Heritage Hotels on Lake Como:
Where History Becomes Part of the Stay
On Lake Como, it’s golden eras all the way down—from Roman senators and Renaissance men to the leisure class of the Grand Tour and the Belle Epoque, through to today’s most discerning travelers. There is hardly an age when Lake Como has NOT had an almost mythical appeal for the world. It’s no wonder, really, considering the ideal marriage of natural beauty with architectural and horticultural excellence on our shores. That and the legendary hospitality that has given visitors the warmest of Italian welcomes for millennia. This legacy is most evident in the heritage properties on Lake Como that still host guests to this day, like our very own family of historic villas. Treading on well-worn flagstones, opening a tall sash window to the lake breeze and eating fresh-caught pesce persico with crisp sage leaves situates you in a long line of travelers stretching back to Roman times, making your sense of place and belonging all the richer.
For travelers who care about heritage, discover three Lake Como properties where history is as much a part of the stay as the views:
Villa Sola Cabiati—a stately 16th-century residence expanded by the Dukes of Serbelloni in the Neoclassical style, available today as a full-service vacation rental.
Passalacqua—an 18th-century Grand Tour estate in Moltrasio restored by the De Santis family, offering a luxurious home away from home to a lucky few from Easter through New Year’s.
Grand Hotel Tremezzo—a Liberty style façade from 1910, this Belle Epoque landmark on the western shore of Lake Como has been wining, dining and wowing guests like Greta Garbo ever since.
Villa Sola Cabiati: One of the oldest stories on the shore
Probably the earliest personal account of life on Lake Como comes from Roman senator and statesman, Pliny the Younger. He built not one, but two villas on our shores—a cliff-top retreat known as Tragedia somewhere near Lenno and another named Comedia closer to the water, probably by Bellagio. In his letters, Pliny reflects on how this became a place of refuge and beauty for him, far from the pressures of political life—a Roman ideal of cultivated retreat that the Dukes of Serbelloni were also seeking when they purchased Villa Sola Cabiati from the original owners in the 1700s.
Antiquity heavily influenced the villa’s exterior in its Neoclassical renovations as well as the interior lives of the family. The duke hired noted classicist and poet Giuseppe Parini to tutor his son Gian Galeazzo in the 1750s. No doubt his teachings inspired the words “Villulae quietem” inscribed above the main entrance that extol the kind of tranquility only found in a country retreat. Gian Galeazzo went on to champion Napoleon Bonaparte, which is how the emperor’s marriage bed ended up on the piano nobile, brought from the family’s villa in Milan for safekeeping when allied bombs started dropping in the 1940s. It is precisely this uninterrupted stewardship of families like the Serbellonis—and the De Santises—that is the true patrimony.
On behalf of the Dukes of Serbelloni, who own the villa still today, the De Santis family manage this lavish estate as an exclusive vacation rental. You and up to 12 of your closest friends can embrace your inner dukes and duchesses as you frolic between the Murano chandeliers and the terrazzo floors, a butler ever-present for your every whim. With meals under the watchful eyes of the frescoed nymphs and strolls through the formal arabesque gardens, you take your place in the lineage of people restored by this landscape.
Passalacqua: The Grand Tour villa
Count Andrea Lucini Passalacqua was a man of vision. When he purchased the sloping site in the ancient hamlet of Moltrasio, he could already imagine carriages arriving between blazing torches, bright colored silk skirts swishing up the grand staircase and powdered wigs bobbing as great minds debated politics beneath the ceiling frescoes. It was the height of the Grand Tour, when Lake Como was an essential stop on every cultured European’s itinerary, and he dreamed of a villa that embodied the era’s spirit of cultivated hospitality.
Andrea’s son Alessandro carried his hospitality torch into the 19th century with soirées gathering poets, painters and intellectuals that were the stuff of legend. Composer Vincenzo Bellini was among the more illustrious guests who gave impromptu concerts in the Sala della Musica, with guests lining the mezzanine balcony that is part of today’s Bellini Suite. Alessandro was known to linger on the same balcony while the maestro tinkered with such compositions as La Sonnambula and Norma, which are both still delighting opera audiences to this day. The last heir to the Passalacqua name passed away in 1890, leaving the villa to a motley crew of owners—an Estonian baroness, an eccentric Hungarian anthropologist and an American financier among them—until it went to auction in 2018.
That is when Valentina De Santis first heard the villa’s siren song. She knew Passalacqua was her destiny from the moment she stepped through the wrought-iron gates. The whole family—and an army of local artisans, artists and architects—spent three years restoring the property to its former glory and reviving the villeggiatura that the Passalacqua family had embraced hundreds of years before. That meant transforming it into a home away from home for 21st-century travelers: floor-to-ceiling marble slabs in the bathrooms and black and white films projected onto a sheet hanging in the trees, heritage hens laying the breakfast eggs and an alfresco gazebo in the garden for massages with a side of lake breeze, not to mention the steam room and sauna tucked away in the ancient vaulted tunnel. Count Andrea would be delighted…
Grand Hotel Tremezzo: The Belle Epoque Grand Dame
At the turn of the 20th century, things were changing fast. Women were loosening their corsets and fighting for the right to vote. Electric lights, motorcars and indoor plumbing were remaking domestic life, while entertainment—from cinema and variety shows to the gramophone—went mainstream. All of this coincided with a surge in leisure travel and the rise in resorts and hotels, where Europe’s elite flocked to experience new cultures and landscapes, to dine on fine cuisine and to indulge in the pastimes of the upper crust like tennis and golf. Into this world stepped a family of intrepid hospitality entrepreneurs, Enea, Maria and Mariuccia Gandola, with a dream of creating the first purpose-built grand hotel on Lake Como. The building was classic Liberty style, Italy’s iteration of Art Nouveau, boasting wrought-iron railings and balconies with sensual curves, bay windows large enough to let the Lake Como light in, and frescoes, chandeliers and tiles filled with whimsy.
Perhaps the most innovative of the Gandolas’ new features—apart from the electric sign, the tennis court and the hydraulic elevators—was their philosophy, an all-of-community approach to hospitality that welcomes staff, neighbors and guests alike as family. From Mariuccia’s diary we know that each winter, the Gandolas asked villagers to help them comb the forest floor for hellebores to send to regular guests as a Christmas gift. Those winter roses, Maria said, were just like the hotel: “full of energy and elegance, ever in bloom even after the guests have gone home.”
When Valentina joined the De Santis family business in 2010, some 25 years after they acquired the Grand Hotel Tremezzo, the celebrations of the hotel’s centenary were underway under the motto “100 years of love and history”. It was a chance for the family—finally complete now that Valentina was on the team—to recommit to exceeding the guests’ expectations and leading with love. Here as well, the De Santis family managed to bring the hotel into the 21st century with amenities as innovative as those the Gandolas introduced—the WOW pool floating on the lake, wood-fired pizza by the pool and a fleet of boats for messing about on the water—but they never lost sight of the values that have set this place apart since its founding.
What makes Lake Como’s charms so enduring is the ability to reinvent itself for each new generation of visitors—not starting from scratch, mind you, but adding layer upon layer to the foundations our hospitality ancestors so carefully laid. And more often than not, it is the generational stewardship of families like the visionary Passalacquas and the daring Gandolas, the stalwart Serbellonis and our own Valentina, Paolo and Antonella De Santis who remind us that we are here to tend the flames of the past, not worship the ashes—with many a golden era still to come...
