Lariowood: 100 years of Cinema on Lake Como

It was Greta Garbo who first introduced the world to this secret, sophisticated place, and it was she—filling the screen with her radiant face—who twice mentioned the name Tremezzo in that famous final scene of Grand Hotel, which won the 1932 Academy Award for Best Picture. In the words of La Divina, the Grand Hotel Tremezzo was “that sunny, happy place” set amid nature’s wondrous beauty: a landscape of light, water, reflections and ever-changing images that stay with you forever. Cinematic by nature, you might say.

Lake Como has, in fact, been a sought-after location for film productions since the 1920s, when what we now call Lariowood took shape on our shores, thanks to a combination of landscape, art and architecture that is utterly unique in the world. Most recently, we saw Anne Hathaway—aka Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada 2—cross the lake on a classic Venetian-style water taxi and dock at Villa Balbiano, the historic residence in Ossuccio that also featured in Ridley Scott’s 2021 House of Gucci. A century earlier, in the summer of 1925, it was Alfred Hitchcock who came ashore at the little harbor in Nesso to shoot his directorial debut, the silent film The Pleasure Garden. Nearly twenty years later, in 1942, Isa Miranda, an Italian actress so striking that Hollywood had already come calling, starred in Malombra. Director Mario Soldati shot the film—one of his most intense—within the walls and gardens of Villa Pliniana, the very place where the author of the eponymous novel, Antonio Fogazzaro, had once stayed.

Lake Como has long been renowned as a backdrop for stories of love, from the romantic to the tormented. Just think of Annie Girardot and Alain Delon strolling through Bellagio in one of the most tender scenes—if not the only one—from Luchino Visconti’s 1960 masterpiece, Rocco and His Brothers. Visconti himself was no stranger to Lake Como: Young Luchino spent his summers at the family’s Villa Erba, where, as he later recalled, he dreaded the sad day school would start again. As it happens, Steven Soderbergh used Villa Erba as the setting for several scenes in Ocean’s Twelve, the 2004 sequel to Ocean’s Eleven. Who could forget the now-iconic scene that captures the swagger of Vincent Cassel’s François Toulour, aka the Night Fox, as he strolls bare-chested past a rumpled bed in his opulent Villa Erba suite and shrugs on a white silk robe with effortless elegance? Just a short while later, George Clooney and Julia Roberts—the film’s it-couple Danny and Tess—surprise the Night Fox with a visit at the villa. A fitting nod to the huge role that Lake Como and Clooney’s newly purchased Villa Oleandra would come to play in this great American actor’s life. In a little romantic cameo of his own, George Clooney met his true love, Amal Ramzi Alamuddin, at Villa Oleandra in 2013.

Meanwhile, Villa del Balbianello, on the tip of the Lavedo Peninsula at Lenno, is where Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala, former Queen of Naboo, share a clandestine kiss in 2002’s Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones. Played by Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman, the lovers lean against the villa’s ornate balustrade, flower urns behind them and, before them, a shimmering expanse of water shaded in pink, blue and gold that no special effect could ever replicate. Casino Royale was also filmed in this little corner of paradise—which started out as a Franciscan monastery, then became a nobleman’s villa and the home of explorer Guido Monzino, before he bequeathed it to the Italian National Trust (FAI) in 1988. Surely Daniel Craig, in the role of James Bond, must have explored the villa’s eclectic collections after his brutal encounter with Le Chiffre. In the film’s fictional world, Villa del Balbianello serves as a clinic where the famous spy recovers from his ordeal. But let’s come full circle, back to that Prada-clad devil, whose long-awaited sequel celebrates the creative spirit of fashion and the enviable Italian way of life. As Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, reminded Andy at the end of the first film, “Everybody wants to be us.” Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but surely all of us dream of experiencing one of life’s most romantic moments against the dazzling backdrop of Lake Como.