Borromeo Palace - Virtual Tour 360°

Borromeo Palace is a seventeenth-century building located on Isola Bella, on Lake Maggiore (municipality of Stresa, province of Verbano-Cusio-Ossola), whose gardens extend to the southern tip of the islet. It still belongs to the Borromeo family.

Some land was purchased on Isola Bella (then called "lower island") by Giulio Cesare Borromeo, uncle of San Carlo, in the sixteenth century, who was already the owner of the nearby Isola Madre (bought in 1501 by his father). At the time the island was inhabited only by a few fishermen's houses with two small churches and a few vegetable gardens.

In the garden the construction of the central "Casino" that had been planned was given up and the oratory of San Rocco was demolished, building a system of underground chambers in its place. In 1675, to resolve the lack of axial alignment between the palace and the garden, the "Diana atrium" was built, with two curved stairways just staggered.

Count Giberto hosted Napoleon on the palace on the island with his wife Josephine de Beauharnais as well as the Princess of Wales, Carolina Amalia of Brunswick.

With Vitaliano IX (1792-1874), expert in botany, exotic plant species, greenhouses and a new water pumping system were introduced into the gardens.

The palace was completed by Prince Vitaliano X (1892-1982) who finished the north facade and the connected pier and built the large hall based on the original project.

The palace, characterized by a T-shaped plan, stands at the northern end of the island, dominated by the 80 linear m long facade, with the curvilinear protrusion of the hall of honor in the center, developed on two floors and covered by a domed roof.

The chapel of the building, also on the ground floor, houses objects that belonged to San Carlo Borromeo and Cardinal Federico, as well as three sepulchral monuments of characters of the family.

On the first floor, around the central hall, there are decorated and furnished rooms, including the Napoleon room, where he stayed in 1797, the Throne room and the Music room, where the Stresa conference was held in 1935, between Benito Mussolini, Pierre Laval and Ramsay MacDonald.

The interiors of the building host paintings by well-known painters, including Luca Giordano, Francesco Zuccarelli and Pieter Mulier, known as the Tempest. In the gallery of the Tapestries there are sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries with scenes of animals symbolizing the struggle between Good and Evil.

Nel 2008 è stata riaperta al pubblico anche la Pinacoteca (o del Generale Berhier), dove è conservata la collezione di dipinti della famiglia, con opere di Raffaello, Correggio, Tiziano e Guido Reni, insieme alla Sala della Regina e alla Sala del Trono.

Al piano terra si aprono verso il giardino una serie di ambienti con decorazione a grotta, con motivi decorativi formati da ciottoli e piccole pietre.

Map: Borromeo Palace - Virtual Tour 360°