Bravo for Italy's beautiful Como

By JENNIFER GRIMWADE

For at least 2000 years, visitors to Lake Como have been lapping up its splendour. Even back in the first century AD, Pliny the Younger was espousing its virtues.

Bordered by the snow-capped majestic Swiss Alps, the expansive Italian lake's mild microclimate still fosters fun and fauna.

It's not hard to see why visitors are attracted to Lake Como. You can sip Bellinis on the Hotel du Lac's terrace and watch the steamers come and go or visit the Volta museum to marvel at the frogs' legs that Volta used in his electrical experiments. Alternatively, you can enjoy watersports, hike in the mountains, or ogle at the world-renowned gardens and grand villas.

The Lombard Queen, Theolinda, was so besotted with Lake Como's beauty she ordered a road, the Via Regina, to be built along it in the 7th century. Despite this, it is still best to travel by steamer.

Riding one of the many ferries, you see small Italian villages nestled into the lake's craggy shoreline. Painted in soft pink, ochre, sienna red, mustard, even orange, many houses have flaky turquoise shutters and terracotta-tiled roofs.

Balconies and rotundas are decorated with fancy ironwork, ornate concrete balustrades and urns or pots coloured with red geraniums.

Huge magnolias shade clipped lawns adjacent to groves of ancient gnarled fruiting olive trees. Flourishing in this mild climatic cocoon, virgin bush runs up to the snow line. Grand villas with exquisite gardens look out across the misty lake.

Como, one of Europe's deepest lakes, is shaped like a skinny, long-legged man. Bellagio, the jewel in the crown, is at the hub where the lake divides into the Como and Lecco branches.

During the first century Pliny the Younger wrote of his passion for hunting, fishing and writing while staying at his two villas built on the wooded promontory at Bellagio.

Then in the 18th and 19th centuries the aristocracy from Lombardy turned Bellagio into a sophisticated, elegant and exclusive retreat. In stately villas, they entertained illustrious European guests, including numerous writers and poets.

Nobles staying in the luxurious hotels would often rent out entire floors so their maids could lay out their gowns on the spare beds. Dressed in their finery, the aristocracy promenaded past lakeside flower pots and climbed the stone-stepped medieval streets leading to the neo-classical villas.

In 1825, Stendhal was a guest at the Villa Serbelloni built high up on the promontory where Pliny used to holiday. Thanks to the Count Alessandro Serbelloni spending 1,800,000 lira on the gardens in the late 1780s, when the average workman earned less than one lira a day, the Villa Serbelloni has 18km of pathways, with spectacular views and extensive gardens.

Today, 10 full-time gardeners tend the English garden showcasing camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas, the Italian garden bordered by clipped box hedges, and the Tuscan area planted with olives and cypresses.

Owned by the Rockefeller Foundation, Villa Serbelloni now hosts short-term residents pursuing academic, scientific and musical projects. International conferences are held in the main villa and tours of the grounds are conducted daily.

By the lakeside in Bellagio, the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni was part of this estate until it opened as a hotel in 1872.

Former guests include Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, John Kennedy and King Farouk of Egypt, who honeymooned there. When the Sheikh of Kuwait stayed, he wished to buy the bride at another guest's wedding, regardless of the cost.

Today, nearly everyone who visits Bellagio peeps at this grand, but certainly not pretentious, establishment.

On his two-year honeymoon, the composer Franz Liszt stayed at the stately, neo-classical Villa Melzi, with its forest of little chimneys. Walking down the avenue of plane trees bordering the lake to the villa, it is easy to picture Liszt picnicking in the groomed grounds, perhaps under the tree dripping with plump persimmons, or on the manicured lawn rolling down to the lake.

And it is not difficult to imagine Leonardo da Vinci taking a short boat ride around the promontory to the village called Varenna. Built in the Middle Ages, Varenna has flights of precipitous cobbled steps and mossy pathways climbing up the steep hill.

Stone walls are painted with ivy the colour of red wine, wisteria droops from patios high on the hill and palm fronds poke over the edge of rooftop gardens.

On the opposite side of the lake to Bellagio is Villa Carlotta, a favourite haunt of Gustave Flaubert. Writing about Lake Como, Flaubert wanted to "live here and die here". He was certainly not the only visitor to be smitten by the beautiful villa, which today attracts visitors from all over the world.

As well as its stunning entrance, fine furniture and Gobelins tapestries, the garden at Villa Carlotta is spectacular.

Camellias 10m tall and huge azaleas and rhododendrons burst into brilliant flower beside trees from around the globe.

Giant corks from Portugal, cedars from Lebanon, ferns from New Zealand, maples from Japan, even tea bushes and banana plants proliferate in the tropical microclimate.

In stark contrast, the garden at Villa Balbianello has few flowers as it is built on rocks.

The villa is designed to be visited by boat and it is rumoured that in the 19th century Senora Costanza received her lovers on her lakeside balcony. Who knows if she entertained them in her bedroom painted all black?

The Balbianello garden focuses on form and shape rather than colour. The huge evergreen oak is pruned into a great ball and pebbled paths are decorated with borders of winding wisteria, garlands of ivy or trimmed box hedges.

Equally fascinating is Balbianello's private museum, featuring its previous owner, the Italian mountaineer Guido Monzino's equipment and souvenirs from his many international expeditions.

But it is not quite as interesting as the temple in Como housing the instruments and inventions of Alessandro Volta, the inventor of the battery and the discoverer of the volt and methane gas.

Many consider Volta to be the most famous son of Como but it's hard to say, as Lake Como has been attracting fame and fortune for many a millennia.

Case notes

To read: The 100 Things Everyone Needs to Know about Italy, by David Dale.

For a treat, stay at the magnificent Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Tel 00 39 031 950216; fax 00 39 031 951529.

Before leaving Como, be sure to take the funivia up to Brunate for a truly spectacular view (and a change of temperature). If you're a hiker, take the footpath up to Monte Boletto.

www.travel-to-italy.com

www.lakecomo.org