Villa Fontanelle

Villa Fontanelle is a lakeside villa near Moltrasio on Lake Como in Lombardy, Italy, about 50 kilometers from Milan. The four story, yellow painted house was built in the first half of the nineteenth century by the English nobleman Lord Charles Currie, who could not find a villa for sale on the lake and built his own at the water's edge. It later passed to Antonio Besana, a friend of the composer Giuseppe Verdi, and by 1977 had fallen into disrepair when it was bought by the fashion designer Gianni Versace, who restored it to its neoclassical appearance and landscaped its gardens with the help of the art historian Roy Strong. After Versace's death in 1997 the estate passed through further owners and was bought in 2008 by the Russian restaurateur Arkady Novikov for 33 million euros.