Villa Fogazzaro Roi

There are places that seem to have stood still in their time, impervious to the succession of centuries and the transformations of the land. This is the case in Oria, a small village on the Como shores of Lake Lugano, where the rhythm still seems to be the nineteenth-century one that marked much of Antonio Fogazzaro's life here.

The writer spent long periods in the Villa that now bears his name and provided him with the inspiration to compose and set "Piccolo mondo antico," his best-known novel, published in 1896. The same intimate, domestic atmosphere that frames the story of Franco and Luisa Maironi has come down to us unaltered thanks to Marquis Giuseppe Roi, the writer's great-grandson, who in the mid-twentieth century renovated and tastefully refurbished every room before leaving the house to the FAI so that it would not be distorted upon his death. And so it is that the literary suggestion still hovers everywhere, from the study with the writer's personal mementos to the library, from the living room to the dining room, from the frescoed gallery to the private dock where in the book the tragic death of little Ombretta took place. Everything is made more scenic by a charming roof garden that overlooks a panorama of the Ceresio that has remained largely wild, with the intense scent of olea fragrans that "said in one corner the power of gentle things."

Virtually unchanged since Fogazzaro's time, the Villa is a two-track journey into a small bourgeois world of the late 19th century, set in a hidden corner of Lombardy so beloved by one of the great protagonists of our literature.