Villa Litta in Lainate, west of Milan, is a Renaissance playground
French novelist Stendhal provided a succinct description.
“You have to beware of walking alone at Lainate. The garden is full of water
jets built specifically to soak spectators. I unwittingly placed my foot on the
first step of a staircase, and six water jets shot up right beside me.”
At a time of year characteristic for intense and relentless heat – last month in
Milan we had a couple of weeks with temperatures reaching 34°C every day – it
comes as no surprise to discover that Renaissance architects had experimented
with fountains to delight the owners and guests of large villas both inside and
outside Milan. Villa Litta in Lainate, 16 km north-west of Milan, provides one
of the best examples in Europe. The building itself is a fine example of this
type of Renaissance home, but it is in the Ninfeo that Pirro I Visconti Borromeo,
went overboard, so to speak, with his fun and games. Gardens, palazzo and Ninfeo
are open for visits at the weekend (see below), and guided tours enable you to
savour the effect of surprise when you sit down on a stone seat, only to jump up
again to escape an accurately directed squirt of water.
Pirro I’s work on the villa can be dated to about 1585. He was part of the
Borromeo family that gave Milan one of its most celebrated saints, San Carlo,
during the rigours of the Counter-Reformation. Pirro himself contributed to
Milan’s religious affairs by working with the Fabbrica del Duomo, the company
(which claims to be the oldest in Europe, founded in 1386) that built the
Cathedral and now maintains it. This gave him the opportunity to meet the
greatest artists, architects and sculptors of his day, and he gave them more
light-hearted commissions at his villa. Painter Camillo Procaccini is best-known
for his rather dour and solemn compositions of saints and martyrs, but at
Lainate he revealed a totally different personality, creating paintings in which
angels and clouds morph mysteriously into impish and devilish figures. He also
worked using pebbles as his medium, in the fashion of the day known as “grottesco,”
used to decorate the interiors of artificial grottos in the garden.
The finest part of the garden is the Ninfeo, built in travertine to a design
that is both symmetrical, with the octagonal Atrio dei Quattro Venti, and
irregular, forming a maze of grottos with mosaic and pebble decoration, along
with statues of Ancient Roman gods. It is here that Pirro invited his
aristocratic guests to stroll, in the midst of hidden machinery that could be
controlled at a distance so that water jets would appear as if by magic exactly
when someone was in the right spot. During guided tours, these mechanisms are
activated just as they were four centuries ago. When the guide says something
like “Hey, you should be careful if you sit on that step,” his concealed
assistant takes the hint and pulls the lever. In one room of the Ninfeo, called
the Rain Court, water was sprinkled from the ceiling in order to simulate rain
and produce rainbows. All this – in total there are 53 water-squirting
mechanisms – is powered by the pressure generated by a storage tank about
twenty metres above ground level, in the Torre dell’Acqua that can be seen from
the Ninfeo.
There is no doubt that Pirro I wanted to create something on the lines of villas
that he had seen elsewhere in Italy, notably the Medici villas outside Florence.
However there are also connections with a semi-secret organization amongst late
Renaissance artists known as the Accademia dei Facchini della Val di Blenio. The
group was dedicated to the lighter side of life and all the pleasures that life
has to offer, as well as to the more mysterious aspects of magic and the
esoteric crafts. He must have been an interesting and multi-faceted man, and a
great organizer of parties!
There are guided tours to the Ninfeo every Sunday from 15.00 to 18.00, up until
9 October. On Saturdays, visits are from 21.15 to 22.30 (just for September).
The main building is open on Sundays from 15.00 to 17.00, up until 9 October. On
Saturday 3 September (17.00-22.00) and Sunday 4 September (15.00-21.30) the
visits to the Ninfeo are guided by people in Renaissance dress. Entrance on
these two occasions is from Largo Alpini. Admission for the Ninfeo is €8, and €3
for the palazzo. For information and group bookings, phone 02.9359.8266, or
02.9359.8267, or 339.3942.466.
To get to Lainate, the best way is to take a car. There is a bus service which
runs from M1 Molino Dorino, see www.movibus.it. And a final cautionary tale: one
tourist grabbed a taxi, told the driver the destination, and half an hour found
himself at Lainate. After looking around fruitlessly for an airport, the man
realized that he was going to have to get another taxi and head back to the
other side of the city to his intended destination: Linate!
Henry Neuteboom