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.”
