A new home for art: CASABIANCA

This is what art is all about: bringing us closer to life. Even when life is so mysterious and secretive that it seems worlds away, almost as if it belongs somewhere else in the universe. Much in the same way, we are moved, bewildered and then immediately won over by the selected works chosen by Paolo and Antonella De Santis as a gateway—perhaps an initiation ritual—to their contemporary art collection. They opened a new, stunning home for the collection a few weeks ago, in a villa overlooking Lake Como and appropriately named CASABIANCA. No relation to the American namesake, of course, though the domestic setting and the color scheme are in fact two of its most defining features.

In this 1930s villa, designed by the architect Piero Ponci, six slabs of black granite mark the entrance. On them, Giovanni Anselmo, a leading figure in the Arte Povera movement, has engraved the inscription that gives the exhibition its title: Dove le stelle si avvicinano di una spanna in più (in English: “Where the stars come a little closer”). Just a few centimeters in height, they make a grand gesture, seemingly small yet deeply human, and change our perception of the universe. This is not all that changes when you step into the bright spaces—white inside and out—of this house that was once the private residence of a prominent Como textile dynasty. In its new incarnation as a house-museum, visitors can enjoy a profound, enriching and immersive cultural experience. Paolo and Antonella De Santis have arranged some fifty works from their collection in fifteen rooms across the villa’s three floors, and the names of the artists—from Mario Merz to Jannis Kounellis, from Vanessa Beecroft and Alighiero Boetti to Marina Abramovič, William Kentridge and Anselm Kiefer—reflect the talent of these two patrons who have a rare gift for capturing the energy and ideas of their time.

The collection began in the early 1980s when they met another extraordinary couple, the designers and architects Ico and Luisa Parisis at their Como studio “La Ruota”. It was there that Paolo and Antonella bought their first sculpture. The materiality, the gesture and the energy of Italian art expressed in that piece inspired the collectors to focus on key figures of the Arte Povera movement and led to numerous exchanges in which many of these artists became close friends.

A site-specific installation entitled Habitat by Giulio Paolini in 2025 greets guests in the entrance hall of CASABIANCA, and in its own way it conveys the spirit of the De Santis collection. From its central core—two pairs of classical busts depicting Venus and Antinous—the installation extends across the walls in twenty-nine frames and seventeen photographs that tell the story of the bond Paolo and Antonella have with CASABIANCA and Villa Mondolfo, the historic family home where several important pieces of their collection still remain. It was precisely the collectors’ desire to share such beauty, love and passion for art with others that inspired Paolini to choose these two archetypes of aesthetic perfection for the piece that launched CASABIANCA.

The second stop on the tour through the halls, salons and sitting rooms of this house-museum—which remains faithful to its original architectural design—is Joseph Kosuth’s 2015 work, Twenty Locations of Meaning, which translates the word “meaning” into twenty different languages. Climbing the staircase to the first floor, you begin to appreciate what it means to engage with contemporary art today: whether it is Su-Mei Tse’s bronze sculpture Trees&Roots #4 (2011), which depicts a tree awaiting spring; or the huge disk entitled Non Dove (“Not where”) by Emilio Vedova, a master of the Arte Informale movement; or Francesco Vezzoli’s sculpture Non ho l’età (“I’m not old enough”), which grafts the bust of a Flavian-era matron onto a reproduction of the Venus of Praxiteles. In a sense, it seems to say, time is a feminine construct, one that eternally creates and reproduces itself. Anselm Kiefer, too, seeks meaning in the past, as we see in the piece cutting through the air of the central hall: Paete, depicting a Roman matron from the 1st century AD, forms part of his intensely dramatic Women of Antiquity series. Further on, it is up to Giuseppe Penone, to Luigi Ontani, with his Carbonerone (“The great charcoal Nero”) set in the villa’s original black-and-white bathroom from the 1930s, and then to Gilberto Zorio, with his massive Stella Pozzuoli (“Star of Pozzuoli”), to give us a glimpse of other meanings behind our worldly existence.

We return to the ground floor, walking across Stefano Arienti’s Sassolini verso casa (“Pebbles leading us home”), a conceptual trompe-l’oeil stair runner that blends memories of the CASABIANCA garden with those of Villa Mondolfo, the home of the De Santis family. With just enough time for a coffee, a light lunch or a cocktail, we have arrived at the Cova Casabianca pastry shop and café, entirely covered in the flowers and plants of Leg(g)enda Lacustre (“Lakeside legend”), another site-specific installation by Francesco Simeti. Behind it, almost like a wreath encircling the grand staircase, is a prophesy rendered in mirror-image letters by Marzia Migliora. The words are taken from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final interview the day before he died in 1975: in English: “Perhaps I am the one who is mistaken, but I will never stop saying that we are all in danger.”

Though art may not be all-powerful, it can guide us, comfort us, enlighten us and even awaken us from complacency. Paolo and Antonella De Santis offer these little nuggets of wisdom at CASABIANCA to the guests of their hotels, including those in the three suites soon opening on the museum’s top floor, as well as to the city of Como and all those who love art. This may be one of the most radiant and open-hearted acts these visionary hotelier-collectors have ever made—yet another masterpiece in the quintessentially Italian art of hospitality.