ISOLA BELLA seems to float upon the waters of Lake Maggiore. From Stresa the ordered terraces defy the drama of the hills beyond. The brief crossing conveys us to the landing stage near the palace conjured into existence for Count Carlo III Borromeo from 1631 onwards, but only completed in 1958. The palatial interior houses part of the remarkable collections of the Borromeo, rich in Lombard works both of the Renaissance and later periods; it is not difficult to understand why Mussolini arranged for the Stresa Treaty between Italy, England and France to be signed here in 1935. The grand baroque and neoclassical rooms on the piano nobile are perhaps less memorable than the sequence of rooms on the ground floor, grottoed chambers decorated with stucco and marbles and pebbles that catch light reflected from the water. Among the objects that have come to rest in these rooms are such rare survivals as horse trappings from the time of Cardinal Federico Borromeo.
To the south of the palace is the garden, also begun in 1631. The count and his architect, Angelo Crivelli, exploited a natural hill, which was partly cut away and then built up with substructures supporting ten superimposed terraces. The resulting rectangular ziggurat dominates the island. On the upper terrace, some thirty-three metres above the lake, is the theatre, presided over by the heraldic unicorn of the family. Carlo III’s third son, Vitaliano VI Borromeo, who succeeded in 1652, continued the project, calling in Carlo Fontana and Francesco Castelli; he died in 1690, the year in which the Dutch painter Gaspar van Wittel, known in Italy as Vanvitelli, prepared the studies on which his views of the island were based. The terraces were originally planted with cypresses, citrus trees, box and vegetables. Later generations have enriched the planting, but the design of what is in effect a baroque answer to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is unimpaired. Wandering up and down the terraces, not all of which are accessible, we are almost uncomfortably aware that we are in a garden like no other, a statement of patrician control over a once untamed landscape.
Isola Bella.
The Borromeo have held the islands that bear their name since 1501. In the mid-sixteenth century they built a villa on the larger Isola Madre, the lost terraced garden which can be seen in some of Vanvitelli’s views. The island is now celebrated for its botanical garden. This is most easily reached from Pallanza, which itself is best known for the Giardini Botanici of the Villa Taranto, but more memorable for a romantic neo-baroque terraced garden, San Remigio, created from the 1890s by the half Anglo-Irish Marchese and Marchesa Silvio delle Valle di Casanova, which has until recently languished under state control.
the lower terraces.
