After four years of restoration, FAI, together with the Municipality of Morazzone (VA), inaugurates a new Property, Casa Macchi: the exceptional historical testimony of a style of living and a way of life that has now disappeared.

Casa Macchi in Morazzone is a typical provincial bourgeois dwelling, which has been preserved intact for one hundred and fifty years and which Maria Luisa Macchi, the sole and last owner, left in her will to the Foundation in 2015, with a generous dowry needed for restoration and management, so that it would become “a living museum that gives lustre to Morazzone”. The donor’s wishes, in fact, inspired a project that went beyond the restoration of the house and which was realised thanks to a programme agreement signed in 2017 by the Lombardy Region – thanks to the then President Roberto Maroni – which financed the work, with the Municipality of Morazzone and the FAI, and later joined by the Province of Varese, aimed at the redevelopment and revitalisation of the town’s historic centre, which like so many in Italy is now suffering from progressive depopulation and risks losing, along with its inhabitants, its identity, history and value.

Casa Macchi has been regularly opened to the public from 18 December 2022.

A HOUSE WHERE TIME STOOD STILL

Casa Macchi is reborn as the new fulcrum of the village: open on the central square, next to the Church of S. Ambrogio, it will be a welcoming and lively place, open to the small community of Morazzone (free of charge) and open to the public, which will find here a unique and unmissable opportunity to enter a lost world: a typical old house, the last of its kind, which to many will remind them of its history, but for many – the young and future generations – it is already history.

Casa Macchi, in fact, closed for almost fifty years before the arrival of FAI and never substantially altered before then since the end of the 19th century, it preserves an extraordinarily intact and authentic cross-section of the life of a typical middle-class family, aristocratic but not rich, with simple and traditional customs, industrious in their profession and careful in the management of their home: a family like so many that have made modern Italy, but which no one recounts, because there is nothing extraordinary in its story, and because it belongs to a past that is still too recent, which has however already faded away, with the rapid advent of modernity that in the last seventy years has revolutionised the lives, habits and homes of Italians.

Just like the family, in fact, the house, with its lovely garden, porch and veranda, has nothing exceptional about it – some twenty rooms with simple decorations, typical period furniture and everyday objects left exactly how and where they were, and some of which are forgotten or already unknown.

But it remains in its integrity and completeness – from the cheap kitchen to the bed heater, from rosolio glasses to hunting rifles – and is the exceptional historical testimony of a style of living and a way of life that has disappeared today, guided by rigid rules, social conventions and good old-fashioned habits, inspired by reuse and savings, that are useful and necessary today. All of this is a heritage: rare and curious, original and fascinating, culturally significant and profoundly suggestive, whose value Maria Luisa Macchi intuited and handed over to FAI.

FAI President Marco Magnifico comments: “No other house, among the many that I have had the good fortune to take by the dying hand to accompany them to new life, has revealed with such pristine delicacy and with the dignified shyness of one who fears not deserving the attention of others its secrets, its stories, its treasures. This is one of the most virtuous examples of the desired, sometimes difficult, in this case perfect collaboration between three public bodies – the Municipality, the Province and the Region -, a private body – the FAI – and a simple but visionary citizen, who together with the Fondazione Cariplo have dreamt, collaborated and built a great project for the exclusive benefit of the community.

PRESERVING THE AUTHENTICITY OF AN ATMOSPHERE

Casa Macchi opened to the public after four years of work: it was the most complex restoration project directed by the Foundation, involving hundreds of professionals, from structural engineers to historians. The house had the roof that needed to be redone, several collapsed ceilings, damp spots on the walls, completely moth-eaten furniture, worn and torn fabrics. Work had to be done everywhere, but everything had to be left as it was, so as not to erase the authenticity of an intact context, in which lies the cultural value, and also the charm of this place.

Everything has been preserved: restored, or sometimes just cleaned. The stains on the ceilings and the cracks in the walls, the missing, broken or torn furniture and fabrics, the old taps and porcelain switches, and even the dust marks imprinted by the lace doilies have been preserved. Nothing has changed, but the building site has affected every single thing, from the garden to the knick-knacks: because every single thing, combined with the others, makes Casa Macchi.

The roof has been completely redone, as have the plumbing and electrical systems, to adapt the spaces to public use, in its new function as a house-museum. Four hundred square metres of ceilings have been reconstructed, two hundred window and doorframes recovered, one thousand five hundred terracotta medones have been lifted, to insulate the floors, and repositioned exactly where they were; where it was necessary to integrate or rebuild, salvaged materials have been chosen, from roof tiles to mattresses, from tiles to radiators, for a restoration in the full spirit of the place, but also attentive to contemporary sustainability.

More than two thousand pieces, including furniture and objects, were catalogued, three hundred of them were documents, digitized and studied, from letters to postcards, from school report cards to the inventory of the trousseau. Everything was photographed at every stage and filmed in hours of video footage documenting the original state of the house, but also the work done: original and sophisticated, meticulous and delicate, highly professional and sincerely affectionate.