The collection
Lombardy · Deep water with the Alps standing in it
You travel by water here. The slow boat up the western shore to Bellagio runs past 30 kilometres of coast you cannot reach any other way — villages with no road behind them, boathouses cut into the rock, staircases going up into trees — and it is a scheduled public ferry, not a charter. The lake is at its best from the middle of it, looking back.
Lake Como is a glacier's work: an inverted Y of water 46 kilometres long and 410 metres deep, gouged out of the southern Alps so hard that the mountains do not slope down to the shore, they stop in it. There is almost no flat ground on the whole lake. Everything follows from that — villages stacked in tiers up their own hillsides, mule tracks that were the only road until the 1800s, villas built on any ledge wide enough to take one. Pliny the Younger kept 2 houses here and called them Comedy and Tragedy, one on the shore and one on a rock above it. Silk came in the 15th century and Como is still weaving. Then the 18th and 19th centuries planted the western shore, where the water holds the frost off well enough to grow camellias, azaleas and palms at the foot of a mountain that keeps its snow into April. The boat is the road here. Ferries have run since 1826, and they still cross between shores a car would need 90 minutes to link.
A terraced garden on a spit of rock at Lenno, with a loggia at the top open on both sides so you look up both arms of the lake at once. Its last owner led the first Italian ascent of Everest and his expedition rooms are still inside. Reached on foot through the woods, or by taxi boat from Lenno.
Rates are quoted for your dates.
Moltrasio, on the water
An 18th-century villa above Moltrasio, its gardens stepping down through 7 acres to a private jetty on Lake Como.
A hillside garden at Tremezzo, 8 hectares of it, planted where the lake keeps the frost off: 150 varieties of azalea and rhododendron that peak in the first half of May, a bamboo grove and old cedars above them. Inside, Thorvaldsen's frieze of Alexander entering Babylon runs the length of a room.
The only island on the lake, and empty because Como razed the town on it in 1169 and forbade rebuilding. What is left is church outlines in the grass, 3 modernist artists' houses, and a single restaurant that has served the same meal since 1947.
The village sits on the tip of the promontory where the lake divides, so it looks down both southern arms at once — the reason it has been the postcard since the Grand Tour. Busy by 11 and empty by 7. The stepped lanes behind the waterfront are the actual town.
A chapel on the climb above Bellagio, made the patron of cyclists in 1949 and hung inside with bicycles given by the men who raced this road — Coppi's, Bartali's, Merckx's — under a flame kept lit for riders who have died. The terrace looks straight down the southern arm.
Begun in 1396 and finished 350 years later, so it starts Gothic and ends under a Baroque dome. Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger sit either side of the west door — two pagans on the front of a cathedral, put there because Como was proud of its own.
Cernobbio
A cardinal's villa on Lake Como since 1568, its 10-hectare park running down through mosaic gardens to a floating pool moored on the water.
A short list of extraordinary places to stay.
© 2026 Kismet Stay Private Limited.
