Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
My terrace at La Darbia stands before the Platonic ideal of a landscape, the sort of view an earlier visitor might have spent half a grand tour trying to capture in oils.
Far beneath trim rows of Nebbiolo vines, a thick arc of glassy water wanders across the canvas, its shores embellished with spires and palazzi. A wooded lakeside hill, clustered with baroque chapels, looks down at an island with a monastery in the middle. In the background, rearing ranks of plump greenery and sheer granite are speckled with terracotta roofs, crowned by the shimmering tip of Monte Rosa, dutifully pinkish in the mid-morning rays. It is a tirelessly becoming spectacle, and one that evolves as the sun pans across the Piedmont sky, a chiaroscuro masterclass that makes water shimmer and blacken by turns, brings hillside castles into fleeting spotlit focus, and gradually fades Monte Rosa out of the picture after lunch.
The Italian lakes aren’t exactly short on scenic majesty, but these days it’s generally half-hidden behind sunburned faces and lofted camera phones. Earlier this year, a depressing clip from Lake Como went viral, showing an endless queue of visitors waiting in turn for their Instagram money shot through a pair of open waterside gates. Access to the site had cost each of them €13. Some stood in line for two hours.
It’s the sort of experience that has come to blight Italy’s overwhelmed big-ticket locations, but happily this is a country crammed with under-appreciated small-ticket wonders. When Florence gets too much, try Bologna or Arezzo. Escape the Roman hordes by popping down the Tiber to Ostia. And then there’s Lake Orta, Como and Maggiore’s half-forgotten neighbour. In terms of aquatic surface Orta is a minnow, less than a tenth the size of Maggiore. But few places in Italy can match this delightful backwater’s ratio of allure to visitor numbers.
In the days ahead, wandering all but alone through Unesco world heritage sites and past the grandest shoreside mansions, it feels like Como must have felt in a different era, before globalised mass tourism and that corrosive quest for selfie likes. Perhaps the 1980s, or maybe even the 1890s.
La Darbia was created 14 years ago by two local brothers, both architects unburdened by previous experience of the hotel and catering trade. Inspired by the upscale “restored hamlet” resorts then beginning to spring up in Tuscany, Gian Carlo and Matteo Primatesta acquired a ruined 15th-century tower and a surrounding chunk of hillside. “One of our clients owned the land and asked if we were interested,” they tell me in La Darbia’s alfresco bar, a shaded kitchen garden set above a saltwater infinity pool and facing that epic vista. It was the sort of opportunity that would no longer exist on the assiduously developed slopes of Como and Maggiore.
Over Milano-Torinos and focaccia al padellino, it becomes clear that the pair’s motivation has always been aesthetic rather than commercial. Reflective and low-key, they certainly weren’t plucked from Italian hospitality’s central casting. La Darbia’s 20 suites, arranged on two levels alongside the restored tower, are furnished with bespoke tables, bookshelves and wardrobes designed by the brothers and beautifully crafted by local artisans from reclaimed farmhouse doors and the like. (“Here in Piedmont, in most of Italy, people prefer new things, so it’s easy to find old things,” says Gian Carlo. “For us there is so much character and history in these materials.”) The lofty pantiled roof of my top-floor apartment is supported on gnarled beams; the stone and iron staircase up to it is a study in artful patina, wreathed in Virginia creeper.
The tower, now home to the reception desk and offices, was constructed to satisfy a historic regional obsession with the capture and consumption of small birds. Fancy a thrush for supper? Simply plant an orchard of crab apples, build a massive tower in the middle, then throw a big net off the top when migrating passerines stop by for a fruit snack. (The practice was banned in 1992.)
La Darbia’s suites were initially pitched at self-catering young families — mine had a children’s spare room with two little beds — but the demographic began to evolve eight years ago when the Primatestas opened the restaurant where I will dispatch several truly great meals. Most guests are now couples focused on fine dining and elegant exclusivity, and staff confirm that the kitchenettes in every suite — like the spare rooms — are barely used. Dining out on your broad terrace before all that scenery would certainly appeal on a warm evening, but those who do it these days order in-room service.
You could quite easily and rewardingly come to La Darbia and not leave the place until you went home. Plenty of my fellow guests do just that, wandering through the well-tended azaleas and irises, drinking in the poolside views, and in one case endlessly taunting the robot lawnmower that trims the grass between the hotel’s vines. There is a logistical incentive to stay put. It’s important to emphasise that La Darbia is not on Lake Orta, but extremely high above it. Coming and going by car involves a steepling single-track section hemmed in by ancient walls and plenty of impatient oncoming locals. You can walk down to the lake but you wouldn’t want to walk back up, and taxis are hard to come by: the give and take of low visitor numbers.
The answer is La Darbia’s fleet of hybrid e-bikes, of which I take daily advantage. After a bracing descent of the hotel driveway’s cobbled hairpins, it’s a three-minute swoosh to the edge of Orta San Giulio, the area’s showpiece settlement, built around and atop a promontory that noses into the lake. Rhododendrons and Spanish brooms blurt riotously over old stone; palms tower above bulrushes at the twinkling water’s edge. Aristocratic holiday residences, each with three or four hundred enviable summers under their belts, gaze out at the lake over gates flanked with lions and caryatids. The soundtrack is birdsong and gently lapping water. Under cloudless skies it is all sigh-inducingly glorious, not least because my bike and I have much of it to ourselves.
Flowers climbing up the wall of a house in the townThe wooden door of one of the town houses
The main square, Piazza Motta, has been a civic focus since the 13th century, when Orta San Giulio became the hub of an independent federation that would govern the lake and its environs for the next 500 years. The Broletto, a Renaissance town hall decorated with flaking frescoed coats of arms, is neighboured by stately, pastel-fronted hotels, offering grand views of the little monastery island, home to about 70 Benedictine nuns.
An ebullient party of local primary schoolchildren is being herded into one of the ferries that connect Piazza Motta with the island and the towns on Orta’s opposite shore. In four days, this is the only loud noise I experience, apart from the ones I make when a hornet gets into my bedroom.
My circumnavigation of Orta San Giulio continues on foot, pushing the bike round a dappled lakeside footpath. The water is mesmerically clear. When a crested grebe ducks below the surface, I follow its dive right to the bottom and back. Orta is among the cleanest lakes in Europe, and being so compact and sheltered by tall hills, one of the calmest.
A pristine baroque mansion has a polished brass bellplate with two Russian surnames on it, beside a very locked set of enormous iron gates. Past it, a sense of carefully managed neglect begins to take hold: bleached paint, a few cracks in the stucco, the odd missing louvre in a set of shutters. The Piranesi-print vibe might not do it for all those Italians who prefer new things, but I’m enchanted. We can all pretend that we’re better than the snap-happy tourist masses, but in the following hour my phone is barely away from my face.
My bike’s turbo mode whisks me back up to the hotel and a debut encounter with chef Matteo Monfrinotti’s evening menu. The dishes — heavy on Piedmontese ingredients — are bijou but dense in rich flavours, crowned by an especially memorable pasta cappelletti with pears, salted walnut, baby squid and mullet bottarga. The young local staff are warm, wise and efficient, most notably the sommelier who lets me loose on some extraordinary Barolos.
A routine is established: electrically assisted sightseeing by day, Barolo-assisted gastronomic indulgence by night. The next day I ride down — then up — to Sacro Monte, Orta San Giulio’s summit and home to all those baroque chapels. There are 20 in all spread out among the trees in this Unesco world heritage site, each hosting a tableau from the life of St Francis of Assisi, crammed with full-size figures caught in suspended animation. There is much frozen wailing and pointing, and of course barking, flapping and whinnying. It’s both amazing and surreal, like some bonkers devotional theme park. Being at Orta, it’s also empty and free.
The day after, I ride right round the lake on a 38km trail, the Anello Azzurro (Blue Ring) steering the bike through isolated villages full of roses and along stretches of vacant waterfront, then dragging it up a steep forested slope strewn with fallen trees. Public service announcement: no matter what AI might tell you, the Blue Ring is unsuitable for bicycles, electric or not. That night I go off-menu and order a huge plate of spaghetti carbonara.
On the last evening, Gian Carlo drops by at my table to tell me about the Primatestas’ new project: a larger, more luxury-focused hamlet restoration set amid lavender fields in the Chianti hills, due to open this summer. Inevitably he dwells extensively on the furniture he is designing for it, and the gorgeous old wood that will be employed in its construction. Chianti, he acknowledges, is an entirely different hospitality proposition: more visitors, more competition, very much an on-piste destination.
The challenge at La Darbia, for a boy from Orta who loves this lake’s calm contentment — and whose manner embodies it — is to raise traveller awareness just a little higher, spreading the word without losing the magic. “I like that here is maybe a hidden paradise,” he says, “but of course you always want some more visitors, it’s important for our local economics.”
Behind him, through the restaurant’s full-height glazing, dainty little strings of shoreside lights are reflected in distant dark water. “But there is always this fear that somebody goes on Instagram, and says look at this amazing place, and I wake up and find two million people outside.”
