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.
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
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.
