Villa Carpeneto is, together with the Castello Galli, the building that gives La Loggia its face. Underneath there is said to be a castle, presumed to have belonged to the Vagnone of Trofarello, and what you see today is the result of two successive rebuildings.
What to see
The first was ordered by Gaspare Graneri, finance minister of the Savoy court, and it is the front facing Vinovo, the one that looks onto the garden with its little lake: on the ceiling you can make out Gaspare's monogram and the Graneri arms, an ear of wheat surmounted by a castle standing for the rock of La Roche in Haute-Savoie. The second took place between 1769 and 1779, probably to a design by Francesco Valeriano Dellala, and concerned only the front towards the avenue: that was the service entrance, and over time it became the main facade, in neoclassical spirit.
Visiting
The garden, laid out in the Italian manner, was later redone in the English style, and with it the water-lily basin. From those years comes a regatta that the marquis Giuseppe Luigi Graneri had staged to amuse the Royal Court on the Oitana stream, specially prepared for it; the engraver Ignazio Sclopis drew from it two views of the facade and the park. The villa then passed to the Gerbaix de Sonnaz, who gathered here terracottas from Vinovo, ceramics and fine furniture, and in 1868 it was sold to the lawyer Enrico Marenco, who the following year resold it to the engineer Vitale Rosazza: the deeds say nothing of furnishings, a sign that almost everything had already been dispersed.
Our editors' tip
The villa is closed and is looked at from the avenue, knowing how it ended. In 1939 the painter Alfredo Chicco sold it to count Theo Rossi di Montelera, who restored it with painters, plasterers and gardeners and lived there until 1959; since then it has been uninhabited and unfurnished. It is a national monument, but the avenue that links it to the village lost in 1996 the poplars that flanked it, which were diseased, and the entrance damaged in an accident has never been repaired.