Fogazzaro was very familiar with Villa Franco and its surroundings, as it was owned by his nience Countess Giuseppina “Ina” di Valmarana, wife of the notary Count Camillo Franco, who also plied his trade in Arsiero. Fogazzaro stayed at the villa for several months in 1907 on the invitation of his niece while Villa Montanina was being built.
The villa was inspired by a vaguely Liberty style, with a veranda supported by two slender cast iron columns. Its greatest charm was a rose garden that embellished a panoramic belvedere over the valley below, with its roses scaling the entire facade. The villa comprised both the notary’s office and the Franco family’s holiday accommodation. The garden, which was designed in the contemporary fashion, boasted an avenue of linden trees at the entrance and a large lawn with hedges and rose gardens to one side. Opposite was an iron pergola swathed in wisteria, which marked the start of a short path called “Leila’s Way” that led to an unmade town road.
In his room, which overlooked Velo and its villa, Fogazzaro wrote some verses, now carved on a stone plaque beside the service entrance: “Here, from my pen, was born a lady / With white locks and big brown eyes / who called the villa of roses her own / And thinks sadly as she smiles at the thorns.”
In “Leila”, the lady in question is Donna Fedele Vayla di Brea, poetically named “The White Lady of the Roses”, a courageous woman who was inspired by his cousin Marchioness Angelina Mangilli Lampertico, who lived “in the small villa, the tiny strawberry-red dwelling on the edge of Arsiero’s plain, peering at Seghe […] wrapped in roses to the roof ”, facing the thorns, i.e. life’s difficulties, with her sweet smile. The villa suffered severe bomb damage during World War I, and its refined interior furnishings and the flowers in its grounds were lost. Today, it is owned by Elisa Franco, the notary’s granddaughter, who grows roses in the belvedere in the hope of restoring the long-lost charm of the flowers that once inspired Fogazzaro’s prose.
Source: “InCanti fogazzariani”, Giovanni Matteo Filosofo, Editrice Veneta, Vicenza, 2011.
