What I remember most about Villa d’Este, that storied hotel on Lake Como, is the haze that hangs over the water each morning and evening, like a miasmic bookend stuck at either end of another day in paradise. Not a fog— more like gossamer, burning away in the sun then drifting in again as daylight dissipates into the Alps.
The cocktail hour at that place looked like a film shot with a stocking over the camera lens: the lakeside terrazzo shaded by a 500 year old plane tree; Renaissance gardens looming in the distance, a piano playing “Some Enchanted Evening” in the bar. The languorous guests, Slim Aarons chic, murmur quietly, admiring the candle-glow of the sunset and ordering one more Bellini, as if the darkness might never come.
We were there for three days to attend the wedding of a Milanese couple we met while they were living in New York. The boy and girl were wealthy and beautiful and fluent in every social grace. But even at a casual dinner in New York, it was clear that the union of these two was an act of subtraction, not addition. They seemed to feed on, rather than off, one another. The wedding photos would be lovely, of course. Like so much of Italian life, particularly in the best of families, it was all an extravagant deception.
Still weary from the all-night flight, I was ready to take the elevator to our room. But my wife, with her instinctive flair for the dramatic, can never resist a grand staircase. As we reached the last few steps to our floor, C paused, then grasped for the stone railing.
“Dizzy?” I asked.
She stood rigidly, arms flared, as if bracing herself in a storm. “No…it’s just… weird.” “My legs feel like jello,” she said.
“Yea, mine do that here too. Usually when I go to check out.”
C didn’t respond, but made it the rest of the way up. She hesitated at the top, looking for a sign to tell us where we were going. Then we walked in silence down the long corridor to our room.
“That was the first time I felt it—there on the stairs. It was just this sense… of something. Of someone, I think. When I got to the top, I looked down the hall and saw a woman. Older, like from another time. She was wearing a gown—white…with gold. But no one was there. Fortunately, our room was in the opposite direction.”
C was recounting her experience to our friends Franco and Rosanna, who live in the town of Como, a few minutes from Villa d’Este.
“The place has ghosts,” she concluded.
“Wouldn’t Michelin subtract at least one star for that sort of thing?” I asked.
Rosanna ignored me. “Si— è vero. Tanti phantasmi. Everyone knows this,” she said, looking back at me for emphasis. Franco was all-in as well.
“It was the most loved place of Alfred Hitchcock. He made his first movie at Villa d’Este. Then returned every summer. ” Now Franco leaned across the table. “There are so many deaths. Accidents, without explanation. Murders, too.”
C was vindicated. “See?” she challenged me. “I knew it. And my experience the next day was worse… “
After lunch on the day of the wedding, C and I walked the famous gardens of Villa d’Este, wandering through the labyrinth of hedges, the terraced grass, the grottoes with their gargoyle-faced water fountains. All the while, dark clouds massed silently above us.
We returned to the hotel just as the rain began. With time to kill, we settled into a sofa in the salon below the hotel lobby and turned to our books. After ten minutes, I noticed that C hadn’t flipped a page.
“Jet lag?”
She nodded, struggling to keep her eyes open. “I’m going to take a nap” she said. “Remember, we leave for the wedding at five”. She must have been tired— she took the elevator to the room.
When I entered an hour later, I turned the doorknob gently, trying not to wake her. But as the door clicked behind me, C jerked upright in bed— eyes manic, hands trembling— tangled in a nightmare she couldn’t shake off. She needed several minutes to calm down. Even then, she was struggling to make sense of it.
“In my dream… we were here, at the hotel. It was a party, something very fancy. People were shouting. A man was falling. Then you came in.”
I offered explanations: Body clocks. Ambien hangovers. Whatever was on that page you never turned. She stared at me coldly and went to get dressed for the wedding.
After dinner with Franco and Rosanna, I googled: Ghost. Villa d’Este.
The first entry that came up was: “Rolls Royce New Model Ghost Unveiled at Concorso D’Eleganza”.
Pretty much what I expected. I tried: Murder. Villa d’Este.
That’s when I saw it. A darkly glamorous story that was the crime of the decade in Italy— that decade being the Forties. With Italy still smoldering in the ashes of WWII, here was a tabloid scandal that captured the decadence of the old-money aristocracy and the recklessness of the new-money industrialists. The details read like something from F. Scott Fitzgerald:
A fashion show at Villa d’Este in September of 1948, hosted by designer Elvira Leonardi Buoyeure, known professionally as Biki, the granddaughter of opera composer Giacomo Puccini. The event’s guest list includes Baron Rothschild and the uncle of King Farouk.
At one table in the opulent ballroom is Carlo Sacchi, the owner of a local silk factory and his wife, an Austrian ballerina. At the same table is Carlo’s former lover, the Countess Pia Bellentani, wearing a white and gold gown. She is with her husband, who owns a meat-processing company in Emilia. Carlo’s current mistress, Mimi, is seated at a table nearby.
Carlo Sacchi far left; Countess Pia Bellentani far right. Photo by Giancolombo.
At the wedding party, we sat with another friend from New York. He seemed equally dubious about the newlywed’s future. Already there were strains between the families, erratic behavior, unexplainable illnesses. The evening had a gnawing sense of foreboding even the enforced frivolity of an Italian wedding couldn’t mask. We left as soon as dinner was over, well before the dancing began.
The next morning, after checking out, as we waited for the valet to bring the car up the long gravel path that leads to the villa, C remembered leaving her book in the salon downstairs. While she went to retrieve it, I stood on the terrace and watched a vintage Riva, like a mahogany arrowhead slicing through the deadly placid lake. It was the sole boat on the entire blue horizon. That familiar, hallucinatory morning haze had just started to roll out toward the mountains, the silk veil pulling back to reveal the colder, sharper light off day.
When the fashion show is finished, the party lasts long into the night. Around 2am, the band announces their final song. The Countess Bellentani goes to the concierge to collect her ermine stole and her husband’s coat, in which he always carries a 9mm revolver. She hides the pistol under the stole.
The police report relays her last conversation:
Countess: This time it really is over, you better believe me…
Carlo: What are you trying to say?
Countess: I can kill you. I have the gun.
Carlo: Not this same old female nonsense. Drama queen…
A sudden wind blows open the gauzy drapes in front of the french doors, to reveal a couple arguing… shouting now. A shot! Blood splatters on white fur. “Some Enchanted Evening”. Carlo Sacchi falls on the dance floor, a bullet to the heart.
The Countess is screaming, holding the gun to her own head. “It won’t shoot!”
When C came back out with her book, she got into the car without saying a word. Only when we reached the road beyond those wrought iron gates did she look up from her lap. “Something happened in there,” she whispered. “Downstairs, near the salon—there was a man.” With thudding finality, she said: “We are never staying here again”.
“So you believe in ghosts?” I asked Franco.
“Allora”, he replied. “It’s not a matter of believing. Can you accept that in this place where we sit now, other things have happened? Beautiful things. Monstrous things. Things that have consequences.”
“People die, but places remain. And their spaces are filled with longing. All beauty is haunted.”
Enjoyed your spooky retelling of the famed murder and I won't be staying there, thank you very much!
Thanks so much! Really appreciate it!