Hotel Villa Cipressi, by R Collection Hotels

About this audio guide

This guide to Hotel Villa Cipressi on Lake Como opens with an odd question: why would the director of the Milan Mint build a private laboratory here, among cypresses and lake views, instead of in the city where the coins were actually struck. It follows Baron Isimbardi, who ran the mint around eighteen hundred, and the long relay of owners after him, from the Serponti family, who fled a destroyed island home in the eleven hundreds, to the Andreossi, who filled the slopes with agaves and towering Monterey cypress. You'll hear about English owners, a publisher, and the trouble the villa fell into by nineteen eighty. Look for the oldest wing, dating to the thirteen hundreds, as you walk the terraces.