For years, shots of George Clooney at play on the shores of Lake Como have sparked interest in the Italian vacation destination. Now the TImes Online reports that the Clooney effect has spread to nearby Lake Maggiore, which is the largest of the Italian lakes and is 20 minutes from Lake Como. Although Lake Como is the more prestigious address, villas there can be as much as 50 percent more, making Lake Maggiore seem like quite the deal for your Italian villa. Lake Maggiore has many beautiful homes, some built as summer houses by the French aristocracy.

Want in? For €1.5 million euros you can pick up a restored farmhouse with Lake Maggiore views. This home and other Lake Maggiore properties are listed through Knight Frank.

If I had the means I could easily wear nothing but Loro Piana for the rest of my life. They make the most comfortable, classic, stylish and subtly luxurious clothes I've ever had the pleasure of putting on. World-famous for their cashmere, the 200-year-old Italian company, which began as a textile merchant, has also branched out into other areas (including accessories and women's clothing) in more recent years with equal success.

Loro Piana's motto has it that true luxury is "knowing, not showing," i.e. dressing for yourself, not to impress others. It's "an inner satisfaction that comes from an aesthetic, intellectual, tactile pleasure, stemming from tradition, research and genuine quality." What could be better than that?

Their latest innovation is called Baby Cashmere®. To make this fabric the company first had to spend several years convincing Mongolian and Chinese breeders to comb the fine underfleece of the Hyrcus goat kid when it is 3-12 months old. Each combing yields no more than 30 grams of the rare, precious and incredibly soft fibre. Baby Cashmere crops up in Loro Piana's luxe Fall/Winter 2008 collection, which is about to hit stores; as usual we want it all.

We love the knitted stretch cashmere Davenport jacket pictured here, which like a lot of their designs calls to mind a cross between Cary Grant and Steve McQueen. And also like many of their best designs it captures that ineffable quality of effortless elegance the Italians call sprezzatura. This is the kind of thing you wear for a drive to your villa on Lake Como in your Maserati Gran Turismo. Even better, merely putting on this jacket for a trip to the liquor store can make you feel like you're driving to your villa in a Maserati, which is the real test of its worth (The jacket retails for $3,995).

The lush oases pictured in Luxury Private Gardens, the newest title in teNeues' brilliant Luxury Books series, veer between the pleasantly inspirational and oppressively beautiful. In other words, while looking at it made us want to rush outside and start planting things, it also made us despair of ever creating anything one tenth as attractive as the private paradises portrayed between its covers. Much better, we feel, to simply sit back, mix a drink, read the damned book and let someone else do the digging, pruning, weeding and whatnot. But we digress.

Even the most lavish gardens in these pages displaying "the highest standards of horticultural excellence" are founded on simplicity, the book assures us: "Stripped down to their bare essentials, they are like a well-cut couturier's gown - nothing but an utterly simple response to the unadorned landscape or the naked human body they are designed to fit." The incredible Villa d'Este in Lake Como, Italy (where part of Casino Royale was filmed) pictured on the cover, with its elegant, elaborate parterres doesn't exactly scream simplicity to us, but we could stare at it all day. See the gallery for a luxe garden tour.

Enjoy a taste of the Clooney life on Lake Como in Italy. Villa Passalacqua is a gorgeous villa located not far from Gorgeous George's home, Villa Oleandra.  Villa Passalacqua is perched in upper Moltrasio and  its property runs from high up in the village all the way down to the lake’s shore.  The home was built in the 1700s and was designed by Felice Soave. This amazing estate has play host to many famous and infamous people including Napoleon Buonaparte, Vincenzo Bellini and Winston Churchill.  The Villa Passalacqua has a pizzeria, luxury suites, billiards room, theater, This luxury villa on Lake Como is available for rent for 42,000 euros a week. If you don't need something quite so posh you can also rent the Villa Bellini for 11,025 euros during the summer months. More shots of this beautiful estate after the jump.