Lake Como, the chosen lake of Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone, has been admired for its beauty down the ages. The famed Roman poet Virgil (70 BC-19 BC), called it 'the greatest lake'.
More recently, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in a letter to his friend Thomas Love Peacock that "This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty... it is long and narrow and has the appearance of a mighty river winding among the mountains and the forests".
His partner Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, was equally fascinated.
Mark Twain was smitten too. "A great feature of Como's attractiveness is the multitude of pretty houses and gardens that cluster upon its shores and on its mountainsides. They look so snug and so homelike, and at eventide when everything seems to slumber, and the music of the vesper bells comes stealing over the water, one almost believes that nowhere else than on the lake of Como can there be found such a paradise of tranquil repose," he wrote.
A few interesting facts of Paradiso Como then:
* Villa Del Balbianello the venue of the Bollywood wedding of the year was also where Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and Padme (Natalie Portman) were married in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
* Villa Del Balbianello also featured in the Daniel 2006 version of Casino Royale that had Daniel Craig playing Bond - James Bond.
* For the last 30 years, the Villa Del Balbianello is run by the Italian Trust. Before this, the owner was Guido Monzino, leader of the first Italian expedition to conquer Mount Everest (in 1973). An instagram video of the Villa:
* From the filmi to the non-filmi. Lake Como was where Winston Churchill, booted out of power despite his heroic turn as British PM during World War II, decided to paint his worries away in September 1945. Vanity Fair in an article quoted Lord Moran, Churchill's doctor, as writing that the former prime minister was so entranced by the lake that "he sat solidly for five hours, brush in hand, only pausing from time to time to lift his sombrero and mop his brow." According to the article, accompanying Churchill was an entourage made up of his wife, daughter, physician, valet, secretary, and detective. Detective, you ask?! Conspiracy-theory time...
* Lake Como was also where Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci, who were attempting to flee to safety, met with their end on April 28, 1945. Churchill had once termed Mussolini 'the Roman genius' and the conspiracy theory went that there existed secret compromising correspondence between Churchill and the Italian fascist dictator. It was to recover this that the former British Prime Minister had arrived in Como. Delicious theory? Of course. Hard facts to support it? None.