THE VERY IMPORTANT GUESTS

Because of the requisitions occurred during the two last century world wars, it is difficult to exactly establish the presence of very important guests at the Hotel Britannia Excelsior. For sure, during the 1970s -80s, to this hotel repeatedly came some members of the Italian Parliament as well as some Italian Premiers such as Giulio Andreotti and Emilio Colombo, who came to Cadenabbia to attend to some international political meetings together with some other European Premier and Presidents.

And certainly some very important people in the field of music, art and licterature were guests of the Hotel, for all through the XVIII and IXX centuries, Cadenabbia was the place where artists, literate and politicians came to meet and spend their summer holidays. Anyway, for lack of documentation, we must refer to those who certainly came to Cadenabbia and presumably have been guests, although occasionally, of Hotel Britannia.

For a long period Giuseppe Verdi lived at Villa Margherita, guest of the Ricordis, where he composed the most beautiful airs of La Traviata. Amilcare Ponchielli was a guest of the Ricordi, too, and at Villa Margherita he wrote his opera I Lusitani. The great cellist and composer Alfredo Piatti, who lived in London, had a villa built alongshore at Cadenabbia where he used to spend summer, waiting for his British friends to join him. And at Cadenabbia came Stendhal, who described this village in his masterpiece “La Chartreuse de Parme”, and the American poet Longfellow, who dedicated a beautiful poetry to Cadenabbia. Here came the British Queen Victoria, the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, the Price of Piedmont, and Pope Pius XI, who used to spend his summer holidays at Griante with his mother before he was elected Pope. The first German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who called Cadenabbia “my second home country”, the British Prince Charles and many other important people, who also today choose Cadenabbia as a place where to relax and enjoy the quietness and the beauty of this small village set along the shore of Lake Como.