One of the most extravagant hotels in Europe, Adam Hay Nicholls stays at the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni on the fringes of Lake Como in best possible season: autumn One of three ‘grande dame’ hotels on northern Italy’s perennially glamorous Lake Como, the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni lives up to its Belle Époque billing in many ways, not least by serving me peacock for dinner. Delicious and lean, the stately bird tastes somewhere between duck and pork. They neglect to decorate my plate with iridescent plumage.
That might be OTT, even for this place. But more on that later. Built on the lakeside in 1854 by an Italian count in the handsome, bustling (in summer months, certainly) town of Bellagio, it’s situated close to where the tourist boats dock but is an oasis of calm, set in lush gardens.
The geography of Lake Como puts us right in the centre. From my room with a small terrace, I can gaze down to the blissfully refreshing electric-blue swimming pool before a tiny strip of beach and the basil-green lake into which guests can plunge via a vintage diving board. The hotel may appear its most radiant in the summertime, but in autumn it feels all the more intimate with a morning fog on the lake and the tourists banished back to whence they came.
It was in this season that Al Pacino squired Martha Keller in the Formula One meets cancer flick Bobby Deerfield back in 1977. Beyond, on the western side of the lake, are the smaller towns of Tremezzo and Griante, and behind t.