The first person on record to fall for this lake and build accordingly was a Roman senator, in the first century AD. Pliny the Younger owned two villas on its shore, which he named Comedy and Tragedy, and wrote to friends about the view with the specific pride of someone who knows exactly what he has. One of those sites, tradition holds, is where Bellagio's Villa Serbelloni stands today.

What is unusual about Lake Como is not that it attracted one famous admirer. It is that it never really stopped. Cardinals, empresses, industrialists, fashion houses and film stars have followed Pliny's example for two thousand years, largely onto the same handful of promontories, and the villas themselves have mostly outlasted whoever was famous enough to own them at the time. A guest today is, in a fairly literal sense, booking a seat at a table that has never really emptied.

That continuity not any single name on it is what makes the guest list worth reading.

A villa that keeps changing owners, never purpose

Villa d'Este at Cernobbio was commissioned in 1568 by Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio. In 1814 it was bought by Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales, who turned it into a court of her own while estranged from the future King George IV. Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia lived there from 1868 for two years, drawn, like everyone else, by the mild winters. In 1873 it became a hotel, and it has been one ever since which means it is one of the few houses on this list a guest of Italy First Class can actually stay in, rather than only view from a boat.

Villa Carlotta, further up the western shore, has a gentler story. Built in the late seventeenth century for the Milanese Marquis Giorgio Clerici, it passed in 1801 to Giovanni Battista Sommariva, who filled it with sculpture by Antonio Canova. In 1843 a Prussian princess bought it and gave it, as a wedding present, to her daughter Charlotte Carlotta, in Italian on her marriage to a German duke. The state has run it as a museum and botanical garden since 1927. Both houses have had roughly a dozen owners each across four centuries; both are still, unmistakably, themselves.

The forum behind closed doors

Villa d'Este's most consequential modern guests are not visible from the water at all. Since 1975 it has hosted the Ambrosetti Forum each year, an economic and geopolitical conference that gathers heads of state, central bankers, Nobel laureates and chief executives for several days of discussion held, deliberately, behind closed doors.

It is worth knowing this exists, because it says something truer about Lake Como's actual relationship to power than any villa's guest book: the people with the most reason to value discretion have been choosing this lake for half a century, for exactly that reason.

Where fashion and film took over

Villa Fontanelle, above Moltrasio, tells the twentieth century's version of the same story. Built in the first half of the nineteenth century by an English lord and later owned by a friend of Verdi, it was abandoned by the time Gianni Versace bought it in 1977. He restored it over three years, filled it with paintings and had the garden redesigned by Roy Strong, and for two decades it drew the fashion and music world he moved in. After his death in 1997 it sat largely quiet Jennifer Lopez spent part of her 2001 honeymoon there until a Russian restaurateur bought and restored it again in 2008.

Villa Oleandra, in Laglio, is the one guest most people already know about. George Clooney bought the compound in 2002 from the Heinz family for a reported ten million dollars; he met Amal there in 2013. It remains the single most photographed private house on the lake, which is precisely why it is a private house and not a stop on anyone's itinerary.

Villa del Balbianello, at the tip of the Lavedo peninsula, has had a stranger kind of fame: built in 1787 on the site of a Franciscan monastery, it was left to the Italian heritage trust FAI in 1988 by its last owner, the explorer Guido Monzino, and has since appeared as a rebel base in Star Wars: Episode II and Bond's convalescence in Casino Royale. It is now used for private events and weddings the one house on this list where a guest is more likely to have been a body double than a head of state.

What you can actually see

Most of these houses are not visitable, and no amount of asking changes that. Villa Oleandra and Villa Fontanelle are private residences; the closest a guest gets is the view from a boat offshore, which is, in fairness, most of the view.

Villa Carlotta and its gardens are open to the public year-round. Villa del Balbianello opens on a limited FAI calendar, usually closed on Mondays and Wednesdays, and access by land is on foot only most visitors arrive by the small boat shuttle from Lenno. Villa d'Este is not open to sightseers, but its guests are; a stay there is the one way to spend a night inside a five-hundred-year guest list rather than photograph it from the water.

When to come

May and June, then September into early October, keep the gardens at their best without July and August's boat traffic and midday heat. Villa Carlotta's azaleas and rhododendrons peak in late April and May specifically, which is worth building a trip around if the gardens themselves are the point.

Getting there

Milan's airports, Malpensa and Linate are both under an hour and a half from the lake by road, and trains run directly from Milano Centrale to Como in well under an hour. There is no single road that circles the lake quickly; the west and east shores are each their own drive, and a boat is often faster than a car between towns that look close together on a map but sit on opposite sides of the water.

Italy First Class accepts a limited number of requests each year.

If Lake Como is on your list, tell us what you have in mind.

Related: The Amalfi Coast: A Road That Bans Half Its Traffic by Law another coastline, another set of rules about who gets through.

Common questions

Can you visit George Clooney's villa on Lake Como?

No. Villa Oleandra in Laglio is a private residence, not open to the public in any form. The closest view is from the water, on a boat passing offshore, which is how most of it is seen even by people who live nearby.

Which Lake Como villas are open to the public?

Villa Carlotta, with its museum and gardens, is open year-round. Villa del Balbianello is open on a limited calendar set by FAI, the Italian heritage trust that owns it, typically closed midweek. Villa d'Este is a working hotel rather than a sight the only way in is to stay there.

What is the Ambrosetti Forum?

An annual economic and geopolitical conference held at Villa d'Este since 1975, drawing heads of state, central bankers and business leaders for several days of closed-door discussion. It is not open to the public and takes place without the fanfare its guest list would suggest.

Is Lake Como worth visiting outside summer?

Often more so. Late April and May bring Villa Carlotta's gardens to their peak before the summer crowds arrive, and September into early October offers warm days with markedly less boat and road traffic than July or August.