Villa Elisi

Villa Elisi (1912), in the area known as Le Colme di San Maurizio above Brunate, is the sole building designed and built by Antonio Sant’Elia. Commissioned by the industrialist Romeo Longatti of Como, it was built on land that had been purchased in December 1911. Before the results of the remodelling we see today, it stood as a country villa with tympanum decorated by frescoes in the style of Klimt, carried out in collaboration with his sculptor friend Girolamo Fontana. The design of this holiday home was a variation on the small modern villa of 1910 produced for the “Milanino” cooperative competition. It represented an opportunity for Sant’Elia to prove his worth as an architect and as mason and site manager as he himself had to oversee the use of the decorative elements and the difficult structural problems that would emerge, in view particularly of the house’s location on steeply sloping ground.