Lake Como: will it become a luxury tourism resort?

The country of The garlicabout 800 souls under a small bell tower on the Lake Como, has lived more or less without a jolt since it was founded by the ancient Romans. Then in 2002 George Clooney arrived. The story is well known: George bought Heinz Villa Oleandra from his friends for 7.6 million dollars. The star begins his carefree life on Lake Como, while Lake Como, almost unconsciously, begins a journey into the hyperspace of tourist popularity which today has made it no longer a place, but almost an abstract concept: it is «Lakecomo», a hearsay of luxury, an entity that for some remains partly mysterious, so much so that some travelers look for it in vain on the shores of the lake as if it were a town, the town of Lakecomo in fact.

But if Lakecomo has become almost more famous than George Clooney, at the beginning there was only him, «George». His first summer on the lake is told by Vanity Fair in October 2003 with a glorious report by Annie Leibovitz: him handsome and tanned, shirtless, on a Riva motorboat, and the unmistakable mountains of Lario as a backdrop. Almost an anti-star, who bought a house in an unknown village, he bathed in the lake as if it were a transparent sea and spent the whole summer there.

Lake Como in the American article is described as «the beautiful resort area between Milan and Saint-Moritz». In reality it has always been an elegant tourist destination, but certainly not on the cutting edge; the people of Como still think of silk and the laghée – the inhabitants of the lake – are certainly not histrionic, but rather closed off like their mountains, or as they themselves say “of a reserved character”. And that’s what Clooney likes.

At the beginning his encounter with the lake is the perfect love story between an American and Italy. «He was immediately more Italian than an Italian», says the former mayor Roberto Pozzi, who accompanied much of his life in Laglio. He takes theHarley and he goes to eat in the best restaurants, but he also goes to the mountains with sandwiches, he jogs through the streets. The boys go to play on the basketball court and find Clooney there having a shot with his friends, the town barmaid waiting for him at the door saying “hello Giorgio”. In the meantime, he has an oven built in the villa to make pizza, grows a vegetable garden, takes honorary citizenship of the town and introduces himself to the neighbors. It has become a laghée.