View From Abandoned Italian Villa. by Roman Robroek - Photos of Abandoned Buildings

The first information found about this beautiful abandoned villa, dates from the early 17th century. The Notary College of Pavia, which held the landed property of the Castellaro, alienated it to the Pavia nobleman Alessandro Meda, whose descendants, Lodovico and Bartolomeo del fu Pietro Meda, resold the complex in 1719 to Paolo Cornaro from Voghera, descendant of Caterina Cornaro, queen of Cyprus.

The Cornaro family was responsible for the organic restructuring project of 1788 of the complex, which, with the construction of the central residential building, homogenized the original structures of the Castellaro of the Meda nobles into a single large building with an inverted "U" shape.

Forced to alienate part of the family patrimony in order to be able to satisfy the dole obligation towards the numerous sisters, the engineer Giuseppe di Paolo Cornaro sold the possession of the Castellaro in 1829 to Luigi Sperati from Voghera.

This was followed by several owners before becoming, in 1927, the residence of the Countess Carolina Branca di Romanico, a name that has remained in the collective imagination as the one who brought the residence to glory and from which it took its name.