The story of Villa Cavalleri is the story of Battista Cavalleri, who in late nineteenth-century Gattinara stood out as a winegrower attentive to technical innovation. He fitted the villa's cellar with twenty great oak barrels of a hundred hectolitres each, and made it one of the largest and most up-to-date wine businesses in the town.
What to see
The villa was built at the end of the nineteenth century and its front is still firmly anchored to neoclassical models, dominated by an elegant columned pronaos. Inside, the wide rooms recall what the building was, a comfortable bourgeois dwelling; but the real heart is the cellar, which has kept its character unchanged.
Visiting
Since 1908 the Cantina Sociale of Gattinara has had its seat in this building, and the reason lies in a personal story: after the storm of 1905 Cavalleri, financially damaged, emigrated to Argentina and left the running of the cellar to his wife Margherita, who three years later sold the villa to the newly founded cooperative winery.
Our editors' tip
It is worth looking at the villa as you would look at a business, not at a gentleman's house. The neoclassical pronaos and the hundred-hectolitre barrels belong to the same project: a turn-of-the-century winegrower who wanted to keep up with the technology, and whom a hailstorm sent to the other side of the ocean.