The inventor of the Vileda Mocio, Sergio Cervellin, is now « castellano » in the maxi palace of the Habsburgs bought at auction

As a commercial agent (« the youngest in Italy, registered in the register at 18 years and one day ») to « Castellano », lord of a palace that was also of the Habsburgs. It is not a fairy tale, but the story of Sergio Cervellin (born in 1956), entrepreneur Paduan « Graduated from the University of the sidewalk », which has conquered the world markets with Patents such as the Vileda Mocio and the Fuck for Swiffer cloth.

«In the first I simplified a frame, via the screws and a joint logic; the second It was born during the take-off of a San Paolo-Milan flight Observing the flexible parts of the wings and on a sugar map, I fixed the idea of ​​a horny module suitable for each surface ».

Between a plane and the other Cervellin he passes in front of a stone ghost: the Castello del Catajo of Battaglia Terme At the foot of the Euganean Hills, just outside Padua. “It seemed to be abandoned; His monumental tetrashot began to intrigue me.  » He informs himself and learns that he is at auction. « I decided to participate, I was alone. » If you win it for « a symbolic price »: 3 million euros Against an initial request of 11. « It was so bad that no one made a throat to anyone, let alone the state that he looked at himself well from exercising the right of pre -emption. »

In March 2016 he has the keys in his hand. And he finds himself master of the largest private home in Italy: 365 rooms (« never seen all »), 800 windows, 40 thousand square meters of garden (« There is one of the first sequoies imported from America ») and 400 thousand square meters of land around. The next day a team of 40 people is already at work to return dignity and splendor to the catajo. « Never had the temptation to live in it, » he confesses. « My dream, immediately, was to open it to the public And to remove it from the risk of real estate speculation that would have violated him forever « .

Inside, that immense late Renaissance palace reveals wonders, that no one – or almost – had ever seen. Starting with the grandiose cycle of frescoes by Giovanni Battista Zelotti, Right arm of the Veronese and trusted painter of Palladio: 40 numbered panels that squandered the saga of the first owners, the Obizzi, captains of Ventura at the head of one of the most powerful armies in Europe. Terrestrial and naval battles, weddings and blood events mark the triumphal self-breeze of an all-denari house, ambitions and bizarre.

«The catjo was designed to amaze. The Obizzi wanted a castle when in the Veneto of the Palladian villas the castles no longer did them. And in the courtyard of the giants, as in ancient Rome, they organized naumachie, « he says Marco Moressa, director of the complex. Progressive restoration campaigns have reported the Ca ‘on Tajo, home on the channel (Marco Polo’s catajo has nothing to do with it), to the glories of origin. « This is an endless work, every time you change a beam you risk having to change the roof. » The last intervention affected the apartments of the nineteenth -century owners, the Habsburgs Este Duchi of Modena and Reggio. That here, Far from the court label, they spent free and happy holidays. Then the manor passed to the House of Austria; Here was the heir to the throne Francesco Ferdinando shortly before falling to Sarajevo in the attack that unleashed the Great War.

«I am not a man of culture, but since I was a child I dreamed of doing something great. And this « reasoned madness » – as his friend Vittorio Sgarbi says – is « . Pragmatic dreamer with infallible intuition, brain – peasant family, orphan as a child, Graduated with sacrifices – debuts in work by selling food. «But the supermarkets were coming and 20 years that the era of the shops was over; I threw myself in a new field, the Clea-Ning, and In 1985 I opened the first company».

Today leads the Twt tools – new technologies applied to carriages for industrial cleaning – while the catajo regic record numbers, 50 thousand visitors a year, kidnapped by the paintings on the no-can, by the nineteenth-century spaces largely by the evanescent mono-cromo landscapes of Marino Urbani, from the park with a pond of water lilies that would have made the joy of Monet. All reported to the nail polish, including the bloody stone that speaks of the murder of Lucrezia Obizzi, the most famous case of the black news of the 17th century. “I like things done right; If I see a crooked picture at the restaurant I can’t eat, I go to straighten it, « he says walking on the large terrace where he performed in 1838 Franz Liszt for the memorable reception in honor of the emperors of Austria.

We go down. The last gem awaits us: the neo-Gothic chapel all colored woods, golds, star-plates, in which the portable altar of El Greco, now tip of diamond of the Estense gallery of Modena, wash.