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Few Italian cities wear their setting as openly as Como. Positioned at the southern tip of its namesake lake, with the Larian Triangle of water stretching northward toward the Alps, the town has drawn visitors since Roman times, when Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger both claimed it as home. The lake's peculiar Y-shape, formed by glacial action over millennia, means that Como sits at a geographical crossroads, with the Swiss border less than an hour's drive away and the Lombard plain beginning almost at the city's southern edge.

The old town rewards unhurried attention. The Cattedrale di Como, begun in the late fourteenth century and not completed until the eighteenth, stands as one of Lombardy's more quietly remarkable Gothic-to-Renaissance transitions, its facade incorporating statues of both Plinys as a civic statement of intellectual pride. The silk trade, which made Como wealthy from the Renaissance onward and still accounts for a significant share of Italy's luxury fabric production, left its mark in the elegance of the streets around Piazza Cavour and in the Museo della Seta, where the full industrial and artistic history of the industry is laid out with genuine care.