The Grand Tour, a real journey of excellence, is a phenomenon born and developed since the seventeenth century, but which has a particular fortune especially in the following two centuries. Italy is one of the favorite destinations for this itinerary, given the remarkable historical and architectural heritage enjoyed by its main cities. Journey intended as a vision of places in history and in art where one can learn through direct experience what had been learned only from books up to that point.

Lake Como soon becomes one of the places touched during the Grand Tour and generates the interest of visitors for its particular orographic and hydrographic conformation and for local landscape, which seduces and fascinates. Many travelers are bewitched by the brown waters of the Lario, by the wooded slopes of the mountains that plunge into the lake, by the peasant life of its inhabitants, used to tearing the fruits that would have fed them all year long from the steep land.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Lake Como became a fashionable destination, a holiday resort for the health of the air and the richness of its landscapes: a place of excellence not to be missed during a journey made in Italy and the last exotic environment before the cold and dark, north. Being on Lake Como means enjoying the climate and immersing yourself in the landscape that has inspired art and poetry since the time of Pliny. The peculiarity of the landscape of Lake Como celebrated by visitors of the Grand Tour lies in its dual soul: noble and rural. Two aspects that, although distinct, reveal the same reality, made of the complex work of man to shape nature. Rural is the peasant soul of Lario; noble is the most exclusive soul of the lake, that of the villas that are reflected on the shore in the Larian waters.

Prints and paintings, as well as descriptions, capture and summarize this combination that makes the lake a "classic" source of beauty (vases, statues, cypresses, olive trees). Next to the peasant countries with their cultivated terraces, soon appear luxurious villas with luxuriant parks where the rich families on vacation and illustrious guests from all over Europe stay.