“Villeggiatura” in Italian means vacation. It’s easy to overlook that the word’s etymology also includes the idea of villa: as if vacationing meant spending time in what in past centuries were called ville di delizia, places of balance and harmony between culture and nature, where one could restore both mind and body.

Movies have always had a special fascination for villas, setting thrilling intrigues and exciting stories within their walls or in their parks, thus contributing to the legend of certain places.

We can revisit some of the most beautiful Italian vacation houses that movies first and TV series later showed us. We must start from an architectural gem such as Casa Malaparte on the island of Capri, captured in Jean-Luc Godard’s movie Contempt (1963) based on Alberto Moravia’s novel. The scene in which a memorable sun-kissed Brigitte Bardot in a yellow bathrobe talks with Michel Piccoli while descending the iconic staircase designed by Adalberto Libera, then she arrives next to the Faraglioni, throws the bathrobe, and dives into the water is one of the most beautiful homages cinema has ever paid to Italian architecture.

On another island we find the house in Gabriele Muccino’s movie There is No Place like Home (2018) develops and the villa in which Luca Guadagnino set his A Bigger Splash (2015). Muccino’s characters are all at Villa Gancia, a villa build in the 1950s in Forio di Ischia – it’s a silent house, far from downtown and famous for its charming botanical garden; the exact opposite of the family and marital conflicts that are unleashed in the movie. The villa in Guadagnino’s film is on the island of Pantelleria (the Tenuta Bordia on Strada perimetrale dietro isola) and is a marvelous dammuso with a pool that Luca Guadagnino personally redesigned using a David Hockney painting, which has the same title, as the movie as a reference, with the intent of making that pool a sort of pool of the unconscious. 

Even the casale in the countryside around Siena to which Bernardo Berolucci (in Stealing Beauty, 1996) sends Lucy (Liv Tyler), a young American woman) on vacation while searching for answers about herself and her past plays with the idea of the unconscious. Set on a hill among olive trees on Strada Provinciale Traversa del Chianti near San Regolo, a hamlet of Gaiole in Chianti (Siena), the stone farmhouse emanates a fascinating antique flavor. 

Among the most recent houses that cinema has chosen, there is without a doubt the villa overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, 10 km from Porto Ercole, where Francesca Archibugi set some of the most intense and heartbreaking scenes of The Hummingbird (2022), based on Sandro Veronesi’s novel. It’s Villa Sleeps and today is the place in which the Carrera family spends their summer vacations and where they all gather to tie the threads of fate. 

When going from the sea to the mountains, we can’t not mention the lodge that, in The Eight Mountains (2022), the character played by Alessandro Borghi builds among the Aosta Valley peaks. It’s an old, falling ruin that he renovates with his own hands and hard work, overcoming incredible natural and meteorological hurdles thanks to his desire of creating a house that is perfectly integrated with the surrounding nature and deliberately void of any contact with human society.

Even a cult title in the beach-vacation genre like Time for Loving (1983) by Carlo Vanzina, a work that founded the modern mythology of Versilia as a must-see place for summer vacations, relocated some of its shots. The villa in Forte dei Marmi where Jerry Calà and Christian De Sica live and where the party in which all the characters meet happens is in actuality on via Portovenere 1 in Fregene (Fiumicino, near Rome), just like the beach resort all the characters go to, which is actually called Sogno del Mare (Sea Dream) in Fregene, on Lungomare di Ponente 25. In short, movies don’t always tell the truth, and even when staging locations and venues they can lie. This doesn’t prevent them from making imagination travel and run free.

Up to now, we’ve only mentioned Italian movies, but we must also remember that for some time Italy and its vacation houses have been appearing more and more frequently in foreign series. Here’re some examples: the house shown in The White Lotus 2 is the 16th-century Villa Tasca, one of the most renowned and admired historical houses in Palermo – built on an 8-acre park full of citrus and century-old trees, it is the perfect place to set stories steeped in romance and passion.

The young Irish man and woman from the series Normal People spend their summer in the Tenuta Verzano, an old casale with a pool near Sant’Oreste in the Roman countryside. Also some scenes from the popular series Succession, inspired by the Murdoch family’s affairs, were shot in Italy, precisely at Villa Cetinale, a wonderful mansion near Ancaiano, in the town of Sovicille in province of Siena, Tuscany – the three-story building has a quadrangular plan and is situated on a large terrace and immersed in a extraordinary Baroque garden that was built according to the taste of the historical architect who invented French gardens. But a warning is needed: movies don’t always state where they were filmed.

Opening image: Tenuta Borgia, frame from trailer of A Bigger Splash by Luca Guadagnino