The Villa Vigoni "euro" Seminar is a three–day expert meeting on the macro-economic problems of the European Union and especially of the euro area.   The first seminar was held in 2011 and this year the event reaches its twelfth edition.   The seminar, by invitation only, brings together around 35 economists and policy makers of different nationalities.    Germans and Italians are the two largest national groups in line with the nature of the Villa Vigoni German-Italian Centre for the European Dialogue. 

The seminar starts on the Thursday evening of the third week of July with a dinner speech by a prominent guest (in the previous editions: Theodore Waigel, Fabrizio Saccomanni, Siriwan Chutikamoltham, Umberto Angeloni, Enrico Letta, Werner Hoyer, Pier Paolo Padoan, Jacques de La Rosière, Otmar Issing, Daniele FRanco).   The Fridays and Saturdays are dedicated to various sessions on the macroeconomic problems of the euro-area (structural reforms, supporting demand, fostering investment, etc.); on economic governance issues and on to the current attempts to create a fully functioning banking and capital markets union. 

Past participants have ranged from former ministers to senior officials of the IMF, ECB and European Commission, from university professors to heads of the research departments of banks and financial institutions, from directors of research centres to specialized journalists and from Members of the European Parliament to senior officials of major European banks (list of past participants).   The discussions take place on the basis of the so-called "Chatham House Rules": the information made available can be used, but its source cannot be disclosed.   The discussions take place in English and no recordings or transcripts are made.   Some speakers use slides which are usually made available to the participants after the end of the event. 

The seminar takes place in the Villa Vigoni German-Italian Centre for the European Dialogue, which is housed in a splendid XIX century villa by the same name in Loveno di Menaggio on the Lake of Como. These two very short 2012 videos give an idea of the atmosphere of the seminar and of the beauty of the area.

This year sees the fourteenth edition of the Euro Workshop.   The seminar is being held from Thursday July 18 to Sunday July 21, 2024.   

Around forty participants from European and national institutions and from eleven nations are taking part.    An international group that will discuss the perspectives for a deepening and stregtheing of EMU in a dramatically changing international environment, and also the challenges facing financial intermediaries stemming from the digital as well as the “green” revolution.   This year there will be a special, separate session on the history of the European monetary union for the benefit of young officials from some central banks. 

Clicking on the tabs for the years it is possible to access information about the seminar of the year.   The "materials" are only available to the participants.  

You can also add comments and suggestions on the second sub-tab in the "Home" page.

by Sabine Seeger-Regling 

The start of the Euro Workshop goes back to an encounter among three economists in the summer of 2007 at the Villa Vigoni.   They knew each other from their work at the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, where all three had started their respective careers.   Their coming together was both a farewell and a look into the future: Klaus Regling, then Director General for Economic and Monetary Affairs at the European Commission, was about to leave for the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.   Maxwell Watson had just established the "Political Economy of Financial Markets Program”, an economic research center at St. Anthony's College, Oxford. Mark Allen was the Director of the Policy Development and Review Department at the IMF in Washington.   The global economy was - still - running at full steam, Europe was booming, the BRIC countries were celebrated as the new drivers of growth.   Nothing seemed to hold them back.   Yet, clouds were starting to gather on the horizon something that did not escape the scrutiny of the seasoned crisis managers.   Their assessments became clearer by the end of the meeting:  the boom was showing cracks, principally caused by the overheating of the real estate market in the USA and its expected transmission to the financial sector. But they could not anticipate a systemic crisis of the type that appeared after the failure of "Lehman Brothers". 

The experience of this meeting represented the launch of what eventually became a proper dialogue between high-ranking international economists in the German-Italian center high above Lake Como.   Deeply inspired by the synergy of that encounter, Sabine Seeger-Regling, a long standing member of Villa Vigoni, took up the threads and laid the ground of a proper continuation of that meeting.   The full financial crisis helped to raise the awareness for the need of a structured dialogue.   In 2011, a first workshop on the crisis took place at the initiative of the German Federal Foreign Office.   

A year later Sabine Seeger-Regling anchored the folIow-up meeting at the villa.   Sabine was strongly supported by the former Secretary of the Euro Working Group, Günther Grosche, and by Fabio Colasanti, for many years Director General at the European Commission, two experienced and committed economists.   Together they designed the workshops, firmly under German-Italian auspices and in the tradition of other Villa Vigoni seminars.   One spoke German and Italian and the interpreters went out of their way to deliver the unusual subject into the other idiom.   Yet participants, economists with English as their working language, felt more at ease with their own terminology, so that the three soon decided to use the lingua franca at future gatherings. 

Today, the Euro Workshop is an integral part of the Villa Vigoni annual program.   Every second or third weekend in July, representatives of central banks, the European Central Bank, the European Commission, the European Council,  the European Parliament, the European Banking Supervisory Agency, the Brussels think tanks, the International Monetary Fund, representatives of industry and media are invited at the Villa Vigoni to discuss current Eurozone issues in a unique atmosphere.   Usually the topics are introduced by prominent keynote speakers such as former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, former IMF Managing Director Jacques de Larosìere,  ex-finance ministers Theo Waigel, Fabrizio Saccomanni and Pier Carlo Padoan, EIB president Werner Hoyer or entrepreneurs of the like of Umberto Angeloni.   .   These are often controversial: how strictly should the fiscal rules be adhered to, should Greece remain a member of the Euro Club, how is one to regain competitiveness, how to generate growth, close the investment gap, are the structural reforms of the member states sufficient - these have become the crucial questions being discussed by the high level experts.   The participants hold sometimes very different positions, but share the concern for the future of European integration process.   The commitment to the future of the Euro is the common denominator of our gatherings. 

This year will see the twelfth edition of the Euro Workshop.   Due to the refurbishing work carried out in Villa Vigoni it exceptionally takes place at the Campus of the College of Europe in Natolin (Warsaw).   39 participants from European and national institutions and from eight nations are expected, among them 15 from Germany, 16 from Italy, three from Poland, one each from Belgium, Austria,  Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland.   Thus an international group is gathering with extended experience in European affairs able to discuss the perspectives for a deepening and hardening of EMU in a dramatically changing international environment, and also the challenges facing financial intermediaries stemming from the digital as well as the “green” revolution.

I would like to tell you the story of the Founding Father of the Villa Vigoni, Heinrich Mylius

It is a story of Migration, Integration, success mixed with sorrow.

We call this Villa „Villa Vigoni“, for the last private owner was Don Ignazio Vigoni (1905-1983); but that name „Villa Vigoni“ is not perfectly complete.   One should say Villa Mylius-Vigoni, since the story of this house and its destiny begins with a certain Heinrich Mylius, great grandfather of Ignazio Vigoni: two names, but one family.

1769 Heinrich Mylius was born in Frankfurt.   He was some fifteen years younger than Johann Wolfgang Goethe with whom he was acquainted.

Mylius was the offspring of a wealthy Frankfurt business family, and in the nineties of the eighteenth century he was sent to Milan to open a new branch of the family enterprise in the Capital city of Lombardy, Italy.   So he emigrated, together with his wife Friedrike. Friederike came from Weimar, she had been acquaintend with all the stars of the Weimar cultural firmament, Herder, Wieland, Goethe of course, the Duchess Anna Amalia and her son, the later Great-Duke Carl August.

So the Mylius couple emigrated to Milan and they carried in their luggage, so to say, two precious things: one was the close contact to all people that counted in the commercial field in Frankfurt, the great banking- and business-dynasties such as von Bethmann, the Rothschild, the Brentano…. and to all people that counted in Weimar, to Goethe, Schiller and to everyone at the Court. So it was business (Frankfurt, free city of the Empire, one of the eldest and most important trade fairs in Europe) and culture (Weimar, city in Thuringia, very small, but with an immense weight in the German cultural scene) they brought with them to Milan.

In fact, the second thing they had, when they came to Milan, was Mylius‘ talent for business. Here we have a man with an enormous gift for affairs, hard working, innovative, even revolutionary. After only a few years at Milan Heinrich Mylius left the family business and went into business by himself. In a short period he created a huge enterprise, one of the most important companies in Lombardy. He started with import-export, but concentrated then on clothing, fabric; he specialized on silk-production, and soon afterwards he gathered in his own hands the whole of the production, the distribution and sales affairs and the financing, thanks to his own bank: production-distribution and financing by his own private Mylius-bank were in a magic circle together.

So one can say that Heinrich Mylius represented the perfect example of a brilliant business mind, the perfect model of the dynamics of the early capitalism in Nothern Italy. Lombardy, in the eighteenth century, had started to develop quickly also due to the Habsburg legislation and became the economically leading region in Italy (which it is still in our days).

Mylius fit in perfectly well in this dynamic transformation of economy. Industry spies from all over Europe came to his silk manufactories to see what Mylius’ engineers had invented and how his weaving looms functioned.

Mylius and his wife integrated perfectly in the Milan society. They got friends with all the young brilliant intellectuals and writers of the beginning nation building „Risorgimento“ period, Alessando Manzoni being only the most famous. One could mention also Carlo Cattaneo or Massimo d’Azeglio. Mylius became president of the Milanese Chamber of Commerce. His entrepreneurship became a legend.

But all that fortune, all that incredible success could not prevent the very hard stroke of fate that hit him in the year eighteen thirty (1830) when his only son, the crown-prince of the Mylius business-empire died at the age of thirty.   One year before this twist of fate Mylius together with his son had bought this Villa.   It should have been the beautiful landhouse for the son, Giulio, and his young wife Luigia. But now the son was dead.

What happened then was as extraordinary as Mylius‘ business career: Mylius tried to come to terms with the loss and the sorrow by doing two things: Charity and Art-promotion.   He started giving incredible amounts of money to charity projects.   We are talking of a dimension similar to the Bill Gates Foundation funding.   Most of the projects were initiatives in the spirit of “self-help”.   Mylius became famous for his educational commitment and for financing training Schools for young people.

And he invested lots of money in works of art. He commissioned a great number of pictures and statues.   But it was not meant just as l‘art pour l’art.   The works of art he gathered here had to tell his own story: they had to give a sense to what had happened.   They had to interpret the fate of his family.   So he transformed this house in a Memorial for Giulio, with statues and pictures that told a story of love and loss, but first of all they had to prevent the misinterpretation that perhaps Giulio’s death might have been read as Nemesis, as the Gods‘ revenge because some malicious divinity might have been envious of all the Mylius luck.   No such thing: Mylius ordered to the famous artists an interpretation that was humble, faithful and devoted.   Not divine  revenge for too much human luck, but a belief in destiny that gives and takes in a fashion man cannot understand, only humbly accept. 

This mixture makes this house so unique, and this is why I wanted to tell you this story of Migration, Integration, success mixed with sorrow.

Dr. Christiane Liermann