Villa Cantoni stands below the crag of the Rocca, raised above Lake Maggiore. It was designed in the 1880s by the engineer Vittorio Cantoni for his own family, on land the Borromeo had sold him in 1873: a projecting block facing the lake topped by a turret, two side wings closing a courtyard, and a semicircular platform beneath which artificial grottoes open.
What to see
Inside there remain frescoes attributed to the Venetian painter Giacomo Casa; the furnishing, at its best moment, sat between Renaissance and neoclassical. The same property includes a chalet with a pitched roof and wooden fretwork, and the two pavilions that led to the private boathouse, open on all four sides with Serlian windows and bearing coats of arms on the parapet of the roof.
Visiting
The villa was long inaccessible: it stood abandoned for more than thirty years, and restoration work began only in 2016. You look at it from the road or from the water, keeping in mind that the park once reached all the way down to the boathouse pavilions.
Our editors' tip
The house was ransacked after 15 September 1943, when Victor Cantoni and his mother Irma Finzi were taken away: they are among the victims of the Lake Maggiore Holocaust. Victor's wife, Rosy Gattico, and their five-year-old daughter escaped the round-up; the twins were born two months later. That is why this villa stood empty for so long.