On the rocky promontory that divides Lake Como in two, where local tradition holds that a villa of Pliny the Younger already stood in Roman times, the history of Villa Serbelloni spans more than five centuries, from medieval fortress to international research center.
The first building, on a site already fortified in medieval times of which traces remain in the square tower attached to the facade, was built in the 15th century for the feudal lord Marchesino Stanga, who acquired the land in 1486; in the 16th century the property passed to the Sfondrati family, who enlarged the building, and in 1788 to the Serbelloni, from whose name the villa takes its current one. Among the guests who stayed here over the centuries were Leonardo da Vinci, who attended a wedding here and left the note “These journeys should be made in the month of May”, Emperor Francis I of Austria, Queen Victoria of England, Alessandro Manzoni and Silvio Pellico. After various changes of ownership between the 19th and early 20th centuries, the villa came to the American Ella Holbrook Walker, Princess della Torre e Tasso, who in 1959 donated it to the Rockefeller Foundation of New York “for purposes related to promoting international understanding”: since then it has housed the Foundation’s Bellagio Center, a study and conference center that hosts residencies for scholars and researchers from around the world and is not open to the public.
What can be visited, only by guided tour, are the roughly 21 hectares of the Park of Villa Serbelloni that cover much of the promontory: terraces, geometric flowerbeds, artificial grottoes and both local and exotic vegetation, with panoramic points over the two branches of the lake. The tours, which depart from the tourist office in the medieval tower on Piazza della Chiesa, run from early April to early November, every day except Monday. For hours, the calendar and bookings for the guided tours, see the Bellagio tourist office site, bellagiolakecomo.com.