A Peeling 17th-Century Palazzo and the Man Who Was ‘Crazy Enough' to Buy It

New York Times

07-03-2025

WHEN RAFFAELE FABRIZIO was growing up, he lived in a small village close to Lake Como called Fino Mornasco that was near the headquarters of Dedar, the Italian fabric house that his parents, Nicola and Elda, founded in 1976. Fabrizio, 55, and his sister, Caterina, 56, have spent their careers at Dedar, bringing the firm into a new era by introducing novel combinations of color, pattern and texture, attracting clients like Hermès and the movie director Luca Guadagnino.
As a younger man, though, Fabrizio had wanted to be an architect — he would study the field in college and practice in his 20s — since taking an interest in a desolate 17th-century villa around the corner from his family's home that had been occupied, and then deserted, by a countess who'd lost her fortune. 'It's always that same story,' he says, laughing a little, 'but I was fascinated by this forbidden place.' Most days after school, while his parents were running their company, he'd wriggle past the locked gate and wander through rooms decorated with faded frescoes. When friends came over, he forced them to visit 'this beautiful world,' as he describes it, 'hidden and abandoned.'
He recalls this on a gray September afternoon while crossing a grassy courtyard in Valmorea, another village west of Como with its own haunted character. On the street, barren of the few thousand people who live here, a black cat creeps from under a bright yellow Mustang. When church bells toll the hour three minutes early, Fabrizio jokes that the lag is 'the right time to make a murder.' As he remembers his youth, he mentions the emotion required to create interesting textiles — not nostalgia, per se, but the 'feeling of something that was a memory … the atmosphere.' But given that he's now standing outside his own tumbledown 17th-century palace on seven acres that he purchased three years ago, and has since kept in glorious disarray, it's clear he's not just talking about work: As someone who's planning to move soon from his Milanese apartment (where he lives by himself) to be closer to the family business he helps oversee, he knows that his history is also his destiny. 'Your desires are formed when you're younger,' he says. 'And then we live to satisfy that ancient desire.'
IF IT'S TRUE that all houses choose their owners, then this one has been discerning: In nearly 350 years, it has been passed between only four different hands, about once per century. Around 1690, some of the valley in which it sits was acquired by the Sala family, who, according to municipal records, combined a few extant buildings (a noble manor, a farmer's house) to create the structure's oldest, central core. In the early 20th century, the Sassi family bought it in several phases and purportedly rented part of the estate to a professor who'd tutored the children of the 19th-century painter Giovanni Segantini. The Sassi clan, descendants of two brothers who ran home-building companies in nearby Switzerland, divided the C-shaped property in half for their respective families, Fabrizio says, and decided to sell to him after the pandemic. There are more than 50 rooms, many of them with busted-through floors and ceilings that make traversing sections of the three levels treacherous. But Fabrizio was particularly drawn to the grandeur hidden behind the classic Lombardian facade, with its three-arched portico, yellow stone walls and green painted shutters. In finalizing the deal over two years, he told the sellers that they would never recruit someone else 'crazy enough' to undertake such a sprawling renovation.
Parts of the 22,000-square-foot palazzo may have been built by the same family of architects, the Quadrios, who worked on Milan's Gothic duomo in the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet Fabrizio has found little historical documentation for the building, which was listed by the Italian cultural heritage commission only after its sale to him; while he has peeled back paint on wooden ceilings and excavated stone floors in the downstairs common areas and upstairs bedrooms, it's impossible to tell when something was added or removed — every room is its own palimpsest. The lower level's ballroom, for instance, has a cathedral ceiling with trompe l'oeil windows and coffers, painted at some point to balance out the symmetry of the architecture, above a swirly red-and-white terra-cotta floor that's likely original. Its walls are more than 20 feet high because in the 1700s art was displayed in vertical stacks.
The home has no heat and needs new wiring and, so far, the only real furniture Fabrizio has added is a bed, a clothing rack and some tables with sawhorse legs in the few rooms he's 'colonized,' as he says, while he goes back and forth to the city and figures out what to do here. There's no rush, however: 'I want to keep this feeling of living in a place that doesn't belong to me.' Once he starts renovating, he knows, he'll forever change the ambience that first enticed him — not that he's aiming to restore the house to its 17th-century glory or any thereafter. Instead, he wants to add his own modern layer on top of all the period details; why not, for example, consider lacquered ceilings?
For him — for any good designer, in fact — the project's true success won't rest in its physical manifestations but in the mood it provokes and the behavior it encourages. And this house, just as the countess's was, is somewhere he likes to come to be alone, to consider the world before and beyond him. Last summer, he was awakened one morning by a storm that had torn down 20 of his cypress trees. He'd never experienced such intense winds in Italy, nor was he aware that his country had small scorpions, which he's caught scurrying about the wide, empty halls. Fabrizio shares this fact while roaming from undone room to undone room, latching the shutters. 'I don't want the ghosts to get in,' he says. 'Sometimes there's a need to close the door — to keep everything out. This is the place to do that.'