‘Outside was the moon, up above in the sky, and the long garden beside the lake resembled silver, with its noble plants, palms, magnolias, agaves and the scent of roses’. These words of the German Poet Paul Heyse – 1910 Nobel Prize for Literature – describe the rapture of one of his stays at the Grand Hotel, where he was often a guest in the decade 1899-1909, and where he set his novella ‘A Venetian Night’, from the volume ‘Novellas from Lake Garda’ (1902). But the list of excellent guests that have stayed at the Grand Hotel is nearly endless: from Sir Winston Churchill to Gabriele “The Poet” D’Annunzio; from King George of Saxony to the novelists William Somerset Maugham and Vladimir Nabokov; down to the great stars of music, theatre and dance, who in the last years have performed at the summer festival hosted by the Vittoriale at Gardone Riviera, and who have chosen the Grand Hotel as a place to stay on the Garda. Would you like to know more? Then do keep an eye on our blog, where we will regularly post some of the most interesting facts about the Grand Hotel – 130 years of history.
Francesco Messina (1900-1995), one of the greatest Italian sculptors of the twentieth century, well known in Japan, he attended the Grand during the sixties for long stays before buying a summer home and a studio in Gardone in via Roma. He was also a poet and the landscape of Gardone inspired some poems published in a book printed by Mondadori in 1973. One of the poem is dedicated to the great camphor of the promonade along the lake: "Green Eyes has the Night. / Venus ingemmest sunrise-white rose on the back of the fairing Baldo. / To the west the moon still keeps the twilight. / Strange images become foggy with vapors of day."
Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), after attending the Faculty of Medicine at King's College London, devoted himself to literature. Author of plays and novels, he met success in 1914 with "Of Human Bondage" which was followed by other books translated worldwide, including "The Moon and Sixpence", inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, and "The Razor's Edge". He had an adventurous life and he normally spent the last period of his life at the Grand Hotel Gardone before reaching Venice, where he used to stay at the Gritti. Hard to say whether the writer has drawn inspiration from the landscape of Lake Garda, but certainly he was fascinated.
in the entire property
