Hotel Stella d’Italia is located in the town of San Mamete, in the picturesque Valsolda area, on the banks of the Italian lake of Lugano. Alfredo Ortelli had bought an eighteenth century aristocrat villa on the lake and transformed it into an hotel with eight rooms and a restaurant. However, before the road was completed in the 1930's, people and goods travelling between Italy and Switzerland used the lake. And so   it was by boat that the first client, a Frenchman by the name of Raymond du Bois, reached the hotel in 1910. Alfredo married Agnese Galli, and they had three children. He enlarged the hotel in 1926 by adding on the current dining room and the rooms above it.