Katie Holmes Just Gave Lake Como Another Reason to Top Everyone’s Travel List

Katie Holmes has joined the long list of public figures who’ve made a pilgrimage to Lake Como, sharing photos from a recent Italian getaway with boyfriend Jason Bard Yarmosky that doubled as an object lesson in how to spend a few days on one of Europe’s most photographed lakes.

The actress, 47, posted the vacation images to Instagram with a caption that read like a mission statement for the trip: “Life is a friend of art.” The centerpiece of the getaway was time spent aboard a classic wooden speedboat cruising the lake — Holmes in a white bikini for the water portion of the day, later changing into a black halterneck dress for an evening on the shoreline.

Yarmosky, a contemporary artist known for large-scale figurative paintings, took some of the photos himself and spent time at the helm.

The choice of a wooden speedboat isn’t incidental to the Lake Como experience — it’s practically the defining mode of transport there. Unlike destinations where getting around means cars or trains, Como’s appeal is built around the water itself: the lake’s shoreline towns, from Bellagio to Varenna to Como proper, are laid out in a way that rewards exploring by boat, and the classic wooden Riva-style vessels favored by visitors like Holmes have become as much a part of the region’s visual identity as the villas lining its banks. Renting or chartering one for a day is one of the most straightforward ways for a visitor to get the version of Lake Como that shows up in films and glossy travel spreads.

That cinematic reputation is exactly what’s kept Lake Como near the top of the aspirational-travel conversation for years. The lake has built its modern identity partly on a steady stream of celebrity visits — a dynamic where each new set of vacation photos functions as informal advertising, reinforcing an image of the region as effortlessly elegant without a single paid campaign behind it. Holmes and Yarmosky’s trip fits neatly into that pattern: a boat ride, a lakeside dinner, photos that could pass for a tourism board’s marketing material, shared to an audience of millions.

For travelers who don’t have access to a celebrity-caliber itinerary, the practical version of this trip is more accessible than it might look. A day on a chartered wooden boat, a stop in one of the lakeside towns for dinner, and a walk along the water at golden hour is well within reach for visitors willing to base themselves in Como or Bellagio for a few nights rather than trying to see the whole lake in a single day trip from Milan. The region rewards exactly the kind of unhurried, photograph-worthy pacing Holmes’s trip captured — long stretches on the water, a change of outfit for dinner, nothing that requires elaborate planning beyond picking the right boat and the right restaurant.

Whether the trip was a quiet personal getaway or a moment shared deliberately with an eye toward public reaction, its effect on Lake Como’s profile is the same either way: another data point in the lake’s decades-long run as one of the most consistently desirable — and consistently photographed — destinations in European travel.