Moltrasio sits on the western shore of Lake Como, ten minutes north of Como itself, on the strip of coast the Lombard aristocracy built along in the eighteenth century. The land above the village had belonged to the Umiliati, whose eleventh-century church of Sant'Agata still stands on the property, and then to the Odescalchi. In 1787 Count Andrea Lucini Passalacqua bought it and commissioned Carlo Felice Soave to build a villa di delizia on it. Soave, born in Lugano in 1749 and by then chief architect of Milan Cathedral, gave him a neoclassical house stepping down the slope in terraces; Giocondo Albertolli did the stuccos and Andrea Appiani the frescoes. The complex runs to some thirty thousand square metres, one of the largest on the lake.

Vincenzo Bellini came to Moltrasio in 1829 and stayed through 1833. The hotel tells you he composed La sonnambula here; the dates do not allow it — that opera was written in Naples and Milan in the first weeks of 1831 and premiered that March. What is true is that he lodged nearby at Villa Salterio and was a regular at Passalacqua, and that during the summer of 1831 on this lake, with the librettist Felice Romani and the soprano Giuditta Pasta, he settled on Norma. The largest suite in the house is named for him and is built around the double-height, vaulted music room.

The villa's later life was quieter: it passed to Eugenio Torelli Viollier, who founded the Corriere della Sera, then through other hands, and was restored in 1970 by a Hungarian author who had bought it. Churchill stayed. In 2018 the De Santis family — lake natives, owners of the Grand Hotel Tremezzo — bought it and spent three years and a reported twenty million dollars on the restoration, working with the San Francisco practice BAMO on the interiors and Venelli Kramer as architect of record, a credit the house itself tends to leave out in favour of the story of the family buying antiques. What went in is Italian and specific: Barovier & Toso chandeliers from Murano, Fortuny silk lampshades, Rubelli fabrics, twenty-odd marbles, Como silk taffeta. The pool pavilion and the Winter Garden bar were done by JJ Martin of La DoubleJ.

Twenty-four rooms and suites are divided between the Villa, the Palazz — the old estate buildings, which also hold the spa — and Casa al Lago, four rooms down at the water with their own gardens. The garden is the argument for the place: seven acres of terraces, fountains and ancient roses, cypress, cedar, magnolia and olive, a grape pergola and a kitchen garden, a twenty-metre pool on one terrace and a clay tennis court by the shore. Viviana Varese, who held a Michelin star at Viva in Milan, cooks for house guests only, out of a kitchen that runs some twenty-two hours a day. A tunnel dug in the eighteenth century takes you from the house to the jetty, where four boats wait. It was named the best hotel in the world by The World's 50 Best in 2023, its first year, and holds three MICHELIN Keys.