Grand Hotel des Iles Borromées

In September 1918 a nineteen-year-old American ambulance driver, still limping from shrapnel wounds, took a room on the lakefront at Stresa and spent his days fishing and playing billiards. Ernest Hemingway came back to the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromées thirty years later as a famous novelist, and the hotel has kept a suite in his name ever since.

History

The hotel opened in 1863, the first grand hotel on Lake Maggiore, at a time when the Simplon road brought northern visitors down to the lakes before the railway did. The railway reached Stresa in 1906 with the opening of the Simplon tunnel, and the hotel's best decades followed. Its guest book from that era is a list of the crowned heads and bankers of the Belle Époque.

Hemingway's stay gave the hotel its literary place. A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929, has its narrator desert the Italian front and reach Stresa, where he stays in a grand hotel, plays billiards with an elderly count and rows across the lake to Switzerland by night. The hotel is not named in the novel, but there was only one of its kind in Stresa in 1918. The Zacchera family, hoteliers on the lake since the nineteenth century, owns the property and runs it alongside its other hotels in Stresa and Baveno.

Architecture and design

The building faces the lake across a formal garden and the Corso Umberto I, with a facade reworked in the Liberty style, Italy's Art Nouveau, in the early twentieth century. The scale is deliberate: a long symmetrical front with a central block, cream and ochre render and wrought-iron balconies. The interiors keep the period: Murano chandeliers, frescoed ceilings in the salons, marble floors and a sweeping staircase. The park behind runs up the hillside with palms, magnolias and the pools.

Rooms and suites

Rooms and suites face either the lake and the Borromean Islands or the park. The lake-facing rooms on the upper floors have the view the hotel was built for, with Isola Bella and Isola dei Pescatori straight ahead. The Hemingway Suite is the one guests ask about by name. Decoration follows the house style, with period furniture, silk wall coverings and marble bathrooms.

Dining

The main restaurant occupies the ground-floor salon and its terrace facing the lake, with a menu built on Piedmontese and Lombard produce and the lake's fish. The bar opens onto the garden. In summer most of the dining moves outside, and the terrace at aperitivo hour looks straight down the Corso to the islands.

Wellness

The spa in the park is one of the largest on the lake and includes an indoor pool, saunas, a Turkish bath and a range of treatment rooms, with a programme that extends to medical and aesthetic treatments. Two outdoor pools sit among the trees of the park, and there is a gym.

Weddings and events

Weddings use the lakeside garden for ceremonies and the frescoed salons for dinners, and the hotel hosts conferences and seminars in its meeting rooms. The lake itself is part of the event logistics: boats from the Stresa pier, a few steps along the shore, take guests to the Borromean Islands for a ceremony or an excursion.

Location

The address is Corso Umberto I 67, on the lakefront promenade of Stresa, in Piedmont. Stresa station, on the Milan to Domodossola line, is a few minutes uphill by taxi, with direct trains from Milano Centrale in about an hour. Milan Malpensa airport is around 50 minutes by road. The ferry pier for Isola Bella, Isola Madre and Pallanza is on the promenade beside the hotel. It is the oldest luxury hotel in Stresa and the point from which the town's hotel row grew.