The Villa “Le Pozzarelle”, also called the Villa “Ai Bozzolini”, is located in Fiesole at No. 11 Via del Bargellino, at a distance of approximately 800 meters from the central town square. The architecture is in part from the 16th century and in part from the 18th, surrounded by an upper garden terrace in Italian style and a lower terrace. The upper terrace is separated from the road by a garden wall, beneath which a reservoir was constructed in 1700, 80 meters long, 2 meters wide and 2.5 meters deep. One side of the reservoir ends in a grotto with a stone sculpture of an orca whale. Water flows into the reservoir from an uphill spring, past twelve stone carved masks under twelve alcoves with statues placed inside.
The Villa is mentioned in Lensi Orlandi’s 1954 publication “The Villas of Florence.” Among the past owners of the house was the famous operatic tenor Giuseppe Fancelli, who bought it in 1870. In a letter dated October 20, 1874 Giuseppe Verdi writes to his publisher Ricordi that Fancelli was his ideal tenor for the Requiem, which Fancelli went on to perform with enormous success, becoming famous also for his interpretations of Verdi’s Trovatore, Bellini’s La Sonnambula and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.
In 1940 the property was acquired by Prince Don Leone Massimo as a gift for his wife, Princess Maria Adelaide of Savoy, who owned it until 1962. During the war the house was a refuge for the composer Luigi Dallapiccola, who was one of the first to use twelve-tone compositional techniques in the late 1930s. His output from the period was intense, ranging from instrumental and orchestral music, to choral works, to vocal chamber music, ballet and operas, among which were Volo di Notte, Ulysses and The Prisoner.
