This stunning villa in Bellagio, Lake Como, Italy now operates as a hotel. It also houses the Bellagio Study and Conference Centre; a residential centre founded and manged by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1959 and operates a ‘scholar-in-residence’ program for scholars around the world.
The villa was passed from Sfrondati to Alessandro Serbelloni in 1788, who furnished this exquisite villa with works of art and took care of its surrounding gardens and filled them with plants and flowers; oleanders, rhododendrons and cedars. Alessandro Serbelloni commissioned a road to be built that goes from the village up through the property of this villa. Sold in 1905 to the Grand Hotel Bellagio, the property of Serbelloni was transformed into a hotel. Ella Waker (an American princess) acquired the villa in 1930 and upon her death in 1959 she gave the villa as a donation to the Rockefeller Foundation of New York.
