Thanks to a careful restyling and the arrival of furniture confiscated from the mafia, Captain McEacharn’s home has now officially reopened to the public
29March was a historic date for Verbania, with the inauguration of Villa Taranto’s great halls, the seat of the prefecture. And all this in an event which included a journey by institutional figures and citizens on the Piemonte steamship which docked in front of the villa’s botanical gardens. Having been without Captain McEacharn’s original furniture for many years, the rooms are now furnished after untiring attempts to find period furniture.
‘We started by studying what this villa might have looked like, as the building was given to the state empty,’ explained Prefect Matilde Pirrera. To fill this interior vacuum the state agency for confiscated goods assigned the villa over 100 pieces – vases, sofas and statues – taken from organised criminals.
‘The idea was to highlight the profound synergy between all the bodies involved, including the Prefecture, Ente Navigazione Laghi and the Carabinieri,’ continued the Prefect, highlighting the way the project is bringing the story of this Scottish man who decided to invest in the villa in the 1930s back to life, with authentic period objects on loan to the site. The work of Associazione Carabinieri volunteers means that visits to the rooms can finally now be booked from April, as part of a unique itinerary which links the beauties of the botanical gardens to the civic value of lawfulness.
