Lake Como is not a secret. It has not been a secret since the Roman Empire, when Pliny the Younger built two villas on its shores and wrote letters home about the light on the water. The Grand Tour brought the English. The belle époque brought everyone else. George Clooney arrived and the property prices finished the job. Como is famous, expensive, and entirely worth it.

The lake is shaped like an inverted Y, thirty kilometres of cold Alpine water framed by mountains that drop straight into it. The villages on the western shore — Tremezzo, Lenno, Varenna — are connected by a slow ferry that stops at every landing stage. This is the correct way to move through Como. Not by car, where the single-lane road becomes a procession of rental vehicles in summer, but by water, at the pace the place was designed for.

The villas are the point. Villa del Balbianello on its promontory. Villa Carlotta with its gardens in full azalea bloom in May. Villa d'Este, now a hotel, with its floating swimming pool on the lake. These are not tourist attractions. They are arguments for the existence of beauty, made in stone and water and two centuries of careful gardening.