“Grandma was certainly a woman of character. (…) These aspects were also perceived outside the walls of the house. (…) The great architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni, whom I met – thanks to Luca Gelmini – when he was already a hundred years old in his house in Piazza Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, described her to me in these words: ‘Eh, her grandmother Marianne [Maire, in Caprotti family name], she had a temper…’. She was the one who worked hard to convince ‘il Caccia’ – that’s what we called him at home – to take charge of the restructuring of Albiate, at the end of the 1950s, and then of Via del Lauro, a few years later. (…)” (p. 79 – 80).
Luigi Caccia Dominioni (1913 – 2016) is another of the well-rounded figures of architect, designer and urban planner who frequented the Caprotti family’s home where, at least since his great-great-grandfather Giuseppe’s time, they loved art and, above all, architecture.
In issue 984 of the prestigious magazine ‘Domus’ (October 2014), a several-page feature appeared on the ever-innovative work carried out by Caccia Dominioni, eventually ‘convinced’ by his grandmother, in the family villa where I still live, reinterpreting the ancient 17th-eighteenth-century spaces in a new context that surrounds them without touching or annulling them. Every day, in fact, I look at his work, completed in 1957.
Below are some photographs of the swimming pool, which was built during the Second World War by an unknown architect.
Bibliography:
Luigi Caccia Dominioni, entry in Wikipedia. The free encyclopaedia, checked on 04/11/2024, where among the architect’s works also appears the entry for ‘1957 Renovation of Villa San Valerio, Albiate (Brianza)‘.
Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Villa San Valerio, in “Domus”, no. 984, October 2014, pp. 90 – 100 (article published on CN10 a c. di G. GELMINI).
CUNIETTI, A. et al., Villa Airoldi, The Caprotti family – complex/Albiate (MB), in “Regione Lombardia”, LombardiaBeniCulturali, 1995 – 2009.
G. CAPROTTI, Le Ossa dei Caprotti. Una storia italiana, Milan, 2024
