Destinations

Wintering in Lake Como Reveals Italy's Greatest Lake at Its Best

Freed from the summer crowds, there’s a hazy, romantic atmosphere to this iconic Italian spot.
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Phil Hewitt

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It’s a cloudless December day on Lake Como, the kind that would make anyone want to stay in bed and stock the pantry. Ever since we overtook Lord Byron—the unromantic hydrofoil ferry, not the Romantic poet—the only fast-moving object that skipper Giorgio Cantaluppi and I have spotted is a cormorant, cresting the ripples in the direction of George Clooney’s villa, wingtips skimming the water.

Villa d’Este

Phil Hewitt

When we stop by the ridiculously picturesque bridge and waterfall of Nesso—where, in summer, a flotilla of tourist boats face off against an army of selfie sticks—we are still gloriously alone. The waterfall is sublime, but so is the sun warming my back as I turn to the north. Somewhere over there, beyond those snow-dusted peaks on the border between Italy and Switzerland, people are skiing. Me, I’m wondering if the hotel pool is still open.

View from the walk to Crotto Piazzaga

Phil Hewitt

When Mediterranean resorts such as Cannes or San Remo began to attract visitors from colder climes in the second half of the 19th century, they were winter destinations. Not so Lake Como. The great villas that were built around its shores from the 16th century onwards were intimately connected with the summer ritual known as la villeggiatura. Like the Palladian villas of Veneto, they were places that urban aristocrats would decamp to, generally around mid-June, with a platoon of servants, lapdogs, and candelabras in tow.

Painter in the backstreets of Bellagio

Phil Hewitt

The villeggiatura season somehow became hard-wired into the Lake Como mindset. When smart hotels began offering an alternative to owning a grand private villa (and some, such as Villa d’Este, Passalacqua, and the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, were once grand private villas), most chose to open from Easter through to the end of October, but two-thirds of foreign visitors to the lake still arrive in the four months between June and September.

Aquila d’Oro

Phil Hewitt

Recently, however, a breeze of change has been wafting across the Lago di Como—especially across the lower left arm of its inverted Y. Known as the ramo di Como, or Como branch, this is classic Como, Clooney Como, villeggiatura Como, home to most of the lake’s historical villas and gardens, and the near totality of Lake Como's high-end hotels. There are various reasons for this, but the one that leaves all the others trailing far behind is its sheer beauty. This is where the mountains come down to the water in folds like the drapery trailing behind a Botticelli angel. It’s where the lake can feel like a gorge one moment and a sea the next—as it does through the squeeze between Laglio and Careno, where there’s a wide bay dominated to the south by the great pale yellow façade of one of Como’s greatest houses, the 16th-century Villa Pliniana, today a wedding venue and whole-rental property that is owned and managed by Sereno Hotels.

Desserts at Passalacqua

Phil Hewitt

The Lake Como shift has to do with a buzzword that is a mouthful in Italian: destagionalizzazione, which, in effect, means stretching the season at both ends and thinning the bump in the middle. Spring can be slow to arrive in this pre-Alpine setting, and the summer heat often lingers well into autumn. So the Lake Como spin on “de-seasonalization” has become: open in mid-to-late March, then push on through to the winter festive season, closing right after Italy’s Epiphany holiday.

Da Luciano

Phil Hewitt

“I love late fall and the beginning of winter on the lake,” says Valentina De Santis, of the widely adored Passalacqua hotel. “The light is incredible… sometimes you get crisp days when you can almost reach out and touch the opposite shore. At other times, there are romantic mornings when the mist rises off the water, and everything is hazy and indistinct.” Passalacqua—the 18th-century Villa De Santis and her family restored and launched in June 2022 as a ravishing 24-room hotel for those looking for a 21st-century spin on la villeggiatura—now stays open from variable March dates until early January. So does that historic grande dame of Lake Como tourism, Villa d’Este. So does Vista Lago di Como, a smart new townhouse hotel on the waterfront of Como town that is owned by the Passera family. Bianca Passera is another of the lake’s dynamic hospitality entrepreneurs who is gambling on a 10-month season. Como town—smart, cultured, parlaying its historic connections with the silk industry into a present-day flair for looking good—comes into its own in spring, winter, and autumn. This is a hard-working city that also knows how to enjoy itself.

Painting on the walk from Torno to Piazzaga

Phil Hewitt

If most hotels feel the need to shutter for at least a couple of months in winter, the same is not true of restaurants. At lunch in Crotto dei Platani, a place that began as a local hostelry and evolved into a panoramic steel-and-glass pavilion restaurant with its own private jetty, I start talking to the owner, Francesco Cavadini. In 2006, he made the against-the-grain decision to keep the place open throughout the winter. The message took a while to get out, but now, Cavadini tells me, all it takes is a sunny January weekend for the restaurant to fill up.

Houses seen from Lake Como Greenway

Phil Hewitt

Some of these out-of-season guests drive up from Milan for the day, or across the border from Switzerland. But quite a few have houses here—including a small community of affluent Thais who Cavadini counts as among his best customers. Chatting with a Bangkok-based businessman one day, the restaurateur asked why he always turned up in winter. “I like to wear a coat sometimes,” was the reply. The off-season in Italy is also a good time for those who like to factor spontaneity into their plans. I landed a lunch table at Alle Darsene di Loppia, a popular creative trattoria by the entrance to Villa Melzi in Bellagio, at two hours’ notice on a Sunday in March. Good luck repeating that in July.

Lakeside buildings in the morning light

Phil Hewitt

It was on a limpid winter day of strong winds and endless views, soon after that boat ride with Cantaluppi, that I walked to Villa del Balbianello along a stretch of the Lake Como Greenway, a six-mile western shore route that follows sections of an old Roman road. Built by an 18th-century cardinal, Balbianello is the Xanadu of Lake Como, surpassing even those classic lakeside garden palaces Villa Carlotta and Villa Melzi as the ultimate waterside retreat from life’s cares. It’s open to the public apart from a break between early January and mid-March and is one of those places where every twist in the path has visitors reaching for their cameras as the celebrated ilex tree on the front lawn—its crown meticulously trimmed into a green cloud—strikes a different pose against the sunlit lake and a balustrade of classical statuary.

Room at Casa Brenna Tosatto

Phil Hewitt

Another fine off-season activity is to go up, instead of along. (Feel free to climb a thousand feet in the August heat: I’ll set up the martinis for your return.) One Monday in March—always a great time not to be in the office—I found myself heading up an ancient mule track from the town of Torno through hornbeam and chestnut woods carpeted with primroses. Halfway I passed under a gate where locals had left small stones in a niche, honoring a folk memory from the days when a toll would have been paid here. Eventually, the woods thinned and turned into a steep flower-strewn meadow. Above was the hamlet of Piazzaga, a scatter of solid stone houses with pitched roofs. This was where the good citizens of Torno once came to farm, keeping pigs and cattle, making cheese and butter, and growing vegetables. Today many of the houses have become holiday homes, and the old village inn, or crotto, was relaunched in 2020 by three friends from Como. One of them, Riccardo, explains to me that the idea wasn’t so much to open a bar-restaurant as to “create a focal point for this small community”. I order the pizzoccheri: buckwheat pasta strips served with potatoes and seasonal vegetables, doused in melted cheese, and sprinkled with a mix of garlic and foraged herbs called pesteda. The view of the lake far down below comes to me filtered through trees and birdsong.

La Moltrasina

Phil Hewitt

Lake Como is a tête-à-tête on a restaurant terrace on a warm July night; it’s candlelight flickering on frescoed walls; it’s a dash across the lake in a dashing Riva runabout. But this charmed basin of water is also a cultural cradle, a botanical presidium, a geological marvel. You haven’t really “done” Como until you’ve explored its other worlds too, on the water and in one of the mountain villages high above the lake—experiences that give most generously away from the summer rush.

Lake Como in the shoulder season: the lowdown

Passalacqua’s garden

Phil Hewitt

Where to sleep

Three of the lake’s most elegant hotels now stay open from early spring all the way through to the beginning of January—and all three offer a very different off-season experience. With just 24 rooms and suites, Passalacqua is a grand historical villa—the kind where guests expect impeccable service but also have a sense of fun, a penchant for wandering into the kitchen to fix a little something, or taking a spin on the lake in one of two vintage Rivas. Villa d’Este is the archetypal grand lakeside hotel—a place of old-school class and panache—but in the winter festive season, it transforms into an enchanted palace. Vista Lago di Como is for those who want to be on the lake but surrounded by the buzz and culture of one of Lombardy’s most engaging small cities, Como itself. Relais Villa Vittoria, just up the road from Clooney’s pad, is an elegant, good-value villa hotel with the heart and soul of an old-fashioned family-run pension—and opens for the season as early as mid-February.

Exterior of Villa d’Este

Phil Hewitt

Il Sereno, which opened on the eastern shore of the Como branch of the lake in 2016, and its near neighbor, the Mandarin Oriental, Lago di Como—which debuted in 2019—respect the lake’s traditional spring-to-autumn opening, but that still leaves a few months when their low-season appeal can be experienced. With interiors by Patricia Urquiola, Il Sereno is about sleek, glamorous minimalism—all the better to appreciate the lake, which is right there. The Mandarin Oriental is the most delightfully urbane of all the lakeside stays, the kind of place where someone might work on their novel over a negroni before heading off to its sister establishment in Milan for Fashion Week.

Finally, two highly recommended off-piste spots. Romantic bolthole La Civera is an apartment in an ancient stone building right on the lake by the celebrated (and quieter off-season) Nesso waterfall. The lake’s most serenely cultured accommodation has to be Casa Brenna Tosatto, an eclectic 1920s Liberty-style villa in Tremezzina. It’s a charming four-suite guesthouse inside a museum dedicated to the father-and-son artists who once lived there.

Osteria del Gallo

Phil Hewitt

Where to eat and drink

In Como town, the family-run Osteria del Gallo is one of those good local trattorias that Italy does so well. It’s great for soups, pasta, polenta, and ossobuco risotto. At Sottovoce, on the top floor of Vista Lago di Como Hotel, the kitchen takes lake fish and other fresh local ingredients and transforms them into beautifully plated culinary canvases. Opened in March 2024, Ceccato Garden Bar is Villa d’Este’s foothold in town, a cocktail-and-light-bites reboot of a classic belle époque lakeside café (the seafood platter is worth ordering).

Valentina De Santis at Passalacqua

Phil Hewitt

Heading up the western side of the lake, the first stop for romantic foodies has to be Raimondi, the dashingly renovated waterfront restaurant of the Villa Flori hotel. A little further on, in Cernobbio, anyone staying at global glamour palace Villa d’Este will appreciate the local buzz of two nearby restaurants. Trattoria del Glicine, in the high part of town, is the kind of reassuringly old-school place elderly Milanesi head to for Sunday lunch, but that their business school grandchildren secretly love too. In the warren of lanes down by the lake, Osteria del Beuc has an unreconstructed 1960s Italian trattoria interior, full of guys playing cards that might inspire Wes Anderson, and a solid cast of comfort food classics such as lasagna and Milanese veal cutlet.

Da Luciano

Phil Hewitt

In Moltrasio, another high-low frisson is to be had by walking out of Passalacqua and into La Moltrasina, the canteen of a village cooperative set up in 1902 that was given a hip retro makeover in 2021, and today serves great-value local dishes dominated by the three Ps: pasta, pizza, and polenta. Just outside Carate Urio, Una Finestra sul Lago is one of two glass-and-steel pavilions with stunning views along this stretch of the lake. This one is more “fashion,” as Italians say, with many Milanesi taking the hour-long drive for Champagne and excellent pizza. The other, further north in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village of Brienno, is Crotto dei Platani, which sits on the shore with its own boat dock. Inside the vaguely James Bond-ish pavilion, the service is old-school, and chef Andrea Cremonesi turns out gourmet takes on local dishes including buckwheat pasta with wild boar ragù.

La Moltrasina

Phil Hewitt

Clooney has not been spotted at Da Luciano, a lakeside butcher’s shop in his adopted town of Laglio that has reinvented itself as the western shore’s go-to alfresco aperitivo and lunch spot. But everyone else has, so diners should arrive early or be prepared to wait. In Tremezzo, up the hill, is joyfully unpretentious family-run trattoria La Fagurida, a favorite of Passalacqua’s Valentina De Santis, for dizzy lake views and excellent hearty local cuisine, including a memorable mushroom risotto.

Cheese at Aquila d’Oro

Phil Hewitt

The places that offer the ultimate contrast between the lake’s suave waterside modernity and its ancient mountain soul are Crotto Piazzaga and Aquila d’Oro. In a rural hamlet in the hills above Gravedona, the “Golden Eagle” is a slow food paradise where ruddy-cheeked chef Plinio Bossio forages for a rigorously seasonal menu that is paired with a stellar wine list.

Starting back at Como town and heading up the eastern shore, after dallying at the Giulietta al Lago beach club, it’s worth making a beeline for Careno, halfway between Como and Bellagio. In this ancient hamlet, with its handsome Romanesque church, friendly old-school Trattoria del Porto features a menu of local specialities including fried missoltino: a dish of lake fish that is salted and sun-dried before being placed in a wooden press, where it can keep for months.

Charcuterie at Osteria del Gallo

Phil Hewitt

The restaurants of Bellagio have not been served well by the fact that most clients are tourists who will probably never return. Among the very few exceptions is Dispensa 63, a bright, lively contemporary bistro on a steep lane of the old town, run by an Italian-Welsh chef and his Milanese partner (they also offer cooking lessons and picnic hampers). If visiting the garden of Villa Melzi in the south of Bellagio, it’s best to time it to take in lunch or dinner at Alle Darsene di Loppia. Despite the rustic pergola outside by the cute little harbor of Loppia, this is an artsy, upscale place with ravishingly presented mod-Med cuisine.

This article appeared in the March 2025 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here. A version of this story originally appeared on Condé Nast Traveller UK.