Portrait·2 min
Stories from the lake
Stories of the lake: its trades, winds, cooking, architecture and life out of season.
7stories
Story·5 min
The villas and the microclimate
The lake's mass of water, the relief, the exposure and the soil explain why camellias, azaleas and olive trees grow on its shores, and why the villas have their gardens there.
Portrait·6 min
The chancellor on the lake
Between 1957 and 1966 Konrad Adenauer spent eighteen holidays at Cadenabbia. From 1959 his house was an almost empty villa on the hill, furnished from the nearby hotels: he governed from it, played bocce, and walked to Mass on Sundays.
Story·7 min
The musicians' lake
A singer whose villa looked like La Scala, a composer in love on the opposite shore, a retired ballerina and a publisher who had Verdi to stay at his villa. In the nineteenth century musicians, singers and dancers came to the Lario to rest between seasons at Milan's theatres.
Story·8 min
The two Plinys of Lake Como
The uncle wrote an encyclopaedia and died beneath Vesuvius; the nephew told the story, and wrote about two of his villas on the lake, one on the rock and one on the water. The letters, the spring at the Pliniana and two statues on the front of the cathedral: what is known, and what tradition has added.
Story·7 min
The lake on film
Hitchcock shot the honeymoon of his first film here, Soldati brought Fogazzaro, Visconti a couple on a trip to Bellagio, George Lucas the planet Naboo. A century of filming on the lake, place by place.
Story·7 min
The writers' lake
Wordsworth walked through in 1790, Shelley went house-hunting at the Pliniana in 1818, Stendhal raised Fabrizio del Dongo here, Flaubert kissed a statue, Mary Shelley came back to Cadenabbia twenty-two years later and Mark Twain preferred Lake Tahoe.
Story·3 min
The century of the grand hotels
From the first inns of the 1820s to the grand hotels of 1873 and 1910: how Lake Como filled with hotels, and what remains of each.
All 7 entries in this list.
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