Villa del Balbianello

Villa del Balbianello occupies the tip of the Dosso d'Avedo, a wooded spur that pushes out into the south-western arm of Lake Como near Lenno. Because the promontory is almost an island, the garden has water on three sides, and every terrace looks down onto the lake rather than across a lawn. The planting is famous for its disciplined clipping: a great holm oak trained into a broad umbrella, hedges and climbers shaped into green architecture, flowering terraces stepping down to the private landing stage. Few gardens anywhere make so much of so little level ground.

The site began as a Franciscan monastery, recorded from the thirteenth century, and two bell towers of its church still rise above the trees. In 1785 Cardinal Angelo Maria Durini bought the property and within two years had turned the convent into a villa for leisure and literary company. His most memorable addition is the loggia at the highest point of the headland, an open hall that frames the lake in two directions at once, one side toward the Isola Comacina, the other across the water to the opposite shore. Look at the balustrade of the old church and you will find the serpent of the Visconti, left by the Arconati Visconti family, who owned the villa in the nineteenth century and did much to shape the gardens.

After passing to the cardinal's nephew Luigi Porro Lambertenghi, whose house became a meeting point for politically restless minds, and then to the Arconati Visconti, the villa was bought in 1919 by the American Butler Ames. The last private owner was Count Guido Monzino, an explorer and mountaineer who acquired it in 1974 and left it to the Fondo Ambiente Italiano on his death in 1988. His collections fill the rooms: maps, alpine gear, the sledge from his 1971 expedition to the North Pole and an exceptional group of Inuit ivories. Film-makers found the place irresistible; it appears in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones and in the 2006 Casino Royale, and it remains the most visited of the trust's properties.

Getting there

The villa stands on the western shore of Lake Como at Lenno, in the municipality of Tremezzina. The nearest sizeable town in a straight line is Erba, about 17.5 km away on the far side of the mountains, but in practice visitors come along the lake road or by the lake ferries, which stop at Lenno. The nearest airport is Lugano Airport (LUG), about 23 km away; Milano Linate Airport (LIN), about 58 km, has far more connections. Cars cannot reach the villa itself: from Lenno a small shuttle boat crosses from the lido to the villa's landing stage, and a footpath around or over the promontory takes roughly a quarter of an hour to forty minutes.