12 Bed Villa for sale
Piacenza, Piacenza, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
£5,000,000 *
[€5,819,500]
Full Description
At the end of a linden avenue some 750 metres long, in the quiet countryside south-west of Piacenza, Villa Cigala Fulgosi presides over its own English park, an oratory and a rural borgo gathered around a great farmyard. Declared of particularly important cultural interest by the Italian Ministry of Culture in 2008, the estate covers about 12 hectares (30 acres), with a history reaching back more than six centuries.
The first record of a fortified house at Tavernago dates to 1372. The estate passed through the Arcelli counts, the Marquises Malvicini Fontana and the Serafini family before the neoclassical villa was built around 1800, perhaps on the site of the old stronghold. In 1855 it came to the Counts Cigala Fulgosi, whose coat of arms still crowns the pediment, and later to their descendants, the Borromeo counts.
The villa, of about 2,320 m² on four levels, faces the avenue with a composed neoclassical front of pilasters and nine windows on the piano nobile. Inside, an octagonal vaulted hall leads to a staircase with a wrought-iron railing, rising to the hall of stuccoes and the principal rooms of the first floor. Several rooms retain vaulted ceilings with stucco and tempera decoration, from coffered ceilings to a vault painted with stars. The ground floor opens onto the garden behind the house, the top floor holds service rooms, and the villa has ten bathrooms.
Before the main front, a wrought-iron gate on four lantern-topped pillars opens onto an oval garden bed and a neo-baroque fountain with eight putti. Behind the house lies a 19th-century English park of cedars of Lebanon, magnolias and lindens: a great lawn framed by avenues of oaks, hornbeams, lindens and planes, allegorical statues, and a spring-fed pond covered in lotus flowers, with a small island reached by a bridge of river stones. A tennis court completes the grounds. At the head of the avenue stands the Oratory of Santa Maria del Portone, rebuilt in 1687, with a bell tower dated 1696 and frescoes of the Annunciation inside.
Around the farmyard, the wings restored after 2000 form a borgo of their own. The Locanda, in the C-shaped wing beside the villa, has restaurant rooms with high ceilings and historic fireplaces, a bar and guest rooms above, several with mezzanine lofts: about 1,220 m² plus 665 m² of mezzanines. The L-shaped north wing holds nine apartments of 72 to 174 m² and a further unit of about 155 m², and two more dwellings stand beside the oratory. A porticoed stable-barn with three aisles, a second barn, the former workers' houses, storage, garages and parking complete the estate.
Agazzano's planning rules admit residential, hospitality, restaurant, cultural and event uses, subject to planning and heritage consent. Whether as a private estate, a boutique hotel, a venue for weddings and events or a cultural foundation, Villa Cigala Fulgosi offers a rare chance to take on one of the most important historic houses in the Piacenza area, together with its park, its oratory and its borgo.
Piacenza and the A1 motorway (Piacenza Sud exit) are about 20 km away, while Milan city centre and the airports of Milan Linate and Parma are about an hour to an hour and twenty minutes by car.
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