A Roman fort once stood on this hilltop above Lake Maggiore, and around the year 1000 the Visconti family, then minor Milanese nobility, built a castle here that they used as a base to launch their rise to power over Milan by the 13th century. The castle changed hands over the centuries and fell into decline before the Visconti d’Aragona branch of the family restored it in the 16th century as a noble residence.
Its present look came later still, when 19th-century heir Marquis Claudio Dal Pozzo d’Annone commissioned British architect Richard Popplewell Pullan to remake the whole complex in the Gothic Revival style, drawing on English Tudor motifs that British critics have since called one of the purest reinterpretations of that style outside Britain. The Dal Pozzo family has lived on and managed the estate for six generations, and the current owners still run it today.