The Como Journal

10 minutes

Waterfront or View? The Lake Como Decision Nobody Argues About Properly

Buyers treat height above the water as a compromise on the real thing. It is not a compromise. It is a different property, with a different view, a different day and a different set of costs. For most people it is the better house.

7 minutes

The Case for Tremezzina

The great gardens are on this shore because the lake goes wide here and the mountains stand back. That piece of geography is the entire argument for owning on it, and it is also the source of every objection to doing so.

7 minutes

The Case for Cernobbio

Almost everybody chooses this lake by looking at photographs of the middle of it. The first basin answers a different question: not where the lake is at its most beautiful, but where you could keep a life.

9 minutes

The People You Need When You Own a House Here

Finding somebody to work on a house on this lake is easy. Knowing which of them to trust with it while you are in another country for ten months of the year is the whole problem, and it is not solved by credentials.

12 minutes

What It Really Costs to Own a Villa on Lake Como

Our guide sets out the line items. This is what the first three years actually feel like from the inside: the order the bills arrive in, the conversations that set the number, and the economies that cost the most.

12 minutes

Buying Property on Lake Como as a Foreign Resident

The legal sequence is set out in our guide for foreign buyers. This is the human one: the two years it takes, the family you are really negotiating with, and the room where it finally happens.

10 minutes

A House in February

What actually happens to a stone house on this lake in the four months nobody photographs, and why the owners who come in the worst month make the soundest decisions in the spring.

6 minutes

The investors on the lake: Lake Como's hidden capital network

4 minutes

Business networking on Lake Como: the hidden economy

Business networking on Lake Como: the hidden economy

5 minutes

The Ritz-Carlton, Bellagio: What We Know

The former Hotel Grande Bretagne has stood on Bellagio’s waterfront for more than a century, and empty for much of the recent past. Now it is becoming Italy’s first Ritz-Carlton - although exactly when the doors will open remains uncertain.

5 minutes

The Church Above Lake Como

You can see San Martino from the lake long before you understand why somebody built a church there. The only proper way to find out is to walk up to it.

4 minutes

Civenna - the hidden gem of Lake Como

The village you've never heard of but wish you had

7 minutes

The Lake in September

The season does not end on Lake Como so much as change hands. For three weeks in September the lake belongs to the people who own here, and most visitors never find out.

4 minutes

The Lake at Seven

The lake keeps different hours from the people who come to look at it. Between six and nine it is a working place, and it is the part of the day the rest of the day covers up.

7 minutes

The Lake After Everyone Leaves

The season here does not taper off, it stops. What is left is a different landscape with different light, different weather and a fraction of the population, which most owners have never once seen.

8 minutes

Bellagio or Varenna: Two Ways to Live on Lake Como

They face each other across a mile of water and are compared endlessly by people spending an afternoon in one of them. For anyone staying months or buying a house, the differences that matter are almost none of the ones usually listed.

10 minutes

The Light on the Western Shore

A lake that runs north to south has only two aspects, and they are not equal, which is why the villages opposite each other across a mile of water live entirely different days.

11 minutes

The People Who Keep the Lake Working

Behind every villa on this shore is a small number of people whose working year runs in the opposite direction to everybody else's. There are fewer of them each decade.

9 minutes

The Quiet Side of Bellagio

The most photographed village on Lake Como is also the one people most often see wrongly, because they arrive at two in the afternoon and leave at five.

7 minutes

After You've Done Lake Como

There is a point at which a person stops visiting this lake and starts understanding it. Almost nothing about the change is informational. It is a change in what you do with a day.

6 minutes

Why People Keep Coming Back

The hold this lake has on people is physical before it is anything else: deep water in a trench, an unusually coherent built shore, and a working city close enough that the place is lived in rather than performed.

6 minutes

The Long Lunch Still Matters Here

The length of lunch on this lake is not indulgence and it is not leisure. It is structure: the load-bearing part of the day, and where a surprising amount of family and business life is actually conducted.

11 minutes

Where to Lunch by Boat on Lake Como

Lunch reached by water is the thing everybody wants from this lake and the thing most people get wrong, because it is not a restaurant booking. It is a small piece of seamanship with a table at the end of it.