Grand Hotel Fasano

My grandparents, Angela and Wilhelm Sax, were the first in the family to discover Grand Hotel Fasano in the 1960s. They drove there from Munich on their Vespa, crossing the Brenner Pass towards Lake Garda. At the time, they were building up their Kaffeehaus back home, working almost constantly, trying to turn it into something larger while being fully tied to the rhythm of everyday business. But they were always drawn to Italy. To the culture, the food, the style, the elegance of life. Trips to Italy became both a break from work and a source of inspiration for the life they were building back home. A lot of that Italian influence later found its way into their café, and somehow also into the family itself. The love for Italy carried forward through generations. Grand Hotel Fasano sits directly on the shore of Lake Garda, opening up its own small world. A place where time somehow moves differently and people can step into alternate versions of themselves. Waiters in black tuxedos moving across the terrace, long lunches turning into evenings, the jetty stretching out into the water. Over the years, surprisingly little changed there. In 1987, my parents, Camillo and Yvonne, returned to the same hotel during the beginning of their relationship. Looking at old photos now, you can almost immediately understand the atmosphere around those summers. Days spent at the pool, endless hours by the lake, getting dressed for dinner in the evenings, drinks at the hotel bar that slowly turned into long nights. The kind of trip where everything still feels open and undefined. Then came my childhood in the 2000s. By then, the hotel already felt like part of our family history. My sister and I became friends with the children of the hotel director and spent entire days outside around the property. We caught water snakes with nets by the lake, ran through the gardens until it got dark, jumped into the water from the jetty and treated the whole hotel like our own little world. Those summers became some of my clearest childhood memories. And somehow the place never really left me either. Now I still return to Grand Hotel Fasano, but every time I arrive, all those different layers somehow still exist at once. My grandparents arriving on their Vespa. My parents at the beginning of their love story. Childhood summers by the lake. The hotel became tied to all of it. Maybe that is also why I ended up following my path as a hotelier. Because from very early on, hotels never felt anonymous to me. They felt emotional, cinematic, full of memory and atmosphere. Grand Hotel Fasano was probably the first place that showed me how deeply a place can stay with people. Not because it constantly changes or reinvents itself, but because it remains itself while generations pass through it. And I think that idea never really let me go.