Villa del Balbianello, one of the most fascinating villas around Lake Como, is built on a peninsula directly overlooking the lakeshore. Now managed by FAI (Fondo Ambiente Italiano), the villa, with its terraced garden and spectacular views of the lake and surrounding mountains, is a masterpiece of balance between natural and man-made landscape and a highly -desirable film set.

Built on the tuffaceous coast of Posillipo, Villa Oro is counted among the finest examples of modernism in Italy. The work is characterised by the balanced interplay between the building and the landscape, the sharp and clear articulation of volumes, the interpenetration of interior and exterior spaces, and the elegant constructive, detailing and furnishing solutions.

The solitary house that Adalberto Libera designed for Curzio Malaparte is a brilliant example of how rationalist architecture can harmoniously deal with the landscape. The rigorous parallelepiped, Pompeian red in colour, emerges vigorously from the rugged rock of Punta Massullo. The staircase that seems to lead up to the sky makes the roof an open-air room overlooking the sea.

The small building stands on a bank of black Varenna stone overlooking the lake, taking shape from the narrow space between the water and the provincial road, carved into the upstream slope. The rectangular layout is functional and flexible. Particular attention is paid to its integration into the landscape, through the compact and sober volumes and the choice of cladding materials (local stone) that weave a delicate dialogue with the context.

In the Portese area, in a natural landscape dotted with olive trees and meadows, the villa, cantilevering over the slope of Baia del Vento for more than half of its surface area, leans toward the landscape as if to embrace it. Two bare horizontal cement floors for the upper and lower slabs enclose fluid, unified rooms enclosed by vast glass surfaces, blurring the boundary between interior and exterior.

In a landscape of rocks sinking into the sea, Mediterranean vegetation and dry-stone walls, Zanuso designed two “twin” holiday homes for two families. The houses form a Greek-cross layout, the centre of which is a patio covered by a pergola of wood and reeds, and the wings are the living quarters. The small architectures with their composed and severe character, in blocks of granite, evoke the spontaneous buildings of the region.

Skinny exposed concrete volumes partially underground and embedded in the landscape like geological remains attacked by vegetation, clearly visible only from the sea: this is how the five villas that were meant to literally disappear into the landscape of the Costa Smeralda were conceived. Of the five, only one was finished according to the original plan and the others heavily altered. The recent renovation, by Ferdinando Fagnola (the architect who originally designed the work) and PAT. Architetti associati, has made it possible to recover three of the five villas according to the original spirit, through a new spatial organisation, new volumes and the technological retrofitting of the complex.

The house, located in the most exposed position of the open gulf towards Corsica, rests on an irregularly sloping rocky terrain. The massive, introverted reinforced concrete shell, reminiscent of a bunker, opens out into a central courtyard that serves as the epicentre of domestic life, around which the private rooms are arranged, and opens out with a patio towards the sea.

Among the many houses designed by Ponis in Sardinia, Casa Scalesciani is a manifesto of his lexicon that is always attentive to converting the built work into an a-temporal artefact as if it had always belonged to the natural context in which it is located. The house is set in a steep terrain jutting out towards the sea, following its contours. The elongated, meandering plan and the volume embedded in the ground fade into the context, making only the roof of the building visible from the sea and the land.