A cardinal, a La Scala ballerina turned countess, a scandalous English princess and even Alessandro Volta acting as a lawyer: few buildings anywhere hold a history as tangled as that of Villa d’Este.
It all began in 1442, when the bishop of Como, Gerardo Landriani, had a convent for nuns built by the Garovo stream. It was Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio who, between 1565 and 1570, had it demolished to erect in its place a sumptuous private residence, the “Villa del Garovo”, which quickly became a destination for writers, politicians and church dignitaries. After the cardinal’s death the villa passed from hand to hand - to his nephews, to the Jesuits who turned it into a house of spiritual retreats, to the Odescalchi, to the Marliani - until it reached, in 1784, the Calderara family. Widowed by Marquis Bartolomeo Calderara, the marchioness Vittoria Peluso, a former dancer at Teatro alla Scala known as “la Pelusina”, remarried the Napoleonic general Domenico Pino: in his honour she had a small neo-medieval fortress built in the park, inspired by the Spanish strongholds her husband had conquered, and decorated the “Napoleonic room” with yellow silk embroidered with the letter N, hoping for a visit from Napoleon that never came.
In 1815 the villa was bought by Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales and estranged wife of the future King George IV of England: the deed of sale was handled, as the seller’s proxy, by none other than Alessandro Volta. It was Caroline who renamed it “Villa d’Este”, for a supposed but remote descent from the famous Este family, and who transformed its park into an English-style garden, with the romantic Temple of Telemachus still visible today. Accused by her husband of leading too libertine a life in Italy - an accusation that led to a sensational trial in England - she left the villa in 1820; it then passed to the Torlonia and Orsini princes, hosted Emperor Francis I in 1825 and, in 1868, the Empress of Russia Maria Feodorovna, who stayed there for two full years, so fond was she of the lake’s mild climate.
Since 1873 Villa d’Este has been a luxury hotel, among the “Locali Storici d’Italia”: its ten-hectare park, declared a National Monument as early as 1913, remains one of the most scenic examples of Italian and English garden design in all of Lombardy, still able today to tell, among its paths and fountains, more than four centuries of history and intrigue.