🇮🇹 Italy · Northern Italy (Veneto, Lombardy and Liguria)
Lake Como is one of those postcards that look too perfect to be real: mountains plunging into deep blue water, villages of ochre and pink houses crowded by the quay, grand villas with gardens of cypresses, palms and statues, and ferries coming and going leaving white wakes. Less than an hour from Milan, it has been Lombardy's elegant retreat for centuries: Roman emperors, 19th-century aristocrats, Romantic writers and, more recently, film stars such as George Clooney, whose presence sealed the lake's international fame, have all summered here.
Its upside-down 'Y' shape organises the whole visit. At the tip of the southern arm is Como, the main town, with its Gothic-Renaissance cathedral and its funicular up to the Brunate viewpoint. At the heart of the lake, where the three arms meet, is Bellagio, the 'pearl of the Lario', with its cobbled stairways and its gardens; opposite, on the eastern shore, the lovely Varenna with its colourful houses; and on the western shore, Menaggio and Tremezzo, with the most famous villas: Villa del Balbianello, jutting out on a film-set peninsula, and Villa Carlotta, with its spectacular botanical garden.
This guide helps you plan the lake sensibly: how to get there by train from Milan, why it is best to forget the car and travel by ferry, which villas are worth it and at what prices, and how to split your time between Como, Bellagio, Varenna and Menaggio. Lake Como can be seen in a rushed day from Milan, but it gives you far more if you stay the night and live it at the unhurried, luminous pace it asks for.
Lake Como, the Larius of the Romans, was a place of retreat and pleasure from Antiquity: Pliny the Elder and his nephew Pliny the Younger, both natives of Como, had villas on its shores and mentioned it in their writings. In the Middle Ages it was territory disputed between Como and Milan and was absorbed into the Milanese duchy. Its great age of splendour came in the 18th and 19th centuries, when aristocratic families from Milan and half of Europe built the villas and gardens by the water that make it famous today, and when Romantic travellers — Stendhal, Liszt, Shelley — established it as a landscape of inspiration. In April 1945, in the last days of the Second World War, Benito Mussolini was captured by partisans as he tried to escape to Switzerland along the lakeshore, at Dongo, and was shot the following day near Mezzegra. All that history is on our dedicated page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before it was the retreat of aristocrats and film stars, Lake Como was already a place of rest and pleasure for the elites of Antiquity. The Romans called it Larius Lacus (hence the adjective 'Larian' still used for everything to do with the lake), and the city of Como, at its south-western end, was a Roman colony called Novum Comum, refounded by tradition by Julius Caesar around 59 BC on an earlier Celtic settlement of the Golasecca culture.
The lake is inseparably tied to two of the great names of Roman culture, both natives of Como: Pliny the Elder and his nephew Pliny the Younger. Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) was the encyclopaedist who wrote the Natural History, the great summing-up of the knowledge of his time, and died heroically in the year 79 trying to help the victims of the Vesuvius eruption that buried Pompeii. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, was a famous writer and politician who left in his letters lovely descriptions of his villas on the shores of the Larius: he distinguished between two favourite houses that he jokingly called 'Comedy' and 'Tragedy' depending on where they stood — one at the water's edge, the other up high. In one of his letters he also describes a curious intermittent spring on the lake, the one that still gives the Villa Pliniana its name.
These Roman pleasure villas, with their gardens and their views, were the distant forerunner of the great villas that centuries later would make the lake world-famous. The idea of the Larius as a place of luxurious rest and contemplation of natural beauty was born, in a way, with the Romans.
With the fall of the Roman Empire, the lake region passed through the hands of Ostrogoths, Byzantines and Lombards (the Longobards who gave Lombardy its name), and then became part of the Carolingian kingdom and of the Holy Roman Empire. Through the Middle Ages, the city of Como grew as a free commune and a commercial power, famous for its master builders, the maestri comacini, stonemasons and bricklayers from the lake whose reputation spread across Europe.
The lake's great medieval conflict was the rivalry between Como and Milan, the two great neighbouring cities. In the 12th century the so-called Ten Years' War broke out (1118-1127), in which Milan defeated and razed Como. The enmity was so deep that when, shortly afterwards, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa took on Milan, Como sided with the Empire. In time, however, Milan's orbit prevailed: in the following centuries, the whole lake territory was absorbed into the duchy of Milan, first under the Visconti and then under the Sforza.
Control of the lake had strategic and military value, because it was a route north, towards the Alpine passes and Switzerland. From that period there remain castles, watchtowers and fortified villages up in the hills. The fate of the Larius was thus tied for centuries to that of Milan, and with it, in the early modern period, it would pass into Spanish and then Austrian hands.
The image we have of Lake Como today — grand villas, gardens with cypresses and palms, stairways down to the water — largely dates from the 18th and 19th centuries. In that period of relative peace and prosperity, aristocratic families and the new moneyed middle class of Milan, and later of half of Europe, discovered the lake as the ideal place to build their summer houses: a mild climate, sublime scenery and the Lombard capital close by.
That is how the great villas that are the lake's main draw today came about. Villa del Balbianello, on a peninsula next to Lenno, was built at the end of the 18th century on a former Franciscan convent, with its famous loggia leaning out over the water and its terraced gardens. Villa Carlotta, in Tremezzo, dating from the 17th century but embellished in the 19th, took its name from Princess Charlotte of Prussia and developed one of the most spectacular botanical gardens in Italy, famous for its azaleas and rhododendrons. In Bellagio, Villa Melzi d'Eril laid out a neoclassical park on the lakeshore at the start of the 19th century, and Villa Serbelloni crowned the headland. In Cernobbio, Villa d'Este — today one of the most legendary luxury hotels in the world — has its origins in the 16th century.
These villas were not just houses: they were the setting for a refined way of life, with concerts, botanical gardens, art collections and parties. Many were designed by the best architects and landscape designers of the day, and they competed with each other for the best views, the most exotic gardens and the most illustrious guests. That legacy of elegance is what still defines the identity of Lake Como.
In the 19th century, Lake Como became an obligatory stop on the Grand Tour and a magnet for the writers, musicians, painters and nobles of Romanticism, who established it as one of the most beautiful and evocative landscapes in Europe. Its combination of water, mountain, light and melancholy villas fitted perfectly with the Romantic sensibility, which sought the sublime in nature.
The French writer Stendhal, in love with Italy, described the lake rapturously and set pages of The Charterhouse of Parma near its shores; he walked in the gardens of Villa Melzi in Bellagio, which also inspired the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, a guest at the lake, some of whose works evoke these shores. The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was captivated by the Larius, and a long line of travellers — Byron, Wordsworth, Flaubert, Mark Twain, who compared it in wonder to Lake Tahoe — left accounts of its beauty. Landscape painters filled their sketchbooks with views of the lake, its villages and its villas.
That literary and artistic prestige multiplied the lake's international fame and drew an aristocratic, cultivated tourism that would go on for generations. The arrival of the railway and steamboats in the mid-19th century made the lake more accessible and cemented its role as an elite destination. Well into the 21st century, that tradition of glamour continues: the arrival of Hollywood stars such as George Clooney on the lakeshore put the Larius back on front pages around the world, a direct heir of those Romantic travellers who made it fashionable two centuries earlier.
Through the 20th century, Lake Como shared in the tourist and industrial development of all Lombardy, with Como as the centre of the silk industry and the lakeside villages establishing themselves as summer destinations. But its most dramatic historical episode came in the last days of the Second World War, in April 1945.
With the front collapsing and the partisan uprising spreading across northern Italy, Benito Mussolini — the fascist dictator who had ruled Italy for twenty years and who, after his fall in 1943, had been installed by the Germans at the head of the Italian Social Republic — tried to escape to Switzerland along the western shore of Lake Como, in a convoy heading north. On 27 April 1945, near Dongo, on the upper lake, the convoy was intercepted by Resistance partisans; among the occupants of a German lorry, disguised in a greatcoat, Mussolini was recognised and captured, travelling with his mistress, Clara Petacci.
The following day, 28 April 1945, Mussolini and Petacci were taken a few kilometres south and shot near Giulino di Mezzegra, on the lakeshore. The bodies were then taken to Milan and displayed in Piazzale Loreto, a brutal episode that marked the visible end of the fascist regime, barely two days before Hitler took his own life in Berlin. The story is remembered soberly in the area today, with a museum in Dongo dedicated to the end of the war, without celebration and as a record of a tragic chapter. With that period behind it, Lake Como returned to its long-standing vocation: a landscape of serene beauty which, from the retreat of the Plinys to today's villas, has managed to remain one of the most admired corners of Italy.