Indulging my fascination with Luca Guadagnino’s “Desire Trilogy” films, I most recently enjoyed seeing his 2017 release, “Call Me by Your Name.” Again set in a 17th c Italian villa in Lombardy (northern Italy), this movie is all about happiness and love – of nature, of each other, of food, and of wonderful old houses that offer comfort and nurturing.
Apparently Guadignino (“G”) had dreamed of buying this villa, as he told Architectural Digest Magazine, but found his Milan apartments and changed his mind. “I knew this was where I was going to set the action of the film – this place with faded, aristocratic charm, that a professor and his wife might have inherited but can’t quite keep up.”
The parlor
To help him create the authentic interiors, G. recruited Violante Visconti di Modrone, an Italian duke’s daughter. G. says “She’s a genius and really has an understanding of how a family like that would live. She’s not a set designer but she knows the environment – furniture with heritage and a family without money.”
Al fesco dining at the villa
To remake the rooms from scratch, Visconti di Modrone collected old globes, maps, engravings from a print shop in Verona and a few Asian artifacts. She also brought many of her own furnishings and rented some objects. The goal was achieved: rooms with a well-traveled air that “silently establishes the movie family as globetrotters and collectors.”
The main living room
Hallway with a Pompeian fresco
The main characters relaxing
The library
A corner of the parlor
G. explains that they also did extensive research to find just the right televisions, radios and telephones from the early 80s, which is when the movie is set.
The kitchen
“Dedar (a Milanese fabric house) also gave us access to its fabric archives so we could cover the walls, furniture and make tablecloths.
Al fesco lunch
Then Violante filled the walls of the house with the kind of elements you’d find in the home of a quintessentially Italian-French-Jewish family.”
The boy’s bedroom
The guest bedroom
Now that G. has experienced filming in this villa’s rooms and its gardens and orchards, he explains that the property does belong to him virtually, and he had the same feeling when he finished” I Am Love.”
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