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Como is the most beautiful of the Italian lakes. There, I’ve said it; somebody had to.

It is also a lake which in the savage beauty of its green and white shores, in the way the wind whips the surface into wayward textures, in the way it is very difficult to be there and not be in love - and the lake itself will do if there are no other candidates - inspires one to deconstruct one’s prose. You know the kind of thing: “Moon distinct at dawn above Tremezzo. Small child throws pebble into water: plop. The rings expand”.

Como, then, is the most beautiful of the Italian lakes: it is particularly beautiful in the centre, where the eastern Lecco branch meets the main lake. The two southern branches are too fjord-like for spacious views, and both are breathed on hotly by what are, by lake standards, two big urban centres: Como and Lecco. To the north, beyond Dongo, the banks lose their sharp focus to reed-beds and camper vans. But the point and nexus and confluence of the meeting, the place where the lake’s crotch would be if it had anything so corporeal, is a charmed space, a place of almost infinite views - across the slim waist of the lake, deep down the legs on either side, and up the trunk to somewhere beyond the head, where a frozen tidal wave of snow-capped peaks stands poised for some future calamity. And nestling right between the lake’s legs, at the tip of the mountainous triangolo lariano, is Bellagio, which manages to be that rarest of things - a town entriely given up to tourism, and entirely charming. A ferry chugs past. Cocktails slip down pearl-clad necks. The town clock goes bong.

Sorry, it’s difficult to shake the habit. Imagine, instead, this: several orchestras playing all of the music that has ever been composed on Lake Como - from Rossini’s Tancredi to Liszt’s Transcendental Studies to Bellini’s La Sonnambula - while a team of poets read out the poems by Shelley, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Parini and others that have been written on the lake’s fragrant shores. In the background, all the babies ever conceived by honeymooning couples in Bellagio, Cadenabbia and Cernobbio (dubbed, of course, by extras on union rates) add their ounce of salt. The noise would be like nothing on earth - certainly nothing in Bellagio. The most you get here are those chugging ferries and the splash of a foreign body in a large expanse of water.

Bellagio even sounds luxurious - a combination of bella, “beautiful” and agio, “ease” (forget the official etymology, which has something to do with two lakes). It is the quintessential “Aah!” resort. The owner of one of the town’s hotels told me that his English wife - “who came as a guest and then decided it was cheaper to marry me” - set off around Europe one year to see if she could find somewhere more beautiful. She couldn’t. Partly this has to do with the town’s unique setting. Partly, though, it is because tourism is on such a small and human scale: there are only a handful of hotels - including a grand hotel that really lives up to the name - and although the old town, with its narrow stepped streets descending to the lake, is invaded by day-trippers in summer, it does not give in to the tempatations of tack like some of the Garda resorts.

Lake Como is synonymous with the villa as a retreat from the cares of the world. Ever since Pliny the Younger sang the praises of his two lakeside villas - the two, that is, that were his favourites, among the “several” he possessed - the lake has hosted the earthly paradises of the rich and powerful. Even Ostrogoth and Lombard kings, their barbarian ways tamed by the people they were supposed to have conquered, built houses in Bellagio. Later, European royals piled in, including raunchy old Queen Caroline, who made the most of the Villa d’Este in Cernobbio, just upshore from Como, in the days before it was turned into the lake’s most luxurious hotel.

Pliny’s villas declined and fell, but some more recent historic retreats can still be visited. The neo-classical Villa Melzi, which looks so smugly regular from the lake, was built for Franzesco Melzi d’Eril, one of Napoleon’s most loyal Italian henchmen, who was vice-president of the Cisalpine Republic. Its roofs bristle with pointed chimneys, its furnishings are as Empire as they come, its ponds and paths are fringed with azaleas, rhododendrons, and statues, including one of Dante and Beatrice which reputedly inspired Liszt to compose his sonata After a Reading of Dante (so why didn’t he call it After seeing a statue of Dante and Beatrice?). The other great villa and park combination is the Villa Serbelloni (not to be confused with the Grand Hotel of the same name), a curving semi-fortified building which occupies the final hump of the promontory, where one of Pliny’s many villas probably stood. Today it belongs to the Rockefeller Foundation, but the extensive gardens are open to small guided tours. All that remains of the eighteenth-century Italian garden are three terraces with geometric topiary shrubs. The rest is a giardino all’inglese - a legacy of count Alessandro Serbelloni, who spent almost two million lire on improvements (this at a time when a gardener’s daily pay was less than one lira). The views down all three branches of the lake are breathtaking.

But there is more to the central section of lake Como than Bellagio. One town on the rugged eastern shore definitely merits a visit. The tiny harbour of Varenna consists of a few boats pulled up on the beach, two bars and a restaurant, hidden behind a Medieval arcade. From the scenic lakeside walkway that snakes around here from the boat jetty, it looks like nothing so much as a sleepy Mediterranean port. You can even smell the sea. A twist of the head and the opposite bank looms into view, or the opposite banks: Menaggio on the western shore, and bella bella Bellagio in the centre; behind, the bulk of Monte di Tremezzo and Monte San Primo, draped in lazy morning cloud or making a hole in the night sky (the moon on Lake Como deserves a paragraph to itself). And the ducks, and the car ferry cutting a swathe in the glassy surface: so it is a lake after all.

Varenna is one of the few towns on the eastern shore which is more than a single street between lake and cliff. A good hotel and frequent car and passenger ferries make it an excellent base. The completion of the Lecco to Sondrio motorway - one long tunnel in this section - has been a blessing, diverting the heavy traffic from the narrow lakeside road. In any case, Varenna’s peculiar urban structure - the old town consists of six or seven cobbled flights of stairs leading down to a tiny port - makes it a car-free zone. Varenna also has two worthy old churches and a natural wonder, the Fiumelatte, interesting not so much because it is Italy’s shortest river but as a study in primordial forces. The best way to approach it is along the path that skirts around the back of the cemetery; which brings one right to the source of the river. A tumbling surge of foam and spray, it gushes out of a seemingly tiny cavern which Leonardo da Vinci once explored. He was able to do so because, like most of the hotels around here, the river closes down at the end of October and starts up again at the beginning of March. Nobody knows why - not even the local tourist office.

Messing around in boats is the best way to see the central section of Como. Of a weekend, the roads that skirt the lake - especially on the western shore - are like those disaster movies where everyone tries to leave the city at once. It can take thirty minutes just to get through Lecco, with plenty more in store. The boats, on the other hand, do it effortlessly. More than that, though, they give ever-changing views. The run from Varenna to Bellaggio and on to Menaggio - in other words, from the eastern to the western shore via the central promontory - bring all three arms of the lake into view in a slowly shifting choreography of water and mountains. It’s nature’s equivalent of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza - Palladio’s little jewel of a theatre, whose fixed wooden scenery sends the eye running down trompe l’oeil streets.

The western shore, from Tremezzo to Menaggio, is the reign of past British dowagers and present British package tourists. Tremezzo, cowering under the bulk of a great, triangular mountain, is where the nineteenth-century villas start in earnest; this is the start of the Riviera of the Azaleas, a tourist-board coinage which has never really caught on (perhaps they should try “Riviera of the Agaves” or “Riviera of the Rhododendrons”). Cadenabbia has an Anglican church; Menaggio, even more tellingly, has a crazy golf course - as well as a sensible one in the rolling hills above town. There is a Hotel Britannia, a Victoria tea-room, and a few of the villas that divide up the hillside like a string of subordinate clauses still house those dowagers, or their Nintendo-friendly grandchildren.

But the problem with the western shore is the road. It is a constant and disturbing presence - with some surprisingly heavy traffic - and unless you have a private villa most of the hotels are right on it. The villa-less can get close by visiting one of those that are open to the public. If you only visit one, make it the Villa del Balbianello which clings to a little promontory between Sala Comacina and Lenno. The delightful palazzo with its unusual open loggia and its immaculate terraced gardens, whose paths are lined with plane trees clothed in little ivy sleeves, was created by Cardinal Durini in the eighteenth century on the foundations of a Medieval monastery; it is excellently maintained by the FAI, Italy’s version of the National Trust. Along in Tremezzo, the recently spruced-up Villa Carlotta is so neo-classical, so profoundly imbued with the sprit (and the statues) of Antonio Canova, that even the lift has little wooden Doric columns. But the main attraction is the garden, a riot of azaleas and camellias in the spring and a place of botanic bliss the whole year round. The park extends up the hill via a series of winding and ever-surprising paths, past rhododendrons, through a Japanese garden, past cactuses, Australian ferns and giant sequoais.

The spirit of Como lies in the contrast of such manicured perfection with the plunging slopes on either side, and the saw-toothed Alps to the north. Pampered ease is so much more satisfying when you can see the alternative rising up above the still waters of the lake.

This article originally appeared in Conde Nast Traveller (UK)

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