Inspiration: discover the Blog

Italy does not announce itself as a golf destination. It doesn't need to. Its landscapes — lake country shrouded in chestnut forest, Tuscany's quilted hills, the Adriatic glittering beyond a Puglian stone wall — happen to produce conditions for some of the most memorable rounds in Europe.

Villa d'Este golf, fireside dinners and the last golden light — the case for Como in October, when the lake quietens and the chestnut trees turn. There are perhaps three weeks each October on Lake Como when the lake recovers a quality of stillness that is otherwise rare in its calendar. The summer hotel guests have departed. The big late-September weddings have wrapped. The Como Open golf at Villa d'Este has finished. The chestnut trees on the lower slopes of the eastern shor