The Lake Issue

Lake Como is shaped like an upside-down Y, and once you have seen that on a map the whole trip explains itself. Two long southern arms — Como to the south-west, Lecco to the south-east — meet at a wooded promontory, and on the tip of that promontory sits Bellagio, which is why nearly every photograph of the lake seems to be taken from, or of, the same small town. Everything here follows from that shape: which shore you choose, how you move between them, and whether the week feels effortless or like a run of missed connections.

The western shore, along the Como arm, is where the grand villa-hotels and the famous gardens are — Cernobbio with Villa d'Este, Tremezzo with Villa Carlotta, Lenno with the Balbianello promontory. The eastern shore is quieter and more useful than it looks: Varenna is small and walkable and, the part people forget, has the train, an hour up the line from Milan. Bellagio in the middle is the postcard, and pays for it in crowds. There is no wrong answer here, only a choice about what you want your mornings to look like.

Whatever you decide, base yourself within sight of a ferry pier and let the boats do the moving. The lakeside roads run single-file in places and crawl in July; the car-ferry and the passenger boats criss-cross the middle of the lake — the Bellagio-Varenna-Menaggio triangle — all day long, and the getting-around turns into the best part of it rather than the chore. A boat at dusk, with the villages coming on one by one along the shore, is the whole trip in a single picture.

July is the lake at its fullest: warm, green and busy, which is why the planning matters more than usual and why a garden makes the right anchor for a day. Villa del Balbianello, on its finger of land at Lenno, and Villa Carlotta's terraces across the water are the two worth a boat and a slow afternoon. Get the shore and the pier right, and Como is one of the easiest beautiful places in the world to be.

— Vivienne Hartwell, Editor-in-Chief