Victoria Beach Menaggio

This guide to Victoria Beach in Menaggio, on Lake Como, starts with the English, German and Russian travelers who stepped off steamer boats a century ago bound for the Grand Hotel Victoria, opened in eighteen eighty-five as farmland gave way to a Grand Tour stop. It tracks the decades between that hotel's gilded ballrooms and the public lido that finally opened along this shoreline in nineteen thirty-four, and how a silk-weaving village turned into a holiday address in between. Look toward the water: it is roughly the same sightline those trunk-laden arrivals saw, stepping off their steamer, mountains still framing the lake.