Guide Villa Cicogna Mozzoni
A Guidebook of this historic villa by Marianna Cogni.
Introduction by Giovanni Agosti
Photographs and illustrations
«If you go there, free from the blinkers, how many discoveries at Villa Cicogna Mozzoni: an enchanted place of Valceresio, between Lake Lugano and Varese, in Upper Lombardy, which since 1957 is open to the public, while remaining in the hands of the descendants of the ancient owners. How intense the relationship between the country and the Family Cicogna Mozzoni has been over the centuries, the parish of St. George, completed in 1603, which houses a masterpiece by Camillo Procaccini, and the mammoth funeral chapel, erected in the 1860 on the design of Giuseppe Balzaretto and completed in 1867 by Emilio Alemagna, who towers over the small cemetery. Over the centuries there have been many illustrious visitors, nor the praise of this villa: already celebrated at the time of its erection, in the middle of the sixteenth century, by Bonaventura Castiglioni and Bartolomeo Taegio, it has not escaped the nineteenth-century veduism or the foreign aesthetes fin de italy. Enough to confirm the beautiful pages of Edith Wharton, in her Italian Villas & Their Gardens published in 1904, with the watercolors of Maxfield Parrish; So it's no surprise that the book of signatures of those who have passed here also annote - and twice, in 1902 and 1904 - Mary Logan Berenson, Bernard's wife. The many photographs - and of the exterior and interior and the magnificent garden - made since the beginning of the twentieth century are also witnesses to this fortune: from those of the Montabone studio to those of the company Ricordi. Who knows, however, what occasion is the filming of the great Paolo Monti. Despite these successes, until now there was no specific publication that would give an account of the investigations carried out on the building and its decorations and, at the same time, provide scholars and enthusiasts with a substantial collection of images on which to continue their research or simply cultivate the memory of a visit.»
From the introduction by Giovanni Agosti