Built on the lakeshore behind one of the most scenic English-style gardens in Bellagio, Villa Trivulzio holds within its park the small Romanesque church of Santa Maria di Loppia, a corner of quiet well worth a detour from the centre of town.
The villa began life as Villa Taverna, built by count Paolo Taverna in the second half of the eighteenth century in a scenic position between the Loppia inlet and the hamlet of San Giovanni. It was rented to Francesco Melzi d’Eril, vice-president of the Cisalpine Republic, who lived there while his celebrated Villa Melzi was being built not far away. In the nineteenth century the property passed to the noble Poldi Pezzoli family, who enlarged it with two side wings connected to the main building by galleries, and had the park redesigned in the English style by architect Giuseppe Balzaretto, who also designed some of the most celebrated gardens on the Lario.
It was in this Bellagio villa that Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, the famous Milanese art collector who founded the museum bearing his name, spent long periods together with his mother Rosa Trivulzio, a cousin of the patriot Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso: a family tie that later brought the property, through inheritance, to the Trivulzio princes, from whom it takes the name by which it is known today.
In 1941 the villa passed to the Gerli counts, its present owners, who have overseen the restoration of the small Romanesque church held within the park: anyone strolling along Bellagio’s lakeside promenade can still glimpse its Neoclassical outline, a view that tells, better than many guidebooks, the story of the great families who made this corner of the Lario famous.