Where you sleep on Como shapes the trip, and I have come to think the choice really comes down to two things: base town and budget. The lake is a slim inverted Y of water pressed between mountains, and the…
Supporting Guide
The Best Photo Spots on Lake Como
Como is almost unfairly photogenic, and after enough visits I have stopped trying to fight it. You cannot really take a bad picture here. What you can do, though, is take the same picture as everyone else, in the same…
The Villas and Gardens of Lake Como
If the ferries are the heart of a Como trip, the villas are its soul. The lake has been a retreat for the wealthy since Roman times, and the great houses they built, wrapped in gardens that tumble to the…
The Best Things to Do on Lake Como
Lake Como rewards a slow hand. It is a place that people rush, ticking off a villa and a gelato before the afternoon boat, and I understand the temptation, because the lake is generous and the days are short when…
Getting Around Lake Como by Boat (and the Ferries Explained)
The first thing I tell anyone planning a few days on Lake Como is to stop thinking about roads and start thinking about water. The lake is shaped like an upside down Y, and its towns face each other across…
How to Get to Lake Como (and Which Station to Use)
The first thing worth saying about Lake Como is that getting there is easier than most people fear, and harder to overthink than the guidebooks suggest. Nearly every journey begins in Milan, and from Milan the train is almost always…
Cannes Film Festival Parties and Nightlife
The bass reaches you before the boat does. It travels over the water, low and patient, from somewhere out past the buoys where the yachts sit at anchor with their decks lit gold. May, in Cannes, and the town has…
The Yacht Scene at the Cannes Film Festival
At dusk the tenders begin their crossing. Small, low, running without lights until they clear the moorings, then a lamp at the stern and a wake folding out behind them across the flat water of the bay. They carry people…
Where to Eat in Cannes During the Festival
The market smells of it first. Peaches split too ripe, wet basil, the iron tang of fish laid out on ice a street back from the port. By nine the light is already white over the water, and the town…
What to Wear to the Cannes Film Festival
The morning of a premiere, the light comes off the water white and flat. The Croisette smells of salt and warm stone and the diesel of the tender boats. Somewhere a garment bag is already hanging in a hotel window,…
Where to Stay for the Cannes Film Festival
The Croisette in May holds a particular light in the early evening, gold sliding into rose over the water, the palms throwing long shadows across a pavement already thick with people in gowns they have no intention of sitting down…
How to Get to Cannes
The plane banks over the water and the coast arrives before the city does. A thin ribbon of pale buildings, the hills behind them still holding the last of the morning haze, the sea going from slate to something closer…
