Cerruti placed a billiard table in the basement of his villa and created an area to accommodate artworks of the 19th and 20th centuries. In terms of interior decoration, less care was taken with the rooms in the basement, which had a generally domestic character, than with those of a more formal character on the ground and first floors. The presence of a cellar of fine wines and a billiard table attests to the primarily recreational use of this part of the building, on occasions when guests were entertained. Much of the space is occupied by the cumbersome table, which lost its original function over the years, not least due to the steady growth of the collection of rare books and precious bindings, serving as a surface to display items of particular importance. As in the study on the ground floor, books play the leading role here and take up all the available room. The engravings of Francisco Goya thus occupy a small table between the sofas, while the five volumes of the Bible illustrated by Salvador Dalí (1967) are displayed in their original showcase in a corner. The treasures of this room also include the eleven volumes in which Willem and Joan Blaeu gathered together all the maps of the known world halfway through the 17th century and the thirteen volumes of the first edition of Marcel Proust’s "À la recherche du temps perdu" (In Search of Lost Time) in the elegant bindings by Paul Bonet. The walls present numerous great paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries, ranging from Felice Casorati’s "Scherzo: uova" (Scherzo: Eggs, 1914) in tempera on cardboard to a large canvas of 1961 by Emilio Vedova, from an early female portrait (c. 1906) by Robert Delaunay to Federico Zandomeneghi’s "Coppia al caffè" (Couple in a Café, c. 1885) in pastel. A list of the series of works displayed on just one of the four walls would suffice to demonstrate the collector’s eclecticism and his penchant for creating wholly unexpected constellations of images: from the disturbing crouched figure (1963–64) by Graham Sutherland to the composure of Massimo Campigli’s "La amiche" (Friends, 1954), the solemnity of Alberto Burri’s Sacco e rosso (Sacking and Red, 1954), the sinuous lines of Osvaldo Licini’s "Amalassunta" (c. 1950), the enigmatic blanckness of Piero Manzoni’s "Achrome" (1959) and the mysterious figure (1992) by Gino De Dominicis.
