We finished our guided tour and then wandered around Como. As I’ve noted previously, while we like guided tours, we also like to explore on our own. Many of the people on the tour rode the coach back to the hotel, but as we had already ridden the ferry on the previous day and were comfortable with doing so, we left the tour and went exploring on our own. My wife, Kathy, had seen a shop that we didn’t have time to stop in while we were on the tour, so we tried to find it. Alas, we didn’t find it, but found a few other places to shop and had a nice wander around Como. We spent some time in a store from Denmark called Flying Tiger, where we bought a few things, including a few gifts for some of our grandchildren. It reminded us of Ikea, but with smaller items. I would not have guessed we would have bought Danish items in Italy! I spent some time in a hobby shop, but didn’t buy anything. During our wander, we had a nice lunch at a café in the middle of this beautiful city. We eventually ended up back at the cathedral and stopped at a nearby café for something to drink before the ferry ride back to the hotel. We sat in the front of the ferry to soak in the views on our retuen to the hotel, but due to the weather, we were the “soakees”! The lake was a little rough and we got pretty wet from water splashing over the bow, so we moved inside to avoid getting totally soaked. We had dinner at a nearby restaurant at the end of a very enjoyable day.

Bellagio! On the second full day of our three-night pre-cruise extension before our Rhine cruise, we saw more of Lake Como. We had another excellent breakfast at the hotel and then walked through the tunnel under the road that connects the main part of the hotel to the part on the lake with the swimming pool and private dock. Viking arranged for a private boat to pick us up at the hotel dock for the 20 or so of us on the extension to tour Lake Como and spend some time in Bellagio, often called the gem of Lake Como.

Lake Como is shaped like an inverted Y, with Como at the end of the bottom left part of the Y (most south-west) and Bellagio near the apex of the Y; our hotel in Moltrasio was part of the way north-east up the branch of the Y from Como (see map). We had a very nice tour of the lake before Bellagio, where we had free time to wander around and have lunch, before returning to the hotel. We could have stayed longer and taken the ferry back to our hotel, but decided not to, as we plan to go back to Lake Como in the future and explore more of this beautiful lake.

The Villa d'Este, (photo 9) originally Villa del Garovo, is a Renaissance patrician residence in Cernobbio on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy. Both the villa and the 25-acre (100,000 m2) park which surrounds it have undergone significant changes since their sixteenth-century origins as a summer residence for the Cardinal of Como. Nevertheless, visiting the garden in 1903 for Century Magazine, Edith Wharton found this to be ‘the only old garden on Como which keeps more than a fragment of its original architecture’, and noted that ‘though Queen Caroline anglicised part of the grounds, the main lines of the Renaissance garden still exist’. Since 1873, the Villa d'Este complex has been a luxury hotel which is a popular destination of Hollywood celebrities and elite billionaires for its ultra-luxurious amenities.

Today, with room rates averaging €1000 (approximately $1,070) a night and top suites averaging €3500 (~$3,750) per night, the villa is a luxury hotel for wealthy people and a high-level congress center. In June 2009, Forbes reckoned it the best hotel in the world, while in 2014 it was listed as the 2nd best resort in Europe by Travel + Leisure magazine. Every May, the hotel holds a Concours d'Elegance for vintage and concept cars, the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este, which was first presented in 1928. In September, it hosts the annual Ambrosetti Forum, an international workshop attended by prominent figures from the fields of politics, finance and business, which has taken place there since 1975.

My previous post can be found at https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-805647-1.html, while the first post of this series (that includes a map of all of the places where we stopped) can be found at https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-801137-1.html

Next up: More of our second full day at Lake Como