Born as a wedding gift and transformed, after a sudden bereavement, into a place of contemplation and remembrance, this villa above Menaggio is today home to a centre for dialogue between Italy and Germany.
It was the German banker Heinrich Mylius, who had moved from Frankfurt to Milan at a young age to expand the family business, who in 1829 bought the Loveno property as a wedding gift for his son Julius, who had just married Luigia Vitali. Julius’s sudden death, just days after the wedding, changed the villa’s destiny forever: Mylius chose to enlarge and enrich it as a place for reflecting on grief and memory, having a small neoclassical temple dedicated to his son built in the park, still the focal point of the gardens today. Mylius, who was married to Friederike Schnauss – who put him in touch with the Weimar court of Grand Duke Carl August, Goethe’s patron – became a central figure in Milan’s cultural life in the nineteenth century, linked to artists and intellectuals such as Francesco Hayez, Massimo d’Azeglio and Alessandro Manzoni, whose contacts with Goethe himself he helped foster. He was also the founder of the Società d’Incoraggiamento d’Arti e Mestieri, Italy’s first technical institute, from which the Politecnico di Milano was born in 1863.
The romantic park surrounding the villa was laid out in the English style by Giuseppe Balzaretto, the same landscape architect responsible for Milan’s Parco Sempione: amid centuries-old trees and viewpoints over the Menaggio branch of the lake, the path is dotted with statues, fountains and inscriptions that together form a genuine itinerary of memory. The villa also holds the collections of paintings, sculptures and furnishings gathered by Mylius over the course of his life.
The last descendant of the family, Ignazio Vigoni Medici di Marignano, bequeathed the entire property to the Federal Republic of Germany, with the explicit intent of giving new life to the tradition begun by Mylius and to his bond with Goethe. Since 1986 Villa Vigoni, together with the nearby Villa Garovaglio Ricci, has been home to the Italian-German Centre for European Dialogue, promoting scientific research, advanced training and cultural exchange between the two countries.