To facilitate access, Alessandro and Ferdinando Serbelloni commissioned the construction of a road which goes up from the centre of the village winding up through the property. People who passed from here include the Emperor of Austria Francis I and Maria Luigia di Parma; even Tommaso Grossi, Alessandro Manzoni and Giuseppe Parini stopped here for some days. In 1845, Gustave Flaubert mentioned it in the notes of his travelling diary: "…a spectacle made to please the eyes – he wrote – One would want to live and die here". In 1905, it was sold to the Grand Hotel of Bellagio and the property pertaining to the Serbelloni was transformed in a hotel. In 1930, the villa was acquired by an American princess Ella Walker, young bride of the prince Thurn und Taxis, who, upon her death in 1959, give it as donation to the Rockefeller Foundation of New York who still manages it to date.