Villa Panza & the Contemporary Art Collection
On the hill of Biumo Superiore, a ten-minute taxi ride from the centre, Villa Panza is a neoclassical 18th-century estate that hides one of Italy's finest collections of post-war American art — including permanent site-specific installations by James Turrell and Dan Flavin that are reason enough to come to Varese.
The Turrell & Flavin Rooms
Giuseppe Panza di Biumo was one of the great private collectors of the 20th century, and he filled his stable block and servants' quarters with works commissioned directly from artists. The Dan Flavin fluorescent-light installations in the former stables are hypnotic — rooms of pure, saturated colour that shift your perception within seconds of entering.
James Turrell's site-specific skyspace and light installations are among his finest in Europe. The Turrell rooms require your eyes to adjust; give yourself five minutes in each space and you will start to see things that were not there before.
The Gardens & the View
The formal Italian gardens behind the villa are immaculate and largely crowd-free on weekday mornings. Clipped box hedges, a rose garden and a long terrace with a balustrade overlook the lower city and Lake Varese — it is the kind of garden that makes you want to sit on a stone bench and do absolutely nothing for an hour.
The villa is managed by FAI (the Italian National Trust), which maintains it beautifully. The combination of Baroque architecture, 20th-century American art and that garden view is one of the most unexpectedly satisfying experiences in all of Lombardy.
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