Villa Erba

The guide to Villa Erba on Lake Como can't even settle on the year the villa was built, and starts there, before tracing the pharmaceutical fortune of Luigi Erba that paid for it. You'll hear about his daughter Carla, who married a duke and gave birth here in 1906 to a son who grew up to become the film director Luchino Visconti, returning for decades to edit his own work inside these walls. The guide follows the family through wartime requisition by German officers and toward a decision Carla's heirs eventually had to make about the house. Stand in the park, once a private racehorse track, before you go looking for the greenhouse-shaped hall.