“This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty […] But the finest scenery is that of the Villa Pliniana […] The scene from the colonnade is the most extraordinary, at once and the most lovely that eye ever beheld. Above you from among the clouds, as it were descends a waterfall of immense size, broken by the woody rocks into a thousand channels to the lake. On the other side is seen the blue extent of the lake and the mountains speckled with sails and spires.

-Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley 1818.