The conventional wisdom about Lake Como is that it is best visited in late spring and early autumn, when the temperatures are mild, the gardens are flowering, and the famous villas are open to visitors. This conventional wisdom is correct but incomplete. The unconventional wisdom — the one held by those who know the lake with genuine intimacy — is that winter Como is better than summer Como in almost every respect that matters.
Lake Como in Winter: A Different World
In winter, the lake belongs to the Lariani, the people of the area, who have lived with this landscape their entire lives and whose relationship with it is practical, domestic, and entirely unfiltered by tourism. The ferries that cross between Varenna, Bellagio, and Menaggio carry schoolchildren and pensioners and workers rather than tourists. The restaurants serve the local cuisine — missoltini (dried shad), polenta uncia (polenta with lard and cheese), risotto with perch fished from the lake that morning — rather than the international menus designed to satisfy a global clientele. It is the same unhurried intimacy found at Italy’s lesser-known lakes — Iseo, Orta, Trasimeno — but with Como’s particular grandeur preserved beneath it.
The Winter Light
The light in December and January is extraordinary. Low-angled, pale, and crystalline, it renders the lake’s surface silver rather than blue, and the mountains that rise on three sides — the Prealps of the Lario triangle — white with snow above a certain altitude while their lower slopes remain green with cypress and olive. On clear mornings, the reflections of the villas in the still water are so perfect that the photographs look manipulated.
Where to Stay in Winter
The grand hotels, mostly closed between November and March, are replaced by a handful of small, family-run establishments of the kind that Italian travel rewards at its best — places where the owners know their suppliers personally, where breakfast involves freshly made cornetti rather than the anonymous pastries of the larger hotels, where you can ask for advice about where to walk or what to order and receive an answer that comes from genuine local knowledge rather than a printed sheet.
What to Visit in Winter
The Villa Carlotta at Tremezzo, whose garden of azaleas and rhododendrons is one of Italy’s most spectacular floral spectacles in spring, is open year-round and virtually empty in winter. The paintings and sculpture in its rooms — Canova’s Palamedes, Thorvaldsen’s Alexander’s Triumph frieze — can be seen in near-solitude, at the contemplative pace they deserve. The Villa del Balbianello at Lenno, the promontory villa used as a location in both Casino Royale and Star Wars Episode II, opens on weekend afternoons in winter and offers views across the lake that justify any journey.
Planning Your Winter Visit
Come for a long weekend in January. Stay in Varenna, the least-touristed of the lake’s major villages, in a small hotel whose rooms look across the water to the mountains. Eat the local fish, drink the local Italian wine, walk the Greenway del Lago path that connects the western shore villages through gardens and olive groves. Discover that Lake Como, stripped of its summer performance and returned to its essential self, is one of the most quietly beautiful places in Italy.
