The Fantini Experience

An avant-garde tap company in Northern Italy is also the home to Casa Fantini Lake Time, an intimate luxury boutique hotel overlooking Lake Orta, one of Italy’s unsung jewels. Welcome to paradise.

- Michelle Tchea

Italy’s Lake District is always flooded with tourists, including buses crammed full of retirees ticking off their travel bucket list, flocking to one of the popular flashier lakes.

Lago di Como and Lago di Maggiore draw the biggest crowds, thanks to Hollywood celebrities such as George Clooney, who bought the historic 18th Century Villa Oleandra as a summer residence on Como in 2002, as well as Bruce Springsteen, Robert DeNiro, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, all regular summer guests at Villa d’Este, the undisputed grand dame of Lake Como.

Lake Maggiore enjoys a different kind of fame, one more literary and so worth the visit for this if not its sheer natural beauty. In September 1918, just two months after a serious shrapnel injury sustained when an Austrian trench mortar landed in a dug-out he was sharing with Italian soldiers near Treviso during World War II, a 19-year-old Ernest Hemingway checked into room 106 (now the Hemingway Suite) at the Grand Hotel Des Iles Borromees during his convalescence leave. His experiences there were fictionalised in A Farewell to Arms.

All this, of course, has made the region very touristico, as the Italians would affectionately say. Yet, the great lakes of Italy are more than just places to spot a celebrity. A visit to the seaside is the ultimate weekend escape, if not a necessity for Italians anxious to escape fast-paced cities, like Milan and Turin, where life moves at the pace of zooming, tiny red Fiats and makes as much noise as a bustling trattoria during lunch.