Como has a particular kind of light. It comes off the lake, moves between the mountains and settles in interiors with the quality painters have chased for centuries. That same light fills the rooms of CASABIANCA, Lake Como's newest cultural address and perhaps its most personal.
Opened in late 2024, CASABIANCA is the passion project of Paolo and Antonella De Santis, a name familiar to anyone who has stayed at Grand Hotel Tremezzo or Passalacqua, consistently ranked among the world's finest hotels. The family has now turned its eye from hospitality to art, creating a place that sits between private collection, house-museum and living salon.
A 1930s villa reborn
The building carries its own history of reinvention. Architect Piero Ponci designed the villa in the 1930s for a prominent textile industrialist family, and it later served as a private residence, corporate showroom and bank headquarters. Each use left a trace, though none quite matched the elegance of the structure.
Under the De Santis family's stewardship, the villa has returned to its first role as a home, although the residents are works of art. Across three floors and fifteen rooms, CASABIANCA feels domestic. There are no institutional corridors or climate-controlled white cubes. Paintings hang where paintings belong: above fireplaces, beside windows and in conversation with the lake views beyond.
The collection: forty years of passion
CASABIANCA feels different from a conventional museum because the collection is personal. The roughly fifty works on display represent more than forty years of collecting by Paolo and Antonella De Santis, acquired through instinct, emotion and the circumstances in which each piece entered their lives.
The collection leans towards Italian contemporary art of the past half-century, with real depth in Arte Povera, the movement that emerged from Turin and Milan in the late 1960s and challenged the commercialisation of art through humble materials and serious ideas. You encounter Michelangelo Pistoletto, whose mirror pieces draw the viewer into the work, Jannis Kounellis and his industrial poetry, Mario Merz with his luminous igloos, and Alighiero Boetti's embroidered maps.
The scope also reaches beyond Italy. Anselm Kiefer's monumental explorations of memory and mythology have space here, alongside William Kentridge's animated meditations on history and Marina Abramovic's investigations of presence. Emilio Vedova's gestural explosions share walls with Giulio Paolini's cerebral compositions.
Art without barriers
One of CASABIANCA's boldest choices is what it leaves out: labels, placards, arrows and suggested routes. The De Santis family rejected the standard museum apparatus and chose to let visitors find their own way through the rooms.
"We like the idea that visitors can take their time," the family explains, "perhaps read an art book, observe and breathe in the space." Art here becomes part of the room, and visitors can spend time with it at their own pace.
That approach echoes the family's hotels, where guests are made to feel like welcomed friends. At CASABIANCA, the result has the feel of a private collection inside a home, with less of the choreography of an institution.
Cova: Milan's pasticceria arrives on Lake Como
The ground floor of CASABIANCA houses one of Lake Como's most notable cafe openings in decades: an outpost of Pasticceria Cova, the Milanese institution founded in 1817.
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For more than two centuries, Cova has kept its address on Via Montenapoleone, Milan's most exclusive shopping street, where generations of fashionistas, opera-goers and Milanesi have met for espresso, aperitivo and pastries. Its reputation reaches well beyond Italy, with satellite locations in Paris, Monaco and across Asia introducing Cova's traditions to an international clientele.
Como now joins that company. Cova Casabianca offers the full experience: polished pastries displayed like jewels, well-made espresso and the atmosphere of unhurried elegance the original has cultivated for generations. In rooms filled with art and looking over the lake, even a simple coffee feels like part of the visit.
Come for breakfast and linger over a brioche. Return for afternoon tea with Cova's celebrated mignon pastries. Or time your visit for aperitivo, when the light softens over the water and gallery and salon begin to feel like the same place. In the family's words, CASABIANCA is "a place to sip time", and Cova gives that phrase a Milanese accent.
Looking ahead: the suites
In 2026, CASABIANCA will add three suites on the top floor, a natural move for a family with the De Santis hospitality background. It is easy to imagine waking among masterworks, taking breakfast near a Kiefer and watching sunset from rooms where art forms part of daily life.
Planning your visit
CASABIANCA gives Lake Como a new way to experience art: intimate, unhurried and shaped by a collector's eye. For travellers whose time on the lake is led by culture as much as scenery, it offers a chance to see how one of Italy's great collecting families lives with the art they love.
Pair a morning at CASABIANCA with a passeggiata through Como's silk-weaving quarter, lunch at one of the city's historic trattorias and perhaps a late-afternoon ferry to Bellagio. It also fits into a wider art itinerary: Villa Olmo's exhibitions, the rationalist architecture of Como's Fascist-era buildings and the medieval frescoes scattered through lakeside churches.
However you plan the visit, CASABIANCA rewards the slow, attentive looking that Lake Como itself asks of you.
Practical information
Address: Via Lungo Lario Trento 47, 22100 Como
Hours: Tue 15:00-18:00; Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00; Closed Monday*
Tickets: €15 full price; €10 reduced (ages 15-24); Free under 14
Website: casabiancacomo.com
Tip: Visit on a weekday morning. Allow 90 minutes, then enjoy Cova pastries overlooking the lake.
*Hours and prices may change. Verify on official website before visiting.
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