Villa Carlotta at Opening Time, Lake Como

Arrive as the gates open to see Thorvaldsen's marble frieze, Canova's Terpsichore and the terraced gardens before the ferries unload.

Half an Hour Before the Boats

Villa Carlotta stands right on the water at Tremezzina, on Lake Como’s western shore, with lake and mountains in view from every level of its garden. The Milanese Marquis Giorgio Clerici built it in the late seventeenth century; after several owners, Giovanni Battista Sommariva bought it in 1801 and made it one of the great stops of the Grand Tour. In 1843 Princess Marianne of Prussia acquired it and presented it to Charlotte, her daughter, on her wedding to Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen. After Charlotte died in 1855, Georg kept coming back, filling the garden with rare plants and inviting Johannes Brahms, who stayed several times in the 1880s.

Since 1927, when a Royal Decree created the Ente Villa Carlotta, it has been open to the public as a museum and garden of rare plants. It opens at 10 am, and since the boat from Bellagio needs only a quarter of an hour, groups start landing from about 10:30 or 11. Until then you’ll have the marble gallery, Thorvaldsen’s relief and the lakeside terraces almost to yourselves.

Sommariva, the Duke and a Living Collection

Two men shaped the villa’s cultural life. Sommariva bought it in the Napoleonic years, while he served Napoleon as co-president of the Legislative Commission, with Milan the seat of the Italian Republic . Rather than buying existing works, he commissioned new ones from Thorvaldsen and Canova, placing the villa at the heart of European art in the early nineteenth century; Grand Tour travelers of the 1820s and 1830s viewed it as the art of their own day, and because Milan was a day away by boat, its fame spread across the continent.

By the time Princess Marianne bought it, its reputation was made. Her gift to Charlotte tied it to the Protestant German aristocracy that led northern European culture in the later nineteenth century. Georg was both a patron of Brahms and a keen botanist, and his decades of bringing in rare species from around the world created the garden you see today.

Why the First Hour Matters

At the start of the day the Marble Hall has a stillness it never has again. Standing before the Thorvaldsen frieze with no group shuffling behind you, and a guide who can follow all 33 panels in order, from the procession itself to the pair of portraits that close it, changes what it says to you.

Up in the terraced gardens, before the first ferry passengers climb that high, the ferny ravine, the lemon arbor and the banks of rhododendron look their finest.

A guide also brings Princess Charlotte’s second-floor rooms to life, explaining what the furniture reveals about her short time here and what Georg’s continuing visits, once she had died in 1855, meant for the property, far beyond what the labels say.

It’s a gentle, romantic morning for a couple or a joy for garden-loving friends.

Frieze, Muse and Last Kiss

In the Marble Hall, Thorvaldsen’s frieze of 33 marble panels unfolds along the entire hall, telling without a break how Alexander rode into Babylon; the final pair of figures are Thorvaldsen himself and his patron Sommariva, something you’ll only spot if the hall is calm enough to read it from start to finish.

Canova’s room has his 1811 plaster of Terpsichore, the Muse of dance, one of few Canova plasters still in their setting, while Hayez’s painting of Romeo and Juliet’s final kiss, ordered by Sommariva in 1823, hangs in the room named for the artist. Charlotte’s rooms upstairs are kept as a home rather than a display.

Around eight hectares of terraces climb from the water, planted with azaleas and rhododendrons and holding a bamboo grove, a tunnel of citrus and the fern-filled gorge, a slender ravine you’d never guess at from the lower terrace.

Your Out Of Office LGBTQ+ travel specialist can pair the morning with a welcoming hotel on the lake.