
It’s a cloudless December day on Lake Como, the kind that would make anyone want to stay in bed and stock the pantry. Ever since we overtook Lord Byron—the unromantic hydrofoil ferry, not the Romantic poet—the only fast-moving object that skipper Giorgio Cantaluppi and I have spotted is a cormorant, cresting the ripples in the direction of George Clooney’s villa, wingtips skimming the water.
When we stop by the ridiculously picturesque bridge and waterfall of Nesso—where, in summer, a flotilla of tourist boats face off against an army of selfie sticks—we are still gloriously alone. The waterfall is sublime, but so is the sun warming my back as I turn to the north. Somewhere over there, beyond those snow-dusted peaks on the border between Italy and Switzerland, people are skiing. Me, I’m wondering if the hotel pool is still open.

When Mediterranean resorts such as Cannes or San Remo began to attract visitors from colder climes in the second half of the 19th century, they were winter destinations. Not so Lake Como. The great villas that were built around its shores from the 16th century onwards were intimately connected with the summer ritual known as la villeggiatura. Like the Palladian villas of Veneto, they were places that urban aristocrats would decamp to, generally around mid-June, with a platoon of servants, lapdogs, and candelabras in tow.

The villeggiatura season somehow became hard-wired into the Lake Como mindset. When smart hotels began offering an alternative to owning a grand private villa (and some, such as Villa d’Este, Passalacqua, and the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, were once grand private villas), most chose to open from Easter through to the end of October, but two-thirds of foreign visitors to the lake still arrive in the four months between June and September.

Recently, however, a breeze of change has been wafting across the Lago di Como—especially across the lower left arm of its inverted Y. Known as the ramo di Como, or Como branch, this is classic Como, Clooney Como, villeggiatura Como, home to most of the lake’s historical villas and gardens, and the near totality of Lake Como’s high-end hotels. There are various reasons for this, but the one that leaves all the others trailing far behind is its sheer beauty. This is where the mountains come down to the water in folds like the drapery trailing behind a Botticelli angel. It’s where the lake can feel like a gorge one moment and a sea the next—as it does through the squeeze between Laglio and Careno, where there’s a wide bay dominated to the south by the great pale yellow façade of one of Como’s greatest houses, the 16th-century Villa Pliniana, today a wedding venue and whole-rental property that is owned and managed by Sereno Hotels.

The Lake Como shift has to do with a buzzword that is a mouthful in Italian: destagionalizzazione, which, in effect, means stretching the season at both ends and thinning the bump in the middle. Spring can be slow to arrive in this pre-Alpine setting, and the summer heat often lingers well into autumn. So the Lake Como spin on “de-seasonalization” has become: open in mid-to-late March, then push on through to the winter festive season, closing right after Italy’s Epiphany holiday.

“I love late fall and the beginning of winter on the lake,” says Valentina De Santis, of the widely adored Passalacqua hotel. “The light is incredible… sometimes you get crisp days when you can almost reach out and touch the opposite shore. At other times, there are romantic mornings when the mist rises off the water, and everything is hazy and indistinct.” Passalacqua—the 18th-century Villa De Santis and her family restored and launched in June 2022 as a ravishing 24-room hotel for those looking for a 21st-century spin on la villeggiatura—now stays open from variable March dates until early January. So does that historic grande dame of Lake Como tourism, Villa d’Este. So does Vista Lago di Como, a smart new townhouse hotel on the waterfront of Como town that is owned by the Passera family. Bianca Passera is another of the lake’s dynamic hospitality entrepreneurs who is gambling on a 10-month season. Como town—smart, cultured, parlaying its historic connections with the silk industry into a present-day flair for looking good—comes into its own in spring, winter, and autumn. This is a hard-working city that also knows how to enjoy itself.

If most hotels feel the need to shutter for at least a couple of months in winter, the same is not true of restaurants. At lunch in Crotto dei Platani, a place that began as a local hostelry and evolved into a panoramic steel-and-glass pavilion restaurant with its own private jetty, I start talking to the owner, Francesco Cavadini. In 2006, he made the against-the-grain decision to keep the place open throughout the winter. The message took a while to get out, but now, Cavadini tells me, all it takes is a sunny January weekend for the restaurant to fill up.

Some of these out-of-season guests drive up from Milan for the day, or across the border from Switzerland. But quite a few have houses here—including a small community of affluent Thais who Cavadini counts as among his best customers. Chatting with a Bangkok-based businessman one day, the restaurateur asked why he always turned up in winter. “I like to wear a coat sometimes,” was the reply. The off-season in Italy is also a good time for those who like to factor spontaneity into their plans. I landed a lunch table at Alle Darsene di Loppia, a popular creative trattoria by the entrance to Villa Melzi in Bellagio, at two hours’ notice on a Sunday in March. Good luck repeating that in July.