When Principessa Bona Borromeo deigns to meet a reporter, it feels more like a royal audience than an interview. That’s already clear at nine o’clock on a summer morning when a sleek motorboat bearing the three rings of the Borromeo crest nears Isola Bella, a tiny but magnificent island in Italy’s Lago Maggiore. Junior members of the Borromeo family are standing on the dock, like diplomatic envoys. Though the sun is blazing, the Principessa’s elder son, Count Vitaliano XI, 49, is in a suit and tie, while his wife, Marina, and sister-in-law, Lucrezia, are clad in conservative dresses. (Her other son, Federico X, 46, has been detained in Milan.) After exchanging polite greetings, we enter the grand courtyard of a vast 17th-century palazzo and make our way through mazelike hallways to an Empire-style salon, where a butler appears with espresso. Then the Principessa strides in. A slightly stout, white-haired lady in her 70s, wearing a bright magenta tunic over pants, she has a forceful aura that seems to put everyone on their toes, even her husband, Principe Giberto VIII, a genial gentleman in a finely tailored tan suit who enters a few steps behind her. Though the island has been in his family since the 1500s, he, like the rest of the clan, defers to his wife, to whom he was wed by Cardinal Montini, later Pope Paul VI, at Milan’s Duomo, in 1958. A moment later, several adorable young grandchildren scamper in to pay their morning respects to their nonna. “Baci!” she commands, and the youngsters comply by proffering kisses.
A true dynasty, the Borromeos trace their origins to the 15th century, when Vitaliano I, treasurer to the Duke of Milan, began amassing a fortune and accumulating enormous amounts of property. For the better part of the 16th century, a large chunk of what is now North Central Italy was known as the Borromeo State, and the family had full political and military power. In the center of this fiefdom, Lago Maggiore is not only geographically strategic—wedged between the Alps and Lombardy—but also breathtakingly beautiful, with azure waters and lush vegetation surrounded by snowcapped peaks.
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Less than an acre in size, Isola Bella was once just a barren mount of sharp rocks. But through a marvelous combination of imagination, engineering and wealth, the 16th-century Borromeos transformed it into a bijou fantasy. While their gray stone palazzo houses a magnificent collection of paintings, the real attraction has long been the garden, a series of 10 terraces that rise like a pyramid and are accented by statues, niches, pinnacles and other fanciful constructions. Recognized as a masterpiece of baroque garden design, the confection remains miraculously intact.
For centuries Isola Bella was an obligatory stop for aristocrats on their grand tours. Artists and writers flocked there too. In 1904 Edith Wharton devoted an entire chapter of Italian Villas and Their Gardens (recently republished by Rizzoli) to the property. While singing its praises, she also noted a shift in prevailing opinions. In the 1600s travelers were “unanimous in extolling the Isola Bella,” she wrote, seeing it as a paragon of “audaciously remodel[ed] nature.” By the mid-1700s, however, the fashion for English natural gardens led many visitors, who were searching for, as Wharton derisively put it, “sham Gothic ruins,” to consider the place too artificial. Wharton concluded that the Borromean gardens—“anchored in a lake of dreams”—were so unusual that they should be compared to Renaissance poetry, not to horticultural works.
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