The former family home of a series of rich industrialists from Milan, the work of Piero Portaluppi, is today a visited monument and film set. The true owners of the house were not a textile saga but a metal saga.
Sisters Nedda and Gigina Necchi were born respectively in 1900 and 1901, daughters of Ambrogio Necchi, owner of a foundry in the Lombard city of Pavia, about 40 kilometers from Milan. They had a brother, Vittorio, who died in 1916, leaving the business to his young offspring. The Recchi family is a very rich lineage of textile businessmen, who probably – Guadagnino is not very explicit about this – multiplied their fortune during the years of the fascist government, and then clung to it, avoiding the different conjunctures of the modern history of Italy like an alpine skier slides between the slalom flags. The opening credits are superimposed on postcards of a winter Milan, doubly buried under a layer of snow and the solemn music of the American opera composer John Adams. The walls that surround a mansion like the wall of a fortress. Piero Portaluppi was the fashionable architect in interwar Milan. His protean style encompassed a wide formal range that did not rule out either classicist influences or radical rationalism. The design of Villa Necchi Campilio was presented in 1930, and its construction lasted between 1932 and 1935, the same year that Mussolini established the Fascist Saturday, a weekly day dedicated to cultural, sports, and military activities. Although not as daring as the Corbellini-Wassermann house (Portaluppi's next residential project), it was a more daring design than the Hoepli Planetarium, a sort of Roman temple whose monumentality did not clash with Mussolin's taste for imperial revisitation. The architect was acquitted of charges of collaboration with the recently deposed regime. Surely his affiliation to fascism had more practical reasons than political faith. It was, of course, a fairly common case, but it was a fairly common case. He was a great architect with very new ways and very old interests.