Bedazzled by Northern Italy

We’re sitting on the terrace of the Hotel Belvedere overlooking a wide expanse of tranquil blue water on Lake Como, northern Italy. By walking up the hill away from the village below, we’ve managed to escape the tourists who flock here by ferry (and car) to visit this picturesque resort town which sits on the crutch of the lake’s two legs. Despite the summer season being officially over (many places close down from mid-September), there are still plenty of tourists around, and even more on the ferry today due to a public transport strike yesterday. It’s easy to see why people flock here, especially the Milanese escaping the intense summer heat.  Set right on the edge of the lake, Bellagio offers elegant lakeside promenades and cafes and narrow winding streets and steps lined with potted flowers. We order pasta with seafood and a glass of wine and it’s not long before the amiable English couple at the nearby table start chatting to us.  His interest is birdwatching which explains why he’s brought along his binoculars: ostensibly to look for birds, though he seems to also spend a lot of time using them for celebrity spotting. He’s the one who points out George Clooney’s villa at Laglio to us on the return ferry, and who also tells us that Paul McCartney and Madonna own villas here  – and that Richard Branson owns the sprawling lakeside property with tennis court (hidden behind the trees) and ochre villas on the isola.  We discover later that Versace once owned the prominent villa at the far end of the point and that it’s now owned by a Russian billionaire, known as the blini king, who has refurbished the interior and wanted to do the same to the exterior but was prevented from doing so due to protests from the locals. At the southern end of the lake, near Cernobbio is the famous luxury hotel Villa d’Este, far too expensive for us to spend a night (we spent a few nights at Orso Bruno, a small friendly hotel at Maltrasio, 3 Km north of Cernobbio). I would have liked to stroll around the gardens but was prevented from doing so by a security guard. Fortunately, the spacious lawns and gardens surrounding Villa Erba , also in Cernobbio, are open to the public and we were able to stroll around there. The Italian film director, Luchino Visconti, spent his summer boyhood holidays here, and I could see why the grandeur of the lake and gardens and villa so strongly influenced his work. When you know that Lake Como’s scenery didn’t escape artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, who stayed here in the late 1400s and used its landscapes as backgrounds for some of his best-known paintings, you  begin to understand its appeal. I’ve been fortunate to visit (and live in) Italy many times, but have never explored the northern lakes of Lombardy and Piemonte, nor been to Verona or Bergamo.

The Roman Arena, Verona on the evening before the flower festival

All the hotels were full in Verona on the day we arrived due to the annual feria di marmo and a flower festival in Piazza Bra on the Sunday. Thanks to the advice of a friend of mine from Sydney, we managed to get a spare room in the anex of Hotel Torcolo and spent two days in this classy northern city. Verona is arguably best known for being the home of Juliet from Romeo &  Juliet (despite the throng of youngsters, I even managed to get a photo of Juliet’s balcony), though I was far more impressed by the Roman Arena, the third largest and best preserved in Italy (with only a portion of its outer ring missing), and the magnificent churches of San Zeno Maggiore and Sant’Anastasia. And our dinner at Ristorante Torcolo on the Saturday night, an exceptionally warm and inviting restaurant, was one of the highlights of my time there. It was in Verona that we hired a car to drive around the lakes, a heart-stopping experience on our first day. Given the speed at which Italians drive, we decided to take a secondary road from Verona to Lake Garda and managed to get well and truly lost along the way. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived at Sirmione, a pretty medieval town at the tip of the 3Km long tongue of land which juts into the centre of the lake. The Romans were the first to take their holidays here but it wasn’t until the 13th century that the Rocca Scaligeri fortress was built, a medieval castle with a moat which made an island of the town.   Sirmione lies between the castle and the Roman villa at the tip of the peninsula and is filled with cafes, restaurants and designer shops. While there, we walked  out to the tip, on a path beyond the town which follows the rim of the peninsula and passes boiling sulphur springs. Next day, it was off to Bergamo, where we once again got lost trying to find the alta citta, the medieval-Renaissance town which crowns the top of the hill. The diversion was well worth it as the Piazza Vecchia acontains some of the most interesting architectural ensembles in the region, and the green hills leading up to the city are stunning. While most tourists flock to fashionable Lake Como and Lake Maggiore, we also managed to fit in a visit to Lake Orta, Lake Maggiore’s secret little sister. As with Bergamo, this little jewel is also well worth the diversion, not just because of its isola (” a spot coyly hidden and left to nature, a wild garden”, as Balzac described it), but because of its Sacro Monte di San Francesco, one of nine sacred mountains in northern Italy which are collectively designated a World Heritage site. Far from the madding crowds and bedazzling lure of Lake Como, it’s no wonder the likes of writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Honore de Balzac and poet Robert Browning sung its praises. It’s a jewel among the jewels of northern Italy.