The Grand Hotel of Brissago, inaugurated in 1906, was designed by the Architect Paolito Somazzi. Before the Great War, it was a destination for intellectuals and the international high society, also becoming an intermediate stop for those who, following the Grand Tour, returned from Southern Italy with the destination of Northern Europe.
Among the illustrious guests who stayed there, we remember the composer Toscanini, the tenor Enrico Caruso, the English writer Herbert George Wells, the Germanic Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, and the French Prime Minister Aristide Briand, both key figures in the Locarno Treaty negotiations of 1925. And among the significant guests, we also find writers like Piero Chiara, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, Erich Kästner, Kurt Tucholsky, and Vladimir Nabokov.
From January 1933, with the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany, the Grand Hotel predominantly became a haven for intellectuals and writers expelled and persecuted by the Nazis. From 1942, it was transformed by Swiss authorities into an internment center for political refugees (Flüchtlingsheim). Between 1943 and 1945, around two hundred young Jewish refugees, mostly Polish, German, Russian, Belgian, and French, were accommodated at the already deteriorating Grand Hotel and the S. Giorgio home for the elderly.
Life for the refugees – mostly young unmarried women – was not easy. Discipline was strict, and recreational opportunities were extremely limited. The proximity of the hotel to the Ossola region and the noise of the German military operations against the partisans in the border area certainly did not aid in psychological recovery.
After the conflict, the splendor of the glorious hotel disappeared definitively. Following an attempt at revival in the late 1950s by the owners, the Schönenberger couple, it was officially closed in October 1971. On the site that once housed the hotel, the residential complex Villa Bianca has now been constructed, preserving little of the original structure.
Film "Geister und Gäste" (English: "Ghosts and Guests") shot in 1989 by Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch in the already precarious structure of the then Grand Hotel of Brissago: