Il castello di Somma Lombardo. La stagione di Carlo Ermes Visconti (1834-1911

Carlo Ermes Visconti devoted a diligent care to his inheritance in Somma. Castle, houses and lands represented not only the income on which, as for many others aristocratic families in Lombardy, he based his welfare during the nineteenth century, and by which had derived territorial dispositions lasting for a long time; they also became places where he established a preservation program that doesn’t seem casual. The garden’s embellishment, the restoration of the north-east tower in the form that was presumed it had in the fifteenth century, the antique’s collection, and the arrangement both of books and documents in the library and archive settled inside the castle, seem aiming to a purpose of dynastical celebration and local memories establishment. This, at least, might be compared with similar cases and particularly with the restoration of the castle in Milan whose achievement Visconti personally experienced.