This post is a bit delayed, but I guess I needed two weeks to recuperate before I wrote about my two weeks in Italy for work (5 days of which, thankfully, were with Meg). From November 8th to 23rd, I was working for a conference/summit on philanthropy at Villa Serbelloni in the tiny village of Bellagio, which is at the end of a peninsula sticking into Lake Como in Northern Italy. Villa Serbelloni is sprawling estate covering most of the tip of the peninsula and is owned by The Rockefeller Foundation, which was co-presenting the summit. Leave it to me to complain about spending 15 days in a beautiful lakeside Italian village and villa, but to be fair I had to spend most of my time working. Nonetheless, the area was gorgeous and I did have some opportunities to venture out with my camera and explored the town and some of the other towns on the coast of the lake. November is very quiet on Lake Como since it’s really more of a summer destination for tourists. The area actually gets quite cold (it is in the foothills of the Italian Alps), so while it was great not having to deal with mobs of people, it also meant there wasn’t a lot going on and the weather was pretty chilly.
A bunch of us working at the summit pooled our resources and hired a boat for a two-hour tour of the lake one day (and thankfully we didn’t get marooned on a sitcom). Meg joined me for the last few days, which was great. We “hiked” a gorge in the town of Bellano (while it is rather deep, it’s not very big), got to ride on an old school hydrofoil ferry and spent our last day before flying out walking around the middle of Milan, the closest big city. Milan’s cathedral is enormous and one of the biggest and most lavish we’ve seen during our travels (and we went to St. Peter’s last year!). All in all, it was an enjoyable experience (especially since I got paid to be there), but I’m very happy to be settled back in Berlin!