Villa d’Este is the ultimate grand dame hotel

You can read all about the history of Villa d’Este while you have breakfast on the terrace, if you like. Or you can look up and see it for yourself instead. All that patrician grandeur and Renaissance prettiness and high Italian pomp! Once upon a time, there were nuns down in this corner of Lake Como. Then came cardinals, then Milanese counts, then prima ballerinas, then European princesses and British royalty, and then the jet set and the golden age movie stars, and then the Clooneys. It’s a patchy chronology, I know — but perhaps we can put that down to last night’s negronis, if you don’t mind. Two-by-two and tinkling like a baby grand, they were ferried over by white-coated waiters with good hair and enviable posture. Grazie. Prego. The younger brothers that I never had…