Photos

A villa in Como lakefront. It's a panorama pic very reduced from the original. I used Hugin software and Gimp for finalizing on a multilayers tif.

Villa Olmo
18th century from Simone Cantoni's masterpiece, Villa Olmo (1782-92), located at the end of Via Borgovico and surrounded by a huge garden. Innocenza Odescalchi had it built on a spot where a century-old elm grew and apparently where one of Pliny the Jounger's magnificent mansions once stood. It was subsequently passed on to the Raimondi noble family and then to the Visconti, who eventually donated it to the Como municipality in 1924. Villa Olmo features a central part, framed with columns and jutting out on the wings, a lower portico, two rows of windows, huge pilaster strips and on the top a trabeation with statues and with the Visconti's coat of arms. Its interior boasts a vast hall with a wrought-iron balustraded balcony, statues and reliefs by Carabelli and frescoes by Domenico Pozzi. The side-halls on the ground floor are finely decorated with historical scenes: the Mirror hall, the Wedding hall, the Square hall, Diana's hall, Garibaldi's room (so called in memory of the unlucky encounter between General Garibaldi and the daughter of Marquis Raimondi), Bacchus' hall, the hall of Music, containing statues and frescoes by the Pozzi, the Odescalchi Chapel , with an elliptic dome, and finally the lovely miniature theatre decorated with frescoes by Fontana.