Villa Leoni was exceptionally opened to the public during the last week end in occasion of “Spring Days”, many persons had the possibility to discover this unique jewel of the Rationalism.
Villa Leoni is situated on the western side of Lake Como, close to the Strada Regina. The villa dominates the basin of the Comacina Island and the neighbouring complex of Saint Maria Maddalena of Ospitaletto and its famous bell tower. The villa, commissioned to the architect Pietro Lingeri by Raffaele Leoni and his wife Diana Peduzzi, was built for the family Leoni Malacrida, manufacturers in the confectionery field, who settled their summer residence right by the shore of Lake Como. Projected in the same years of the artists’ houses on the Comacina Island, Villa Leoni represents for Pietro Lingeri an other step in the study of a rational and mediterranean architecture, which is the common feature of the italian architecture between the two World Wars. In 1941 Alberto Sartoris described Villa Leoni in the first edition of the Encyclopédie de l’architecure nouvelle”, to attest the rationalism vocation to be mediator between abstraction and nature. Commissioned in 1938, Villa Leoni was built between 1941 and 1944, the years of Rationalism. The latest renovations have restored the villa to its original grandeur, and it has been classified as an historic place, under the protective provisions of the Italian Ministry of Culture. Today Villa Leoni takes part to a territorial valorization programme, to make a rare example of rational architecture known by professionists and tourists.
