literary salon known as the “Accademia dei pedanti”, attended by figures such as Antonio Fogazzaro, Tommaso Gallarati Scotti and Ettore Verga. Later passed to Rachele Martelli, wife of the writer Emilio De Marchi, the villa and its park provided the setting for the novel “Col fuoco non si scherza” (1901).
The park, redesigned in the mid-nineteenth century by architect Giuseppe Balzaretto - the same architect who designed the gardens of Villa Trivulzio in Bellagio and of Villa d’Este in Cernobbio - still holds today an imposing Lebanon cedar, evergreen magnolias and the small funerary temple dedicated to Giulio Beccaria and his wife Antonia, the work of sculptor Bassano Danielli. Visible almost exclusively from the lake, Villa Rachele remains one of the most discreet and least known jewels of the entire western shore of the Lario.