George Clooney’s “Italy” – Lake Como

“Maybe George is here on Tuesday,” Shrugs Michel, barman at the Menaggio Golf club on the western shores of lake Como. “We never know. He just comes up Here and relaxes. A normal guy, who Likes a plate of spaghetti with tomato And basil, or maybe a steak.” t’s hard to comprehend, in the rather incongruous setting of a bar clad in oak panels, illustrated with naff prints of golfers on more celebrated fairways like North Berwick or the Royal and Ancient and fi lled to the sounds of Wham! on the radio and third-agers rustling past in plaid trousers, that this is the favourite hang-out of the world’s most famous actor – George Clooney. Clooney has just fi nished shooting a new TV advert for Martini and on set divulged all that he loves about his adopted second home of Italy. He spends four months of the year based at his lakeside Villa Oleandra at Laglio, half-way between Como and Menaggio. And from there he makes forays by car, motorbike and even bicycle to his favourite furtherfl ung parts of the country. Armed with his personal guidebook to Italy, and equipped with the most quintessentially Italian of cars – a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti – I am on the trail of George’s Italy. First stop is the club at Menaggio where Clooney feels most at home. “My friend Vittorio owns the club,” Clooney explains. “It has the best barstool I’ve ever sat on. You sit there and you have a drink and you sit with a lot of your friends and the band pla ys – he’s got a one-man-band guy that sits and plays It’s Raining Men. And it makes for a perfect night, actually.” Michel points out the barstool to which Clooney refers. It’s one of eight leather-stooped brown stools in the shape of chefs’ hats. And he is right, it is comfy. Behind me, with the backdrop of the Italian Alps far off, is the large round table at which the actor likes to eat. Clooney’s other barman at Menaggio, Alessandro Moiana is more star-struck by the Ferrari than Clooney. “He is so normal…” Alessandro says before getting distracted. “How does the Scaglietti drive?” Michel interjects; “He calls us by our fi rst names and we call him by his. He is not snobby.” The barmen only talk so openly and the club only agrees to let us in because I show them Clooney’s passionate endorsement of the club. Otherwise, like the rest of the Comoese population, having their resident megastar in residence makes the locals close ranks. One sight of our photographer’s camera, despite the fact we are in a Ferrari, closes the shutters. They do not afford the same protection to all Hollywood glitterati. “De Niro is at the Villa D’Este right now,” volunteers one man walking his dog in Piazza Barchetta (little boat) in Laglio. But when I tell him our photographer has shot Clooney in Los Angeles and we have the big man’s guide to Italy, he spins round and points at the large custard-yellow villa perched 100 yards away on the foreshore behind. “Casa Giorgio!” he declares. “He arrived yesterday.” A voluptuous blonde is lain out on a dock jus t yards from George’s fence. Maybe it’s coincidence. Or maybe a cow will jump over the moon tonight. No more a coincidence is the fact that in Laglio there is a via San Giorgio and a B+B San Giorgio too. Thankfully, no Clooney postcards are on sale in the post offi ce. Laglio is Italy personifi ed. Turreted village houses shuttered I to the 39 degree sun. Macho young men wringing every last kilometre from their screaming and scarped Vespas and the scent of espresso permeating the summer air. No wonder Clooney’s days in Italy are so idyllic. “Just waking up is a good day,” he says. “The perfect day for me though is, I’ll be at the house, and there will be a light breakfast laid out, and then I take my bicycle out and I will ride up the hill for about three hours. But I do that really early in the morning because that’s the only time you get left alone. And then I get passed by a bunch of 70-year-old men on bicycles because for whatever reason they just ride bicycles better than we do. Then I’ll come home and take a boat out for a little bit of the day and ride the motorcycles around. Sometimes we go all the way up to St. Moritz. Then we have lunch at two o’clock: sit outside and have lunch on the lawn with all of my friends and people in the town and things like that. And then take a nice nap. Then we take the boat out for a booze cruise, watch the sun set, and then have dinner out on the lawn. That’s the perfect day.” Word has got out we are writing about Clooney’s Italy. Pulling up outside a restaurant to check the satellite navigation for the next leg of our trip draws the entire kitchen staff out to see the car and talk about their homespun hero. And on the nearby border with Switzerland (it’s so close, the concept of going into another country for a short cut is not so odd) the carabinieri frontier guard gets all excited at our mission. “George is always coming across the border here,” he says. “You seeing him at the golf club?” Sadly not. Clooney’s Italian odyssey includes the Dolomites and Siena before the car needs to be dropped back to Ferrari’s factory at Maranello, near Modena. By the time he might, or might not, swing in to see Michel for a Martini, only the dust from the V12 Ferrari will be left in Como. Ferrari might have made models called barchetta, or little boat, but not even that would be suitable for getting us to Venice, where he will premiere his next fi lm, The Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading at the fi lm festival in the autumn. “I’ve been to the Venice fi lm festival fi ve or six times and it’s still my favourite thing to do. I love going there. You know, taking a boat to the premiere is kind of a fun way to go,” he reveals. As for a place to stay: “I love the Cipriani,” Clooney says. The plan was to take in the world’s greatest road, the Stelvio Pass, for the drive to Clooney’s other favourite haunt in the mountains, the Hotel and Spa Rosa Alpina in San Cassiano. Four hours of stomach churning and tyre burning turns fi lled me with excitement and the poor, travel sick photographer with dread. Luckily for him, the weather closed in so badly we abandoned the trip to San Cassiano. Clooney raves about the Rosa Alpina. It is furnished with beautiful ecclesiastical sculptures, reclaimed from a local church and said to bring luck to those who stay there, and contemporary cowhide chairs. Instead of the trip north, past his Swiss hideout in St Moritz, we turned turtle and made for Tuscany. Crammed full of posh Brits possibly, but Tuscany is to Italy what the Loire is to France or Rioja is to Spain; culinary and oenophile heaven. “You can’t go wrong with food or drink in Italy,” Clooney grins. The importance of food and drink to Italians borders on the religious. Not even football and Ferrari come close. Clooney relishes the sanctity of eating and drinking with friends. “You’ll see people in Italy who are walking home from a long day at work with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and the y’re going to have an hour and a half or a two hour dinner and they’re going to sit with their family and their friends and the y’re going to talk. That’s a tradition that has long since left the United States if it really ever was one. It would really be nice to have back because it’s a fun one.” Once a year Clooney makes the pilgrimage to Siena. Not for the medieval horse race Il Palio, but for the short fi lm festival each autumn. It ties in perfectly with the larger gathering in Venice. “Siena is one of my favourite places to stay in Italy,” says Clooney. “It’s a fun place and a great town.” The Ferrari is perfect for Tuscany’s swerving roads. ‘Chiantishire’, as it’s known, tends to get a bit crowded with New Labour luvvies and Islington liberals, so a better bet is an hour to the south of Siena in Montalcino, where the surrounding vineyards yield the famously robust Brunello. Drive east along the ravishing Val d’Orcia and you fetch up in the picturesque Montepulciano, where they make Vino Nobile. These towns are well worth wandering around, slipping into tiny, beautiful museums to admire the works of Maestri done half a millennium ago. Perhaps the most stunning town of all is San Gimignano, best known for its ancient buildings that tower inside the town walls. The towers of this medieval Manhattan were built centuries ago by feuding families eager to outdo each other. Not that there’s any discord at Clooney’s lakeside retreat: “I have a great chef at my house,” Clooney divulges. “Mostly I leave my guests alone and let them do their own thing. It takes about a day or two to acclimatise, but once they do they kind of realize that everything moves at a very different pace and everything slows down.” “The truth is that I love the way Italians take their time with everything. I’m sure that can be frustrating at times when you’re trying to get something done. But I love it. They’ve taught me how to live my life very differently.” “There’s nothing Italians do that is wrong. They embrace every part of the day. I spend four months there a year and it’s always the best four months I have. It’s truly the best four months of the year.”