When an aristocratic family has owned an island in the middle of a lake for centuries, that is what you call a private retreat. On Lago Maggiore - Italy's second-largest lake - the Borromeo family holds two islands, Isola Bella and Isola Madre. Beatrice Borromeo, a journalist and the wife of Pierre Casiraghi, married there in 2015. Not by accident.

Lago Maggiore stretches from Piedmont in northern Italy to the southern edges of Switzerland. The Alps drop vertically into the water, and the lake bed has a black depth the other northern Italian lakes do not have. From Milan's airport to the shore - one hour by car. That is why the wealthy have always chosen this place - it is close to everything, but looks like another world.

Stresa is the main gateway - a well-preserved Belle Epoque town, with hotels lining the shore from the late 19th century. Verbania is the kingdom of villas: Villa Giulia, Villa San Remigio, Villa Taranto with its 20,000 plant species. Cannobio, near the Swiss border, is a medieval village with houses in pastel tones - a scene out of a film for anyone who still thinks Italy is only Tuscany.

Isola Bella, the Borromeo's main symbol, holds a 17th-century palace shaped like a ship. Baroque gardens, marble, a grotto decorated with shells and pebbles. Popes have visited, Hemingway wrote here. Isola Madre is another world - a romantic English garden, white peacocks and golden pheasants, tropical plants transplanted to the Alps. Isola dei Pescatori is the only inhabited island - fishermen, craft markets, August nights with illuminated little boats in religious procession.

The Borromeo Palace has welcomed Napoleon and Mussolini. Queen Victoria came, the British court still pays private visits today. The Frenchman Montesquieu described Lago Maggiore as "the most beautiful place in the world". In the Balkans, every one of our lakes - Ohrid, Prespa, Dojran, Skadar - has its own mythology, but none carries that aristocratic weight that Maggiore does. Maybe that is good. Maybe it is bad.

The fact is that on Maggiore the tradition of wealthy retreat is not new - it has worked for centuries, with the same families, in the same palaces. The Balkans has not yet learned to sell beauty without an ugly hotel in the middle and a traffic jam to the beach. The Italians know: a 700-year-old family that keeps two islands and refuses to allow over-development creates a value that cheap mass tourism will never reach.

Could that work with us? The question is not rhetorical. When Lake Ohrid looks again the way Maggiore looked a century ago, we will talk. Until then, if you go to Italy, skip Como - it is full of selfie sticks. Lago Maggiore is bigger, quieter, and more secret.