COMO: VILLA OLMO, Como: Villa Olmo

Hi, I am Rick, your personal guide, and together with MyWoWo I’d like to welcome you to one of the wonders of the world: Villa Olmo.

The magnificent Villa Olmo owes its name to a centuries-old tree that once stood here.

You should know that this land was owned by the noble Odescalchi family as early as 1664, but construction of the villa did not begin until many years later, in 1782, when Marquis Innocenzo Odescalchi decided to build a summer residence on it, commissioning the architect Simone Cantoni, an expert in neoclassical forms, to design the project.

You can immediately recognize this style by observing the central body of the façade with its ten tall Ionic columns, among which five roundels with the faces of the Greek philosophers Plato, Solon, Thales, Socrates and Pythagoras stand out, as well as the statues depicting pagan divinities in the Italian-style garden in front of the villa, the work of the sculptor Francesco Carabelli.

When the property passed to Innocenzo Odescalchi's nephew, Marquis Giorgio Raimondi in 1824, the villa's twenty-year heyday began. It hosted such important figures as the Emperors of Austria Franz II and Ferdinand I and Princess Maria Theresa of Habsburg.

Everything went well until the marquis, in the second half of the 19th century, sided with the Savoys against the Austrians. The latter, in retaliation, exiled him to Switzerland and confiscated Villa Olmo, which was stripped of everything and turned into a barracks....