08 Villa Farinelli

Texts by Rodolfo Huber

Listen to the audio

Villa Farinelli was designed by architect Paolo Zanini in 1896 for Giuseppe Farinelli, an entrepreneur descended from a family from Intra who had come to Locarno fifteen years earlier. Giuseppe Farinelli made his fortune in the grain trade and married a niece of the painter Antonio Ciseri of Ascona, but he remained faithful to his Italian citizenship and during World War I worked for his homeland, earning himself the title of knight. For a time he was also Italian consul in Locarno.

But let us turn our attention back to the villa. The original building, in its essential features still recognizable today, looked like a kind of castle, with a turret in a vaguely post-romantic bourgeois style. In the typical 19th-century garden, in keeping with a fashion of the times, there was not even an exotic touch missing: a cage of ostriches from Africa. Near the villa were grain warehouses and stables that formed the so-called "Farinelli quarter," later demolished in the years around 1960. Villa Farinelli was renovated in the 1990s.

In 1925, on the occasion of the Locarno Conference, Benito Mussolini stayed at Villa Farinelli and therefore did not stay with the rest of the Italian delegation, headed by Vittorio Scialoja, in the nearby Grand Hotel. In fact, the Duce had only arrived in Locarno on October 15, the day before the signing of the Rhenish Pact, leaving Rome by train for Milan, then continuing by car to Stresa and by boat to Brissago, where he again boarded a car to reach Locarno.

The Duce's arrival in town fueled the enthusiasm of his many admirers, but also some hostile signs. A French newspaper wrote: "It is useless to dissimulate that Mussolini's arrival has caused a small revolution in the little village of Locarno."