Collezione Enrico a Villa Flecchia
On the crest of the Ivrea moraine, a modern villa hung with sixty landscape paintings — Fontanesi, Delleani, Pasini — that compete with the view from every window.
At a glance
The Collezione Enrico fills Villa Flecchia, a modern house built between the 1950s and 1970 on the ridge of the Serra Morenica di Ivrea, near Magnano in the Biellese. The architect Piero Enrico and his wife Franca gathered more than sixty paintings here — Italian and Piedmontese work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all turning on landscape. Antonio Fontanesi and Lorenzo Delleani anchor the collection; Alberto Pasini, Francesco Menzio and the abstract painter Luigi Spazzapan extend it. The villa’s plain rooms open onto a 360-degree panorama, so the painted landscapes hang against the real one. The Enricos gave house and collection to the Fondo Ambiente Italiano in 2011.
Key facts
- Location: Via per Zimone 3, Magnano, province of Biella, Piedmont — on the Serra Morenica di Ivrea
- Villa: built between the mid-1950s and 1970, modern lines, panoramic site
- Collection: more than 60 paintings, 19th–20th century, Italian and Piedmontese, landscape-focused
- Key artists: Antonio Fontanesi (1818–1882), Lorenzo Delleani (1840–1908), Alberto Pasini, Luigi Spazzapan, Francesco Menzio
- Given to the FAI: 2011, by Piero and Franca Enrico
- Named after: Domenico Davide Flecchia, the donor’s uncle
History
The Serra Morenica di Ivrea is one of the largest moraine ridges in Europe, a long wooded hill left by an Ice Age glacier. On its crest, near the village of Magnano, the architect Piero Enrico built a house between the mid-1950s and 1970 — modern, low and plain, set for the view.
Enrico was also a collector. Over a lifetime he gathered more than sixty paintings of the Italian and Piedmontese nineteenth and twentieth centuries, choosing work bound together by a single thread: landscape. The Romantic landscapes of Antonio Fontanesi and Lorenzo Delleani sit beside the more modern hands of Alberto Pasini, Francesco Menzio and the abstractions of Luigi Spazzapan.
In 2011 Piero Enrico and his wife Franca gave the villa and its collection to the Fondo Ambiente Italiano, in memory of Enrico’s uncle Domenico Davide Flecchia, whose name the house carries. Enrico’s wish, in his own words, was simply to keep what he had gathered with love.
What you see
The collection is shown in the house the Enricos lived in, paintings on the walls of ordinary rooms rather than gallery halls. More than sixty canvases trace a century of landscape painting, from Fontanesi’s storm-lit Romanticism to twentieth-century work, hung as a private collection rather than a survey.
The setting is half the point. The villa stands on the ridge of the Serra, and its windows open in every direction over woods, fields and scattered villages to the horizon. The painted landscapes and the real one answer each other across the glass.
Practical information
- Open to visitors as a FAI property; check FAI opening times and booking
- Shown as a furnished house-collection — visits are usually guided
- The panorama is part of the visit; clear days reward the trip
- Allow about an hour
Getting there
Magnano lies on the Serra Morenica between Biella and Ivrea, in the Canavese-Biellese borderland of northern Piedmont. The villa is on the ridge above the village. Ivrea and Biella, both on rail lines, are the nearest towns; from either it is a short drive into the moraine hills.
Nearby
- The Monastero di Bose, near Magnano
- The medieval ricetto (fortified village) of Magnano
- Ivrea, UNESCO World Heritage city of 20th-century industrial architecture
Sources
- Fondo Ambiente Italiano (FAI) — property page
- ATL Biella — local tourist board
- Castelli Aperti Piemonte
- Comune di Magnano
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