We’ve written before about Villa Ponti Bellavista being influenced by Gio Ponti, one of Italy’s most famous architects. What we haven’t told you is quite how far down this rabbit hole we’ve actually gone.
It started with the drawing. The original design, framed and hanging in our entrance hall to this day, found by the original owners, the Fossati family, when they were packing up the villa to leave. Along the bottom, three names. Two of them young — one a newly graduated architect, the other only a few years further along. And the more we looked at that drawing, the less it made sense to us that two neophytes, barely out of their studies, would have been handed a villa commission and just… come up with a stern-shaped chimney, a kidney-shaped living area, funnels on the roof that look straight off a ship’s deck, all on their own. It didn’t add up. Then we found out Ponti spent the 1950s designing interiors of transatlantic ocean liners. And suddenly it added up a lot more than we expected.
And there’s a very concrete reason it doesn’t add up as pure coincidence. Cesare Casati and Enzo Hybsch, the two young names on that drawing, joined Gio Ponti’s own studio in 1958 and worked there before eventually leaving to found their own furniture design practice. Casati went on to become managing editor of Domus, the influential Italian architecture and design magazine Ponti had founded back in 1928 and edited, with one wartime break, right up until his death in 1979. So this wasn’t two architects inventing ship funnels out of thin air. They’d spent years inside Ponti’s studio, absorbing exactly that world, before this drawing was made.
Because honestly, where else would two young architects, this early in their careers, get that from? Nobody dreams up ship funnels and portholes and a fireplace shaped like the bow of a boat out of nowhere. That’s someone who’d spent years thinking about ships, who’d lived and breathed that world. And the only person in this story for whom any of that would have meant something is Ponti himself.
We know the villa itself wasn’t built until some years after this drawing was made — the land wasn’t even bought until 1965 — and Ponti’s studio doesn’t seem to have followed the build itself. But the drawing came first, and that’s the bit we’re stuck on. Where are the sketches Ponti would have done for the Fossati family, in his studio, or when he came to look at the land above Bellagio? They have to be somewhere. That’s the mystery we can’t let go of.
So we’ve kept going. Letters to the Comune di Bellagio, the Archivio di Stato di Como, the Agenzia delle Entrate land registry, anyone who might have old permits or records. We’ve been in touch with people who study Ponti’s work for a living. And we’ve engaged a PhD researcher to go through Ponti’s archive directly — his family donated the whole collection to a holding in Parma, and a huge amount of it has never even been digitised. It’s slow, box-by-box work, hunting for anything with our villa or the Fossati name on it.
We don’t have proof yet. What we have is a drawing that makes no sense any other way, and people who keep looking on our behalf. We’ll update this the moment we find anything worth telling you.
In the meantime, if you like your holidays with a bit of architectural detective work thrown in, you’ll feel right at home in that top living room, ship’s fireplace and all.
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