Villa Monastero garden

This guide to Villa Monastero garden on Lake Como starts with a mystery: how African palms, Mexican agaves and Lebanon cedars thrive on a shoreline barely south of the Alps. The answer traces back to Lake Como's own climate, and to a Cistercian convent that held this shoreline from the eleven hundreds until Carlo Borromeo shut it down in fifteen sixty-seven amid disputed charges. From there the guide follows an ironmaster who turned the old convent into a private villa, and the German industrialist who later blasted its terraces into the rock. Look down toward the water from the balustrade as you listen.