Villa Leumann is Pianezza's town hall, but it did not start life as a villa: a document of 1600 names the Rivajra family as owners of a farmhouse with courtyard, garden and pond. It was the lawyer Burlotti, in the following century, who added a park and turned it into a gentleman's residence.
What to see
Its present appearance comes from 1885, when Napoleone Leumann bought it and had it restored in art nouveau style by Pietro Fenoglio. Fenoglio raised the roof, built the attic storey and the three domes — in slate, so as not to weigh the building down — added two balconies and two terraces at the front and, at the back, an octagonal turret, plus a greenhouse and an artificial grotto.
Visiting
You visit it for what it is today, the town hall: you go in for the offices and look at the rest on the way past. The railing that closes the property comes from the same late nineteenth-century work.
Our editors' tip
The villa had three lives before this one: in 1946 an owner tried without success to turn it into a casino, in the mid-twentieth century it became an old people's home, and only in 1997 did mayor Soffietti open it as the town hall.