Lake Como in Spring: Wisteria, Villa Gardens and the Lake Before the Crowds

Lake Como in July and August is a managed experience. The Bellagio ferries are queued. The lakeside promenades are occupied. The roads between Bellagio, Tremezzo, and Varenna — narrow, one-lane, built for carriages — are working at their maximum capacity. In April and May, the conditions are the reverse, and the argument for early spring is one of the strongest in Italian travel.

The Wisteria Season

The wisteria of Lake Como is a specific botanical event. The vines — some of them two hundred years old, trained across the pergolas and terraces of the nineteenth-century villas along the Tremezzina shore — flower in late April and the first two weeks of May in cascades of violet and white that have the quality of an architectural element rather than a natural one. The most visible concentration is at Villa del Balbianello at Lenno and Villa Carlotta at Tremezzo, but the wisteria phenomenon is general along the western shore: every hotel terrace, every private garden, every old villa that has maintained its planting programme shows it.

Villa del Balbianello — the FAI property on the Lavedo promontory, accessible only by water taxi from Lenno — is, in the wisteria season, one of the more genuinely dramatic garden visits in northern Italy. The terraced gardens descend to the lake on three sides; the view north toward Griante and south toward Argegno frames the full basin of the lake. The villa itself, built by Cardinal Durini in 1787 and subsequently owned by the explorer Guido Monzino who donated it to FAI, has an interior of considerable quality. Morning visits before the first public boats arrive from Como town are the correct format.

Villa Carlotta in April

Villa Carlotta at Tremezzo houses the most significant botanical garden on Lake Como — 7 hectares of formal terracing, with collections of azalea and rhododendron that flower in April and represent the primary spring colour event on the lake before the wisteria takes over. The villa's interiors, with their neoclassical sculpture collection, are publicly accessible and rarely crowded in April. The garden in April morning light — the azalea panels in front of the central pergola, the wisteria beginning on the terrace railings, the lake visible between the cypress alleys — is the botanical argument for the month.

Lake Como in Spring by Boat

The practical argument for a private boat on Lake Como in spring is not luxury — it is logistics. The road system, built in the early nineteenth century before automobiles, was not designed for contemporary traffic volumes. A private boat between Bellagio, the Tremezzina shore, Varenna, and Menaggio takes fifteen minutes where the road equivalent takes considerably longer in May. More practically, several of the most significant properties — Balbianello, Villa Monastero at Varenna, the private gardens above Cernobbio — are accessible only or primarily by water. The morning light on the lake from a boat, with the limestone mountains of the Lario basin above and the wisteria cascading from the villa terraces at water's edge, is not available from the road.