Casa Olea Hotel

Under the reception at Casa Olea is a nevera, a pit five metres deep that was packed with snow each winter to keep food cool all year, and its top is left on show. The nineteenth-century vicarage above it lay abandoned until a renovation kept the walls of rounded stones and the beams of whole logs, ran a stair of rusted steel between them and let a wall of glass into the gable. Digging the infinity pool, in a garden shaded by the olive trees the hotel is named after, turned up graves from about 2000 BC and the ruins of a Roman house. Book a room with a terrace: the Deluxe ones look over the lake to the mountains. The spa, a stone wet room under a slatted wooden ceiling, is booked privately, which with thirteen rooms was never going to mean a long queue.

Recommended for anyone who wants Lake Como's quieter western shore, and for families of four: the corner suite has two sofa beds besides the king, and rooms 11 and 12 connect. There is no restaurant, so breakfast is the meal to stay in for: local cheeses, and eggs from an organic farm in a Valtellina chestnut forest. The wine list runs to 264 DOC and DOCG wines, all Italian but the Champagne, a serious cellar for a hotel with no restaurant. San Vito's kite-surfing beach is five minutes' walk down, and the Bellagio ferry leaves from Menaggio, ten minutes' drive away. Better to walk the lakeside path to Musso's old harbour, about 45 minutes, over a walkway hung above the water and on to the Giardino del Merlo, a nineteenth-century garden about as old as the vicarage, which after what turned up under the pool counts as recent.