Description of the attraction
Villa d'Este, once called Villa del Garovo, is an aristocratic Renaissance estate in Cernobbio on the shores of Lake Como. Both the villa and the surrounding garden with an area of 100 thousand square meters. have undergone significant changes in its almost half-thousand-year history from the time when it was the summer residence of the Cardinal Como. Since 1873, Villa d'Este has been a luxury hotel.
And its history begins in the middle of the 15th century, when Gerardo Landriani, Bishop of Como, in 1442 decided to found a convent at the mouth of the Garovo River. A hundred years later, Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio ordered to demolish the monastery and build his own summer residence in its place. The construction work, which lasted from 1565 to 1570, was directed by the architect Pellegrino Tibaldi. While Gallio was in power, his villa was a real haven for politicians, intellectuals and religious leaders. After the death of the cardinal, Villa del Garovo became the property of his family and partially fell into disrepair. From 1749 to 1769, a Jesuit center was located here, and then the building passed from hand to hand several times, until in 1784 the villa was acquired by the Milanese Calderari family, which initiated large-scale restoration work. At the same time, an Italian garden was laid out around the villa with a wonderful nympheum (a sanctuary with an artificially created grotto) and a temple in which the 17th century statue of Hercules was kept. After the death of the Marquis Calderari, his widow Vittoria Peluso, a former ballerina of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, remarried Count Domenico Pino, in whose honor a comic fortress was built in the garden.
In 1815, the villa became the residence of Caroline of Braunschweig, the wife of the future English king George IV. It was she who gave her estate a new name - Nuova Villa d'Este (after the famous Villa d'Este in the vicinity of Rome) and ordered to re-plan the garden in the English style.
As mentioned above, in 1873, the villa was turned into a luxury hotel, the cost of a room in which today ranges from € 1000 to € 3500 per night. In 2008, Villa d'Este was included in the list of 15 best hotels in Europe, and in 2009, Forbes magazine named it the best hotel in the world.
