Villa Leumann

Unfortunately, we have no bibliographical track on the villa, only fragmentary documents. In 1500 the site was of agricultural purpose, in 1600 the Rivajra family, built a "house with courtyard, garden, field and kettle" (a pond). In 1700 they sold their property to the lawyer Burlotti, who changed the land from exclusively agricultural to predominantly civil, with the construction of a park and a garden and the construction of a mansion next to the rustic farmhouse, thus assuming the appearance a country dwelling in the fashion of the period when the nobility and rich bourgeoisie used to create dwellings in extra urban areas.
In 1885 the property was acquired by Napoleon Leumann, a young industrialist of Swiss origin, who began a series of renovations that changed the appearance of the villa to its present appearance, by Pietro Fenoglio (1865-1927) who on the eighteenth-century villa, he grafted elements of the dominant Liberty style in the first decade of the twentieth century.
The building was raised with the construction of the attic roof and three domes made of lightweight and innovative materials and with slate roof: the balance of the facade was thus completely transformed and the country villa assumed the late nineteenth-century appearance today. Two loggia-balconies and two terraces supported by cast iron columns were symmetrically added to the façade, while an octagonal angular tower was built in the rear facade. On the south side, a further greenhouse was attached to the villa and functioned as a "winter garden" that went into the building with two cave imitations. Inside it restored the eighteenth-century staircase, and the atriums of the ground floor and first floor, renewing marble and decorations, with enrichment of wall decoration. It was realized the outer wrap with decorative elements typically Liberty and of a phenomenal imprint; during the Second World War it was disbanded to give "iron to the homeland".
After a period of decline begun in 1930 with the death of Napoleon Leumann, in 1946 his heirs sold the property to Ermenegildo Massarini who wanted to use it at Casinos, but the project did not go to port, so he resold it in 1949 to the Institute of Poor Daughters of San Gaetano and will become a retirement home for seniors until 1997 when, in December of the same year, it becomes the seat of the town of Pianezza. Acquired for the wish of the geometry Giovanni Soffietti, for many years Mayor of Pianezza, knowingly restored by the architect Alessandro Girotto and adapted to the new function of Commune Palace, is now the home of all citizens of Pianezza.