Lake Como and Franciacorta: Lombardy's Two Finest Pleasures

The most beautiful lake in Italy and the most serious sparkling wine south of Champagne occupy the same Lombard landscape, an hour apart. We have spent years understanding both. The programme we design does justice to each.

The western shore of Lake Como, from Cernobbio to Tremezzina, is one of those places where the landscape has been refined by so many centuries of human attention — the terraced gardens, the lakeside villas, the Baroque churches on their promontories, the morning light on the Alps — that it presents itself as a completed argument for beauty rather than a work in progress. To move along it by private launch, stopping at will, is to understand why the families who built their summer residences here in the eighteenth century and the visitors who have been making the journey from Milan and beyond ever since have always felt, and continue to feel, that Como is a special case: a landscape that genuinely exceeds expectation.

We arrange access to the lake's great villas with the seriousness that these places deserve. Villa del Balbianello — the eighteenth-century Franciscan monastery converted to a private residence for Cardinal Durini, now held by the FAI — receives its first visitors of the day in a condition of mist-softened early-morning calm that the afternoon crowds entirely replace.

Our exclusive pre-opening access, conducted with the head gardener through the topiary terraces and the double-loggia terrace cantilevered above the water, produces an hour of exceptional quality. Villa Carlotta's combination of neoclassical sculpture — Canova's Cupid and Psyche, Thorvaldsen's reliefs — with its extraordinary botanical collection provides a different, more intellectually various morning.

And Villa d'Este in Cernobbio, the sixteenth-century cardinal's palazzo that has been one of Europe's finest hotels since 1873, is for those guests who want the experience of Como as it has been lived by the most aesthetically demanding visitors for a century and a half.

Bellagio and the Private Launch

Bellagio sits at the exact triangular point where Como's three arms converge, and its position — visible from every part of the lake, connected to the rest of the world by water rather than road in its most natural state — gives it the quality of a village that exists specifically to be arrived at by boat. The crossing from Varenna on the eastern shore, fifteen minutes by private motorboat over water of extraordinary clarity, deposits you at the lakefront steps below the Villa Serbelloni gardens with the Alps filling the view to the north.

The Villa Melzi waterfront gardens, with their Japanese maple collection and their Egyptian statuary reflected in the lake, are among the finest private gardens on Como; we arrange access through our established relationship with the Melzi family. Lunch in Varenna before the return crossing — at a lake-edge table with grilled lavarello and a bottle of the local Tremezzina white, the eastern shore cliffs behind you and the western gardens glowing across the water — is one of the quietly perfect meals of northern Italian travel.

Franciacorta: The Wine That Settles the Question

An hour south of Como, in the morainic hills that the retreating glaciers of the last ice age deposited between the city of Brescia and the shores of Lake Iseo, the Franciacorta DOCG produces Italy's most seriously made and most critically under-recognised sparkling wines.

The method is traditional — secondary fermentation in the bottle, riddling, disgorgement — the varieties are Chardonnay, Pinot Nero and Pinot Bianco, and the lees ageing requirements are among the most demanding in the world outside Champagne: eighteen months for non-vintage, thirty months for vintage, sixty months for Riserva. The finest Franciacorta Riserva wines, from producers whose estate philosophy prioritises precision over accessibility and whose hillside sites concentrate Chardonnay with extraordinary mineral intensity, are wines of genuine complexity and substantial longevity that deserve to be tasted alongside the Grande Marques of Reims rather than contrasted with them. We arrange private tastings at the most distinguished estates for sessions that include vertical selections of Riserva and Satèn: an encounter with Italian sparkling wine that changes the terms of the conversation permanently.

From Villa del Balbianello at seven in the morning, with the Alps reflected in the lake below and no other visitor in sight, the scale of what Como offers becomes briefly and overwhelmingly clear. We know how to arrange that hour.

The Essentials

Best season: April–June for flowering gardens; September–October for harvest and clear light

Signature experience: Private early-morning Villa del Balbianello access; Franciacorta Riserva vertical tasting

Stay: Villa d'Este (Cernobbio), Grand Hotel Tremezzo, or a private villa with dock and staff

Combine with: Milan (one hour), Bergamo, the Valtellina, the Dolomites

Every journey we design is entirely bespoke — crafted around your preferences,your pace, and your desire for the exceptional.

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