| Villa
Antona Traversi in Meda, which is 200 years
old, stands on a hill that dominates the
upper milanese plain. Almost 12 centuries
ago this terrace like hilltop area had been
selected as the site for Saint Vittore monastery.
This Benedictine monastery was founded in
about 830 A.D. by Aimone and Vermondo, two
illustrious descendants of the Manfredingi
lineage, a great feudal family in northern
Italy, in fullfillment of a vow made to
the Virgin Mary. Their remains are still
kept in an urn located under the altar of
the Saint Vittore church. In
1194, the Emperor Henry VI and his celebrated
wife, the Empress Costanza d’Altavilla,
stopped over at this monastery on their
return trip from Germany to Sicily.
With the advent of free communes, certain
rights had to be relinquished. In 1252,
the monastery’s abbess had to give
up her feudal rights regarding Meda and
acknowledge the comune’s statutes,
although the monastery still retained all
its ecclesiastical rights: the most important
was the right to nominee the parish priest. In 1496, the monastery was the scene of
a meeting between the Emperor Maximilian
I of the House of Hapsburg and the Duke
of Milan, Ludovico il Moro.
The
18th century brought further important and
damaging innovations to the monastery. Although
it narrowly missed being suppressed by Joseph
II, it later succumbed to the much more
severe suppression imposed by the Cisalpine
Republic, which was founded by the Napoleonic
armies. With the issuing of a decree on
the 29th of May 1798, the thousand-year-old
monastery was closed, and all the nuns were
expelled. The following October, the property
was put up for auction, with the final bid
going to Giovanni Giuseppe Maunier, a rich
merchant from Marseilles who was a supplier
for the French army. Maunier, however, had
no respect whatsoever for what the monastery’s
historical and religious value and promptly
engaged Leopoldo Pollack, a well known Viennese
architect to turn the cenobium into a neoclassical
villa. Pollack raised most of the building
and put up entirely new structures, including
a grandiose front and a surrounding hemicycle,
which looks like a large balcony from which
one can obtain a sweeping view that goes
from the Alps to the Appennines.
Pollack
also put in a series of rooms, including
the Octagonal room, the Room of the Masks
and the Room with the mirrors, all with
superabundant neoclassical decoration. He
also turned the ancient convent into a courtyard
with a large room. Fortunately, parts of
the ancient monastery survived, such as
the San Vittore Church, which dated to 1520
and had been decorated with the most important
upper Milanese Renaissance frescos done
by Bernardino Luini and his school. The
church decoration had been further enriched
by Giulio Campi’s frescos on the wall
behind the main altar and, in 1626, by an
altar-piecedone by Giovanni Battista Crespi
(known as “The Cerano”). Also
surviving is a gilded wooden 17th century
statue of the Madonna of the rosary, and
a group of wooden figures of the Lombardy
school representing the Deposition and attribuited
to Gaudenzio Ferrari. In
addition, we also still have Bernardino
Luini’s splendid frescos on the chorus-room
walls. The chorus-room floor, which was
done by Pollack, divides the ancient roon
into two parts, but the dazzling arabesques
and surrounding figures on the ceiling still
provide splendid decoration for this room.
The rest of the monastery and the new neoclassical
villa, which were purchased in 1836 by Giovanni
Traversi, were later inherited by Traversi’s
grandchild who then bequeathed them to his
descendants, the last of which now owns
and maintains this property.
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