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A crew that wants these terraces has to book them two years ahead. When Como's local station asked the management in February 2024 what was coming, the answer was nothing. No film booked for 2024, none for 2025.
Three features in thirty years, then, on a promontory a great many people would recognise on sight. The queue here is real, just made of other people. The same report counted 200,000 visitors in 2023 and a sharp rise in guests from India, which it puts down to a Bollywood wedding held at the villa in 2018.
The film nobody outside Italy writes about is A Month by the Lake. John Irvin made it in 1995 with Vanessa Redgrave, Edward Fox and Uma Thurman, set on this lake in 1937. Irvin put the story's hotel in the villa's gardens, and the German record says almost the whole picture was shot on the property. It is also the one film of the three where Lake Como is playing Lake Como. The other two, Attack of the Clones and Casino Royale, turned the place into a planet and into a clinic. Italian travel blogs add three older titles, a 1941 melodrama, a Stendhal adaptation and a Celentano comedy, and none of the three is carried by FAI, which owns the villa, or by the Italian encyclopedia.
Butler Ames, an American, saw the house before the First World War and was refused. He kept coming back with larger offers in cash until the Arconati Visconti family sold to him, in 1919. Before them it had belonged to Porro Lambertenghi, whose houseguests included the writer Silvio Pellico, tutor to his sons, arrested by the Austrians in 1820.
The last private owner filled the attic. Guido Monzino's museum of his own expeditions is up there: flags, photographs, the sledge from his run to the North Pole in 1971, and what FAI calls the largest collection of Inuit ivory outside Greenland. The Italian record has him buried on the property as well.
Weddings are booked to 2026, and every couple gets the same request, made politely and written down nowhere: nothing kitsch on a terrace like this one. The booking nobody made was the film one.