Wearing a grey jacket from Alexander McQueen, pale grey cashmere sweater and button-down shirt, his baby birdlike features exaggerated by black-rimmed spectacles, Federico Marchetti meets me in a small parking lot on the shores of Lake Como, Italy. It’s a steely grey day and the clouds hang mistily over the surrounding hills. As he greets me, the scene has a whisper of John le Carré about it — like two operatives meeting to share secrets.

The truth is rather more prosaic. The 46-year-old tech entrepreneur and founder of Yoox, the vast e-commerce retailer of luxury goods now poised on the brink of a merger with Net-a-Porter, is about to give me a tour of his hood.

Marchetti settled in Como permanently a year ago, at the insistence of his partner, Kerry Olsen, a writer and journalist, who wanted to raise their daughter, Margherita, three, in a house with a garden. “I moved for her,” he says, explaining the daily commute to his office in Milan. Although Como has no shortage of starry inhabitants — Richard Branson is a few minutes along the lakeside, George Clooney owns a villa — the neighbourhood has, says Marchetti, the same sleepy provincial feel of his childhood home in Ravenna, the Byzantine capital in Italy’s northeast.