Villa del Balbianello

It is located on the tip of the small wooded peninsula of Dosso d'Avedo on the western shore of the south-west branch of Lake Como, 1500 meters east from the Isola Comacina.

During the period of Visconti ownership, the villa hosted politicians and writers Giovanni Berchet, Alessandro Manzoni, Giuseppe Giusti, as well as the artist Arnold Böcklin.

In 1974, Ames's heirs sold the villa to businessman and explorer Count Guido Monzino (leader of the first Italian expedition to climb Mount Everest).

[4] Monzino died in 1988 and left the villa along with most of the Dosso d'Avedo and an endowment to pay for maintenance, to the Fondo Ambiente Italiano (FAI), the National Trust of Italy.

[5] In 2016, the Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano commenced a €413,000 project to restore and improve the villa’s jetty, install new signage, new security, emergency lighting and fire prevention systems.

The villa was also used for the lake retreat scenes in Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones (2002), with computer-generated imagery used in place of the building's true exterior.