After You've Done Lake Como

By the fourth or fifth time, most people have run out of things to see. This is usually experienced as a mild flatness, the sense that the place has been used up, or that it was always slightly overstated. It is in fact the beginning of the useful part.

Nothing further you learn about the lake will change your experience of it much. You know where the villages are, which gardens are open, what the ferry does and which view is the famous one. There is no next tier of information waiting. What changes from here is behaviour, and it changes in roughly the same order for everybody who keeps coming back.

It usually takes people about five years to work through. It does not need to take five years.

The first change is that the number of places you go falls sharply. Instead of nine villages in six days: three places, repeatedly, at different hours and in different weather. It looks like a reduction and is the opposite of one. A place you have been to once is an image. A place you have been to eleven times has a Tuesday and a Sunday, a bad-weather version, and a moment in the afternoon when the square empties out.

Repetition is the only thing that makes anywhere legible. It is how you find out that the terrace everybody sits on is in shade by four and the one nobody uses is in sun until eight, or that the man who runs the landing stage is the person to ask about anything happening on the water. None of it can be read in advance and all of it arrives on the third or fourth pass.

You also stop photographing, not as a discipline, but because at some point you notice you have not taken a picture in two days.

The day here has a middle that is not for doing things in, and two ends that are. Visitors invert it: they sleep through the morning, walk uphill in the heat and eat at the hour when everything has just gone into shadow. Then they report that the place was crowded, which it was, at precisely the hours they chose.

The week has a shape too, and it is less obvious. Your two or three places are shut on days that are not the same day as each other, and whole stretches of the year come with closures attached. The visitor discovers this on the doorstep and calls it bad luck. The person who has been coming a while asks once, writes it down and organises around it. Being defeated by a closed door is the clearest marker there is of a first visit.

The boat has a shape as well. The early service and the midday service are different vehicles carrying different populations, and once you know that, half the standard complaints about the lake stop applying to you.

Nothing rearranges a person's understanding of this lake faster than an hour on it. From the road you experience a sequence of blind corners, tunnels and glimpses, with the water appearing and disappearing on one side. From the water you see a single continuous frontage, and you understand for the first time that the villages are facing you, because the lake was the road and the water side was the front.

Distances re-sort themselves at once. Two villages that are an unreasonable drive apart are close across, and the far shore stops being the other side and becomes part of the neighbourhood. Houses invisible from the road turn out to have been the point of the whole arrangement. People who come to this late almost all say the same thing: that they wish they had done it on the first visit rather than the fifth.

May and June before it fills; September and October after it empties. These are not quieter versions of August. They are a different arrangement of the same place, with warm water and cool air in one direction and long light and cold water in the other, and with everybody who works here operating at a pace that allows them to be interested in you.

Most of the frustration people report about Lake Como is really a report about six weeks of it. Move the same trip four weeks in either direction and the complaints stop being available. Almost nobody acts on this, because holidays are booked around schools and offices rather than around places.

Some things will be shut, and that is the trade. It is a small one, and it stops being a trade at all once you have found out what is open.

The largest single improvement most people make to a week here is to stop treating every meal as a reservation. A market in the morning, a shop that sells four kinds of cheese and will tell you which one, bread bought at the hour it comes out, tomatoes that need nothing done to them, a fish somebody else has already dealt with, and then lunch on a terrace, for a fraction of the money and almost none of the logistics.

The restaurants get better as you use them less. Two places you return to, where they know what you drink, will feed you better than nine places you are trying once, and the difference has nothing to do with the cooking.

Everybody is on the shore, because the shore is where the road, the ferries, the hotels and the photographs are. It is a corridor a few hundred metres wide with a great deal of pressure on it. Ten minutes above it, there is nobody.

What is up there is the old landscape: mule tracks and stepped paths between hamlets that had no road until recently, terraces running through the chestnut woods, a church standing open with nothing in it but a smell of cold stone, and the lake seen from above rather than across, which is a different object entirely. It is cooler, too. The paths are neither secret nor difficult; they are simply not on the way to anything, which is why they are empty.

At some point, usually the third or fourth year and usually without any decision being made, you have relationships with two or three businesses rather than transactions. You are expected. The greeting is different. Somebody puts something aside for you.

This is routinely misread as preferential treatment. It is not; it is information. What came in this morning and what did not. Whether the wind will get up and whether to bother going out. Who to call about the thing that has broken, which is never the person you would have found yourself. Where the family are eating on Sunday, which is not where the menu is in three languages.

None of it is purchasable and all of it is available. It costs repetition, and it costs treating people as people rather than as staff. That is a smaller investment than it sounds, and one a surprising number of otherwise sophisticated visitors never make.

Almost nobody's final village is their first one. The first is chosen from a map and a reputation: on the water, in the middle, with the view that is on the postcard. It is genuinely lovely, and in season it is largely occupied by people who are leaving in four hours.

What people converge on instead is duller to describe and better to inhabit: a shop that stays open through the winter, a bar that fills at seven in the morning rather than seven in the evening, somewhere to leave a car, a landing stage still served in November, and enough residents that an arrival is noticed. The view is usually slightly worse. Nobody who has moved has ever wanted it back.

The test is simple enough. In the village you first stayed in, you were a visitor and there was no other role available to you. In the one you end up in, there is.