Sun 5 Oct- Villa del Balbianello and Villa Carlotta

Sun 5 Oct- We are enjoying visiting gardens in towns around Lake Como. Today we visited Villa del Balbianello, near the town Lenno, built in the late 1700s on a promontory previously occupied by Capuchin monks. It's more famous as a museum, but the grounds are lovely, with many vistas overlooking the lake. It is maintained by FAI (http://www.fondoambiente.it).
After a short ferry ride to Tremezzo and a coffee break at Cafe Helvetia (E16 for a beer, a coffee and a salad- $25!), we visited Villa Carlotta (http://www.villacarlotta.it), which was built in the 17th Century. The garden is huge, and is also a botanical garden, with plants identified by plaques and on the map of the garden. There are plants from all over the world, laid out in a very enjoyable way that makes it a real pleasure to wander the paths with their frequent vistas of Lake Como. We could smell, and then see when we stopped and looked around, many gin-mokusei (osmanthus fragrans) and kin-mokusei (osmanthus auris) as we walked in the gardens. It reminded us of our garden. The kin-mokusei and gin-mokusei trees here are huge, much larger than ours; we can't believe how well they are doing here. The fragrance is heavenly.
From our hotel balcony, we can see beautiful sunsets before we go to dinner, as the sun sinks behind the mountains across the lake. We are eating at our hotel every morning and night because we arranged half-board. They are serving us four courses every night, but hopefully, visiting gardens will give us enough exercise to burn off the excess. Tonight we had 1/2 liter of the house white wine, salmon and cream cheese appetizer; tortellino with cream and ham and rigatoni pasta Portofino style (tomato and basil sauce) as first plate; grilled veal escalope and swordfish Amalfi style as second plate; then profiteroles and ice cream sundae for dessert.