Grand Hotel Villa d'Este

The Grand Hotel Villa d'Este occupies a sixteenth century villa built in 1568 on the shore of Lake Como near Cernobbio, Italy, originally constructed as a summer residence for Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio, a senior official of the papal court under Pope Gregory XIII. The villa passed through a succession of aristocratic owners over the following three centuries, including Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales, who lived there in the early nineteenth century and added a mock-medieval tower and other garden follies to the grounds. A group of investors converted the property into a hotel in 1873, retaining the original Renaissance villa's formal terraced gardens, its grottoes and its avenue of clipped hedges while adapting the interior for guest accommodation. The gardens themselves, laid out with fountains, statuary and a distinctive Neoclassical grotto known as the Temple of Hercules, are considered among the finest surviving examples of a formal Italian lakeside garden. The hotel has remained one of the most prominent luxury resorts on Lake Como since its conversion, drawing on the architectural and landscape legacy of its original Renaissance construction.