As the seaplane clears the southern end of the lake, it banks high above Como. It comes back round and down behind the football club’s open Curva Como stand before landing on the water in front of Aero Club Como, the oldest seaplane flying school in the world.
It’s a natural route to achieve the appropriate landing, but you can’t help thinking the pilot is hoping to catch a glimpse of FC Como 07 in action every time he comes by.
He’d be right to because the club itself is flying high, back in the Serie A for the first time in two decades with a very bright young manager in former Arsenal and Barcelona star Cesc Fabregas coaching a squad of competitive home-grown talent mixed with former Liverpool and Real Madrid players. Perhaps most pertinently since 2019 – when it was acquired by Indonesian tobacco and banking magnates, the Hartono Brothers, the fifth wealthiest family in Asia – it has become the richest club in Italy.
The acquisition was dreamt up by the family’s representative Mirwan Suwarso, who had been overseeing and creating programming for the family’s broadcast channels, and simply wanted to find a new project to keep him in Italy. They acquired it when it was at the bottom of the Italian football pyramid for just $850,000 and have since built it to the point where they achieved promotion to Serie A in the summer of 2024.
Now the club is re-establishing itself at Italian football’s top table, it’s also once again firmly embedded in the community. As Murwan told Square Mile: “Without the community’s involvement, the project is nothing. We can be profitable, yes, but real success is changing people’s lives for the better along the way.”
Como 1907 celebrate promotion to Serie A with the Serie BKT Runners-up trophy following the Serie B match at Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia, Como.
Jonathan Moscrop / Sportimage / Alamy Stock Photo
Working closely with the local tourist board, the club are fully focussed on making Como FC one of the world’s must visit football destinations. And given the lake’s population of visiting and resident film and fashion stars, it’s already attracted the likes of Hugh Grant, Andrew Garfield and Kate Beckinsale to its stands this season.
On match day, there’s a sense of electricity to the place, which is perhaps appropriate given Alessandra Volta, the man who gave the world the electric battery and volts was born here 280 years ago. There’s a huge Daniel Libeskind monument to him named The Life Electric situated at the end of the town’s breakwater.
When the football club’s owners, the Hartono family, visit the club they stay at the Mandarin Oriental Lago di Como, 15 minutes drive up the east side of the lake just before the small town of Torno. When I decided to bring my two sons aged 23 and 11 to see Como versus Palma, the club suggested the Mandarin would be an ideal place. They were right. It’s a stunning location and feels very much like the complete luxury hotel offering.
The hotel features 21 rooms, 52 suites and two stand alone villas, Villa del Lago and Villa della Rocca. It has two restaurants, a lakeside dining option and, at 40 metres, the longest floating infinity pool in the world, made from local Cardoso sandstone by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron.
Lying in bed overlooking Lake Como on your first morning you are blessed with a wealth of beauty, history and an array of mind-calming nature. Experts say that if you spend just 20 minutes by a wide expanse of water your calm levels increase and your stress levels decrease, but at this hotel you don’t have to study Blue Mind Theory to understand this, you can simply feel it. The lake is everywhere.
Being by the water releases creative thinking, unlocks difficult issues and gives you a sense of vision. The most simple example of this for me is that I’m writing this less than a day after checking in when I normally leave everything until the editor is hammering on the metaphorical door. (Much appreciated. – Ed.)
On the opposite side of the lake, the towering green banks are fringed at water level with sand and rust-coloured villas that look as if they have been here forever. They are also scattered across the forested mountain side leaving you to wonder how you actually drive to them.
Between the opposite bank and the bed I’m lying in, little boats putt putt putt along, and the lake itself looks like one of those images on Instagram that at first glance seem to be a photograph but on closer inspection reveal themselves to be a very still video.
he lake has a slight silver green motion that you only really recognise when the white blade of a motor launch cuts through it.
The hotel was launched five years ago and sits in its own botanical gardens that surround the impressive central Villa Roccabruna that people stop in their rented Rivas to photograph from the water.
The house was originally upgraded to a recognised level of grandeur in the mid 19th century by famous opera singer Giuditta Pasta. The Mandarin Oriental group acquired it and set about taking it to another level five years ago.
They’ve wasted little time in hitting their own high standards. All the qualities of the MO are here. The staff are friendly and incredibly helpful; there’s a special skill in answering a guest’s question in a way that makes you feel like you are being spoken to by someone who simply loves to be in your company.
One front house valet took time out from parking the golf buggy that moved your luggage or aching legs about to ask me what I’d thought of the game as he’d been at the Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia himself and had enjoyed the match.
The size of the grounds are huge. After a dinner of delicious crisp thin traditional pizzas and a risotto with veal in the Como Bistro, wander off into the warmth of the night. You’ll see goldfish swimming in a small pool beneath a hillside waterfall, and feel the crunch of pale gravel underfoot as you take steps and pathways through deep dark foliage which is illuminated by occasional uplighting.
With hardly anybody about, you can sit on carefully placed benches and look across the dark expanse of water at Gianni Versace’s old estate and consider how long people have been settled here.
Something about the combination of the hotel comforts and the mind-calming powers of the lake inspires thoughts of possibility and mobility. This doesn’t feel like a place you could feel stuck in. ‘Lake Como unlocked’: these are the words in my mind; not an insider’s location guide but rather a freeing of the mind.
Although, if you do want to go behind the local scenes, the concierge can arrange a visit to Villa del Balbianello where the young Darth Vader was married in Star Wars: Attack of The Clones.
I was a little more interested in where scenes from Succession were filmed but his marital information was the first thing my 11 year old told me when we arrived.
While it’s not a playground by any means, I welcomed the open approach the hotel has to allowing supervised under 16s use the stunning spa waters, pools and hot tubs.
I always think you have to read the room in a situation like this and explain to the kids people are relaxing so don’t start going crazy – so we only went in as a family during quieter times. It’s nice to travel as a family and not to be told there are areas or services out of bounds to minors.
As it was, my boys used the gym twice but were often more interested in screenery than scenery, and I was able to spend more than an hour relaxing in the subterranean caves of plunge pools, and saunas. It’s undoubtedly the finest hotel spa I’ve been in.
The combination of classic Italian villa interiors and contemporary landscaping and architecture gives the hotel corners and self-contained villas and staircases and walks that all make you forget you are actually in a hotel at all.
I think I could accommodate the multiple lake views and environment forever, and not get bored. At one point on our post-dinner walk through the botanical gardens, listening to the gentle slap of waves against the garden walls, I fleetingly found myself thinking, “I wouldn’t mind dying here.” On reflection, it’s a strange thought given that when you arrive at Lake Como you are filled with such an incredible sense of being alive.
See more at mandarinoriental.com
