Villa’s miracle transformation into luxury hotel

Passalacqua, an 18th-century villa transformed into Lake Como's most beguiling new destination.

Vincenzo Bellini greets me as I open the door to my powder blue suite on the shores of Lake Como. His music is tremulous at first, misting the floorboards, caressing velveteen walls, trailing up silk drapes and drifting through open windows towards the lake spread out below in harmonising shades of pewter. The maestro’s score intensifies as I pass from entry hall to boudoir; its high notes stream from concealed speakers, ping the Murano chandelier, rattle the Venetian mirrors and swell to meet the ceiling in a magnificent crescendo.

What would Saint Agata make of this flower-scented room with its sumptuous furnishings and melodious soundtrack? Hers is the name inscribed on the brass plate outside my suite at Passalacqua, the 18th-century villa in Moltrasio transformed by some miracle into Lake Como's most beguiling new destination. From the window I can see the belltower of Sant'Agata Church peering over the villa's crenulated walls and into its expansive gardens; it's miraculous, too, that this 11th-century stone chapel is still standing.

Earlier, I'd regarded the faces of St Agata and St Cristobal, frescoed onto the church's outer walls at the estate's entrance; at the villa I'd found those timeworn pigments – pink, ochre, blue – brought back to life in vivid, imaginative applications. Agata, had she been raised from the long-dead, would have surely followed me through the gates and along the path of centuries-old trees, into the filigree-screened entrance, up the staircase and into my boudoir. There, Bellini's music would have washed over her as she rested her martyred bones in a bed so heavenly it would prove more difficult to arise from than the grave itself.

The hotel pool.

If Bellini were immortal, he would be here too, coaxing tunes from the piano in the vaulted music room – now part of Suite Bellini – where he played during visits in the early 19th century. Perhaps he'd beget an opera to complement La Sonnambula, which he's said to have composed here in 1831. So storied is the villa's past, it's fired my imagination: not only have stones, stucco and pigment been preserved here, but the essence of its lodgers, too; luminaries aplenty – Churchill, Napoleon, Bellini – occupy this space as tangibly as any artefact.

Nonetheless, the villa has been rebirthed with modern sensibilities. Built for Count Andrea Lucini-Passalacqua in 1787 on a property once owned by Pope Innocent XI, it passed through motley hands before it was bought in 2018 by the owners of Lake Como's fabled Grand Hotel Tremezzo. The De Santis family – parents Paolo and Antonella, daughter Valentina – were casting about for a second property when Passalacqua came up for sale.

"So we came together to see it, and we understood that it was the place we wanted three steps after the gate," Valentina recalls. "We immediately felt the generosity in this place."

The villa was reconfigured to encompass 12 suites.

But hopes waned on the day of the auction: six other bidders had registered.

"We arrived here and I was heartbroken, saying, 'Oh, this is the last time I will see this place, I'm so sad, it was perfect'."

When the hammer fell in their favour, the family was elated. It took three years to navigate the heritage requirements, structural improvements and design work necessary for the transformation of Passalacqua from private residence to luxury hotel. Under the vigilant gaze of St Agata's bell tower and the trees that had stood sentry for centuries, the property transformed into a vibrant version of those sepia images of lore.

The villa was reconfigured to encompass 12 suites, each with a capacious marble bathroom; the old stables became the Palazz, accommodating eight suites and a spa; Casa Al Lago, secreted upon a lower terrace, became a four-room retreat. Green-thumbed Paolo and Antonella oversaw the garden's renewal and scoured antique auctions for furnishings. Valentina, whose second child was born shortly after the auction, recalls selecting fabrics from Italian textile houses Rubelli, Dedar and Fortuny while self-isolating during a bout of COVID.

"I collected samples of the kind of fabrics that I love, the richest and the more colourful," she says. "And during this week of isolation, I put together… every room. It was quite a big job, so at the end of this week, I was like a black belt of every kind of fabric!"

If the ghosts of St Agata and Bellini were haunting the process, their input was disregarded; it was important, Valentina says, to respect the property's history without embedding it in a particular era.

"[We were] trying to create something that could be timeless, because it's very easy that a hotel gets older if you make choices that are too much related to a specific time, either modern or antique … We had to respect the original aim and the history of the place, and just [articulate] it."

But the antiquated ritual of languid holidaymaking hasn't been tinkered with.

"I think one of the beauties of this place is that we really managed to bring back to life something that we think is lost in time, and that in Italian we call the 'art of village', the villeggiatura," Valentina says.

"Now, holiday means doing a lot of activities, visiting this, that. [But] at the end of the 18th century and afterwards, this villa was meant to host a different kind of holiday, the villeggiatura. People were moving here for weeks, months, and the aim of the holiday was just enjoying the time, the little things, the nature, the company, enjoying good food, good talk, a good book. And I think nowadays all these things are quite lost."

Lost, perhaps, but easily rediscovered here. Rising early, I throw open the shutters to a still, dewy day. Boats plough the mist-swaddled lake. Sunlight flares above the mountains and pours into the valley. The little church is swaddled in damp; how many sunrises have its frescoed eyes witnessed?

Downstairs, people are spilling like houseguests from bed to kitchen, chatting to the cook, unfurling newspapers in sunny nooks, reclining with books on outdoor loungers. I descend the terraces, weaving from the pool's glasshouse bar and cafe – florid with Milan-based JJ Martin's La DoubleJ homewares – to olive grove to kitchen garden aflutter with a flock of fussy chickens.

Last night I ate a veloute of beets harvested from this patch; it was topped with baked ricotta and pioppini mushrooms, and glowed lush as the greenery spilling towards the lake. Each terrace is its own private chamber: a bocce court here, a gym tucked against the stone wall there. Scalloped parasols and candy-striped awnings throw patches of shade and whimsy all the way down to the water.

At the pier I board a vintage motor launch. Its driver, Alessandra Villani, is deeply connected to these waters: she swam, sailed and fished here as a girl; today she's a mountain and boat guide for Passalacqua and the Grand Hotel Tremezzo. As she steers us offshore, Moltrasio shrinks against the limestone crags in a tumble of terracotta roofs and light-doused sycamores.

"In the past, almost all the villages along the lake you could find silk factories," Villani says. "They would sell silk to the aristocracy and the church."

Those villages unspool now in a collage of huddled villas and summer residences dangling above limpid water. There's the late Gianni Versace's home in Moltrasio, George Clooney's pad in Laglio, and the 19th century opera singer Giuditta Pasta's estate in Blevio. Did her voice ring out across the water as Bellini sat on the opposite shore composing his opus, Norma, for her?

Back onshore, I retrace the imagined footsteps of Agata and Bellini through the cobblestone streets of Moltrasio. In Roman times, flour mills were powered by the town's two waterfalls; one of them is now a gelato shop. High on the hill lie three small villages, says bar manager Alex Bargna as he serves me a pre-dinner Bellini at Passalacqua that evening. One soars hundreds of metres above sea level, the lake spread out like an ocean below, the hills opposite aflame in the twilight. It has no road access, no electricity.

Perhaps this is where Agata's spirit resides, amid familiar simplicity. That night, I peer at the little church from my window. It's silhouetted against the flushed sky, its belfry perforated with remnant sunlight. Bellini's dirge spirals in heartbreaking lamentations over my shoulder and into the dark. I close the shutters and thank the saints for my heavenly bed.

Catherine Marshall was a guest of Passalacqua and the Grand Hotel Tremezzo.

THE DETAILS

FLY

Qatar Airways flies daily from Sydney and Melbourne to Doha, with regular connections to Milan. See qatarairways.com. Lake Como is an hour's drive from Milan.

STAY

Passalacqua's season runs from early March to early January. Doubles from about $1250 a night. See passalacqua.it/en.

VISIT

Activities include open-air cinema screenings, tennis, spa treatments, cooking classes, boat trips and guided walks around Moltrasio.