Villa Panza, Italy

For gigantic trees in the garden and contemporary works of art, you can visit ‘Villa Panza’ in Varese an Italian town, which is situated on the Biumo mountain with views across the Alps and the Monta Rose mountain range. The founder is Giuseppe Panza, who took the risk of compiling an art collection with works by unknown young artists back in the fifties. Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Soll Lewitt, Richard Long, Joseph Beuys nowadays are some of the most famous and the list of names is several times longer. When his house in Milan became too small he brought an initial selection to his family house in Varese, a U-shaped baroque villa. At a later stage his villa boasted his entire collection. Americans like Dan Flavin, James Turell, Robert Irwin and Maria Nordman were even invited to design and furnish various different rooms in his villa. Flavin, who was resident in New York in the sixties, was the first artist to work with light bulbs and strip lights, in short, with artificial lighting. Flavin would depict various emotions in the villa’s long corridor and in the rooms off the corridor he designed concentrated atmospheres, for example strip lights in the form of a cross presented an ode to the death of his brother who died in the Korean War. Blue rooms would absorb you and the green room would offer rest. Panza’s collection has now been distributed across various different museums throughout the world.

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