Villa Balbiano

This guide to Villa Balbiano on Lake Como follows Cardinal Angelo Maria Durini, a Milan-born papal diplomat elevated in 1776, who filled this lakeside villa with musicians, poets and painters and threw festivals that pulled the region's high society across the water. It traces the library, frescoes, statues and fountains he commissioned, and the sudden end of that era in 1796. Walk the terraced gardens toward the water and you are tracing the same paths he cut for guests moving between courses.