On the headland stretching between Cernobbio and Moltrasio, this pink and pale-yellow villa takes its name from the Comasco dialect word “pizz”, the point of land on which it stands.
The earliest records date to 1435, when the Como merchant Giovanni Mugiasca bought the land with its vineyard and farmhouse. During the sixteenth century, after the wars between Como and Milan, the property passed to Giovanni Battista Speciano, a lieutenant in the service of the Sforza, who in 1532 had an elegant villa built there, then called “Speciana”. At the start of the seventeenth century the Mugiasca family regained possession of the estate and, in 1630, moved there to escape a plague epidemic: it was in those years that the garden’s terraces took shape, together with vineyards and olive groves. In 1842 Bishop Giovanni Battista Mugiasca donated the property to the Sant’Anna hospital in Como, which auctioned it off in the mid-nineteenth century: the buyer was Archduke Rainer of Austria, viceroy of Lombardy-Venetia, who had exotic plant species planted in the garden. In 1865 the villa passed to the Austrian noblewoman Elise Musard, who had the facade repainted in the pink and pale-yellow tones still visible today, and finally, between 1871 and 1873, to the Bassani-Volpi family, who enlarged the landing stage and added a gatehouse.
The villa’s present appearance owes much to a nineteenth-century intervention designed by architect Simone Cantoni, dated 1806. In the park, among the celebrated avenues of cypresses, stand a monument dedicated to Alessandro Volta and the mausoleum of the Volpi-Bassani family, built in forms recalling a Romanesque baptistery. Now owned by the Lodigiani family, Villa Pizzo preserves its Italian and English gardens, which can be visited in the warmer months only by appointment and with guided group tours.