Beyond the Yalla Dog

10.10.11

Palazzo Pfanner in Lucca

Another setting for a famous film and rightfully so – it is just the place for Gilbert Osmond to lead his too perfect life amongst beautiful but cold statues and an abandoned limonaia.

The Palazzo is near Piazza San Frediano, right in the centre of Lucca, so very convenient to visit before taking lunch.

The original owners were the Moriconi family in the second half of the 17th century but they ran out of money and the development was taken over by the newly ennobled Controni family towards the end of the century. They installed most of the external embellishments and a sign of how their stock had risen was that they gave hospitality at the palazzo to Prince Frederick of Denmark  when he was making his Grand Tour of Italy.

Palazzo Pfanner

The Pfanner name comes from a German beer industrialist Felix Pfanner (1818-1892), a local brewer from Hörbranz (Austria), from a Bavarian family, who was invited to Lucca in 1846 to improve the quality of Tuscan beer! The beer factory that he developed in the Palazzo remained open until 1929 – presumably the family, notwithstanding having survived the ousting of Austrians in the Risorgimento, had to leave Italy because they were Germans during the later WW2 years, but the Palazzo and garden still belong to the Pfanner family.

Fountain and sunlight enlivens a four season at Palazzo Pfanner

This is a small but perfectly formed garden with octagonal pool in the centre of the path leading from the Palazzo providing a perfect symmetry to the view from the door of the Palazzo – a beautiful treasure hidden behind thick Tuscan walls it can also be glimpsed tantalisingly from the walls of the city of Lucca.