Lake Como, Italy, is a world-renowned vacation destination, with lush greenery, glittering blue water, quaint towns stacked on sun-drenched mountainsides, delicious food and wine and, of course, George Clooney’s villa.
And increasingly, members of Congress are going there for free.
The nonprofit Aspen Institute is sending lawmakers — and their spouses — to a Lake Como villa owned by the Rockefeller Foundation, where the members learn about food insecurity, climate change and artificial intelligence.
Members say these trips encourage collaboration, build relationships and are genuinely educational.
“It’s one of the few opportunities we have to actually work with our colleagues across the aisle on topics of great interest and importance,” Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland told NOTUS of his recent trip there with a bipartisan group of members. “America needs to be dominant in the energy sector, and we discussed many different aspects of it.”
“It was very valuable,” he said.
But it’s not just energy policy on the itinerary.
“They put us on a small houseboat and took us over across the lake to a little villa, if you will, and the restaurant there. You talk about Italian, it was Italian,” said Rep. Randy Weber, a Texas Republican who also went to Lake Como in April.
“I was a little disappointed because we never got to try any Italian pizza,” he added.
Weber said the conference itself was “very bipartisan” and “very beneficial.” Being from Texas, energy policy is one of his foremost priorities, and he said he learned a lot. “We talked about policy,” he said.
Weber also touted the benefits of being in, well, Italy. He said his wife got to attend a cooking class and went shopping during some of her free time.
“She got to go into the little town there,” he said, “and try not only their cooking class but also got to try their gelato, if you know what that is.”
“I had never had it. She took me the next day and said, ‘You’ve got to try this.’”
Lake Como stands out among congressional trips abroad, when members typically visit areas of geopolitical importance, like Jerusalem, Berlin, Taiwan, London, Brussels, Beijing or, when in Italy, Rome. Since 2023, however, more than four dozen lawmakers have visited the Rockefeller villa on Lake Como, with their travel fare and lodging covered by the Aspen Institute, according to privately sponsored trip disclosures reviewed by NOTUS. The nonprofit describes its purpose as advancing “a free, just, and equitable society.” It hosts the Aspen Ideas Festival, which draws policymakers, artists, journalists and others to Colorado for discussions about tech, the environment, health, science and other policy issues each year.
These invitations — which go to Republicans and Democrats alike — are coming from an old colleague. Former Rep. Charlie Dent, now retired from Congress, leads Aspen’s congressional program, and Dent, who once chaired the Ethics Committee himself, submits forms to the respective Hill ethics panels to help members get their visits to Lake Como approved.
“There are no taxpayer funds involved in what we do, and there are no lobbyists involved,” Dent said, arguing there’s value in bringing members of Congress from both parties together in “this bitterly partisan and tribal political environment.”
“There are simply not enough opportunities in Congress for members to develop meaningful relationships across the aisle,” he told NOTUS, adding that Aspen expects to release a public report about the most recent conference this week.
For members traveling with their spouses or another companion, the average cost for recent trips has ranged between $10,000-$15,000, with the costs for some members going as high as $20,000. The trip expenses include business-class airfare, meals, and lodging in the villa, according to the invitation included with the ethics disclosures.
These trips have made the town of Bellagio, which the villa overlooks, one of the most-visited foreign places by lawmakers on privately covered trips this year. Italy is the fifth most-visited country that members of Congress have gone to on privately sponsored trips outside the United States in 2025 so far — a high ranking largely due to congressional travel to Lake Como.
According to disclosures, attendees have included Democratic Sens. Chris Van Hollen, Dick Durbin, Chris Coons and Peter Welch; Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy, Shelley Moore Capito, Susan Collins and John Cornyn; Democratic Reps. Adam Smith, Glenn Ivey and Jim Himes; and Republican Reps. Kat Cammack, August Pfluger and Neal Dunn, among others.
Some members have gone there repeatedly, including Rep. Michael Guest, a Mississippi Republican who chairs the House Ethics Committee. He disclosed attending an Aspen conference at Lake Como with his wife in April 2024 and another one in April 2025. In his role as ethics chair, Guest helped review and signed off on other House members’ paperwork to attend the same sponsored trips to Italy. (Different Ethics Committee members reviewed Guest’s own paperwork to attend.)
When asked about his visits to Lake Como and how he made sure he was being rigorous in monitoring other members’ trips when he was going on the same ones, a spokesperson for Guest referred NOTUS to the House Ethics Committee.
An Ethics Committee spokesperson responded simply: “No comment.”
Dent told NOTUS that Aspen convenes “members of Congress on a bipartisan, bicameral basis.”
“The Rockefeller Foundation allows us to use their center in Bellagio, which is ideally suited for these types of convenings. In addition to it being ideal for these types of convenings, it’s economical and it’s very, very secure,” Dent said. “They are a supporter of ours. They are a funder to us, as are other foundations.”
“We’ve developed a very good reputation for putting on high-quality academic programming for the members,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Rockefeller Foundation said the conferences follow Congress’s “rigorous rules and filing requirements.”
“At a time when it’s nearly impossible to get bipartisan members of Congress around one table for a productive conversation, The Rockefeller Foundation is pleased to continue — as we have for 60 years — to bring people together across political, sectorial, and geographic lines,” the spokesperson said.
Weber confirmed members stayed in the villa, which also hosts around 1,300 other attendees at events throughout the year, including researchers, artists and thought leaders during separate Rockefeller programs.
When asked how he would explain his decision to attend to constituents who might be upset to find out their congressman was going to a villa in Italy, he said he asks several questions when evaluating any invitation: “The most important thing is, does it apply to my district? Does it apply to our state? Does it apply to our country? And is it something worthwhile?”
Most lawmakers see these conferences as entirely uncontroversial. Aspen has been sending members on trips for decades.
But the trips to Bellagio, Italy, only began in 2023. That fiscal year, the Rockefeller Foundation donated more than $500,000 to the Aspen Institute for convenings on artificial intelligence, climate change, and food security issues, according to tax disclosure documents. A $1.125 million Rockefeller grant starting in September 2024 and going through March 2027 is directed specifically for “nonpartisan, educational convenings” of congressional leaders and experts in the fields of food security, foreign policy, and climate.
The Aspen Institute explained in its submissions for the ethics panel that it selected the villa for the meetings in Italy because it “provides access to experts related to conference topic,” — experts who, according to a NOTUS review of speakers, mostly live in America, with many of them based in the Washington area.
In another explanation, the nonprofit said the historic villa has the “required technology and meeting space” for holding the conferences.
Under current law, members of Congress are allowed to go on privately sponsored trips with their spouses or a different close family member if they didn’t actively solicit the invitation, the trips aren’t underwritten by lobbyists or foreign agents, the sponsors provide detailed itineraries, the ethics panel pre-approves the travel and if accepting the invitation won’t “create the appearance” of “using public office for private gain.”
The rules may unintentionally incentivize foreign trips; lawmakers can spend up to four days on domestic trips paid for by private groups, but up to seven days on trips abroad.
Members haven’t seriously debated changes to their privately sponsored trip rules for more than a decade. These trips are common: An investigation last year found that members had accepted nearly $4.3 million for airfare, lodging, meals and other travel expenses from private sources over the past decade. Roughly $1.4 million of that amount covered costs for members’ relatives to attend.
On the most recent trip to Lake Como, at least 11 members spent about six days at the Bellagio villa. The expert speakers were primarily American energy policy advocates, speaking about the same issues that occupy their day-to-day jobs in Washington.
The speakers list is a who’s who of many of the same clean energy industry leaders who have spoken at or hosted forums in D.C. over the last few months. The American Clean Power Association, the Clean Energy Buyers Association, C3 Solutions, Grid Strategies, and other related groups sent representatives to Lake Como this year — the same groups that have been pushing heavily in D.C. to preserve some of the Biden-era clean energy tax credits in the ongoing reconciliation bill negotiations.
Some of the U.S.-based speakers also attended earlier energy-focused Aspen trips to Sydney, Australia, and Oslo, Norway. While trips to other destinations often involve frequent travel to see manufacturing sites, energy production plants, or places of historic significance, the trips to the Bellagio focus on time in the villa, with occasional boat rides and visits to the town.
The advocacy efforts of these clean energy groups, even after convening with members at Lake Como, have mostly failed. Aside from some protection for nuclear tax credits, other clean energy programs were almost entirely gutted in the recent budget reconciliation bill by the same House Republicans who went on the Italy trip.
Hal Harvey, the founder of policy firm Energy Innovation, still said the trips were useful.
“The Aspen Institute Congressional Program offers a terrific venue for policymakers to work together, Rs and Ds, on rational problem solving,” he said.
Harvey missed the most recent Italy trip but has attended other Aspen workshops abroad.
Kedric Payne — senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center and a former investigator for the independent House ethics watchdog, the Office of Congressional Ethics — said the paperwork about members’ travel to Lake Como didn’t raise alarm bells for him, “because it is complying with the transparency rules and the preapproval rules.”
“The question always becomes: What is behind what you see on paper?” Payne said in an interview. “Is there anything else that is happening that is not disclosed that would make it seem as though this is a way for someone to get special access, influence, with members of Congress by providing them with a lavish vacation?”
Members have given the trips glowing reviews, saying they did help them in their jobs.
Take Rep. Buddy Carter’s typo-riddled paperwork about his April 2025 visit to the villa, for example: “I was able to participate and engage in converstations and meeting taht focused on today’s urgent issues with imput from Cogressmen and Congresswomen from all over the United States,” he wrote.
One ethics slip-up Payne watches out for is when members are invited on trips but, for whatever reason, don’t file their disclosures within the 15-day deadline afterward.
At least one member was delayed in filing post-travel paperwork for the most recent Lake Como trip in April. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, attended, according to flight schedules included in other members’ paperwork, but McCaul hadn’t yet submitted his own documents when NOTUS reviewed the trips in early June. (A spokesperson for McCaul said the office underwent recent staffing changes that caused a delay in filing the paperwork, but the issue has now been resolved.)
The Office of Congressional Ethics and the House Ethics Committee sometimes investigate lawmakers’ travel, if the trips may have infringed on any rules. In 2013, ethics investigators probed a trip that a group of lawmakers, including some Foreign Affairs Committee members, took to Azerbaijan that was funded by a state-owned Azerbaijani oil company, with the money reportedly funneled through a U.S. nonprofit.
The Ethics Committee eventually found the lawmakers weren’t responsible for the lapse, because they hadn’t known about the state-owned oil company’s involvement.
Trips abroad can also be an opportunity for lawmakers to get into trouble. The FBI probed a 2010 trip to Israel sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, where former Rep. Kevin Yoder skinny-dipped in the Sea of Galilee. (The FBI even probed the incident to determine if anything improper had happened.)
But former Rep. Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican who went on an Aspen-sponsored trip to China in 2016, told NOTUS that privately sponsored travel can be formative and illuminating for members. Brooks said it was “very, very valuable to be able to see how people in China actually live.”
That trip was busy, according to the schedule, including a meeting with China’s prime minister, the U.S. ambassador to China and travel to Nanjing.
“They were all exhausting,” Brooks said of the privately sponsored trips he attended while in Congress. “Long days, short nights.”
For the members going to Italy with Aspen, at least, they can spend those long days and short nights in a villa overlooking scenic Lake Como.
For Weber, one benefit of the Lake Como trip was being in a place to talk out issues where there are “no cameras, no reporters,” and besides, the Aspen Institute was footing the bill.
“Nobody’s using taxpayer dollars, and there’s nobody breaking any ethics rules,” Weber said. “And this is going to be something that we benefit from.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt and Anna Kramer are reporters at NOTUS.
Disclosure: In 2019, the Aspen Institute gave Haley Byrd Wilt a scholarship to attend that year’s Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado for free alongside a group of other journalists.