Our head office is located in Varese, at villa Toeplitz, a historic mansion surrounded by a large park, open to the public.
The park, designed in 1927 by the Parisian firm Collin et Adam, welcomes its visitors with a long tree-lined avenue. Various garden styles are harmoniously blended: the formal Italian garden, with its geometric plant architecture, belvedere and water features, and the romantic English garden, with a woodland of majestic cedar, beech and oak trees in the upper part.
Mosaic fountains, streams of water, and some exotic trees recall the oriental gardens of India and Kashmir.
The villa is the result of the remodeling of a pre-existing early 20th-century building occurred between 1920 and 1926. The project followed the wishes of the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Toeplitz, who gave the villa its name. Nowadays, the villa, furnished according to its style, hosts congresses and cultural meetings in some of its rooms. Other rooms store materials for study and research on the history of the Insubria territory.
These include about 3,000 volumes in the Center’s library, with a section of monographs and periodicals devoted to the history of Varese and Insubria, a collection of first editions of the Futurist movement, and some ancient books.
The seminar room on the second floor houses some valuable maps from a private collection, produced between the 16th and 19th centuries and depicting ancient Italy. The maps show the name of the Insubres, a Gallic tribe from central France that settled, at least since the 4th century B.C., in a part of the territory of northern Italy that was precisely named Insubria after them.
On the second floor, the most extensive part of the Center’s Photographic Archive consists of shots by the local photographer Vivi Papi, covering a time span from the early 1950s to 2005.