This is part of Off Season Italy, a collection of guides highlighting the year-round appeal of Italy's most popular destinations, courtesy of our favorite local tastemakers. Read more here.
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Valentina De Santis
There are those who are to the manor born. Valentina De Santis was to the grand-hotel born. Her grandfather acquired one of the lake’s hospitality legends, the Grand Hotel Tremezzo, in 1975. Born in 1982, Valentina grew up wandering its corridors and getting little “don’t tell mum and dad” treats from the kitchen staff. Gradually, her sense of the hotel as one big playhouse morphed into a fascination with its inner workings and the mysterious qualcosa that keeps a venerable luxe hotel fresh and relevant. When her father talked her into joining the family business as the “GHT” celebrated its centenary in 2010, this interest became a professional one. Just over a decade later, the family acquired Villa Passalacqua, an 18th-century lakeside villa not far from Tremezzo. We spoke with her about the most beautiful time to visit Como, when the streets are less crowded and the days get crisper.
Let's talk timing—is there a sweet spot for visiting Como and embracing life as the locals do?
I love late fall and the beginning of winter. In recent years, early October has been almost as busy as summer, but numbers start dropping off in the month's second half. By November, when most hotels have closed for the season, it’s pretty much just us locals. But alongside a few other hoteliers around Como, my family and I have embraced the challenge of extending the season. Passalaqua now stays open all through November and December into the first week of January.
A room with views of the lake at Passalacqua
Bellagio glowing in the late-fall sun
What do you love more about these end-of-year months?
The light. The lake changes with the seasons. At this time of year, you either get crisp days when you can almost reach out and touch the opposite shore or romantic mornings when what we call la bruma—a kind of winter mist—rises off the water and everything is hazy and indistinct. You also get the most incredible sunrises and sunsets, and I love to go for long walks with family and friends in the chestnut woods. We always come home with bagfuls of chestnuts. Then begins the fun of roasting them.
Are there any travelers visiting during this cooler time of year?
Milan is only an hour away, and so is the Swiss border, so there are a few visitors—especially on the weekends. Many villa owners like to spend time here in the low season, too. But mostly,
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It's the summer of the Paris Olympic Games and Taylor Swift's Eras Tour across European cities, but for locals, this summer is already heating up to be one of protests—across Lake Como, Barcelona, the Canary Isles, Venice and Amsterdam, residents are already fighting what they perceive as overtourism.
The way people usually travel is all wrong, says visionary hotelier Thierry Teyssier. And for more than two decades, he’s been showing them how to do it better. His latest venture, 700,000 Heures Impact, is spreading to a new continent—and proving that regenerative travel doesn’t have to be lectures and compromises but can instead be real encounters and comforts.
Traveling to Europe in the summer months is a rite of passage—steamy nights spent in the south of Spain, snoozy days on the most beautiful Greek islands, breezy afternoons sipping rosé on a terrace in the South of France. But as tourism levels continue to rise after a few quiet years, and peak-season temperatures climb from Italy to Croatia, is the appeal of a big European summer holiday dwindling?
This is part of Off Season Italy, a collection of guides highlighting the year-round appeal of Italy's most popular destinations, courtesy of our favorite local tastemakers. Read more here.
This is part of Off Season Italy, a collection of guides highlighting the year-round appeal of Italy's most popular destinations, courtesy of our favorite local tastemakers. Read more here.
This is part of Off Season Italy, a collection of guides highlighting the year-round appeal of Italy's most popular destinations, courtesy of our favorite local tastemakers. Read more here.
This is part of Off Season Italy, a collection of guides highlighting the year-round appeal of Italy's most popular destinations, courtesy of our favorite local tastemakers. Read more here.
This is part of Off Season Italy, a collection of guides highlighting the year-round appeal of Italy's most popular destinations, courtesy of our favorite local tastemakers. Read more here.
The delights of Italy are universal: clinking Negronis in Rome, spinning a Riva through Venice’s Grand Canal, island-hopping off the shores of Sicily, all interlaced with hefty doses of wine, mozzarella, and art. It’s this limitless allure that has travelers from all over the world descend on the boot with near insatiable fervency, and often all at the same time—at least that’s how it can feel when trying to claim an inch of the Amalfi’s rocky beachfront in July. But in arriving en masse, travelers risk muting the very thing they come to enjoy: the essence of the place, as conjured by the lifestyle that Italians pull off with aplomb.