About Us

What we believe in

We look to the elegance of old gardens and old houses, but with an eye on the traditions of plain, hard-working people. On Lake Como the two have always lived side by side, and it seems right that they should here too. That idea shapes how we keep the house, how we welcome you, and how we tell you about the lake: without a shop window, and without hurry.

The elegance of Lake Como’s historic houses, without the pose

Lake Como built its fame on villas, designed parks and stone stairways running down into the water. It is a real beauty, born when Milanese families came up here for the summer and brought gardeners, architects and ideas with them. We like that sense of measure, and we keep it in mind when we look after the garden, the pool terrace and the details inside the apartments.

What does not interest us is the pose. This is not a museum you walk into, and you are not living inside a photograph. The houses are lived in: the furniture has a history, some floors still carry the step of the people who grew up on them, and the late seventeenth-century stone fireplace in the Angeli apartment is real, not a prop bought to impress.

The difference shows in small things. A residence built to look good has everything identical and nothing of its own. Here the ten apartments differ from each other because they came into being at different times, and people choose the right one for them instead of taking whichever is free. That is why, when you write to us, the first thing we ask is how many you are and what you actually need.

Lake Como is not the Dolce Vita: silk, fishermen and boatyards

People often link Lake Como to the Dolce Vita. That is a Roman image, a society image, and it has little to do with these shores. The identity here is another one, and it comes from centuries of work: silk, looms, fishermen, the yards where boats were built, and the smugglers who crossed the border at night.

Anyone arriving expecting a playground for speedboats finds instead a severe landscape, with mountains dropping straight into the water and villages clinging wherever there was room. It is a beauty that was not built to be photographed: it came out of people who had to live in it all year round.

This lake is not beautiful because it became famous. It became famous because it was already like this, and long before: in the nineteenth century the European aristocracy came here precisely for the quiet and the slow pace, and Manzoni opened the most widely read novel in Italy with it. The rest, the films and the photographs, came afterwards.

Lake Como away from the tourist trail

People arriving at the lake for the first time nearly always follow the same track: the main road, the car parks of the best-known villages, the two or three sights that appear everywhere. It is a circuit you can do in a day, and it leaves you feeling you saw everything in a hurry, often in a queue.

The real lake sits a few metres higher and a few hours later. Above Mezzegra the old mule tracks climb between dry-stone walls and terraces, and ten minutes of walking takes you from the noise of the road to the quiet of the woods. The Soccorso sanctuary, the Val Perlana and the Alpini chapel above Rogaro are within reach of ordinary legs, not athletes, and they have the advantage of being almost always empty.

The same goes for the hours. Villas and boats fill up in the middle of the day, when the coaches and the day trippers arrive. Early morning and late afternoon, in exactly the same places, are another thing altogether: the light is better, you walk without queueing and the photographs come out well. It is not a secret, it is simply something nobody tells you when you arrive.

The same logic applies to the water. The boat is not just a way of getting somewhere: it is how this lake has always been looked at, from below and from the middle, with the villages opening up one after another. Taking it in mid-afternoon, when most visitors are heading back, costs the same as taking it at noon and is worth twice as much.

Proverbs and legends of Tremezzina

Now and then we like to translate an old local proverb, the kind grandparents used and nobody writes down any more. They are short, often blunt lines, made by people who worked the land and the lake and had no time for flourishes. They explain the weather, the effort and the character of this place better than any guidebook.

One of them is already on this page, and it is the family one: "Ca pe pian ve dent can e barian", at our house there is always room for everyone. Put like that it sounds like a courtesy. In a mountain village on the lake, where houses were small and families were large, it was a precise decision about how to live.

And then there are the stories. Above Bonzanigo there is a meadow that people here call Pra de la Taca, or pee de cavai, horses’ hooves. There are marks in the stone, and the versions do not agree about how they got there: some bring in the ark, some the witches, some events centuries old. None of these versions is the official one, and perhaps that is for the best.

If you come, ask us to tell it. It is the kind of thing passed on by voice, on the spot, with the right person beside you: written on a website it would lose half its meaning, and it would no longer be ours.

When to visit Lake Como: the seasons seen by people who live here

The lake is almost always described in summer, with blue water and tables outdoors. It is a beautiful season and our pool is open from April to the end of October precisely for that. But people who come back more than once nearly always end up choosing the shoulder seasons.

In spring the villa gardens are at their best, azaleas fill the parks with colour and wisteria covers the walls and pergolas of the villages: walking the lanes is enough to run into it. The trails are dry, the snow has gone from the lower slopes and you walk without suffering the heat.

In autumn the air dries out, the summer haze disappears and the lake takes on colours it does not have in August. This is when the views from the paths above Tremezzina are at their clearest, there are tables free and you board the boats without queueing. The same places, with half the people.

And then there is winter, which almost nobody recommends. At Christmas the lake villages traditionally set up nativity scenes: they appear in courtyards, under porticoes, along the old mule tracks, and Tremezzina has a route that links them, with the Casa dei Presepi in Mezzegra. You walk very little, you stay among the houses, and you understand how these villages live when the visitors are gone. For opening dates it is always worth checking the local council channels, which change from year to year.

Lake Como in the rain: the light nobody photographs

Here is something no brochure will tell you: the lake is at its best when it rains. In full sun it is beautiful and crowded. In the rain the noise drops, the water turns into a matt mirror and everything fills with different greys, until you can no longer tell where the lake ends and the sky begins.

Those are the hours when the villages go back to the villagers, the landings empty out and from the windows you see something that does not exist in August. People lucky enough to be here on a day like that usually remember it more than the others.

So when the forecast is bad, we do not apologise. We tell you where you can still walk under the cover of the woods, which terrace looks best over the water in the rain and what time it is worth going out. A holiday ruined by the weather, here, is usually just a holiday planned as though the weather should always be the same.

Mezzegra on foot: bread, groceries and the boat

One thing we always suggest is doing at least one shop the way it is done here. Bread comes from the village bakery, 670 metres from here, just under ten minutes on foot. The shop is 736 metres away, the patisserie 764: we measured every distance. These are numbers we measured on the real walking route, not as the crow flies, precisely so that they are of some use.

It means you can spend a whole week without moving the car: bread in the morning, groceries when you need them, the Lenno boat landing less than a kilometre away. People who arrive convinced they will have to drive every day usually change their minds on the second.

There is also something smaller and nicer: the water house, a little over three hundred metres away. It is where the village goes to fill its bottles, and at certain hours you find people who know each other and stop to talk. It is not an attraction and it appears in no guidebook, but it is exactly the kind of place that separates a holiday lived from a holiday watched.

On eating we make no rankings and keep no sponsored lists. Ask us where we go when we do not feel like cooking, and we will tell you that: it depends on the day of the week, the season and who is in the kitchen at the time, which is information no website can give you up to date.

Lake Como with children, with a dog and with grandparents

The lake has a reputation as a place for couples on a romantic escape, and in part it is. But most of the people we host arrive in a group: families with small children, brothers and sisters with elderly parents, friends with a dog in tow. Those trips need different things from the postcard.

With children, short distances matter, and having somewhere to come back to in the afternoon without another half hour of driving. With grandparents, it matters that there are not a hundred steps before you reach the bed, and that the pharmacy is not an expedition. With a dog, what counts is shaded trails starting from the village and a garden where you can step out before bed without crossing the whole place.

These are exactly the things we can help you weigh up, because they differ from apartment to apartment. Tell us before you book: a few more questions now are worth more than ten reviews afterwards.

What you will not find in a residence on Lake Como

We would rather say it in advance. We are not a hotel: there is no room service, no restaurant on site, nobody at the door twenty-four hours a day. Anyone looking for that kind of holiday will be better off elsewhere, and we take no offence.

For some things the car is still needed. Not for bread and groceries, and not for the boat. But for a trip into the Val d’Intelvi, for certain walks that start higher up, or for an on-duty pharmacy at nine in the evening, without a car it gets complicated: we would rather write it here than let you discover it once you have arrived.

And in August the lake is busy. It is nobody’s fault and we do not hide it: those who can choose other weeks do, and those who cannot get through them with a bit more care about timing. That too is part of what seems right to tell you before, rather than after.

Quiet help: we are here when you need us

We are around all the time, but quietly. There is no reception with opening hours and a notice board of rules: there is us, living here, knowing the place because we grew up in it.

It means the directions we give are not the ones printed in a leaflet. We know what time it is worth taking that particular boat, which road to avoid on a Sunday in August, where you can actually park when the village is full and which path is still muddy after three days of rain. That is information worth a great deal, and it goes out of date quickly: which is why it is given in person.

Then there are the practical things, the ones nobody puts in the shop window but which decide how a holiday went. A blown bulb we change straight away, without you having to mention it twice. If the boiler plays up we deal with it, not a call centre. And if you need an on-duty vet for the dog, or a paediatrician on a Sunday with a child running a temperature, we look for one with you: that is the moment when being from here makes the difference between a ruined day and a problem solved within the hour.

The rest of the time you do not see us, and that is deliberate. People on holiday do not need somebody hovering: they need to know that if something is needed, they will not have to look far for it.

If we had to say in one line what we try to do, it would be this: keep a beautiful house without turning it into a shop window, and stay close to the people who arrive without crowding them. On Lake Como, the rest becomes beautiful on its own soon enough.