Villa del Balbiano, Renaissance villa with hotel in Ossuccio, Italy

Villa del Balbiano is a large rectangular villa with pale yellow walls and a low-pitched hipped roof at the end of a grassy lawn in Ossuccio. Its symmetrical facade has a central arched doorway in grey stone, four ground-floor windows with dark shutters, five upper-floor windows, three small square openings near the roofline, and two dormer windows. Two tall chimneys rise from the roof.

The estate originated in the 10th century and was shaped by several important owners, including the Giovio family and later Tolomeo Gallio, who made substantial architectural changes from 1596 onward. In the 18th century it came under the ownership of Cardinal Angelo Maria Durini, bringing the site renewed prominence.

The name Balbiano appears in a document of 941, and Paolo Giovio (1483–1552) wrote of his family's houses and lands here planted with mulberries and olives. Cardinal Angelo Maria Durini moved his literary circle to the villa in 1787, hosting the Neoclassical poet Giuseppe Parini; an eighteenth-century plaque records Giacomo Gallo's completion of the building in 1680.

Villa del Balbiano is a private residence and event venue, not a public museum; visits are not generally open to individual tourists, so access must be arranged in advance with the property. The lakeside gate and parapet collapsed into the lake in 1940, so the water frontage is not a public promenade. The gardens, replanted with rare species under Michele Canepa from 1982, are best seen in the warmer months.

In the early 2010s the villa underwent careful restoration by French architects and landscape designers who painstakingly recovered historical decorations and planting schemes. This work brought many original details back to light that had been hidden beneath centuries of change.