Anyone searching the web for Villa Olmo these days will often find pages explaining how to visit its magnificent rooms. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case: the building is closed for a lengthy restoration, while the park remains open every day from seven in the morning, free of charge.

If Villa Olmo were a museum, this would certainly be bad news to lead with. Fortunately, however, Villa Olmo is not just a building that can be visited, and that is precisely the point.

Of the villas of delight of Lake Como, that is, the network of holiday residences that wealthy Lombard families built between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Olmo is the only one to have come under the direct management of the Municipality of Como.

Villa Monastero has become a research centre and museum, Balbianello is a FAI property with its own admission fee and opening hours, while others have remained private and can only be seen from the water.

This residence, on the other hand, became everyone's, quite literally: within its grounds today there are a municipal swimming pool, a hostel, a tennis club, a botanical garden and a wonderful stretch of lakeside promenade that the people of Como use for their morning runs at seven. A house built to decide who could enter has stopped excluding anyone.

The villa takes its name from a tree that no longer exists. According to a very ancient tradition, unsupported by any documentary evidence, two enormous elm trees once grew on this shore, and before them there may have been the villa of Caninius Rufus, Pliny the Younger's friend from Como.

What is documented in meticulous detail, however, is the convent: in 1136 a community of Humiliati settled here and founded Santa Maria di Vico. In 1664 the Odescalchi family bought the land known as Olmo and turned it into a country estate, a locus amoenus, a place to escape the chaos of the city.

The villa was built more than a century later, arriving relatively late in the era of the villas of delight. In 1780, Marquis Innocenzo Odescalchi returned from Rome with an up-to-date, cosmopolitan outlook and entrusted the project to Simone Cantoni, a Ticinese architect from Muggio who was highly sought after by Como's aristocracy.

Construction began in 1782, the central section was completed in 1789, the two wings in 1796, and the Municipality of Como gives 1812 as the date of completion of the whole complex. The gap between these dates says a great deal about how long a house like this can continue to be built even after it has been inhabited.

It is worth spending a few minutes in front of the lakeside façade before walking around to the back, because this is where the patron's intentions are expressed. Five entrance arches, six Ionic columns, and between the columns a series of medallions depicting philosophers.

You read that correctly: no family coats of arms, no portraits of saints, and not even ancestors in armour. Only philosophers. In 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte stayed here, and the villa began its second life, one in which it mattered more for those who passed through it than for those who lived there.

After the death of Innocenzo Odescalchi in 1824, the property passed to Marquis Giorgio Raimondi. Raimondi had financed Mazzini's Italian unification project since 1833 and took part in the uprisings of 1848 and 1849, which cost him his exile in Canton Ticino.

Meanwhile, the Austrian government requisitioned the villa, converted it into barracks and stripped it of much of its immense artistic value. Thirty years after Napoleon's historic visit, the Odescalchi villa was housing military troops.

In 1859, after the liberation of the city of Como, Garibaldi was a guest of the Raimondi family and spent time at the villa. Here, during a reception, he fell in love with Giuseppina Raimondi, the marquis's eighteen-year-old illegitimate daughter, who in those months was carrying clandestine newspapers and weapons between Como and Ticino in her horse-drawn carriage.

Many accounts say that the wedding was held at Villa Olmo. It was not, and this is one of those inaccuracies that has been copied for twenty years: the wedding took place on January 24, 1860, in the oratory of the family's villa in Fino Mornasco, and lasted only a few hours, because during lunch Garibaldi received news that the bride was already involved with someone else and repudiated her on the spot.

It was her father who, following the scandal, confined Giuseppina inside Villa Olmo itself. The official annulment came only twenty years later, in 1880.

We tell the whole story because it explains what kind of building this is. Over the course of sixty years, the same house was an Enlightenment-era villa of delight, an Austrian barracks, a Risorgimento salon and a domestic prison. It is not a place that passed through Como's history quietly on the shores of the lake.

In 1883 the property passed to Duke Guido Visconti di Modrone, who had the stables rebuilt in the Neoclassical style to a design by Emilio Alemagna and landscaped the garden at the back in the English style, the same garden that still climbs towards the hill behind the building today. Then, in 1925, Villa Olmo became the property of the Municipality of Como, and from that moment on it ceased to be the story of a single family.

Today the complex is not one building but many. The central section, used as an exhibition space, the north wing, the two smaller buildings, the historic greenhouses, the botanical garden, the Tennis Como Club in the south wing, the hostel and the lido overlooking the water.

For decades, people from Como have called Villa Olmo the place where you go swimming, rather than the Neoclassical villa by Simone Cantoni, and that still says something true.

Since 2023, the complex has been undergoing a restoration plan consisting of five separate projects, with a total investment of more than eleven million euros, largely financed through PNRR funds.

The work concerns the façades and interiors, the removal of architectural barriers, the monumental fountain and the small temple, the park and botanical garden, the restoration of the south casino as a reception point with a bookshop and services, as well as the refurbishment of the restaurant and café, which have been closed for years. For the entire duration of the works, the villa will remain closed, while the park has never closed.

It is worth knowing this before setting out for two practical reasons. First, scaffolding has covered the rear façade for a long time, so some classic photographs of the building cannot currently be taken.

Second, the historic greenhouse construction site, which operates on a separate schedule from the rest of the complex, has already missed more than one deadline, so any reopening date found online should be treated as indicative and checked on the Municipality's website the day before.

The historic park and botanical garden are governed by written regulations, specifically a municipal ordinance from December 2023, which almost no guidebook mentions but which actually determines how the site can be used.

Opening hours are seasonal: from April 5 to September 30, entry is permitted from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m.; from October 1 to April 4, from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., every day. There are eight entrances: two on Via Simone Cantoni, three on Via per Cernobbio, one on Via Bellinzona and one from the grounds of Villa del Grumello.

The park is a pedestrian area, so bicycles must be walked along the marked route crossing the parterre. Dogs are allowed on a leash and only along the paths, not on the lawns.

The parterre lawns facing the lake are off-limits even for simple foot traffic, while the other lawns in the park and botanical garden can be used. Picnics are not allowed, barbecues may not be lit, glass bottles are prohibited, drones may not be flown, ball games are not allowed and swimming or diving is prohibited. The last rule always surprises someone, given that the lake is only about three metres away: swimming inside the park is forbidden, and anyone wishing to swim must use the dedicated lido, which operates under a separate concession.

These are fairly strict rules for an urban park, and the reason becomes clear as soon as you look at the parterre lawns, which are the surviving scenery of an eighteenth-century villa of delight, rather than an ordinary public garden.

Villa Olmo is best reached on foot. From Piazza Cavour, take the lakeside promenade westwards, pass the Tempio Voltiano and join the Lino Gelpi promenade, opened in 1957 specifically to connect the aristocratic villas of Borgo Vico.

It is about two kilometres on level ground, roughly twenty-five minutes at an unhurried pace, and you reach the gate having already seen a good half of Como's residential history, villa after villa, gate after gate.

The alternatives all work too, with a few things to keep in mind. Urban buses heading towards Cernobbio stop along Via per Cernobbio, just a few steps from the entrances. In summer, the boat service includes a stop at Villa Olmo, which is particularly convenient for the return journey, when the five-o'clock walk in the sun feels more demanding than it did on the way there.

By car, paid parking is available nearby, subject to availability, on Via per Cernobbio and in the Via Cantoni area, bearing in mind that no vehicle is allowed inside the park.

The lido is inside the park, in a Rationalist-style building overlooking the water, and features a twenty-five-metre pool, a small children's pool, an equipped beach area and supervised swimming in the lake.

It is open during the season, with its own admission fee: prices and opening hours change from year to year, so they should be checked on the operator's website before showing up with a towel.

The park is also the starting point for the Chilometro della Conoscenza, one of the most underrated attractions in this part of the city. It is a pedestrian route of about one kilometre that crosses the road to Cernobbio via a bridge, runs alongside the municipal greenhouses and continues through the parks of Villa del Grumello and Villa Sucota, home of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, covering a total of seventeen hectares of interconnected centuries-old parks, with chapels, lemon houses, greenhouses, botanical rarities and contemporary artworks installed along the paths.

The parks of Grumello and Sucota have their own seasonal opening schedules, so it is worth checking the calendar before relying on the entire route being accessible.

Taken together, these three things make for a half-day itinerary that we would happily recommend to anyone with just a few hours in Como who does not want to use any transport: city centre, lakeside promenade, Villa Olmo park, Chilometro della Conoscenza, and a return by boat if the timetable happens to work.

In 2023, bad weather and various diseases destroyed several trees in the park, including an elm near the lido. The Municipality subsequently commissioned work to replant the lost trees.

It is a minor detail within an eleven-million-euro construction project, but it is the detail that best captures the spirit of this place: a villa named after a vanished tree, inside a public park where someone is replanting that tree.

The other instalments in the series about the villas of delight explore Villa Della Porta Bozzolo and its garden that breaks the rules, Villa Monastero between convent and physics, and Villa del Balbianello and its owners who were always leaving.