Description:
A privately owned property protected by high walls, Villa del Balbiano allows its elegant garden to be glimpsed from the large gate, overlooking via Regina road that from the town of Ossuccio leads to Lenno on Lake Como.
The prestigious residence was purchased recently by a young Russian woman merely 21 years of age, a descendant of a wealthy Moscow family.
For thirty years Villa del Balbiano, a protected landmark, was owned by the Como textile industrialist Michele Canepa.
In the mid sixteenth century the property was registered in the name of one of Como’s most famous citizens,
Paolo Giovio, whose family seems to have originated from Comacina Island, facing Ossuccio. In various documents Giovio stated to have a home and land cultivated with mulberry and olive trees in Balbiano.
At the end of the century Villa del Balbiano was sold to Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio who had a completely new building designed by the great Pellegrino Tibaldi. The original design of the facade and the part of the building facing the mounting was later reworked by Marco Gallio in 1637. This latter architect can be credited with the creation of the villa’s magnificent Italian garden.
The facade, with its simple and sober lines, is punctuated by ornamental grey stone motifs, directly overlooks the mirror of water in front of the building where Durini ordered the construction of a tower-beacon with bells and a clock for boats, which was destroyed in the last century.
The villa is surrounded by a garden where statues and the cardinal’s fountains are on display. Coming in from Regina street, a nymphaeum with blue irises leads to the entrance driveway bordered by boxwood hedges, on the side of which the plane and cypress trees the villa is widely known for grow.
Palm trees, wisteria and new shrubs such as the wonderfully fragrant Olea fragrans were added to the park.
At the time of Durini, Villa Balbiano was regularly used to host the gallant and frivolous society of the late eighteenth century.
Inside Villa del Balbiano you can still see the spectacular Baroque frescoes Marco and Carlo Gallio commissioned the Recchi brothers to create in 1630 with the walls painted by Torricelli. The cardinal housed his rich library collection in the pavilion with the arcade.
In the immediate vicinity, where the Perlana stream empties into the lake, you can still admire the canals that Durini ordered to be built to divert the flow of the waters.
