Villa Forneris

Villa Forneris 1991

I went to Issiglio for the first time in 1991 with my cousin Ruggero Martellono.  Prior to going, I had spoken with my aunt and she told me about a property that we had inherited which belonged to my great grandfather.  The property was located on a street named via Martellono.  When I arrived, I was saddened to see the condition, which my aunt had mentioned to me prior to the trip. The first and second floors had collapsed in on themselves and the property was in very bad shape.  My cousin's wife was kind enough to send me pictures of the property which I am sharing below.  As you can see, the property was pretty much a pile of rubble.

When my great Aunt Ella passed away, her obituary told about her and our family living in Italy and the family home called "Villa Forneris".  I never made the connection to the name until I realized that there was an old bakery in town and the oven for the bread baking was located in a building behind the family house.  Forneris means furnace and thus, I had solved the mystery of the name Villa Forneris!

I was in college at the time I visited and unfortunately, I did not have the money to fix the property.  As time progressed, the property continued to sit and eventually, the town took the property and sold it to another person. I was upset when I found out, thinking that had the town told my cousin, he could have reached out to me and perhaps I could have found a solution. 

My grandfather had told my aunt that when his family lived in Issiglio (they returned to Italy in 1922 when he was 12 years old and stayed for 6 years), they lived in the hills during the summer with the animals under the house on the ground floor, and in the winter, they lived in the center of town. For 30 years, I looked for the "house in the hills" turning up nothing each time I asked.

In September of 2021, I visited Ivrea to stay at the apartment and as usual, I also visited Issiglio.  I again asked a cousin of mine about the house in the hills that my grandfather had talked about.  We had talked about it on a previous visit, however, this time, my asking paid off!  Just before I left, she told me that she had located the house.  I could not believe that my asking so many times was finally going to pay off!  I would be coming back in October of 2021 with my cousin Darrell (his mother was my great aunt Alma Martellono) and we would go to visit the house when I returned.  

As it stood, the property was way out on the outskirts of town and very far up in the hills, not easily found like the property in the center of town.  It also turns out that the property had been sold after being passed down through my great grandfather's sister, and a couple had purchased the house with the intent of taking it down and building a new one.  We had made it just in time before the house had been totally demolished.  I was happy to find out that the new owners (a couple from Holland) were using the stones that had previously been on the roof for the roof of their new house.  You can see from the pictures below that Casa #5 was in rough shape.  I suspect that my family had owned that house for hundreds of years.  Based on what I know of Canavese houses, I think there was previously a porch that ran across the front above the two small windows, and there were two rooms on the "second floor" where my family stayed.  Animals stayed below.  How did they ever live there at all between 1922 and 1928? The house appeared to be hundreds of years old.  

Fast forward to the fall of 2022, and I was planning a trip with my husband and his family to visit Ivrea, Issiglio, and the Piedmont region.  Prior to going I had received a real estate alert for Issiglio, which I periodically do, and the property that was advertised looked very familiar!  As it turned out, the property was via Martellono #8, the property to the left of the one we had once owned in the center of town.  I reached out to the realtor hoping that they would report that #8 had bought the property my family once owned and that it was part of that house.  As I waited to hear from the realtor, I gingerly told my husband about the property, and that I had inquired about it.  For 31 years, I had felt guilty about letting our family home slip through my hands and not being able to do anything about it.  And then I had also lost the house in the hills as well.  If that was my family's property, I would want to get it back!

As it turned out, the property at via Martellono #8 was not extended to our former property when it was rebuilt.  The realtor was good enough to entertain my questions and to quickly get back to me. I went back to my husband to let him know that I would not be trying to buy anything.  He doesn't dislike Issiglio, but he has never been eager to buy there as the village is very small (about 180 people) and there are not amenities like we have in Ivrea (restaurants, stores, hospital, cafes, etc).  

Funny enough, after finding out that the property was not my family's former property, my husband suggested that I write a letter to bring to Issiglio for our upcoming trip.  His thinking was that I should write the letter in Italian, letting the people who currently own the property that my family had owned on via Martellono know, that if they ever wanted to sell, I would want to buy the property.  I laughed at the idea, and was surprised he suggested it, but I also wrote the letter.

We headed to Italy on October  8th, and on October 10th, while visiting Issiglio, I left the letter in the mailbox on via Martellono.  Nobody was home, otherwise, I would have handed the letter directly to them.  The mailbox was quite full, however, I carefully put the letter inside and then we went on with our visit to Issiglio, Ivrea, and surrounding areas!

The seven months after I wrote the last section have pretty much been a blur!  In January of 2023, I flew to Italy with a good friend to view the house.  It was pretty cold and the house had been closed up for some time and there were still many items left in the house from the previous owners.  Although I had received pictures of the house, it was important for me to actually look at the house with a trusted person (Francesca Corvo as my realtor and Amy Chrisogonou as a friend).  I already had a "vision" of what the house could look like but again, it was necessary for me to see it in person.  After the viewing, I was still interested and there was nothing that came up which I thought would deter me from buying the house.  I left the trip with an agreement with the owner that I wanted to move forward with the purchase and that he needed to have every item cleaned out and removed from the house, including the cellar. It was really happening!

I returned in March, money in hand and with a good friend from Middle School in tow to help clean!  I had reached out to Shaun Walker and asked him if he wanted to come with me and help clean the new house.  Shaun had not been to Italy and luckily for me, he was a willing party.  The closing took place in Ivrea on March 28, 2023 at 4pm and was a familiar process to me as I had already closed on another property six years prior.  I used the same notary and same translator and in all, the process was extremly smooth.  I got a check for the seller when I arrived in Italy and had that prepared for the closing.  The seller and his wife were both there and could not have been nicer.  They were extremely happy to sell the house to me and it made them happy to have the house return to its previous owners and I was relieved to have gotten the house back into my family!  Shaun and I spent about two days cleaning the house.  Stefano, the previous owner, did a great job of getting it emptied and after two days and LOTS of scrubbing, we had the house thoroughly cleaned and ready for some next stages!

Between the closing (and cleaning) in March and April, I had the interior of the house painted and then cleaned again.  There were some areas with brown painted on the walls and I had the whole place painted over bright white.  There were a couple of places where the brown paint took four coats of white paint to cover!