.

Bellagio.co.nz
This may or may not be a compliment to New Zealand, or it may even be that our remote island status is too insignificant to be internationally noticed, but here is a true story. In Italy there is an historic town called Bellagio right on the fork of Lake Como and in Las Vegas there is a hotel and casino of the same name. The hotel got in first and grabbed the Bellagio website domain name and registered every derivation it could find which bore any faint resemblance to it, meaning that the town was unable to promote itself on the internet using its own name. That was until it discovered one of the only names not taken by Bellagio, the hotel, was one using the New Zealand company suffix. It now happens that the official town website and the sites of many of the local businesses all use .co.nz in their names, the town’s official website being www.bellagio.co.nz. We found this out by chance, having happened upon a very nice little restaurant named Aperitivo Et Al Bar where we stopped for a meal of buckwheat pasta, the house specialty which turned out to be rather more delicimo than the name suggested. The proprietor gave Anousheh the business card and it was she who spotted the quirk in the website address. We thought we had stumbled upon some great Kiwi connection but no, the explanation was as uncomplicated as a small town’s fight against an American corporate name snatcher.
Bellagio itself is another of these towns adorned with old villas and grand hotels connected by narrow cobbled streets but distinguished from our little haven of Damaso by being busy and home to some very nice shops. It is described as the most famous of the resorts on Lake Como, accommodating 150,000 visitors a year, and a place of fascination for the cultured set ever since the Renaissance, its well known visitors including poets Shelley and Longfellow and composers Flaubert and Liszt. Love scenes from Star Wars, Part II: Attack of the Clones were filmed close by, at Villa Balbianello, as were parts of Oceans Thirteen through the George Clooney connection.
As an aside, one thing we have noticed in restaurants in Italy is that they all display no-smoking signs, but then send something of a mixed message by placing ashtrays on tables. Fortunately it is not the practice of patrons to smoke indoors, most seeming content to linger in doorways even though the habit is banned in public places. This public ban is presumably not enforced anywhere, even the young attendant in one of the local council offices, whose tenants include the local health enforcement agency and police, hung around the doorway chain smoking while we were there.
It was the C10 bus that picked us up from Domaso and took us to Como to bring our Italian sojourn to an end, an almost two-hour journey right down the lakeside. It is a quite spectacular drive, from the Alps in the north separating Italy from France to the West, Switzerland due North and Austria in the East, through the small towns of Dongo, Musso, Pianello, Cremia, Rezzonico, Mennagio dotted along the coast. Past village markets, churches and religious statues, and enormous villas and palaces we went. In parts the road was so narrow that two vehicles could not pass and quite an amount of time was spent inching our way past on-coming vehicles, each separated by not more than a coat of paint, or waiting for other vehicles to reverse up the road to find a patch wide enough to accommodate both.
Nearing Como we overlooked the town of Laglio from where it had by then been established that George Clooney was actually in residence at his Villa Orleandra. This had been confirmed not only by reports that fellow actors Robert Di Niro, Matt Damon and Bill Murray have all been house guests, but by newspaper headlines that Clooney was entertaining his latest love interest Elisabetta Canalis there, much to Kaelene’s disappointment. This story had occupied newspaper headlines for days, but what intrigued us was that the Mayor of Laglio introduced a new regulation last week making it unlawful for anyone to gather in groups of three or more outside the actor’s home. “Gawpers,” The Independent reported, “will face a 19 Euro fine”. Apparently this action been introduced at the request of neighbours rather than Clooney himself, thus not blemishing his reputation as something of a much loved adopted son of the town.