Hotel Villa Cipressi

Villa Cipressi, on the shore at Varenna, is a group of buildings and gardens reworked between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century.

The first core of the villa was built in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries for the Marquis Serponti, secretary of the Milan mint. In the first years of the nineteenth century it passed to Count Carlo Innocenzo Isimbardi, director of the mint of the Cisalpine Republic. Between 1824 and 1864 it was a hotel run by the Venini family. In 1864 the Andreossi family bought it, rebuilt it and gave the lake front its neoclassical look. In 1980 a subscription among the people of Varenna brought it into public ownership. It is a hotel once more. The garden, open to the public, steps down in terraces between rows of cypresses to the lake, once the main way into the villa.