Tilda Swinton said that, while she and director Luca Guadagnino were immersed in the pre-production of Io sono l’amore (2009), they were looking for a house that was “part palace, part museum and part prison.” Palace, because that was the expected habitat for the gentry of the haute bourgeoisie that starred in the film. Museum, because the members of that family were presented as objects arranged in displays outside of time and space. And prison, because the passions imprisoned there were going to overflow as in a riot, threatening to alter the strict social order that repressed them. The film told the story of an individual liberation – of several, rather – and the disintegration of a social class through love and sexuality. It is understandable then that Guadagnino breathed a sigh of relief when he discovered Villa Necchi Campiglio in the pages of a coffee table book: there was everything he was looking for, perhaps even more.
The opening credits Io sono l’amore They are superimposed on postcards of a wintery Milan, doubly buried under a layer of snow, and the solemn music of the American opera composer John Adams. The plans of wide avenues, imposing buildings and solitary parks parade, until we reach the walls that surround a mansion like the wall of a fortress. That is where the Recchi family lives, a very rich lineage of textile businessmen, who probably – Guadagnino is not very explicit about this – multiplied their fortune during the years of the fascist government, and then clung to it, avoiding the different conjunctures of the modern history of Italy like an alpine skier slides between the slalom flags.
The true owners of the house were not a textile saga but a metal saga. Sisters Nedda and Gigina Necchi were born respectively in 1900 and 1901, daughters of Ambrogio Necchi, owner of a foundry in the Lombard city of Pavia, about 40 kilometers from Milan. They had a brother, Vittorio, two years older than Nedda. Ambrogio died in 1916, leaving the business to his three young offspring. Gigina married Angelo Campiglio – nicknamed Nene – who abandoned his medical vocation to also join the family business. A schism then occurred in the family and in the emporium, so that Vittorio dedicated himself to the production of sewing machines with lucrative results – it was said that there was a Necchi machine in every home in Italy – while Gigina , Nedda and Angelo created Necchi e Campiglio Sas, better known as NECA, focused on the production of cast and enameled iron. They were three young and dynamic millionaires, with refined tastes, who soon decided to move from small Pavia to the more frenetic and cosmopolitan Milan, a city that was more similar to them.
The story is often repeated that one afternoon, at the end of the performance at the La Scala theatre, a dense fog flooded Milan, and the driver carrying Angelo, Gigina and Ledda got lost in the somewhat peripheral neighborhood of Porta Venezia, today bohemian and artistic district, then occupied by private gardens and orchards, in addition to some ancient palazzo. When a “for sale” sign appeared in front of them, a little light went on in the minds of the trio. So they first acquired the land from Count Cicogna, owner of large plots in the area, and then decided to assign the project of the family house to Piero Portaluppi, the fashionable architect in interwar Milan, who was contributing to the greatest extent. facelift that was to convert the aristocratic Lombard capital into the most modern city in Italy. He was, therefore, the right one to design the house of some great capitalists with very new ways and very old interests.
Portaluppi’s protean style encompassed a wide formal range that did not rule out either classicist influences or radical rationalism. Such versatility had allowed him to tackle projects such as the restoration of the Brera art gallery and the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, but also the design of the Italian pavilion for the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929 (the same year in which Mies Van der Rohe presented theirs for Germany) or, a few meters from the plot acquired by the Necchi Campliglio, the Hoepli Planetarium, a sort of Roman temple updated whose monumentality did not clash with Mussolin’s taste for imperial revisitation. In fact, shortly after Portaluppi would receive (and accept) the commission for the headquarters of the Federation of Milanese Fascists in Piazza San Sepolcro. A decade later, after the Second World War, this work, in addition to his affiliation with the Party (in 1933) and statements such as those he gave in a conference, praising the fascist style as “one of the best stages of our art”, They put him on the spot before the purge committees. However, he was acquitted of charges of collaboration with the recently deposed regime. Surely his affiliation to fascism had more practical reasons than political faith. His was, of course, a fairly common case.
The design of Villa Necchi Campilio was presented in 1930 and its construction lasted between 1932 and 1935, the same year that Mussolini established the Fascist Saturday, a weekly day dedicated to cultural, sports and military activities. Although not as daring as the Corbellini-Wassermann house (Portaluppi’s next residential project), the art deco The rationalist Necchi Campiglio lived up to its clients’ claims to modernity. The exterior offers a sobriety of Roman domus, with its orthogonal lines dotted with somewhat eccentric details such as a small star-shaped window, a motif especially dear to its author. It is separated from the outside world by an automatically opening gate – a revolutionary system for the time – and then you reach its entrance door passing a heated swimming pool, the first of its kind to be installed in Milan.
Once inside, the hall with walnut and rosewood parquet, and its imposing stairs with fretted balustrade. On one side, the ceiling dining room decorated with stuccos representing the zodiac signs. On the other, the library, the living room and what is perhaps the most portentous room, the greenhouse, with its transparent glass walls that overlook the garden and its travertine and green marble pavement (Portaluppi’s marble obsession is well documented, which had converted the multicolored floor of his office into a display of different stones, so that clients could point down at any point in the room to choose theirs). The main rooms on the upper floor, equipped with a dressing room and a marble-covered bathroom, were reached through a hallway flanked by built-in wardrobes: a profusion of storage space was needed to house the fashion and accessories collections of the sisters Gigina and Nedda. .
During World War II, the house was confiscated by the Italian government and converted into the headquarters of the fascist government in the city, while its owners moved to the countryside. After the war, and after a period in which it was converted into the residence of the consul of the Netherlands, the Necchi Campiglios were able to recover it. Among the guests who frequently occupied their bedrooms were two good friends of the family, Princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy, daughter of the last king of Italy, and her cousin, Prince Heinrich von Hesse-Kassel, also known as Enrico d’ Assia, painter and set designer, son of a German nobleman who was a member of the Nazi party who fell into disgrace with Hitler and Mafalda of Savoy, who died in an Allied bombing when she was a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
In the fifties, the house underwent an update that actually consisted of a trip to the past. For this, the owners counted on Tomaso Buzzi, an architect and interior designer much more conventional than Portaluppi. Buzzi provided decorative details close to the sensibility of the 18th and 19th centuries – and that of the traditional bourgeois classes – in line with the enormous Belgian tapestries in the dining room, which distorted the original rationalist bet. In this debatable decision of its owners, the desire for the house to formally move away from the fascist style that Portaluppi had praised in times more receptive to this discourse cannot be ruled out.
Angelo Campiglio died in 1984, and his sister-in-law Nedda Necchi died nine years later. They were followed by an almost centenarian Gigina Necchi in 2001. The last survivor of the trio of residents, Gigina had bequeathed the property to the FAI (Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano), a foundation for the safeguarding of national historical heritage, which is its current owner. After a long restoration process, which among other objectives tried to return it to a state as similar as possible to that conceived by Portaluppi, it was opened to the public. The art collection, carefully chosen by Nedda, with works signed by avant-garde authors such as Lucio Fontana, René Magritte and Jean Arp, was sold almost entirely for charity, so she had long since left the mansion. In exchange, works loaned to the FAI by the gallery owner Claudia Gian Ferrari are currently on display at Villa Necchi (who apparently made it a condition to sleep from time to time in the house in exchange for contributing her repertoire of Italian futurists such as Boccioni, Balla and Carrà , in addition to De Pisis, De Chirico or Morandi), the textile industrialists Alighiero and Emilietta de’ Micheli (paintings of the classics Rosalba Carriera, Canaletto or Tiepolo) and the lawyer Guido Sforni (roles by Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani, among others ).
On the other hand, among the elements that survived Buzzi’s make-up we must mention the sculptural sliding alpaca doors of the winter garden, which would represent the gates of the figurative prison in which Tilda Swinton, Marisa Berenson, Alba Rohrwacher and the rest of the Cast of Io sono l’amore. There, Emma, the wife of a rich industrial heir – a character played by Swinton – sees how the upper-bourgeois universe of which she is a part falls apart due to the discovery of her daughter’s lesbianism (Rohrwacher), but above all due to her adultery with a young man. chef friend of another of his children. An ill-timed fish soup will trigger a series of tragic events that will lead to the triumph of passion between models from Fendi and Jil Sander, visits to the roofs of the Duomo in Milan (whose square, by the way, Portaluppi redesigned in 1928) and shots of flowers wild plants in full pollination that contrast with the severe sumptuousness of the house.
Years later, Ridley Scott would use this setting again to set some scenes of The Gucci house (2021). There the gardens and swimming pool of Villa Necchi Campiglio were posed as those of the patriarch Rodolfo Gucci (Jeremy Irons). Portaluppi’s masterpiece demonstrated, once again, that as an architecture of power it is unbeatable.
