Casa Macchi
A bourgeois house in a Varese village, left exactly as three generations lived in it — furniture, letters and a grocery counter, frozen at the moment it was abandoned.
At a glance
Casa Macchi sits on the main square of Morazzone, a village north-west of Milan and just south of Varese. It is an ordinary nineteenth-century Lombard house — two storeys and a small tower — and that is precisely the point. Adele Bottelli and her husband Giuseppe Macchi brought it to its present form around 1900; three generations of the family then lived here without modernising much. In 2015 the last of them, Maria Luisa Macchi, left the house and everything in it to the Fondo Ambiente Italiano. After four years of restoration it opened in 2022 as a living museum of everyday life.
Key facts
- Location: Piazza Sant’Ambrogio 2, Morazzone, province of Varese, Lombardy
- Type: 19th-century Lombard house with a walled garden and small tower
- Present form: rebuilt around 1890–1900
- Family: three generations of the Bottelli-Macchi family
- Bequest: left to the FAI in 2015 by Maria Luisa Macchi, with all its contents
- Opened: 2022, after four years of restoration
History
The house first appears in Morazzone’s land registry in the mid-eighteenth century, divided between a farmhouse and a share belonging to the parish priest next door. Between 1890 and 1900 it was rebuilt into the house seen today, and in 1898 it passed to Adele Bottelli, who with her husband Giuseppe Macchi, an accountant, brought both halves under one roof.
For more than a century the Bottelli-Macchi family lived here, through the Risorgimento, two world wars and the long quiet of provincial Lombardy. They kept things: furniture, paintings, silver, and a family archive of letters, diaries, photographs and postcards. Little was thrown away and little was updated.
In 2015 Maria Luisa Macchi, Adele’s granddaughter and the last to live in the house, left it to the Fondo Ambiente Italiano with all its contents, asking that it serve the town as a living museum. The FAI restored the roof, the services and the garden over four years and opened the house in 2022, holding it at the moment the family left it.
What you see
The rooms are shown as they were used, not arranged for display. Upstairs, the main bedroom keeps its boudoir and dressing room, and a veranda looks onto the garden. The old stable now holds a short immersive film on the restoration, and the ground floor includes a reconstructed emporio, the grocery shop the family once ran.
The garden is part of the visit. Within its walls are a goldfish pond, an aviary, a small tower and a limonaia — the lemon house where citrus plants wintered. Together with the family archive, it makes the house read less as architecture than as a life left intact.
Practical information
- Open to visitors as a FAI property; check FAI opening times and booking before travelling
- A house-museum shown room by room — comfortable shoes help
- The garden is part of the visit and is best in mild weather
- Allow about an hour
Getting there
Morazzone lies a few kilometres south-east of Varese, in the pre-Alpine hills of Lombardy. The house stands on the central square, Piazza Sant’Ambrogio, beside the parish church. Varese, on rail lines from Milan, is the nearest town; from there it is a short drive or bus ride, and the village centre is easily walked.
Nearby
- Varese and its Sacro Monte (UNESCO World Heritage)
- The parish church of Morazzone
- Castiglione Olona and its Renaissance core
Sources
- Fondo Ambiente Italiano (FAI) — property page
- Musei riconosciuti in Lombardia — Regione Lombardia
- VareseNews
- Abbonamento Musei
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