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Written in the 1800s, Alessandro Manzoni’s novel is a window into Lombard life in the 1600s, set in Milan and Manzoni’s Lake Como hometown of Lecco during Spanish rule. It is required reading for all Italian schoolchildren and has been translated into many languages.

Ernest Hemingway’s World War I novel (written in 1929) tells the story of an American soldier wounded while fighting for the Italian army. He convalesces in a Milan hospital, and, after inadvertently deserting while escaping the Germans, reunites with his love in Stresa on Lake Maggiore. They stay at the Des Iles Borromées hotel (where Hemingway himself often stayed) before fleeing by boat across to Swiss Locarno.

The first place D H Lawrence and his lover Frieda settled during their European peregrinations was the shores of Lake Garda, during the winter of 1912–13. In 1916 he compiled his notes on those happy first months spent in Italy and wrote this travelogue.

It’s 1937, and a group of stodgy society Brits and bored Yanks loosen their mores and inhibitions on the shores of Lake Como. Vanessa Redgrave and Uma Thurman head up the cast of this 1995 film by John Irvin. You can visit its setting, the Villa Balbianello, Lake Como.

Vittorio de Sica’s 1951 fable of a magical dove that grants wishes to the inhabitants of a Milan slum uses an early version of “special effects”, bridging the popular Neo-Realistic style of Italy’s post-war cinema with the era of magical realism in film-making that Fellini would make famous.

H V Morton, who in his youth gained fame scooping the story of Tutankhamun’s tomb discovery in the 1920s, became one of the 20th-century’s best, if little-known, travel writers. His 1950s journey through Italy is an erudite combination of travelogue, history and wonderful prose, all of it surprisingly undated.

Film director Michelangelo Antonioni takes the slow death of affection between a couple, masterfully played by Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, and sets it against a backdrop of rapidly industralizing Milan in 1960.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s usual mix of sex, homosexuality and a communist critique on the emptiness of bourgeois life defines this 1968 film. Handsome stranger Terrence Stamp raises the libidos of a middle-class Milanese family, then further stirs up their lives by disappearing.

Before gaining international fame, Bernardo Bertolucci made this 1969 story of a dysfunctional family haunted by the fascist past. He set this psychological drama in the quirky town of Sabbioneta.

George Lucas knew that even his vaunted digital special effects couldn’t hold a candle to the extraterrestrial beauty of Lake Como, which, with very little touching-up, filled in for Naboo’s lake district in the fifth Star Wars instalment, Attack of the Clones (2002). Beautiful Villa Balbianello (see Villa Balbianello, Lake Como) is again a backdrop for romantic scenes.