Very romantic Delfino: the restaurant-hotel of the Borromeo princes reopens

A small island on Lake Maggiore, a princely palace, a surprising baroque garden populated by white peacocks, an eighteenth-century guesthouse transformed into a hotel with two suites. From the bed you look at the lake, from the living room you open the large windows onto the balcony full of flowers. Silence, some boats passing by, the seagulls. And then a gourmet restaurant, walks, views, sunsets. Welcome to the perfect romantic weekendin a new hotel to dream: it’s called Dolphin and is the suite restaurant that will re-open on May 12, 2022 on Isola Bella. A project of the Borromeo family which for over two years has been working on the redevelopment of the old island village.

The ancient charm of the Dolphin

It rains when we enter the Delfino, the living room welcomes us with recovered and restored antique furniture, blue velvet armchairs, a huge and lit fireplace. The whole Beautiful island – where from 1630, the Borromeo family, in the person of Vitaliano VI, began the construction of a sumptuous representative palace with the famous terraced gardens – is subject to a double constraint, landscape and artistic, and each intervention has been carefully examined. The Turin architect Salvatore Simonetti has restored the rooms while maintaining style and atmosphere, the coffered ceilings, the Venetian terrazzo floors, the recurring decoration of one of the symbols of the Borromeo family – the three rings ringed to signify the alliance of the three Milanese families , Sforza, Visconti and Borromeo. In the suites there is an atmosphere of peace, in the back there is the greenhouse full of plants. In 1828, Stendhal wrote in the Small guide for travel in Italy of having left your luggage right here, at the Delfino, to go hiking on the lake; Mario Soldati walked around the hotel Small Ancient World.

It is a bit like that, Isola Bella, ancient, beautiful and distant, touristy in the day and now an exclusive destination for the evening. How nice will it be to come to dinner on the large terrace of the restaurant on summer nights? The chef is called Luca Vietti, he is almost thirty years old, he is from Campania, he has the cult of the raw material he chooses to be local and possibly sustainable, including some excursions to the “home garden”, that is to say that of the Borromeo family. From the menu we try an egg cooked at a low temperature of great satisfaction, a pasta with pea cream and crispy bacon. We are the second “customers” of the restaurant, the first were the princes, Vitaliano and Marina Borromeo. It must not have been stress-free to test the menu with the descendants of San Carlo Borromeo (just to mention one of the illustrious ancestors of the family), but evidently everything went well.

Inside Isola Bella, in the Borromean lands

Speaking of family, the trip to the island takes you to the center of its history, in the heart of “Terre Borromeo” the brand they belong to Isola Bella and Isola Madre, the Rocca di Angera, the Pallavicino Park in Stresa and the Mottaroneand – will open shortly – the Castles of Cannaro. From the island you can move by boat to discover these places of art. The first, however, is a two-minute walk from the Dolphin, the Palazzo Borromeo on Isola Bellasumptuous stucco rooms, baroque furnishings, windows overlooking the lake, a collection of paintings that fill rooms and rooms, up to the most beautiful surprise: the garden on which – together with the other Borromeo parks – an army of 40 gardeners works.

But there is also an army of peacocks. With green and blue plumage they are on the Mother Island while here on Isola Bella are the white peacocks that come from Persia. There is also the unicorn, a symbol of nobility and the political value of the family. It stands on the facade of the large rock theater at the head of the garden, where it still happens today to be able to attend some concerts, among the flowers and trees of the botanical park, in a wonder garden in the middle of the blue lake.