Parco di Villa Serbelloni

This guide to Parco di Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como opens in seventeen eighty-eight, when the Lombard duke Alessandro Serbelloni bought this wooded promontory and set masons cutting nearly eighteen kilometers of paths through it. It follows an old, unprovable belief that the Roman writer Pliny the Younger once kept two villas here, one light and playful, one graver, and traces how that legend clings to the hill's two sides. Later owners, including an American princess, kept Serbelloni's layout largely intact. Walk the paths where they open, without warning, onto both arms of the lake at once.