Villa del Balbianello

Where it sits. Villa del Balbianello stands on the tip of the Dosso d'Avedo, a wooded promontory that pushes into Lake Como from the western shore at Lenno, in the municipality of Tremezzina. The point sits almost exactly where the lake's western leg meets the central basin, so the house has open water on three sides and sightlines north towards Menaggio, east to Bellagio and south down the Como arm. It is one of the few significant Como villas with essentially no road access. You arrive by boat from Lenno, a five-minute crossing, or on foot along a stony one-kilometre path from the church of Santa Maria Maddalena, open only on certain days. That isolation is the point: the promontory was chosen for contemplation, not for display to passing traffic.

The story behind it. A Franciscan monastery occupied the site from the thirteenth century, and its two small bell towers still stand, absorbed into the later building. In 1787 Cardinal Angelo Maria Durini, a churchman with literary ambitions, bought the point and built the villa around them as a retreat for his salon. His architect gave him the feature everyone photographs: the Loggia Durini, an open belvedere of three arches on each side, set at the highest point of the promontory, with a library on one side and a music room on the other. In the early twentieth century the estate passed to Butler Ames, an American general and congressman, who added terraces and consolidated the gardens. Its last private owner was Guido Monzino, the Milanese explorer who led the first Italian expedition to summit Everest in 1973 and a sledge expedition to the North Pole in 1971. Monzino furnished the house with his collections and left it in 1988 to FAI, the Italian national trust, which has run it since.

On screen. Balbianello is one of the most heavily filmed private houses in Italy, and two of its appearances are famous. In Casino Royale (2006) it plays the private clinic on Lake Como where Bond is treated after the torture scene in Montenegro. The recuperation sequence with Vesper Lynd — Bond in a wheelchair, the conversation on the terrace, the water flat behind them — was filmed on the loggia terrace and the stepped garden below it, and the villa's real geography is entirely legible in the finished cut. Four years earlier the same loggia and the lakeside steps served as the Naboo lake retreat in Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones (2002), the setting for the secret wedding at the end of the film, with the far shore replaced by digital matte work. A Month by the Lake (1995), with Vanessa Redgrave, used the house and grounds extensively, and Ocean's Twelve (2004) also worked on this shore. Visiting the villa after seeing any of these is unusually satisfying, because almost nothing was faked: the arcade, the balustrades and the pollarded plane trees are all as shot.

What you actually see today. FAI opens the garden and, separately, the interior on guided tours. The garden is the draw, and it is a work of topiary discipline rather than flowers: plane trees are pruned into flat green canopies that echo the roofline, ivy and Ficus repens are clipped tight against the arches of the loggia, and holm oaks, cypresses and box hedges frame each opening in the balustrade so that the lake appears as a series of composed views. The old monastery church survives with its twin campanili. Inside, Monzino's rooms hold his expedition equipment, Chinese and pre-Columbian artefacts, English furniture and a museum room devoted to his Everest and polar journeys. The house is compact by Como standards, arranged over a handful of rooms rather than a grand enfilade, and the guided route takes under an hour. Note the small details that betray the monastery underneath: irregular wall thicknesses, a chapel doorway that no longer aligns with anything, and the way the loggia sits slightly off-axis from the house because it was placed to catch the view rather than to obey the plan.

Getting there and timing. Take a train or bus to Lenno on the Como–Menaggio road, then a shuttle boat from the Lido di Lenno jetty; the crossing runs roughly every twenty minutes during opening hours and there is a charge on top of the villa ticket. The footpath from Lenno is open only on Tuesdays, Saturdays and Sundays in most seasons. The estate is generally closed from mid-November to mid-March, and Mondays and Wednesdays are closed days for much of the year, so check before travelling. Late April and May, when the azaleas and wisteria are out, and September are the strongest months. The terrain is stone, stepped and sloping throughout, which makes wheelchair access very difficult, and the boat transfer adds a further step.