The Hotel Antica Torre Viscontea is a historic building, whose origins are merged with the Visconti castle, built since 1360 as wanted by Galeazzo II Visconti, and the subsequent Visconteo Park.

“A mansion for his dwelling, a garden for his recreation and a chapel for his devotion”:
having inherited the castle from his father, Gian Galeazzo Visconti enlarged the park extending to the north of the residence and completed it with the foundation of the Chartreuse, conceived as the family’s mausoleum. The vast park, thoroughly surrounded with walls, was saved for the master’s hunting and scattered with model farmsteads, a pleasure country house, the Torretta, and the Mirabello Castle, the park keeper’s residence.

The Torre Viscontea of San Genesio was part and parcel of the walls bounding the Vecchio Parco, from the Nuovo Parco, extending up to the Chartreuse, towards Milan, and running along 22 kms from the Cantone delle Tre Miglia to Due Porte. We can suppose that just because of this subsequent delimitation, deriving from the enlargement of the Vecchio Parco, the construction was finished and assigned to the guards in about 1394. At San Genesio, at that time a village leaning to the north of the partition wall between the Vecchio Parco and the Nuovo Parco and on the side of the ancient Mediolanum Ticinum road, the present Vigentina road, the postern of Porta Pescarina is still preserved, connecting the two parks between the walls.

The history of the park develops over more than a century and a half, together with the contemporary building of the Mirabello Castle. Placed in the centre of the Park and connected in ancient times to the Castle of Pavia with a straight path called Corso, it was built between 1376, year when Galeazzo II Visconti buys the lands, and 1384, when the documents testify repairs ordered from his son Gian Galeazzo. It was the residence of the Park Captain, who had to supervise the maintenance and surveillance of the huge private estate of the dynasty, but also gave hospitality to the masters and their guests on hunting occasions.

At its golden times, the Park was a real garden of pleasure. Reserved for hunting, it sheltered deer, bucks, wild boars and more plentiful game taking shelter in the thick woods which covered a good part of its surface. The Vecchio Parco, where the battle took place in 1525, was crossed by watercourses, the most important of which, the Vernavola, rose, like today, in the outskirts of San Genesio, in the Nuovo Parco, ran down towards Pavia crossing the Vecchio Parco throughout its length and flew into the Ticino downhill Pavia.

The history brusquely breaks off with the Pavia Battle, one among the most important and bloody war clashes in Europe at that time, faught on 24th February 1525 between Francis I of France and Charles of Habsburg, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, formerly king of Spain and Archduke of Austria, who became Charles V.

The Antica Torre Viscontea Hotel has been realized by keeping its existing structure untouched, entirely restored, using antique art objects and pieces of furniture for its interior decoration. The structure offers its guests an absolutely unique and time-uncorrupted vision of the eighteenth-century Lombard countryside, discreetly coupling all the necessary comfort for nowadays stays with the charm of the rooms, the suites and the common areas.

Our Guests will find an accurate breakfast service, the convenience of satellite TV and Internet facilities available in all our rooms, plunged in a structure of former days, made precious by unique art objects.