Italy’s Lake Garda is only a two-hour drive from Como, and while it doesn’t attract the George Clooney set, it is arguably just as majestic. Fog clings to the surrounding mountains, dotted with small, colorful villages. In the summer months, the dark water brightens and shimmers a luminous blue. It features in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and D. H. Lawrence, who spent six months on its shores, called it “a lake as beautiful as the beginning of creation.”
Nearly 500 years earlier, on a rocky outcrop between the towns of Corno and Acque Fredde, Punta San Vigilio, an estate overlooking the lake, was built. “My ancestor constructed it around 1450,” Bartolomeo Guarienti di Brenzone, a descendant of Italy’s once royal House of Savoy, tells me. “His idea was to create a humanistic paradise—an Eden for artists, philosophers, and Renaissance thinkers.”
The owners converted the villa—a large, pale-stone structure with a hipped roof and Renaissance garden—into an inn in 1498. The Republic of Venice was at its height, lakes were arteries for commerce and culture, and Punta San Vigilio became a waypoint for merchants, pilgrims, and wandering nobility.
For centuries, little changed. The villa was painted by Peder Mønsted in 1909 and by John Singer Sargent in 1913. Over the years, everyone from Napoleon to Churchill, King Charles, and Czar Alexander II, as well as writers such as Hemingway and Gabriele D’Annunzio, have walked its pebbled paths. When, in 1910, the Italian entrepreneur Ludovico Montresor di Pescheria del Garda tried to build a luxury hotel on the premises, the project was met with widespread protest and quickly abandoned. “A property may pass through your hands for a lifetime,” Bartolomeo says, “but it’s your duty to safeguard it for the generations to come.”
Today, Punta San Vigilio, now a national monument, includes two main buildings at its heart: the villa and the locanda, which still houses a 13-room hotel run by the Guarientis, as it did many centuries ago. But the family’s ownership of the larger property was fractured when, in the middle of a recent inheritance dispute, part of the Punta San Vigilio estate was reportedly sold to Giovanni Rana, the head of a global pasta empire. Then a flurry of permits—which the Italian media alleges bypassed heritage protections and ignored environmental protocols—were granted with unusual speed, raising suspicions of local corruption.
In May, the mayor of Garda, Davide Bendinelli, dismissed the uproar, calling the project a modest redevelopment. He claimed that the overall building volume would remain unchanged, and that the land’s zoning—which determines whether it can be used for tourism or other purposes—had not been altered since 1975.
In November 2023, three towering cranes appeared above the historic driveway. They uprooted 500-year-old olive trees to make way for a cement parking lot as well as a terrace overlooking the lake’s shore. The following summer, the Riviera Restaurant—complete with a beach club, lounge, and panoramic terrace—officially opened at Punta San Vigilio.
Controversy continues to swirl on Lake Garda, not only around a sprawling basement and six luxury suites still under construction on the Punta San Vigilio property but also around how any of this was allowed to happen to a designated national monument. If local complaints are anything to go by, Italy’s king of fresh-packaged pasta has cast a long shadow over the lake.
“Look at this parking lot,” Bartolomeo’s father, Agostino, said in an interview. “It cries out for vengeance.”
Friends and Enemies
According to Bartolomeo, the Guarienti family’s relationship with the Ranas began in 1994, when Giovanni’s son, Gian Luca, and his wife, Antonella, began renting part of the Punta San Vigilio estate from Bartolomeo’s aunt, Countess Emanuella Guarienti di Brenzone.
At first, things were cordial. “It was nice to have another young couple nearby,” Bartolomeo, who splits his time between Lake Garda and Barcelona with his family, recalls.
But over time, tensions allegedly mounted. In 2006, Count Guglielmo Guarienti di Brenzone died, leaving his entire share of the estate to Emanuella, his daughter. Guglielmo’s sons, Guariente and Agostino (Bartolomeo’s father), had already inherited the main villa and the locanda as a gift while their father was still alive, but they contested the will, arguing they were entitled to more of the estate. During the litigation, Emanuella sold her portion of the estate—including the farm buildings, surrounding agricultural land, and the Baia delle Sirene beach—to Giovanni Rana. The result was a fractured estate: the Guarientis kept the villa and the locanda, while the Ranas got everything around them. (The Guarienti family is still in court, challenging Emanuella’s sale to the Ranas, so far unsuccessfully.)
By then, relations between the two families were already strained. In the late 2000s, Gian Luca began using the property for commercial purposes—hosting events, including a literary prize—allegedly in violation of his rental agreement. Bartolomeo says the Guarientis responded with formal legal action, though those early efforts were soon overshadowed by the larger fight over ownership.
Gian Luca, now the C.E.O. of the family company, has attracted controversy far beyond Lake Garda, having been sued for both racist and homophobic remarks he made toward employees. A spokesperson for Rana told the New York Post in 2016 that the lawsuit regarding workplace racism was “wholly without merit.” A lawsuit found that he had indeed made homophobic slurs targeted at a specific employee. However, the company maintained that they “always denied and [continue] to deny that Gian Luca Rana ever addressed [the plaintiff] with homophobic names.” (Gian Luca Rana did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.)
Fast-forward to November 7, 2023, when the municipality of Garda issued permits for the Ranas to begin redevelopment of Punta San Vigilio. According to Italian media, the permits included restoration work and new additions: a parking lot, a pavilion, a lakeside pier, a thermal plant, and external power cabins (portable, pre-fabricated containers that house electrical equipment). Notably, reports also claim that there was no environmental-impact assessment, despite the villa’s being perched on Italy’s largest lake, and the Baia delle Sirene’s being a spawning ground for several species of birds and fish.
Getting the green light on such a massive project is especially significant in a country as bureaucratic, and protective of its historical treasures, as Italy. Under heritage laws, modifications to national monuments typically require explicit, detailed authorization from the Ministry of Culture. In this case, the necessary approvals were obtained, but the speed and discretion with which they were granted has raised questions. The Guarientis have said that they have historically not been able to so much as “move a pebble” on the Punta San Vigilio property without facing endless red tape, let alone touch walls dating back to the 16th century. Yet, according to Italian-media sources, the Rana family was able to secure permits for major renovations in short order.
Local pushback followed almost immediately. Environmental groups, heritage-preservation advocates, and members of the Guarienti family all sounded the alarm, questioning how such a protected site could be subjected to drastic changes with so little transparency.
The backlash caught the attention of investigative journalists at Italy’s national broadcaster, Rai. In April 2024, a detailed investigation by the network alleged possible foul play, citing irregularities in the permitting process, fast-tracking, and blurred lines between public officials and private interests. According to their reporting, the land was sold not to the Ranas directly but to Soledad SRL, a shell company shielding the identities of the buyers, begging the question of why the local authorities of the Ministry of Culture would ever be willing to grant permission for the purchase. While Rai stopped short of explicitly alleging bribery, the implication of corruption was difficult to ignore.
“We don’t understand how a national monument can be owned by a company whose name we don’t know, whose owners we don’t know, and whose legal beneficiary we don’t know,” Bartolomeo says. (Though it has been widely reported that the Ranas own the property, the family has neither confirmed nor denied it publicly.)
Most shockingly, construction of a 4,000-square-foot “technical area” in the basement of the villa—room for tubes and electrical appliances far larger than what’s typical for a 20-seat restaurant, a beach club, and six guest rooms—was approved, sparking rumors that the Ranas might be gearing up to turn the property into an actual resort.
Meanwhile, the project’s supervisory architect, Marco Cofani—a regional Ministry of Culture official—was appointed to a political post in nearby Peschiera del Garda in 2023, just after the project was approved. This means that the person meant to be overseeing the site is the same one who applied for the permits.
“Someone working for the superintendency should’ve recused themselves,” Flavio Amicabile, a member of the civic group Peschiera di Tutti, told Rai. Cofani tells Air mail he is no longer involved.
“I’m incredulous,” Bartolomeo told Rai. “I requested [the redevelopment approval documents] from the municipality and still haven’t received them.” In February 2025, an appeal he filed with the Regional Administrative Court to contest the permits was rejected.
Despite the mayor’s insistence that everything is aboveboard and the court’s rejection of Bartolomeo’s appeals, locals worry that Punta San Vigilio will mark the latest in a broader pattern in the region: developers reclassifying land as “for tourist use” to bypass restrictions—often with tacit support from local officials. A few miles away, in the town of Albisano, a cooperative acquired the historic Torri del Benaco estate. It was swiftly re-zoned and flipped to the Margesin family, of Bolzano, who turned it into the luxury resort Cape of Senses.
It’s not hard to imagine what Rana envisions for Punta San Vigilio. As Como gets overrun by tourists, they may see the estate as an opportunity to transform Garda, long the domain of cyclists and hikers, into the next high-end Italian lake for Aperol spritzes and $1,000-per-night hotel rooms.
“Disneyfication” is a word I’ve heard more than once this summer. Historic trattorias and artisanal workshops in lakeside towns are being replaced by chain-owned souvenir shops and fast-food outlets. As Europe’s economy stagnates and American demand rises, the Old World is increasingly treated like a theme park, trampled by tourists in search of la dolce vita.
“In 1997, when I moved to London, Lake Garda was better known than Lake Como,” Bartolomeo says. His is a cautionary tale.
Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor at Air Mail. She splits her time between Milan and New York
