A PRESTIGIOUS SET ON LAKE COMO

Every glimpse of Lake Como is a source of beauty and enchantment: nature meets authentic villages, and each glimpse blends classic silhouettes and modern lines, sky and earth, mountain and lake, notes of green and chords of blue. The landscapes of the Lario create poetic suggestions that inspire literary, creative and cinematographic expression.

Among the villas of Lake Como, one of the fulcrums of this trend is Villa Erba which, as well as being a prestigious location for events and conferences, weaves valuable relationships with creativity and artistic expression. The residence of the Italian director and screenwriter Luchino Visconti, who occasionally spent his summers there, the elegant estate in Cernobbio, on the shores of Lake Como, has always had strong links with the seventh art.

 

"Villa Erba is a house that we love very much, a real Lombard villa, very dear to us. We will all gather there, brothers and sisters, and it will be just like the time when we were children and lived in the shadow of our mother," says the neorealist director; and who knows whether the elegance of those magical places has contributed to his films, thanks to the vivid memories of the villa at the end of the 19th century: "Happy days, by the lake, we would make plans and the storm would always break. Disgruntled, we remained silent, clinging to the glass already streaked with rain. A storm destroyed the most beautiful tree in the garden. Everything is still alive in me. Sometimes we slept on the grass in the afternoon hibernation, in a quiver of crickets and cicadas. In the evening we would show our sleep-weary faces to our parents. We fell asleep as soon as we got up from the table, we had run so much.

 

The ties woven between Villa Erba and the cinema are strengthened thanks to the Lake Como Film Festival, an event that involves various locations around Lake Como and celebrates, renews and nurtures the link between Como and the seventh art: Villa Erba, with its splendid park overlooking the lake, becomes the prestigious location for the Lake Como Film Nights.

The charm of Villa Erba and its historical and cultural wealth have also won over Hollywood directors. Thus the estate, from being an event location, became a film set: the gallop, the greenhouses, the park, the ancient villa... intertwine and follow each other in front of the cameras of Marleen Gorris in La partita - La difesa di Lužin (The Game - Lužin's defence) (2000), where Lake Como becomes the backdrop for the love story between young Natalia and chess player Alexander.

 

George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta Jones, Julia Roberts and Matt Damon move through the elegance and reflections of Villa Erba in scenes from Steven Soderbergh's 2004 film Ocean's Twelve. In 2019, Villa Erba becomes the destination of a chase, a getaway that branches off from Como along the lake's roads to Cernobbio (with a collage of places that locals will have realised are totally distant views of each other) in Kyle Newacheck's film Murder Mystery, starring Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler.

 

In addition to cinema, Villa Erba also opened its gates to music: in 2005 it was the backdrop for the music video for Cool, the single by singer Gwen Stefani, in which the elegant villa immersed in the park overlooking the shores of Lake Como is recognisable. The same year, the splendid setting of Villa Erba was chosen for a stage on singer Anastacia's Live at Last Tour.

 

The reflections of the Lario and the architectural elegance of the historic villas of Lake Como often become the ideal location for culture: the beauty of these places manages to enchant those who go there and is easily impressed in the mind as a sweet memory. These fascinating views give life to suggestions and inspirations, suggesting the perfect setting through their own expression; so every event on Lake Como becomes a work of art, a manifestation of style and culture, even when it offers surprising settings for business events, congresses and meetings.

As if to say: beauty cannot be locked away and will always find space and emotion in the mind.