WHEN RAFFAELE FABRIZIO was growing up, he lived in a small village close to Lake Como called Fino Mornasco that was near the headquarters of Dedar, the Italian fabric house that his parents, Nicola and Elda, founded in 1976. Fabrizio, 55, and his sister, Caterina, 56, have spent their careers at Dedar, bringing the firm into a new era by introducing novel combinations of color, pattern and texture, attracting clients like Hermès and the movie director Luca Guadagnino.

As a younger man, though, Fabrizio had wanted to be an architect — he would study the field in college and practice in his 20s — since taking an interest in a desolate 17th-century villa around the corner from his family’s home that had been occupied, and then deserted, by a countess who’d lost her fortune. “It’s always that same story,” he says, laughing a little, “but I was fascinated by this forbidden place.” Most days after school, while his parents were running their company, he’d wriggle past the locked gate and wander through rooms decorated with faded frescoes. When friends came over, he forced them to visit “this beautiful world,66jogo casino” as he describes it, “hidden and abandoned.”

This year’s Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award went to three scientists for their work on GLP-1, the hormone that led to drugs like Wegovy (the same compound is the basis for Ozempic), which have transformed the treatment of obesity. They are Dr. Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov and Lotte Bjerre Knudsen.

ImageA room on the second floor has a marble fireplace, along with a ceiling fresco that’s thought to have been painted in the 20th century.Credit...Simon UptonImageAn 18th-century arched doorway overgrown with jasmine, trumpet vine and wisteria connects the central courtyard with the garden.Credit...Simon Upton

He recalls this on a gray September afternoon while crossing a grassy courtyard in Valmorea, another village west of Como with its own haunted character. On the street, barren of the few thousand people who live here, a black cat creeps from under a bright yellow Mustang. When church bells toll the hour three minutes early, Fabrizio jokes that the lag is “the right time to make a murder.” As he remembers his youth, he mentions the emotion required to create interesting textiles — not nostalgia, per se, but the “feeling of something that was a memory … the atmosphere.” But given that he’s now standing outside his own tumbledown 17th-century palace on seven acres that he purchased three years ago, and has since kept in glorious disarray, it’s clear he’s not just talking about work: As someone who’s planning to move soon from his Milanese apartment (where he lives by himself) to be closer to the family business he helps oversee, he knows that his history is also his destiny. “Your desires are formed when you’re younger,” he says. “And then we live to satisfy that ancient desire.”

ImageA staircase leading to the former caretaker’s apartment, which was likely added long after the house was built.Credit...Simon UptonImageIn the portico connecting the main entrance to the courtyard, there’s a traditional Rizzata Lombarda river-stone floor, an arch supported by stone columns with Tuscan capitals and a painted landscape above a false door.Credit...Simon Upton

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