Al Lago

Wow. I'd really hoped we'd be able to do this, come here, during our stay in Milan, and I'd suggested the idea to Filippo, but I wasn't sure if it would come to fruition. But it has, and we're here, staying overnight in a B&B in a village on the shores of Lake Como.

Panorama from our B & B

Filippo and Valentina planned the day together and looked up possible accommodation for us, and Filippo drove us here from Milan, picking us up at 10 this morning. His wife and kids stayed home while he had a lovely day out with his mates. Although we are only an hour out of Milan, and this is such a gorgeous place, neither Filippo nor Valentina had been here on a family holiday or outing before. But they knew places by word of mouth, and Valentina's partner works in one of the towns on the lake, so he gave her some information too.

Lake Como is like an upside-down Y, and the town of Como is on the left-hand side bottom tip, but that's further to get to from Milan, or Filippo's starting point anyway, so we just came straight up the freeway then started going through tunnels as we came up the right-hand leg of the Y. We came first to a village called Bellano, because it's a bit less up-market than some of the others, and so had some accommodation more in our price range. We're in a triple room (just Stephen and me), sharing a bathroom, with a balcony overlooking the lake, for 85Euros. The room has sparkly chartreuse/mustard-coloured walls, but that's okay, we'll be turning the light out soon. And I didn't notice the walls at all when we arrived, so maybe they're better in daylight. Merely yellow, perhaps.

Main road into town from Germany

So we checked in, left our backpacks and Filippo's car, and walked down to the town. There is a walkway all the way down (sometimes up also) to the lake, and we just followed our noses along the paths. After five minutes there was an interesting door open on our left, and interesting sights inside. We went in and found a small contemporary art exhibition in an extremely old ex-church. The curator was happy to talk about the church to us (12th century, with frescoes from three different eras still visible.) It was deconsecrated some time ago and is now used for village events and exhibitions. But the most amazing thing the young man said was that the pathway we had just walked down, a narrow cobbled footpath that winds along walls and between houses, used to be the main route into Italy from Germany. Germany had actually invaded this way in the 1500s! How can you invade a country single file? Maybe they came at night and tiptoed.

Orrida Gorge

We continued through the village, through these tiny alleys. I kept expecting them to get wider, but no, they stayed narrow until about one house-depth from the lakeside road. Now we were looking for a feature that Filippo  and Valentina knew about and wanted to show us, the Orrida. On the way we looked in at a couple of churches: this little village church with not a lot of resources (one would imagine) several centuries ago, had several magnificent tapestries with gold embroidery as well as a marvellously painted vaulted ceiling as well as paintings as well as a painted (wooden?) carved Pieta of six people.  And that was the small church.

Eventually we came to the Orrida, which could be called in English the Horrid Gorge. It was a steep, roaring river, bouncing down through the rocks it had eroded itself. I used to enjoy seeing places like this, but apparently I've become a scaredy in my old age. The boardwalk made me really nervous. It was quite high, and the rock looked quite hard, after all. But Valentina told me she felt the same, so maybe it's a perfectly sensible reaction to walking 20m above pounding water and sheer rock faces.

Villa Monastero gardens, Varenna

Now it was well after 1, and we were ready for lunch, so we found a panini shop near the ferry stop. We would take the ferry to the next town along the lakeshore, a 15-minute trip that cost 2.50 Euros each. I had an idea that an all-day ticket would be 16Euros, so you could hop-on-hop-off, but apparently you can also buy tickets just like a bus fare. The next town is Varenna, which is bigger, much more famous, much more up-market, and much more expensive than Bellano. We walked through Varenna too, as it has a very attractive path along the lakeshore, as well as pretty shop-lined streets through the town. We wanted to see Villa Monastero, but having found it, we were informed that the villa itself was closed. It would be open tomorrow. However, the gardens were open to the public, so we walked through them for half an hour or so. The gardens go down to the lake, so they get the full afternoon sun, but there are bits of land at both ends that extend down into the lake, so they would be protected from wind on three sides. They had lots of citrus trees, including mandarins and clementines (which I thought were the same) and pomelos, a wisteria garden, and several weird and interesting palm species.

We now walked back to the town to catch the ferry back to Bellano at 17.05. We had time for a drink/gelato stop, then we waited for the ferry to come in. Unfortunately ours was running late, and we watched about four ferries arrive and load people on and leave again, before ours finally came at about 5.30. It was only 15 minutes back to Bellano, but this was where we had to say goodbye to Filippo and Valentina. They now walked up to the car which was still at the B&B, but we stayed in town to explore a little more and fill in time until we could have dinner. (Italians prefer to eat after 8. We don't mind being quaint foreigners with their crazy notions, ready for dinner at 6. But that's after a hard day's holidaying.)

Night-time walk home, Bellano

Valentina had recommended a restaurant with a local speciality of a particular kind of pasta dish, pizzoccheri*, but it didn't open till 6.30. So we had an aperitif at another bar a bit up the road, went back at about 6.45, had dinner (just that one course - it was pretty filling) and then started the walk home. It was getting dark now, and not so easy to recognize the alleys in reverse order, and some were unlit. But we made it, with no u-turns, and only a little wasted energy, taking the long (bright) way round instead of the direct (dark) route for the final leg. We were back by 8, and now it's a little after 9, but I'm not as tired as I was earlier in the day. Our pasta dish took 30 minutes to prepare, and I would have like to have had a little sleep while I was waiting. All this fresh air and ozone - I just can't handle it.

* Here is pizzoccheri. It's buckwheat pasta (very like Japanese udon noodles) in wide and short strips, cooked and then oven-baked with local vegetables such as potato and cabbage, and there were traces of a sugar snap in there, and does garlic count as a vegetable? There was butter and oil, and loads of cheese throughout. It started out okay: the pasta wasn't particularly heavy, but then every mouthful was the same so it got a bit boring halfway through. Perhaps we should have had a salad with it. We started by having salad with almost every meal, but we seem to have fallen into bad habits recently. Anyway, here's a picture of the pizzoccheri. It had to be ordered as a dish for two, and it cost 12Euros per person.̣ Sorry, I forgot to take a photo before we dished it.