The lake's hotels began in the 1820s with the first inns at Varenna and Bellagio. In 1873 the grand hotels of Cernobbio and Bellagio opened, and others were built in Como for the centenary of the battery.
During the two world wars some hotels changed use, and in the twenty-first century more villas have become hotels.
In 1824 the Venini family opened a hotel at Villa Cipressi in Varenna and ran it for forty years, until 1864. In the same years, at Bellagio, the inn on the shore that Abbondio Genazzini had bought in 1788 became a proper hotel, around 1825. In 1837 Franz Liszt stayed there with Marie d'Agoult.
On 16 August 1826 a paddle boat left Como for Domaso: it was the lake's first steam service, and the villages on the shore have been linked by regular runs ever since. Between 1884 and 1902 the trains arrived too, with the railway along the eastern shore and the little line between Menaggio and Porlezza.
1873 was the year of the grand hotels. At Cernobbio, Villa d'Este became a hotel: the villa built between 1565 and 1570 for Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio and given its name by Caroline of Brunswick, who bought it in 1815. At Bellagio the Frizzonis' neoclassical villa, designed by Rodolfo Vantini, was enlarged and opened as the Grand Hotel Bellagio; from 1905 to 1930 the hotel also owned Villa Serbelloni, on the hill above the village, and took its name. In the same year, on the Bellagio lakefront, Antonio Mella opened the Hotel Grande Bretagne.
In Como the Hotel Metropole Suisse opened on Piazza Cavour in 1892. For the Volta Exhibition of 1899 the Grand Hotel Plinius, the city's first grand hotel and the present Palace Hotel, was built on the lakefront. In 1900 its spa went up next door, and in the 1930s it became a hotel of its own, the Albergo Terminus.
In 1910 Enea Gandola opened the Grand Hotel Tremezzo, a long Art Nouveau building on the shore that had lifts and electric signs from the start.
In 1926 and 1927 the young Giuseppe Terragni redesigned the first two floors of the Metropole Suisse's front, and in 1930 he designed the Albergo Posta, between Piazza Volta and Via Garibaldi. During the two world wars some hotels changed use: the Terminus was a military hospital in the first, and in the second it was requisitioned by the German army and then by the Allied command, which kept its headquarters there until 1946.
In 1960 Villa Flori, the nineteenth-century villa between Como and Cernobbio that the Marquis Giorgio Raimondi had meant for his daughter Giuseppina, Giuseppe Garibaldi's bride, became a hotel. The Grande Bretagne, on the other hand, closed in 1972, when the Lombardy Region bought it; the hotel school it had housed since 1949 stayed until 1992, and then the building was abandoned.
In the twenty-first century other villas have become hotels: at Blevio, in 2010, Villa Roccabruna, built after 1904 on the site of the soprano Giuditta Pasta's villa; at Moltrasio, in 2022, Villa Passalacqua, where Vincenzo Bellini stayed between 1829 and 1833. Terragni's Albergo Posta has been a hotel again since 2014, and Bellagio's Genazzini reopened on 1 June 2026 after a restoration, as Palazzo Genazzini.
Compare historical views with recent photographs in Then and now.
Historical events linked to this story are collected in the Lake timeline.
