Beatrice & Marco: A Lake Como Love Story

Como is the most theatrical of the Italian lakes, and the most romantic. Glacial, deep, shaped like an inverted Y, it has been a retreat for the wedding-minded since the Romans built their summer houses on its banks. The light here is particular, softened by the water, caught and doubled by it, and the gardens, fed by the mild lake climate, grow with a lushness that feels almost tropical against the alpine backdrop. For a certain kind of couple, there is simply nowhere else.

The villa they had chosen, Villa Nascosta, sat low on the western shore behind a screen of oleander, its garden running down to a private jetty and a terrace just above the water. They had taken it for the weekend, the whole house, all of it theirs, and that first evening the wedding party gathered on the terrace for an aperitivo as the sun went behind the mountains and the lake turned from blue to pewter to black, the lights of Bellagio pricking out across the water.

The morning of the wedding was clear and already warm. Beatrice dressed in a room with the shutters half-open, the lake breathing in below; her mother pinned the veil, someone brought espresso on a silver tray, and the florist moved through the house leaving trails of white, ranunculus, garden roses, trailing jasmine, along the staircase and the loggia. Marco and the men took an early swim off the jetty, which is the sort of thing one does on Como and tells no one about.

They had decided to hold the ceremony itself a little further along the lake, at Villa Sofia, above Lecco on Como’s quieter eastern arm, where a pergola stands at the end of a garden walk with the water and the mountains laid out behind it. The guests were ferried over by boat in the early evening, the most beautiful commute of their lives, one of them said, and took their seats as a string quartet played and the light began its long Italian descent.

They married beneath the pergola as the cypresses threw their long shadows across the lawn. It was a symbolic ceremony, the legal marriage had been quietly done at home some weeks before, as most international couples on the lake arrange it, and so it could be exactly theirs: their words, their friends standing close, no register to sign, nothing to do but mean it. When they kissed, the quartet shifted into something faster, and a tray of chilled Franciacorta appeared as if the garden had produced it.

Dinner was served in the conservatory as the sky went violet, a long table down the centre of the glass room, candles and more of that trailing jasmine, the lake just visible through the windows. The kitchen sent out the food of the region without apology: risotto with lake perch, a slow-cooked veal, a procession of Lombard cheeses, and at midnight a towering torta nuziale carried in to applause. The speeches ran long, as the best ones do. Someone cried. Everyone laughed.

They danced late, out on the terrace under strings of warm light, the mountains a black mass against a sky full of stars and the lake utterly still below. Near two in the morning the boats came back to carry the guests across the water to their beds, the wake catching the moonlight, the music thinning behind them. Beatrice and Marco stayed a while longer on the terrace, not saying much. The lake had done what the lake always does. It had made the day feel like the beginning of a very long, very happy story, which, of course, it was.

An editorial portrait. To plan your own celebration on the lake, discover Villa Nascosta on the western shore at Como and Villa Sofia above Lecco, both available for exclusive-use weddings on Luxury Wedding Directory.