"Villa Erba is a house that we really love, a Lombard villa that is dear to us. We will all meet there, brothers and sisters and it will be like the times when we were children and we lived in our mother’s shadow".

These are the words of Luchino Visconti, the famous film director and founder of the "neo-realism" movement which brought European and then world wide renown to the Italian film industry of the 40’s and 50’s. The Villa Erba became the customary residence of his beloved mother Carla Erba, following her separation from her husband Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone.

The atmosphere of the Villa and its grounds reminded the director of his childhood, as this was where he usually spent his summer holidays: “Happy days, on the banks of the lake, we made plans and invariably a storm broke out. Disappointed we stayed in silence, stuck to the windows that were already streaked with rain. A storm destroyed the most beautiful tree in the garden. Everything is still alive, inside me. Sometimes we slept on the grass in the lethargy of the afternoon, to the rustle of crickets and cicadas. In the evening we showed our tired faces to our parents. We fell asleep as soon as we left the table, after all that running about.”

The playful and relaxed atmosphere that livened up the villa at the end of each school year with the advent of the school holidays is confirmed by Giulio Origgi, son of the Villa’s caretaker, and for many years resident in one of the grounds' three caretaker’s lodges. Origgi, who is the same age as Lady Uberta, Luchino’s younger sister, remembers the splendour of the villa in the early XX century and the marvellous grounds where the Visconti and the children of their servants used to spending their leisure afternoons. Meanwhile their parents received guests and important figures from around Como and the Milanese aristocracy for high tea or for carefully prepared lunches.

Luchino’s stays in the villa decreased dramatically following the death of his mother in 1939. It still remained a pleasant residence and the director stayed there as a guest of his brother Edoardo, before travelling to the Venice Film Festival. In those years, the villa’s rooms accommodated all of the director's greatest friends and colleagues: Franco Zeffirelli, Helmut Berger, Alain Delon, always received with great curiosity and great courtesy by the servants. For them, Luchino was still that young lad who, during the hot summers on Lake Como, loved to cover himself in talcum powder and flour with his brothers and sisters and imitate the neo-classic statues that decorated the balustrade of the wet dock, before throwing themselves into the lake in front of astonished boating tourists.