LA VILLA PLINIANA

A PHOTOGRAPHIC TOUR TO VILLA PLINIANA   

LA VILLA PLINIANA DI TORNO

   Villa Pliniana overlooks the lake in an isolated cove not far from the village of Torno. The building, built between 1574 and 1577 by the count Giovanni Anguissola, governor of Como in those years, is so called and so famous for its periodical spring which ebbs and flows several times a day. This spring, which is located in the courtyard, had already quoted during the Ancient Roman Empire by the elder Pliny and later more described by his nephew the younger Pliny in a letter to his friend Licinio Sura.
   The most reasonable assumption is that the intermittence is due to the hydraulic principle of the siphon.
   In hydrostatics, the siphon is a conduit leading a fluid between two tanks, the initial one higher than the final one, rising above an intermediate level higher than the level of a tributary tank.
   Therefore, a karst cave is believed to be located inside the mountain opening on the Villa and siphoning the water in the cave (filled by subterranean springs as long as a top level) through an outlet to the Pliniana, where the fountain at that moment flows and marks the maximum in flood.
   When the cave has finished to flow, the fountain will ebb and later the water level will be low in Pliniana waiting for a new flow.
   Nowadays ebbing and flowing alternate in irregular intervals, rather than what some naturalists and scientists asserted in the past time, as the two Plinys and Leonardo da Vinci.
   Camillo Ghilini, a local writer and expert of the 16th Century, was the first to write that “waters flow out from the fountain in irregular intervals and not in regular times”, yet with two daily ebbs and flows.
   After the end of the construction of the house in 1577, count Anguissola lived for just one year (he died in the June of 1578); after that, the property went to his nephew Giulio who, living in Piacenza, was not so interested and sold it to Pirro Visconti Borromeo from Milan, who made the Villa magnificent, luxurious and famous.
   After a century the house and the fountain were bought by Francesco Canarisi from Torno and under his family Villa Pliniana reached the highest prestige for both the building and the garden.
   He made the Villa the memorial home of his family with many plaques, portraits and renovating the Chapel dedicated to St. Francis from Assisi already located by the house.
   Sold in 1831, the Pliniana had been in a state of neglect for nine years until 1840 when it was bought by the Prince Emilio Barbiano di Belgioioso d’Este, who adorned it bringing it back to the last glorious time and been living in for eight years with a French lady, Anne Berthier of Wagram, duchess of Plaisance, 18 years younger than him. From this love story (a famous gossip story in those years), in the 1971 the authoress Magda Martini took inspiration for her novel Gli amanti della Pliniana (The Pliniana’s lovers).
   From Belgioioso, Villa Pliniana was left by inheritance to the family Belgioioso-Trotti in 1858 and later still by inheritance to the family of Valperga di Masìno e Caluso, that opened the house from the 1960s of the 20th  century.
   In 1983, it was bought by the company Pliniana S.r.l. and now it’s a private property.
   Many important personalities were guests at Villa Pliniana: amongst the writers Lord George Byron, Percy Bessie Shelley, Stendhal, Fogazzaro; then musicians as Liszt, Bellini; scientists as Leonardo da Vinci (this one before the construction of the Villa to study the spring in 1498) and Alessandro Volta as well as Napoleon Bonaparte in 1787 and Francis II emperor of Austria.
   Rumors said the famous Italian poet of the 19th Century Ugo Foscolo was inspired by this place for his work Le Grazie and here the musician Gioacchino Rossini composed his Tancredi.
   In 1942, the director Mario Soldati set his movie Malombra, taken from the homonymous novel Malombra by Antonio Fogazzaro, with famous actors as Isa Miranda and Andrea Checchi.
   Painter Giuseppe Mentessi, professor by the Academy of Brera in Milan and designer of the cemetery of Torno, decided to draw Villa Pliniana as subject of some of his paintings.
 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Translation and notes by Giulio Graziosi
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     drawn from La Pliniana di Torno
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     by Mr. Pietro Muller