Grand Hotel a Villa Feltrinelli

Benito Mussolini lived at Villa Feltrinelli from October 1943 until April 1945, under German guard, while the Italian Social Republic was administered from Salò and the surrounding towns of Lake Garda. The villa at Gargnano had been built in 1892 for the Feltrinelli family, whose fortune came from timber and later from publishing, and it had never been a public building before the war or since. The Grand Hotel a Villa Feltrinelli, Gargnano, opened within its walls in 2001.

History

The Feltrinellis commissioned the villa as a summer house on the lakeshore, with gardens running to the water and a lemon house of the kind that lined this shore in the nineteenth century. The family kept it after the war, then let it go in the later twentieth century. Bob Burns, the American founder of Regent International Hotels, bought the villa in 1997 and spent four years and a great deal of money restoring it, replacing or repairing every surface, before opening it as a hotel in 2001 with himself as the resident owner. The restaurant has held a Michelin star since the late 2000s under the chef Stefano Baiocco, who arrived in 2004.

Architecture and design

The villa is a late-nineteenth-century mixture of neo-Gothic and Liberty motifs: turrets and pointed arches outside, frescoed ceilings, stained glass and inlaid woodwork within. The restoration kept the original decoration where it survived and reproduced it where it did not, and the furniture is period, with pieces from the Feltrinelli era returned to the rooms. The gardens hold magnolias and cypresses, the old lemon house, a swimming pool among the trees and a dock on the lake. Nothing in the house looks like a hotel, and the staff outnumber the guests by a wide margin.

Rooms and suites

There are 21 rooms and suites, most in the villa itself and a few in the garden houses and the former boathouse. Rooms in the villa have the frescoed ceilings and lake views; the garden rooms have more privacy and direct access to the grounds. The suite once used by Mussolini is among them, furnished without reference to its history. Each room is different in shape, as a private house would be.

Dining

Stefano Baiocco's restaurant holds a Michelin star and serves a menu built on vegetables and herbs from the villa's own garden, lake fish, and the olive oil and citrus of the Garda shore. Lunch is taken on the terrace by the water; dinner inside, in rooms that keep their original decoration. The cellar covers Italy thoroughly and the bar serves on the lawn in fine weather.

Weddings and events

The villa can be taken in its entirety for weddings, with the ceremony in the garden by the lake and dinner in the dining rooms or on the terrace. Its size, 21 rooms, defines the scale: it suits a wedding of family and close friends rather than a large reception. Small meetings and retreats use the same rooms.

Location

Gargnano is on the western shore of Lake Garda, in the province of Brescia, about twenty minutes north of Salò. Verona airport is about an hour and a half by car, Milan's airports a little over two hours; Brescia is the nearest mainline railway station. The hotel's boats take guests across the lake to Sirmione or up to Limone and Riva. As a luxury hotel on Lake Garda, Villa Feltrinelli belongs to a small group of houses where the history is in the walls rather than the brochure.