Crazy for Lake Como
Lake Como
was the province of a few noble families, visited by artists, royalty, world
leaders, and the cream of Old Hollywood. Then, in 2002, George Clooney put the
tranquil Italian retreat squarely in the spotlight, and now reports have
everyone from Bill Gates to Rupert Murdoch to Tom Cruise vacationing among its
few magnificent Gold Coast villas. As BlackBerry-wielding Russian tycoons wave
untold sums at the lake’s aristocratic homeowners, Janine Di Giovanni asks if
Como’s days are numbered.
SOME ENCHANTED SHORE Villa del Balbianello, on Lake
Como. Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones and Casino Royale
were both shot here. Right, George Clooney, who owns a villa on Lake
Como, enjoying a stroll in the lakeside town of Argegno.
Shortly after losing his prime-ministership in the
July 1945 elections, Winston Churchill, stunned by the defeat and feeling a
strain in his home life, left for an extended painting holiday on the shores of
Lake Como. As summer waned, he flew to Italy with his entourage—his wife,
daughter, physician, valet, secretary, and detective—in a Dakota belonging to
Field Marshal Harold Alexander, the first Earl Alexander of Tunis. The party
stayed as Alexander’s guests at Villa Le Rose, in the tiny village of
Moltrasio, a home Churchill described as a “small palace …the last word in
modern millionairism.”
That first morning, surrounded by local children, he sat quietly staring out
at the lake and painting. His daughter Sarah described his work: “A luminous
lake and boats, backed by a beetling crag, with a miniature toy village caught
in the sunlight at its foot.” Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, wrote that the
former prime minister was so entranced by the lake that “he sat solidly for
five hours, brush in hand, only pausing from time to time to lift his sombrero
and mop his brow.”
Churchill wasn’t the only World War II leader to find peace, of a sort, at
Lake Como, 25 miles north of Milan, in Lombardy, near the Swiss border. Nearly
five months earlier, on April 28, 1945, Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist,
had died in Mezzegra, a tiny village 20 miles along the lake from the Villa Le
Rose. The exact details of his death are not known, though it is widely thought
that he and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were murdered by Italian partisans.
(The bodies were later hung on meat hooks in a square in Milan.) Was
Churchill’s trip to the same area merely a historical coincidence? There have
long been rumors that Churchill traveled to Como that summer not simply to
paint but to retrieve secret letters in which he had supposedly tried to
persuade Mussolini to make a separate peace with the Allies, subverting the
Allies’ stated demand for an unconditional surrender of all the Axis countries.
A recent Italian documentary even claims that Mussolini was shot by two British
secret-service agents acting on Churchill’s orders.
But whatever the “real” reason for Churchill’s 1945 trip to Como, he found a
retreat that seemed far removed from the brutal war that had broken Europe. “An
air of complete tranquillity and good humour pervades these beautiful lakes and
valleys, which are unravaged by war,” Churchill wrote. “There is not a sign to
be seen in the countryside, the dwellings or the demeanour or appearance of the
inhabitants which would suggest that any violent events have been happening in
the world.”
That dreamy sense of unreality is exactly the reason that Como, a narrow,
30-mile-long lake that looks like an inverted Y, has always been a retreat for
artists, writers, aristocrats, and, now, the very newly rich. Stendhal was
inspired to set part of
The Charterhouse of Parma on Como’s shores.
Verdi composed
La Traviata here, Liszt
Après une Lecture de Dante,
Bellini
Norma. Wordsworth, Shelley, Puccini, and Rossini all found
inspiration at Como. Leonardo da Vinci used the streams and waterfalls as the
setting for
Madonna of the Rocks. John F. Kennedy stayed here, as did
Napoleon. Hitchcock made his first film,
The Pleasure Garden, on the
grounds of the Villa d’Este, the lake’s premier hotel, in 1925.
Como is grounded by the weight of history, from the
grand villas which string out along the lake like a rope of pearls to the noble
families which go back to the Renaissance, to the ghosts of European
aristocrats and Old Hollywood. It is that combination of glamour and
exclusivity which is now drawing in moneyed Russians, American venture
capitalists, billionaire publishers, Internet and airline moguls, and the
latest generation of Hollywood stars.
“New money always wants to be with old money,” commented one long-term
Comasco I spoke to.
According to Francesco Ugoni, who runs Bene Habitare, the most exclusive
real-estate agency in Como (with branches in Moscow and Saint-Moritz), his
agency gets five or six new foreign clients a week during the peak season
trying to buy villas. “Como is now in the 20 top places in the world to live,
thanks to George Clooney.” Ugoni smiles. “Clooney did not invent hot water, but
he’s made a new name for Lake Como.” Clooney bought his 18th-century pale-cream
green-shuttered Villa Oleandra from the Heinz family in 2002 for about $10
million, which seemed astronomical in those days but which is peanuts now, when
villas can sell for nearly 10 times as much.
“There is no logic in this market,” says Giacomo Mantegazza, a
fifth-generation Comasco. “The prices here now are crazy. If Silvio Berlusconi
looks at a place, the price goes up. If Clooney sells tomorrow, the price will
drop.” Mantegazza, now in his 70s, is an engineer who has restored many of the
lakeside villas, including Villa Oleandra, when it still belonged to the Heinz
family. He is also the former owner of Villa La Cassinella, in Lenno, which his
father, Carlo, built in 1926. Many locals believe it is now owned by Richard
Branson, or “Mr. Virgin,” as he is called here. But Branson’s office denies
that he owns the property, and Mantegazza refuses to name his buyer. (Whoever
owns it is currently having a pool built in full view of the lake, which angers
many locals who feel that it should be built in a more discreet location on the
grounds.)
Driving prices even more than Western industrialists and Hollywood stars are
newly rich Russians, who, Ugoni says, arrive with suitcases full of cash. “They
think it’s great,” Ugoni says. “But this is not the Wild West, where you go to
the saloon and lay dollars on the bar to do business.”
“They started buying properties without asking how much they were,” says
Enzo Pifferi, a photographer and publisher who has photographed nearly all the
villas along the lake and has also documented Como’s famous silk industry.
“They had no limits. They bought what they liked.”
You can hardly blame them. Como is a spectacular place, with the glacier
lake running beneath the Italian Alps, ringed by small towns and villages and
the city of Como. The air is clean. The people are friendly. The food is
extraordinary. It’s less than one hour from Milan.
A map of Lake Como published in the Italian newspaper
La Repubblica
showed purported recent acquisitions by, among others, Branson, and the Kazakh
oil magnate Nurlan Kapparov. Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime
minister, has been searching for a property for months—for his daughter, it is
said.
La Repubblica also reported that Tom Cruise owns property in Como
and that Bill Gates is actively hunting for a villa.
Before Clooney’s purchase, Lake Como was a somewhat
forgotten destination. Now Comaschi complain about how noisy it is on weekends
when the newly rich race their speed-boats. “There was a time,” says one, “when
all you heard on the lake was the sound of sailboats, or tennis balls bouncing
on clay courts.” Now there are also absurd traffic jams of S.U.V.’s and pileups
of expensive sports cars in the small villages and on the narrow road that
links them.
But while all of the recent real-estate activity is ultimately good for the
local economy, which is dependent to a large degree on tourism, the noble
families who have lived here for generations are not necessarily thrilled with
the changes. And they have ways of putting on the brakes. For one thing, to
prevent drastic alterations to the villas, the area has very strict building
requirements. Even if Billionaire X could get a parcel of lakeside property, he
would have to go before a committee that must examine and approve all new
projects. If they did O.K. his plans, another office would have to second them.
“It’s impossible even to alter a window,” says one villa owner.
There is also an Alice Through the Looking Glass dimension to buying property
on Lake Como. First, even though there are more than a hundred villas in the
region, there are a limited number around the lake, perhaps a few dozen truly
magnificent properties, many of which are never for sale. Homes are usually
passed down through the generations, according to Robert Eves, an investor from
Marin County, California, who spent six years finding his home in Como, Villa
Calla.
“A man and his family live in the home that was formerly and is perhaps
still occupied by his parents,” Eves says, speaking generally. “Why would one
sell his or her home when it is assumed that it will later become the home of
the next generation of children?”
Much like other wealthy enclaves in Italy, there are no multiple-listing
services in Como, and no Web sites on which sellers can post listings or
potential buyers enter housing requirements. There are no FOR SALE signs. “This
is the antithesis of American ‘shotgun’ marketing,” says Eves. “Here it’s all a
big secret and it’s a wonder that anything ever sells.” So people are forever
guessing what might be on the market. Villa Fontanelle, owned by the Versace
family, for instance, “is always for sale and always not for sale,” says Ugoni.
The route to buy is discreet, says Eves. If someone wants to sell his home,
he casually mentions it to a friend or favored agent, who agrees to keep it
secret until the most propitious moment. Then the agent casually mentions the
availability of the property to another agent, or to people who have expressed
interest in buying. Then a call is discreetly placed. Then a “visit” arranged.
Then there is the matter of price. How much, for
instance, would Villa Fontanelle sell for? Ugoni shrugs. “A pen costs one euro,
but when it’s a famous pen, everyone wants it.”
Another reason for high prices is that there is only one part of the lake
where everyone wants to buy: the “Riva Romantica,” or Gold Coast of Como, a
five-mile stretch on the western side between the towns of Cernobbio and
Laglio, which gets the sun in the morning—“The gold in the mouth,” says Ugoni.
So the same gang of super-rich are competing for the same limited properties.
Berlusconi, perhaps more discriminating than most newcomers, has looked at
“a lot” of properties, according to Ugoni, but he wants only two or three, none
of which are for sale. “Berlusconi came one Saturday with his wife to see the
house even though they know well it was not for sale,” says Michele Canepa, an
elegant silk industrialist whose family has been in the business for
generations, and who produces fabric for haute couture houses such as Oscar de
la Renta, Chanel, and Lanvin. Canepa owns Villa Il Balbiano, in Ossuccio, which
dates back to the Renaissance and is considered one of the most beautiful
villas on the lake.
You can reach Villa Il Balbiano by boat, but if you drive along Via Regina,
the narrow lakeshore road, you enter through an ancient walled garden with
bursting roses, jasmine, hydrangeas, and calycanthus plants. There is a row of
tall, regal cypress trees leading to the stone doors of the house.
Cardinals and counts once lived here. Canepa has modernized the interior,
leaving the original trompe l’oeil and pictorial sequences painted by the
Recchi brothers in 1630, but adding abstract German paintings from the 1950s,
60s, and 70s. There are modern fabrics that come from Canepa’s factory and a
magnificent ball gown mounted on the wall, made by his wife in the 80s for a
museum competition with a Fortuny theme.
In the dining room, which still has the original 18th-century frescoes and a
heavy Venetian crystal chandelier, Sri Lankan waiters serve risotto seasoned
with fresh herbs from the garden, and homemade fruit sorbet. Canepa—who is one
of the silk manufacturers in Como who still do very well despite
globalization—admits his life on the lake is rarefied. Would he ever sell Villa
Il Balbiano? He shakes his head firmly no.
“Some things are beyond cash,” he says, smiling slightly.
Construction on the Liberty-style Villa Il Dosso
Pisani began in 1897 and was completed in 1910. The villa sits high on a
hilltop looking out onto the lake. Carlo Dossi, a writer, built the portico as
a place to entertain his friends and inscribed many of their names, in poems
and epitaphs, on the white marble columns inside the courtyard.
His granddaughter, Giosetta Reverdini Pisani Dossi, has poignant memories of
growing up in the villa. She remembers the war years in Como: her mother
packing away the precious leather-bound books from the library in wooden
crates, food coming from the neighboring farms, bombs dropping in the spring of
1944, all the windows in the villa shattering. She also remembers an after-war
party: peeking through the big doors of the ballroom and seeing her mother in a
long gown, a hundred people dancing and eating.
But those were different times. “My mother had five servants,” she says.
“Now I have only one servant. The stairs are hard for me to climb. We used to
have deliveries to the house. Now we go to the supermarket.”
When did life change? There were stirrings in the late 1980s. “Villa d’Este
started doing promotions, bringing actresses like Bette Davis or soap stars,”
Pifferi recalls. That these were noteworthy events says something, perhaps,
about the sleepy Como of that era.
Some recall the first wave of arrivistes in the early 1990s, when the
fashion crowd followed Gianni Versace—whose ashes are reportedly now enshrined
in a private chapel on the grounds of the family’s 18th-century Villa
Fontanelle. “Versace opened the gates,” says Enzo Pifferi. “Before that, it had
only been the old, moneyed Milanese families.”
Versace, who had acquired his crumbling villa in 1977, introduced Elton John
and Madonna to the lake. Later came Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
They told their friends. Designers such as Bill Blass, Donna Karan, Ralph
Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Oscar de la Renta began vacationing in Como. In 2000,
Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones was filmed in part at the
Villa del Balbianello, which juts out dramatically into the lake. (More
recently,
Casino Royale was shot there as well.) Jennifer Lopez came on
her honeymoon in 2001 with her second husband, Cris Judd. Britney Spears
visited; Tori Spelling honeymooned. But the biggest change was Clooney’s 2002
purchase of Villa Oleandra, in the tiny village of Laglio. According to Robert
Eves, “The prices, especially around the Gold Coast, shot up.”
Tom Cruise asked to close down the Villa d’Este for his wedding to Katie
Holmes, in 2006 (request refused). Then came Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt,
visiting Clooney; the couple reportedly expressed an interest in getting
married at Como. This rumor sparked such a media uproar that Reuters and other
news agencies sent reporters.
And now come the Russians and the billionaires with lots of cash and nowhere
to buy.
“It took me six years to find my property,” says Robert Eves. He eventually
bought Villa Calla, as he renamed it, but the process was arduous, more
courtship than real-estate transaction. Eves had met the owner of the villa
through Francesco Ugoni in 2000. The owner had no interest in selling. Eves
continued searching. He estimates that he looked at maybe 30 villas.
“The first villas I toured were not like the typical offering in America,”
he says. “One villa on the lakeshore had not been occupied in 70 years. It had
no electricity, heating, or water systems remaining.” Another, a Liberty-style
villa, on a hill overlooking the lake, had been vacant for 20 years; thieves
had removed all the windows, the carved wood paneling, even the flooring.
In the meantime, Eves had continued to meet with the Villa Calla family, and
over the years they grew to be friends. “The future availability of the home
was not even discussed,” Eves recalls. Then, one evening, “the owner of the
villa announced at a dinner that he decided to sell his beautiful home to his
friend Robert Eves,” Eves says. “I was proud and honored.” But still there was
no mention of price. Another year went by and finally a price—he declines to
say what—was agreed upon. (“I told George Clooney at dinner one night that he
cost me well over a million dollars” extra, says Eves, who met the actor in
Milan after the “courtship.”) In January 2006 the deal was at last concluded.
But Eves’s story is exceptional. Partly it was his patience, but also his
respect and love for Como, which won over the owner. Other old families refuse
to sell, no matter how much money is laid on the table.
Athena Besana Ciani lives alone in cernobbio, in the
beautifully fading Villa Besana, which once housed her husband’s family. Among
their number were explorers, members of Parliament, patriots who fought with
Garibaldi—the family history is long. Besana Ciani herself resembles a
character from an Edith Wharton novel, with her rope of pearls, her refined
manners, her Queen’s English accent. (Wharton loved Como and featured it in her
1904 book,
Italian Villas and Their Gardens.) She serves pre-lunch
aperitifs, tiny salted pastries, and cold white wine on her shaded veranda
overlooking the long, green garden leading to the lake. She talks about the
past.
“There was an air of joy in the house. My daughter and seven nephews played
in the garden,” she says in a melancholic voice. She recalls life in Como from
the time she was a little girl. But now, she says, she is worried about how the
young generation of Comaschi, such as her surgeon daughter, who lives in
England, are leaving for other countries.
Inside, the villa—built in the 17th century—is tiled and cool. Besana Ciani
points out precious objects: the portraits of Enrico Besana, who traversed
America and New Zealand on horseback in the 1800s; his maps; his exquisite
traveling bar with crystal decanters, tiny golden liqueur glasses; a porcelain
collection from China. She tells stories of how her husband’s ancestor Baron
Ippolito Ciani bought the Villa d’Este in 1834, during the Austrian occupation
(the period of the Risorgimento, which culminated in the 1870 unification of
Italy). The legend is that the baron used the Villa d’Este as the center of the
anti-Austrian movement and sent fireworks into the sky with the colors of the
Italian flag. “These men were patriots of Italy and Lake Como, great men,” she
says. “But now the modern patriots of the lake are rich people who want to
destroy it. If they buy my villa, they will divide it up into apartments.”
She has had countless offers to sell—from Russians and others—but always
refused. “My house is like an old lady who speaks to me of all the people who
loved her,” she says quietly.
There are many people around the lake who have the same sense of history as
Besana Ciani. But huge sums of money are hard to resist, and she ticks off on
her fingers the noble families who were forced to sell or rent. “It’s very
difficult to fight against money,” she admits. “I am sorry not to be an
optimist. My life is here. My childhood was here. But it has changed. It once
was so intimate.”
Lake Como has always been a magnet for the elite.
Nineteen hundred years ago, the orator and writer Pliny the Younger, who was
born in Como, wrote to his friend Romanus, “I have several villas upon the
borders of this lake, but there are two particularly in which I take most
delight…One of them stands upon a rock, and overlooks the lake; the other
actually touches it. The first …I call my tragic; the other…my comic villa….
The former does not feel the force of the waves; the latter breaks them; from
that you see the fishing-vessels; from this you may fish yourself.”
If you close your eyes to the construction of the new swimming pool being
built too close to the water’s edge at the mysterious Villa La Cassinella (does
Branson own it or not?), you can imagine Pliny’s Lake Como. Or even further
back.
The Romans arrived here in the second century B.C., and the cove near
Bellagio, where the lake forks, was turned into an important military and
trading point. In the first century, the wealthy families from Milan and other
parts of Italy began to build villas to escape the city’s stifling summer heat.
The Viscontis arrived as early as the 14th century. (Their descendant Luchino
Visconti, the film director, once lived at Villa Erba, in Cernobbio.) After the
Viscontis came the Sforzas. Their Como guests were illustrious. At the December
1493 wedding of Bianca Maria Sforza to Emperor Maximilian, one attendee,
Leonardo da Vinci, was apparently disappointed by the lake in winter. “These
trips should be made in the month of May,” he wrote in a message left behind
after the ceremony.
It was in the 1700s that Lombardy came under Austrian
rule. This was the beginning of Como’s economic expansion and the domination of
the silk industry. Silkworms had been imported to Como, and for a time the
region produced the most beautiful silk in the world. Como prospered. At the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the new moneyed families in Lombardy
began building ever more elaborate villas. Some of these families still have
them.
English lords and Russian princes arrived in the 1800s. The villas, through
the coming years, housed tremendous parties full of royalty and heads of
state—Kaiser William, Franz Joseph I, the King of Albania, the Queens of Spain,
Sweden, and Romania, the Grand Duchess Catherine of Russia, Lady Chamberlain,
the Sheikh of Kuwait, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. King Farouk of Egypt spent
his honeymoon in 1951 at the Grand Hotel in Bellagio.
You can spend your entire time in Como on a Riva
speedboat zipping around the lake. But you only get a true sense of the weight
of history and the importance of preserving it when you enter the villas. On an
overcast late-spring morning, I take a boat—most people travel across the lake
by boat—to see Prince Fulco Gallarati Scotti at Villa Melzi d’Eril, one of the
most illustrious villas on the lake. Before we reach the landing, I spot the
neoclassical and imperial villa through the cypress trees that partially hide
it from the lake. The house was built from 1808 to 1810 for Francesco Melzi
d’Eril, an ancestor of the prince’s and a vice president of the short-lived
Italian Republic when it was constituted under Napoleon’s rule.
The prince pulls a heavy key from his vest and leads me inside the dark
quiet. His grandfather Duke Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, a diplomat, entertained
Churchill here in the 1950s. Another ancestor, the first Duke of Melzi, is
thought to have been one of da Vinci’s lovers. The rooms are dusty and smell of
leather. There are two portraits of Napoleon, one in which he holds a map with
his hands all over Italy. There are bronze tables by Manfredini. There is a
locked cupboard from which the prince pulls an ornate blue cashmere coat with
gold trim that at one time belonged to Francesco Melzi d’Eril. There is a heavy
guest book with aristocratic signatures going back hundreds of years. From a
window, you can see Villa Carlotta, across the lake, once owned by the Sommariva
family, rivals of the Melzis.
“Families competed. Alliances were made,” the prince says. “Deals were
brokered.”
But now the noble families are “extinguishing.” He adds, “Before, Como was
Italian.”
Like other residents, he says he has been offered large sums of money to
sell the villa, but has always refused. He has also refused to rent it for
parties or weddings. “If you open something up commercially,” he says, “you
lose your property. This villa is priceless. You cannot put monetary value on
it.” He has, however, opened the gardens—with their Egyptian sculptures and
exotic flowers—to the public. That is as far as he will let modern life reach
into his fiefdom, and requests by V.I.P.’s for private viewings have been
refused.
“New money does not understand the history or the culture of these villas,”
he says, walking with me through the tiny village of Loppia, most of which is
still owned by his family, to the dock where our boat is waiting.
On the way home from Villa Melzi, Sergio, the boatman, points out Villa
Oleandra. It’s the first place Lyudmila Putin, the Russian president’s wife,
asked to be taken when she visited Como two summers ago, or so a local will
tell me later: “She did not ask, ‘Where is the cathedral?’ She asked, ‘Where is
the house of George Clooney?’ So she took a boat and went to see the house of
George Clooney.”
There is indeed plenty of stargazing at Lake Como, but
part of the reason that celebrities love the area is that locals tend to
protect them. At Gatto Nero, the most starry restaurant in the area, the owner,
Fausto Fontana, guards clients such as Britney Spears, Daniel Craig, and Kylie
Minogue like a mama lion, and says the privacy of everyone, tourists or
celebrities, is respected. But when boats slow so that tourists can gape at
Clooney’s property or Branson’s supposed home or other landmark villas, there
is little the homeowners can do. The lake is public property.
Clooney, to his great credit, is beloved by locals. Recently he joined a
campaign to stop construction of a large parking complex and floating bridge in
Laglio near his villa, convening a meeting of local activists at Villa
Oleandra. “I don’t want my presence here to be a pain to the other citizens,”
he told the newspaper
Corriere della Sera, “but if you ask me, these
proposals are in every probability just to exploit the fact that I live here.”
The actor even said he’d sell the villa and move if the bulldozers arrived.
(The mayor of the village eventually decided to scrap the plans and told
Us
Weekly, “To Mr. Clooney we gave the honorary citizenship. We all are proud
of his choice to live here on Lake Como.”)
The locals see Clooney as
un bravo ragazzo, a good guy. He tries to
speak Italian. He plays basketball with the children. He rides his bicycle down
the winding roads without his bodyguards. In return, the locals, who understand
the value he has added by putting the little village of Laglio on the map,
protect him. Some locals have been known to point tourists who ask for George
Clooney’s villa in the wrong direction, says one Comasco.
Como’s social hub is Villa d’Este. It was built in
1568 by a prince and was later a royal residence of a future Queen of England,
Caroline of Brunswick, before becoming, in 1873, one of the most famous hotels
in the world. Located in the town of Cernobbio, on the southern end of the Gold
Coast, it is a magical place. The scented gardens stretch out, a blending of
Baroque and Romantic landscaping. There is a pool, which floats out onto the
lake, where Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Springsteen have played with their
children.
Many of the rooms are full of antiques and priceless paintings, and the
guests have included King Leopold, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Rita
Hayworth, Clark Gable, and Vladimir Nabokov. There are wonderful stories, such
as how Marlene Dietrich visited in 1949 but would appear on the lake only
incognito, in a big hat. Elton John had his personal chef take cooking classes
here, and Hitchcock used to come in and question the hotel’s chef about which
cooking machines he used. The restaurant is famous for its risotto, but Gianni
Agnelli’s favorite dish was simply the bean salad with tomatoes.
The hotel is now partly owned by the Droulers, a French family who arrived
in Como in the 1930s to work in the linen industry. The eldest son, Jean-Marc
Droulers, the current C.E.O. and president of the hotel, is often credited with
spicing up the image of Villa d’Este in the 1980s. Today, while the old legions
of American and French tourists are still coming, sitting on the terrace
drinking champagne are a new breed of guests: Russians barking into cell phones
or picking away at BlackBerrys.
They don’t smile, they don’t say “
Buon giorno” in the elevators, the
way polite guests do. In the evening, tall, slender women wearing four-inch
gold heels and dressed in leopard-print Cavalli dresses prowl the hallways on
their way to dinner. At breakfast, burly men signal waiters by snapping their
fingers or commanding them in tones one would use with a dog. They wear their
dressing gowns and smoke cigars in the lobby.
“Russians are tough,” says one employee who can’t be named. “Because they
arrived at money so quickly, they never learned manners or culture. They look
at a menu and scan it for what is the most expensive. To them, that is class.
They have no idea of what good taste is.”
At Navedano, a restaurant in the city of Como favored by Hollywood people,
the proprietor, Giuliano Casartelli, whose family has run the restaurant for
generations and has seen it all, tells me about a Russian millionaire who
arrived the night before me with a beautiful young woman. He phoned ahead to
order a tableful of expensive, rare flowers. He drank two bottles of Cristal.
Then he had the flowers sent to Moscow by private jet the next day.
Gauche extravagance is one thing. Some Russians arouse darker suspicions, as
they do in other parts of Europe they have colonized, such as the Riviera.
“Every single time X arrives,” says the Villa d’Este employee, referencing a
Russian steel magnate, “the Italian secret service arrive immediately after and
question everyone about his movements.”
“Frankly, I check the Russians out before they come,” says one businessman
in the area, who sometimes hosts visitors and relies on an Italian visa agency
for intelligence. “It’s not hard to do. You make a few phone calls and you know
who you are having as a guest.”
Though local gossip has it that some Comaschi homeowners refuse to sell to
Russians, one real-estate agent says, “I think that, even if someone tells you
this, if a Russian arrives and offers the asked price, everyone will say, Yes,
thanks.” Many Russians prefer to pay in cash, this agent adds, even when prices
are in the millions, though, he says, an Italian anti-Mafia law makes it
illegal to accept more than 12,500 euros in cash.
Robert Eves says another way of protecting the villas is to buy them not for
investment but for preservation. “I am putting my villa into a trust for the
benefit of my children with strict rules that they cannot sell for a profit. It
is for their children and their children’s children,” he writes in an e-mail.
“A villa on the west shore of Lake Como is an extraordinary
tesoro, and
it should be protected and carried through the generations in the traditional
Italian way.”
So what will happen to Como?
I first came to the northern lakes from London as a young student, more than
two decades ago, and then returned about 10 years ago with my Italian-born
father. It was a strange, Thomas Mann—like voyage. My father was terminally ill
but did not yet know it. He would be dead within a year, and it was the last
time he would see Italy.
It was he who told me the history of the area, of Mussolini’s grisly end, of
Churchill’s paintings, and of the nearby northern front in World War I, where
my great-uncle and grandfather fought in trenches (and my great-uncle died). He
told me about the silk industry and the invaders from the north who came to
conquer Italy in 218 B.C.
My father took me to the train station when I was returning to London. We
had tea first. In the café, an odd man with a comic-book Iron Curtain accent
and imitation-crocodile shoes was sitting with a sexy young woman. They began
to chat with us. They were visitors from Russia on a holiday. But the girl kept
winking at my elderly father, and the man kept offering me a lift to Milan. It
was rather odd, and eventually they left.
“Russians in the Italian lakes, how strange,” my father remarked. Then he
added, “Did you see his shoes? Never trust a man with cheap shoes.”
Visiting this spring, I kept thinking that the Russians are certainly
present in the lakes now. But they don’t wear cheap shoes anymore.
The day I left Como, it was drizzling slightly. From the elaborate terrace
of Villa Il Dosso Pisani, in the mountains above the lake, I took a final look
at the grand villas curving toward the water and the unspoiled parcels of
hilltop land. I could see small boats and smell jasmine. Everything looked
probably the way Churchill painted it, more than 60 years ago. But I wonder
what it will look like in 15 years and remember what Longfellow once wrote of
Lake Como: “I ask myself, Is this a dream? / Will it vanish into air?”
