Somewhere in Northern Italy

The book. André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name is about seventeen-year-old Elio, one summer at his family’s villa, and the graduate student who comes to stay — and it is, sentence for sentence, one of the great novels of desire in any decade. But read it again as travel writing and you notice what the swooning reviews skipped: it’s a book about the texture of an Italian summer. The transcribing of music in the morning cool. The apricot juice. Bikes on gravel. The afternoon so hot the whole house surrenders to it. Nobody has written the pace of Italy in July better — the way a day can hold almost nothing and be the fullest day of your life.

The geography plays a lovely trick worth knowing before you pack: Aciman set the novel on the Italian Riviera, in a town he only calls “B.” Luca Guadagnino’s film moved it inland to Crema, in Lombardy — and the film’s Lombardy is so completely realized that it has effectively become the book’s landscape in the world’s imagination. I say let it. Lombardy in summer is the novel’s temperature.

The route. Villa life, lake light, and no ambition whatsoever — six nights, and the discipline is refusing to add a seventh thing to any day.

• Crema, a half day. The film’s town: the Piazza del Duomo where Elio waits by the war memorial, espresso at a bar with your book, and the flat green farmland around it that hums with cicadas exactly on cue.
• Lake Como, three nights. This is the villa chapter. Stay lakeside somewhere with a garden that steps down to the water — the kind of property where the afternoon is the itinerary. Bellagio and Varenna by ferry, one long lunch in a village you didn’t plan.
• Lake Garda or Iseo, two nights. Quieter water. Iseo is the connoisseur’s call — Franciacorta country, Italy’s serious-sparkling region, which means the wine tastings are a bike ride apart.
• The non-negotiables: swim before breakfast at least once; read outdoors daily; one dinner that starts at eight and ends when it ends.

This is honeymoon-and-milestone country in my book of trips — the novel is about a summer that marks a life, and the Lakes are where Italy does exactly that at the highest level. The villa-hotel tier here is genuinely special, and matching a couple to the right one is a taste conversation, not a search result.

The glass and the bite. An Aperol spritz — bitter orange, prosecco, the exact color of seven p.m. on Como — and a bowl of peaches. Chilled. At home: build the spritz, slice the peaches, read the first fifty pages in one sitting. It’s June on the page no matter what month you’re in.

If you need a copy: Call Me by Your Name — from Bookshop.org, whose profits go to independent bookstores. It’s an affiliate link — I earn a small commission and it costs you nothing.

The invitation. Read it together. Live it together. This one also works at the scale of two — it might be the most persuasive anniversary-trip argument ever printed. But if your book club reads it and the meeting runs long (it will), the Lakes host a group beautifully: one villa-hotel base, boats instead of buses. The ringleader’s playbook is here, and the call is here.