On the Bellagio lakefront, at the point where the two branches of the Lario divide, stands the neoclassical villa that Francesco Melzi d’Eril, Duke of Lodi and vice-president of the Napoleonic Italian Republic, wanted as his own residence at the end of his political career.
Built between 1808 and 1810 to a design by the neoclassical architect Giocondo Albertolli, the villa was Melzi’s home until his death in 1816; it then passed to his nephew Giovanni Francesco, then to his son Lodovico and, through the marriage of Luisa Melzi to Giancarlo Gallarati Scotti, Prince of Molfetta, to the Gallarati Scotti branch, who still own it today. In 1815 the English-style park was designed by the architect Luigi Canonica and the agronomist Luigi Villoresi, the same pair who had overseen the garden of the Villa Reale di Monza a few years earlier: a roughly 800-metre path along the lakeshore, among centuries-old trees, camellias, azaleas and rhododendrons, enriched with statues, a family chapel and historical and artistic pieces collected by the family. Among the guests who frequented the villa and its gardens in the 19th century were Stendhal, the musician Franz Liszt and the couple Percy and Mary Shelley.
The interior of the villa remains inhabited and privately owned, not open to visitors; the former orangery, however, has housed the Museo Lodovico Gallarati Scotti since 2021, which brings together paintings by Andrea Appiani, Van Dyck, Rubens and Van Ruysdael alongside marble sculptures by Giovanni Battista Comolli. The gardens are open to the public every season, generally from late March to late October; the ticket also includes access to the chapel and the museum. For hours and the seasonal calendar, see the official site, giardinidivillamelzi.it. Walking along the paths that follow the shoreline, with views of the Bellagio promontory and the mountains of the Triangolo Lariano, visitors cross one of the best-known historic gardens on Lake Como, still cared for by the heirs of the family that created it more than two centuries ago.