Lake Como is an upside-down Y of water 46 kilometres long in the Alpine foothills of Lombardy, in northern Italy, with wooded mountains going straight down into it. It is 410 metres deep in places, the deepest lake in Italy, and its floor lies well below the level of the Mediterranean. All that water holds its temperature. The gardens along these shores grow palms and citrus at the foot of the Alps. The glacier that cut the trench left only narrow shelves of flat ground, so the villages sit wherever there is room and are joined by ferry rather than road. The classic day is spent on deck, crossing between Bellagio, Varenna and Menaggio while the villas and slopes slide past you.
Bellagio stands on the promontory where the two southern arms divide. Its lungolago is flat — a waterfront promenade under pastel facades and clipped plane trees, water on both sides, boats at the pier. Behind it the streets turn into stone stairways too narrow for cars, and as you climb them the lake keeps reappearing between the buildings. At the top the view opens back over the fork of the two arms below you. You meet the villas properly only from the water, from a varnished wooden taxi-boat. From out there the scale registers: mountains dropping straight in with no shelf of flat land anywhere, and the western shore going gold late in the day. Several of the great houses open their grounds: Balbianello's sculpted terraces, Carlotta's banks of azaleas, Melzi's lawns running into the water. Paths climb between cypress and camellia to terraces where the mountains stand doubled in the lake below. None of this arranging is new. Pliny the Younger kept two houses on this shore and named them for the theatre. Comedy sat down at the water, where he said he could nearly fish from the window; Tragedy stood high on a ridge with the whole lake under it.