Villa Balbiano stands in Ossuccio, on the western shore of Lake Como. The property covers three acres of lakeshore, with an indoor and an outdoor pool and private access to the lake.
The name Balbiano appears in a document dated 941. In 1596 the villa was sold to Tolomeo Gallio, later the first Duke of Alvito. The architect is uncertain. One eighteenth-century source names Pellegrino Pellegrini, called Tibaldi, and no other document confirms it.
By 1638 the outer walls stood on three floors, unfinished. In 1680 the Marchese Giacomo Gallo celebrated the building's completion, enriched with stuccowork, frescoes, gardens, and fountains.
In 1787 Cardinal Angelo Maria Durini acquired the villa. He commissioned new frescoes, built a small church and a tower, and raised a double pavilion on the promontory to the east. He called it Balbianino. It is now known as Balbianello, a site of the Italian National Trust.
The property later passed to the textile industrialist Gustave Salomon Gessner in 1872, the engineer Hermann Hartlaub in 1960, and the silk industrialist Michele Canepa in 1982.
New ownership arrived in 2011. The modernisation went to the French interior architect Jacques Garcia, with structural design by Carlota Proenca da Almeida. The garden was restored under the supervision of Colson Stone. Six suites resulted.
Seventeenth-century frescoes are attributed to the Recchi brothers and Agostino Silva. The restored garden was recognised by the British Society of Garden Designers in 2017. In 2021 the villa served as a location for Ridley Scott's House of Gucci.