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How Lake Como became the most photographed lake on earth — and what Byron had to do with it

Lake Como's international romantic reputation preceded Instagram by 200 years — it was established by the Romantic poets who visited in the early 19th century (Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and later Flaubert, Stendhal, and Henry James all wrote about Como's landscape) and commercially developed by the 19th-century grand hotel boom that built the palatial lakeside hotels that still define Como's luxury character. Byron's description of the lake in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) — "Lake Como! Oh lovely lake!" — was the first internationally circulated romantic description in English, and subsequent Romantic literature created the template for Como as the archetypal romantic lake landscape. The specific Victorian-era development: the Grand Hotels Villa d'Este (opened 1873 as a hotel, originally a 16th-century villa), Villa Serbelloni (Bellagio), and a dozen smaller establishments created the physical infrastructure for the romantic lake holiday that every subsequent generation has repeated. Lake Como's Instagram domination (currently one of the most-tagged European destinations) is the technological extension of a cultural construction that began with a Romantic poet's verse in 1812.