Piedmont
Stresa - Intra, and
Borromee Islands a boat trip

Lake Maggiore - Photo © Roberto Romano

Stresa - Intra and Borromee Islands, a boat trip

This boat itinerary covers the Central part of Lake Maggiore, with its Borromee Islands.

This portion of boat trip takes about one hour. With the low season some stops, like Santa Caterina del Sasso, are skipped, and the service is suspended during some months, so check the most recent schedule before going. If you start early enough in the morning, you can get off the boat at an intermediate landing, visit the place and wait for the next boat, that will arrive in about one hour, half an hour between Stresa and the Borromee Islands (check the schedule).

You can easily reach Stresa from Milan in about one hour ten minutes train ride, on the Trenitalia state railway company, along the Sempione (Simplon) line.

Santa Caterina del Sasso

From the Piedmont shore, place where the boat heads north once again in the direction of Stresa, you can admire the beautiful stretch of Lombard coast.

On the right the town of Ispra, seat of the Nuclear Studies Center of Euraton and the namesake promontory.

Then, almost opposite Belgirate, the beach of Monvalle, a long stretch of low coastal sandy banks, fleck with beds of reeds and brushwood; afterwards the tiny town of Arolo, and lastly one of the most evocative and enchanting localities of the lake, the Sanctuary of St. Catherine del Sasso.

Santa Caterina del Sasso Hermitage - Photo © epmd

Clinging to the cliff vertically over the waters and with a view that spans the Borromeo gulf to Angera, the Sanctuary is a complex of buildings recently restored and opened for visits, that, according to the legend, originated as a monastery work of the beatified Alberto Bosezzo who, miraculously landed on these cliffs during a storm, he went into reclusion after a solemn vow to Saint Catherine, protectors of the seamen.

Presently occupied by the Dominicans, the same order, that first erected it in the 14th cent., a tiny convent, later occupied by other religious orders. It houses important frescoes dating from the 14th cent. to the 17th cent. St. Catherine's Sanctuary is easily reached by lake with the boats departing from Stresa. With the low season the Santa Caterina del Sasso stop is skipped, so check the most recent schedule before going.

Isola Bella - Photo © Antonella R.

Borromee Islands, Isola Bella & Isola Superiore

The first stop is at the Isola Bella (Beautiful Island), right opposite the beach of Stresa and 400 far meters from the coast. It is the most famous of the three islands that make up the archipelago; the Count Borromeo III had a mansion built and grandiose garden for his wife Isabella (from whom the name of the Island, that shortened to "Isola Bella"), one of the most beautiful examples of 17th century gardens.

Numerous artists worked here - from Angelo Crivelli to Vismara, to the celebrated Richini and Fontana - transforming the island into a sort of incredible flowered vessel, a truncated pyramid of ten superimposed terraces, joined together by tiny flights of steps, courtyards, caves, baths, fountains and waterworks, green back-drops and rare plants, that culminate into a large hemicycle called the "Theatre".

The Palazzo is an imposing massive structure with a central body of four floors and three lateral bodies where you find the suggestive subterranean salons "in grottoes".

It houses a picture-gallery with the works of Gianbattista Tiepolo, Luca Giordano, Francesco Zuccarelli, a noteworthy gallery of Flemish tapestries from the 18th cent. and antique decors. The Palazzo and the gardens are open to the public from March 27th to October 24th, from 9.00 to 12.00 and from 13.30 to 17.20.

From Isola Bella, going northwest we reach the Isola Superiore (Superior Island), about 300 meters long and 100 wide, which hosts, taking its name, an ancient and picturesque fishermen's village, of tiny winding, narrow streets. To be seen the Parrocchiale di San Vittore, of probable Romanesque origins, which to the visitor today appears in the restructured style of 1627.

Baveno

In a few minutes the boat turns to berth on to the coat, to Baveno. The little town, of ancient origin documented since the beginning of the 11th century, is one of the major tourist spots of the lake. Among its monuments two important structures: the Parrocchiale of St. Gervasio and St. Protaso of the 12th-13th centuries, adapted in the 7th-8th century, with Romanesque bell and the octagonal baptistery, this too restored in the 18th-19th cent.

With an elegant appearance, with a pleasant garden lake-front from which you enjoy an enchanting view onto the Borromeo Gulf and over the Lombardy lake shore up to the Laveno inlet, the little town boasts many illustrious guests.

From Byron to Lamartine, from the Czarist Alexandra to Queen Victoria of England, from Wagner to Umberto Giordano - who composed the opera Fedora in the namesake villa - and to finish Churchill who is portrayed in some Parrocchiale watercolors. Baveno is what's more famous for the red granite cave, it opens onto the foothills of Mt. Camoscio (890 meters) at the back of the town, from which also rise the mineral water springs called "Fonti di Baveno".

In Baveno you have a Trenitalia train stop, if you want to end your trip back without going all the way back to Stresa by boat.

Baveno Cloister - Photo © mauroman

Borromee Islands, Isola Madre

From Baveno the boat departs once again for the last Island of the Borromeo archipelago, the Isola Madre (Mother Island), the largest, green and fragrant, which Flaubert defined "a terrestrial paradise". 330 meters long and 220 wide, it is still the property of the Borromeos as is the Isola Bella, and it is without doubt the most interesting from a landscape and botanical point of view.

Originally called Island of San Vittore, then Renata in honor of the Count Borromeo that transformed it, and, from the 17th cent., with the present name, hosts the villa and the garden begun by Lancillotto Borromeo in the early 16th century. The park, called Botanical Garden (with beautiful views on to the lake), is dived into five sectors where they alternate and come one after the other: gardens, pergolas, groves, drives, baths, with splendid and rare examples of birds and fowls roaming freely. The villa's interior hosts restorations of epoch milieu and a collection of chinaware and livery.

Pallanza - Villa Taranto gardens
Pallanza from Villa Taranto gardens - Photo © Umby

Pallanza

From the Island departing once again towards the coast to the north in the direction of Pallanza: on the left opens the alluvial plane of the Toce River, dominated by Mt. Orfano (794 meters), rich in quarries, that close the entrance of the Val d'Ossola, where the tiny lake Mergozzo, once part of the Verbano, stretches out.

Opposite at the slopes of Mt. Rosso, you find the built area of Suna, whit the medieval lay-out of its ancient center while, at the far end of the lake-front, the 17th cent. Casa Cioia rises.

A continuum of habitations, villas, gardens and hotels unite the little center to Pallanza, where you arrive after ten minutes of navigation from the Isola Madre.

Here you find the office of the Commune of Verbania, that from 1939 reunites a series coastal localities (Fondotoce, Suna, Pallanza, Intra) and other tiny ex-Communes of the hinterland. A frequent visiting stop, but also site of various industrial activities, Pallanza also offers from its 19th century wharf, from the lake-front, and from the central piazza Garibaldi visible on the Gulf, splendid views: from Feriolo (on the right) to limits of the inlet, to Baveno and Stresa (opposite) dominated by Mottarone, to the islands.

Very close to the coast, almost opposite the park with the Kursaal, you find the tiny Island of San Giovanni, already known in the 12th century for a church that rose there, where it can be seen, among the rich vegetation, the Palazzo built in the 17th cent. and then passed on to the Borromeo, that for some decades was the summer residence of Arturo Toscanini.

At Pallanza, at the end of the important Via Cavour (known here with the name Ruga) with its 17th-18th cent. buildings, rises the Palzzo Viani-Dugnani restored in the early 17th cent. late-baroque style, where you find the Museum of Verbano and of the Landscape (built in 1909), and the collection of sculpture and moldings of Paolo Troubetzkoi, artist of Russian origin author of bust and monuments collocated in the nearby Piazza Garibaldi.

To see as well the church called Madonna di Campagna (Madonna of the Countryside) at the slopes of Mt. Rosso, built on the pre-existing Romanesque building and reconstructed in Brahmanist forms in the 16th cent., with it's interior frescoes of Bernardino Latini and paintings of Camillo Procaccii. Still at Pallanza you have every year in September " a race of flowered wagons" international fame.

Villa Taranto

Departing from Pallanza passing the tiny San Giovanni island and the Castagnola Point, the tip of the splendid promontory, called thus because of the chestnut trees that one time covered it and where, between 9th and 10th cent., they built villas in eclectic and liberty forms. Immediately after you land at Villa Taranto, complex of the end of the 19th cent., that the Scottish Captain Neil MacEacharn donated to the Italian State in 1939, that became its effective property only in 1963, with the completion of the exceptional park, presently managed by State-owned Villa Taranto Gardens.

The park that stretches some 20 hectares of area, is among one of the richest botanical gardens of Europe: begun in 1930 with enormous works of reconstruction that literally "recreated" the landscape producing a great variety of environments (a tiny dale, drives, flowered terraces, a small waterfall, a pond, a conservatory, etc.) where more than 30.000 specimens of plants are gathered, and where numerous peacocks pheasant live. It took its name from the ancestor of the captain, the General McDonald nominated by Napoleon Duke of Taranto.

The gardens are open to public from April 1st to October 31st, every day from 8.30 to 19.30 (the ticket office closes at 18.30). To the south of the park and to the east of the promontory of Castagnola rises in a super elevated the precious Romanesque church of San Remigio of the 13th cent. And then in the direction of Intra, the largest of the fractions that make up the Commune of Verbania, and major industrial center and commercial port of the lake.

Here you find the ferry vehicle service that connects the Piedmont shore to the Lombardy, at intervals of half-hour. The city, that probably got its name from its position between the streams of San Bernardino and San Giovanni, preserves some 17th -18th buildings among which the baroque Palazzo Peretti and the ancient church of San Vittore, restored between the 18th-19th cent. The lake-front instead, with ample view onto Laveno and on to the rest of the Lombard coast, still preserves the characteristic 19th century metallic structure of the wharf.

You have the choice of coming back on the same itinerary to Stresa, or Baveno to get to your car or the Trenitalia train, or to reach Laveno with the ferry boat, and then take the LeNord private train line to Milan.

Text in part courtesy of www.navigazionelaghi.it

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