For a few decades, primary and middle school children from Milan spent their holidays in a mock castle looking out over the Ligurian sea. Villa Tigellius stands at Mulinetti, a hamlet of Recco, and was built in 1898 to a design by the Genoese architect Marco Aurelio Crotta for the Peirano family. In the sixties its owner at the time, the wealthy Milanese Giovanni Battista Massone, gave the property to the city of Milan, which turned it into a holiday home for Milanese schoolchildren. In 2011 the council led by Giuliano Pisapia put it up for sale. Today the building stands unused.
What to see
The architecture is eclectic, with heavy borrowings from the neo-Gothic, and openly imitates a castle. The building rises through four floors and is marked by a tower set against the main block; the windows are two-light openings and the crenellation is swallow-tailed, the Ghibelline model that nineteenth-century Italy liked to quote. This is end-of-century architecture playing at the Middle Ages, and saying so without embarrassment.
The setting counts as much as the building. The villa occupies a panoramic position above the sea and has a large garden with rare botanical species, which is also why a private residence could become, without being pulled about, a summer camp for children: open space, greenery and a sea horizon.
Visiting
Mulinetti is a coastal hamlet of Recco, on the Riviera di Levante, reached from Recco by following the shoreline. Let us say it at once: the villa is disused and cannot be visited, so this is a stop for looking, not for going in. The panoramic position works in the passer-by's favour, because the outline with its tower and battlements reads clearly even from a distance, and better still from the water.
Our editors' tip
We pair it with a stop in Recco, a town worth the trip for its cooking alone, and we look at it in the afternoon, when the sun swings west and the seaward front comes out of shadow. If you happen to pass along the coast by boat, keep an eye on the shore: from there the mock castle detaches itself from the greenery for what it is, a late nineteenth-century folly with a view nobody has known what to do with for years.