Lake Como and Lake Maggiore: Villas, Saints and Steamboats

Hello, and welcome. Tonight, we are going to spend a long and quiet evening in the north of Italy, among three lakes at the foot of the Alps. Lake Como. Lake Maggiore. And between them, in the green hills, the small and gentle Lake of Varese.

Our story tonight is a long one. It begins in the age of the glaciers, and with people who built their homes on wooden posts at the edge of the water, many thousands of years ago. It passes through Roman villas and medieval castles, through bishops and hermits and families of bankers, through silk and steamboats and grand hotels. And it comes to an end in the early years of the twentieth century, not long before the First World War.

There is nothing you need to remember, and nothing you need to do. You can let the story come and go, like small waves on a pebbled shore. If you drift off before the end, that is perfectly all right. That is what this evening is for.

Long ago, great rivers of ice came down from the Alps. They moved very slowly, grinding and scraping, and they carved deep valleys running down toward the plain. When the ice melted away, the valleys filled with water, and the lakes were born. A travel writer of nineteen-oh-seven put it simply: The great subalpine lakes surround the Alps like a necklace of jewels.

The Romans called Lake Como the Larius, and Italians still often call it the Lario. It has a curious shape, like a letter Y turned upside down. One arm runs north, into the mountains. Two arms reach south, one toward the city of Como, and one toward the town of Lecco. Where the three arms meet, on a point of land that the local people call the spartivento, the divider of the winds, stands the little town of Bellagio.

The lake is narrow, but it is very deep. In places it is a little over four hundred metres deep, one of the deepest lakes in Europe, and its floor lies far below the level of the sea. The river Adda comes in at the northern end, and flows out again at Lecco.

To the west lies Lake Maggiore. In Latin it was the Lacus Verbanus, and so it is still called the Verbano. Maggiore simply means the larger, for it is the biggest lake of this district. It is about sixty-five kilometres long, and nearly three hundred and seventy metres at its deepest.

Its shores are shared between two Italian regions, Piedmont and Lombardy, and its northern tip lies in Switzerland, in the canton of Ticino. The river Ticino flows in at the top, and leaves again at the southern end. An old guidebook says that the water is green in the northern part of the lake, and deep blue toward the south.

Between these two great lakes lies a third, Lake Lugano, winding among the mountains in a shape rather like the letter S. And to the south of it, at the foot of the hills, lies Lake Varese. It is small, and shallow, around twenty-five metres at most. The people who live beside it say it is shaped like a shoe. Its water flows out through a little river into Lake Maggiore.

Tonight, we will meet many people along the way. A Roman gentleman from Como, who wrote letters about his villas by the water. A merchant who, as an old legend tells, was saved from a shipwreck, and became a hermit on a cliff. A family of bankers who became lords of Lake Maggiore, and turned a bare rock into a garden. A scientist from Como who made the first electric battery. And poets and composers, boatmen and fishermen, silk workers and smugglers, and travellers from all over Europe, who came to stay in the grand hotels by the water.

Many of the pictures you will see tonight are old. Some are coloured prints called photochroms, made between about eighteen ninety and nineteen hundred, by a process that turned black and white photographs into soft, painted colour. Others are old photographs and prints from a great museum in Amsterdam. And some are photographs I took myself, on summer visits to Como, Bellagio, Varese and its Sacro Monte, Lugano and Locarno.

So, make yourself comfortable. Let your shoulders soften, and let your breathing slow down. And let's begin, a very long time ago, on the shore of a small lake among the hills.

About fifteen thousand years ago, a great glacier was slowly drawing back toward the mountains. It left behind a wide hollow among the hills, and the hollow filled with water. At first the lake was much larger than it is now, and it took in most of the small lakes around it. Little by little, the water shrank, and what remained was Lake Varese. About a hundred and seventy kinds of birds have been seen around it.

Close to the western shore, only a few metres out in the water, there is a tiny island. It is called the Isolino Virginia. It looks like a small natural island, with water lilies floating all around it. But it is not quite natural. It was made, very slowly, by people. Over thousands of years, the remains of their homes and their daily lives piled up, layer upon layer, until the little island rose above the water.

Why did they choose this place? It seems that the fishing was good, and that a home surrounded by water was safer, from wild animals and from rival groups. An archaeologist named Mario Bertolone, studying the layers of the island, found that people were already living there in the second half of the fifth millennium before Christ, in the New Stone Age. That is more than six thousand years ago. And people kept coming to this spot for more than four thousand years.

We often imagine these people in huts standing on tall poles, high above open water. In fact, most of these villages were built on marshy ground at the edge of the lakes. The wooden piles kept the floors dry when the water rose in flood. Later, the lakes grew larger, and covered many of the old piles. And the wet, airless mud has kept the old wood from rotting, so well that archaeologists can count the rings in the timbers, and find out very precisely when the trees were cut.

In two thousand and eleven, one hundred and eleven of these places, in six countries around the Alps, were listed together as a World Heritage Site, the Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps. Lake Varese is among them, with its small neighbour, Lake Monate.

The little island has had several names. At first it was the Island of San Biagio, and later the Island of Donna Camilla Litta. Toward the end of the eighteen hundreds, its owner, an industrialist named Andrea Ponti, renamed it after his wife, Virginia, and paid for excavations there. A guidebook of nineteen thirteen tells us that a small boat took visitors out, in an hour from Schiranna, or in thirty-five minutes from Gavirate, and that there was a restaurant in summer, and a small museum full of relics of the lake dwellers. Today, herons and wild ducks come to the island, and the water lilies still open around its edges.

Much later, from about the ninth to the fourth century before Christ, in the Iron Age, a culture flourished near the southern end of Lake Maggiore, where the river Ticino leaves the lake. It is named after the village of Golasecca. Its people were traders, between the Etruscans and the Greeks to the south, and the Celtic peoples beyond the Alps. Through their hands passed salt and tin, wine and oil, bronze and coral, and amber from the shores of the Baltic Sea.

In one grave at Sesto Calende, called the Warrior's Tomb, there was a chariot. And at Castelletto sopra Ticino, a boulder was found with a few letters carved into it, probably a name, Chothios. It is described as the oldest known inscription on stone in a Celtic language, a single name, carved more than two and a half thousand years ago.

Long before there was a Roman city at Como, people were living in the hills just south of it, on the wooded slopes now called the Spina Verde, the green spine. Between the eighth and the sixth century before Christ, in the time of the Golasecca culture, a small town grew up there, almost a city. Later, its people wrote on their pottery, in letters borrowed from the Etruscans, and around Como, it seems, writing became quite common.

From the fourth century before Christ, Gauls came over the Alps and settled in the wide plain of the river Po. The people around Como appear in the old writers as a Celtic tribe called the Orobii, and later they joined a larger league of Celtic peoples, the Insubres. The old Roman writers, Cato and Livy and Pliny the Elder, said that it was the Orobii who had founded Como.

The Roman conquest of the lands north of the Po began in the year two hundred and twenty-five before Christ, and it ended in one hundred and ninety-six before Christ, with the taking of Como. A century later, raiders from the Alps attacked the town, and a Roman general came to restore it, and gave its people Latin rights.

And then, fifty-nine years before Christ, Julius Caesar founded a new town. He called it Novum Comum, New Como. He moved the town down from the hills, to the flat land at the southern tip of the lake. He had the marsh there drained, and he laid out the streets in the Roman way, straight, and crossing one another at right angles, inside a ring of walls. According to the ancient sources, Caesar sent five thousand colonists to live there, and five hundred of them were Greeks. Novum Comum grew into a prosperous little Roman town, with a forum, a harbour, baths, temples and walls.

Many centuries later, people liked to think that those Greeks had left their mark on the map. A writer of nineteen-oh-five believed that the village of Corenno remembered the Greek city of Corinth, and that Dorio and Delio remembered other Greek places too. It is a lovely idea, but modern scholars do not believe it.

And in this town were born two of the most famous writers of Rome. Both were called Pliny. The elder Pliny was born in the year twenty-three or twenty-four after Christ, most probably at Como, although the city of Verona once claimed him too. His great work, the Natural History, filled thirty-seven books. He died in the year seventy-nine, at Stabiae, during the great eruption of Vesuvius.

His nephew, the younger Pliny, was born at Como around the year sixty-one after Christ. His father died when the boy was still young, and a stone in Como records that he left money to buy oil for the townspeople's baths. The boy was adopted by his uncle, in his will. He became a lawyer and a magistrate, consul in the year one hundred, and later governor of a distant province called Bithynia.

But all his life, his heart stayed at home, on the lake. He once wrote to a friend from Como, Caninius Rufus, who had a villa there: What news of Comum, your delight and mine? What of that most charming of villas? What of those cloisters, where it is always spring time?

If you walk today into the cathedral square of Como, you will find the two Plinys still there. They sit in stone, one on each side of the great main door of the cathedral. They were put there in fourteen ninety-eight, and they have been quietly watching the square ever since.

The younger Pliny owned several villas on the shores of the Larian lake. In a letter to a friend named Romanus, he describes the two he loved best. One stood high on a rock, looking out over the water. The other stood down at the water's edge.

He called the first Tragedy, and the second Comedy. On the Roman stage, actors in tragedies wore tall boots, called buskins, and actors in comedies wore low, soft slippers, called socks. So one villa stood on a high boot, and the other on a low slipper.

Each had its own charm, he wrote. One had a wider view of the lake, and the other a nearer one. One curved gently around a little bay, while the other stood on a high crag, between two small bays. One did not feel the waves, and the other broke them. And then he adds a lovely detail: from that you see the fishing-vessels; from this you may fish yourself, and throw your line out of your room, and almost from your bed, as from off a boat.

Where were these two villas? Nobody knows exactly. Almost every village on the lake has claimed them at one time or another. An old tradition places Tragedy at Bellagio, and Comedy near Lenno, on the western shore. But it is only a tradition.

In another letter, to a learned friend named Licinius Sura, Pliny described a small wonder of the lake. A spring rose in the mountainside, ran down over the rocks, and was gathered into a little dining room, made by hand, before it flowed away into the lake. Three times a day, the spring rose, and fell again. You sit down by the side of the fountain, he wrote, and while you are taking a repast and drinking its water, which is extremely cool, you see it gradually rise and fall.

If you put a ring on the dry stone at the bottom, the water would slowly creep up over it, and cover it, and then slowly draw back again. Pliny wondered why. Was it a hidden current of air? A secret reservoir inside the mountain? A kind of tide, like the sea? He could not decide, and he left the puzzle to his friend.

The spring is still there, on the shore near the village of Torno, not far from Como. Centuries later, Leonardo da Vinci came to see it, and described it in his notebooks. A waterfall, about ninety metres high, pours down the rocks beside it. And in the fifteen-seventies, Count Giovanni Anguissola, governor of Como, built a large villa on the spot. He brought the spring into the inner courtyard, and from there it still runs out into the lake, beneath a vaulted arch.

It is called the Villa Pliniana. There is an old story that the count, who had once been part of a plot against a powerful duke, chose this lonely bay as a refuge from revenge. Perhaps. It is certainly a quiet place.

Pliny was generous to his home town. He gave Como a public library, and opened it with a speech. Once, on a visit home, he met a boy who was studying in Milan, and asked him why he did not study at home. Because we have no teachers here, said the boy's father. So Pliny offered to pay a third of the cost of teachers, if the fathers of the town would pay the rest, so that the children of Como could learn at home.

He also arranged for thirty thousand sesterces to be paid to the town every year, from one of his estates, to help support the free boys and girls of Como. So, in a way, he never really left the lake.

As the centuries passed, the Roman world became Christian, and Como had its own bishops. The one the city remembers best is Saint Abbondio, or Abundius in Latin.

Very little is known about where he came from. An old tradition says that he was born in Thessalonica, in Greece, and it is certain that he knew Greek well. He began as a helper to the bishop Amanzio, who chose him as his successor, and in the middle of the four hundreds he became bishop of Como.

He spoke Greek well, and in the year four hundred and fifty, Pope Leo the First sent him at the head of a mission to Constantinople, to win support there for the Pope's teaching on matters of faith, and he succeeded. By tradition, he died on an Easter Day, after preaching, probably in the year four hundred and sixty-eight. For more than a thousand years, he has been honoured as the patron saint of Como.

Where his basilica stands today, there was once an early church of the apostles Peter and Paul, from the fifth century. In the year one thousand and ten, a bishop of Como founded a Benedictine abbey there. In the second half of the eleventh century, the monks rebuilt the church in the Romanesque style, with two tall bell towers. And in ten ninety-five, Pope Urban the Second came to Como and consecrated it, even before the work was quite finished. It is the Basilica of Sant'Abbondio, and it is still there today, with frescoes inside from the fourteenth century.

In the heart of the town stands another old church, San Fedele. It began as a church of Saint Euphemia, and took its new name after what was believed to be the tomb of Saint Fidelis was found there. It has a fine apse with five sides, and a pointed side doorway with carved reliefs, which is known as the dragon door.

On Lake Como itself, there is only one island. It lies in the arm of Como, close to the western shore. The Isola Comacina is small, less than half a mile long, and wooded. The narrow channel between the island and the land was once called the Zocca dell'Olio, the bay of oil, because of the olive groves along its banks.

When the Lombards came into Italy, and took Milan in five hundred and sixty-nine, the island became a refuge. According to the old chronicle, a commander named Francione, loyal to the emperor far away in Constantinople, held the island for twenty years. At last, in five hundred and eighty-eight, after a siege of six months, the Lombard king Authari took it. But Francione was allowed to leave in peace, and to go to Ravenna, as the chronicle says, with his wife and his goods.

In the year six hundred and forty-three, the Lombard king Rothari issued a great book of laws. Two of its articles speak of a magister commacinus, a master builder. This is the first time we hear of the Magistri Comacini, the Comacine masters. They were guilds of travelling builders, masons, plasterers and sculptors, from the country around Como and Ticino, and they were among the first masters of the Lombard Romanesque style.

Where does their name come from? Some say simply, from Como. Others thought it came from the Latin cum machinis, with machines, meaning their scaffolds and their hoists. Scholars still do not agree. And one old writer tells a story that the master builders took refuge on the Comacina, and that the Lombard queen Theodelinda took them under her protection, and used them to build her cathedral at Monza. It is a legend, but a pleasant one.

In the early eleven hundreds, Como and Milan were rivals. Milan was the great city of the plain. Como held the lake, and the road north to the mountain passes. And in eleven eighteen, the two cities went to war. The war lasted almost ten years, and so it is remembered as the Ten Years' War.

Nearly everything we know about it comes from one long poem, written by a cleric of Como who lived through it. Nobody knows his name, and he is called simply the Anonymous of Como. He was on Como's side, of course. And the historians and poets of the time compared this war to the siege of Troy.

It began with a quarrel over a bishop. The emperor had named a nobleman from Milan, Landolfo da Carcano, as bishop of Como. But the clergy of Como chose their own bishop, Guido Grimoldi, from the village of Cavallasca. Landolfo withdrew to a castle at Magliaso, near Lugano.

In eleven eighteen, the council of Como met in the church of San Giacomo, and decided to act. Horsemen rode out at dusk, took the castle, and brought Landolfo back to Como as a prisoner. Milan answered with an army. That August, the Milanese marched north and camped on a marshy plain south of Como. Part of their army slipped into the city and set Landolfo free, but the men of Como soon drove them out again.

After that, much of the war was fought on the water. Many of the lake villages took Milan's side, and above all the island of Comacina, with its walls and its castle. Como built a fleet of its own. Its boats were long, about thirty metres, with little wooden towers on board. Bishop Grimoldi, who led Como in war as well as in prayer, used to bless the ships before they sailed.

In eleven twenty-five, Bishop Grimoldi died, and he was buried in Sant'Abbondio. Two years later, Milan brought in carpenters from Genoa and engineers from Pisa. They built four great wooden siege towers, and boats closed the lake around the city. When Como could hold out no longer, its leaders ferried the people, with their most precious things, to the fortified suburb of Vico.

Peace was made on the twenty-seventh of August, eleven twenty-seven. The people kept their lives and their goods. But the walls of the city had to be pulled down, and only the churches were spared. For many years afterwards, the people of Como lived outside the ruins, in huts with roofs of straw.

Then, from eleven fifty-eight, with the help of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Como rose again. It built new walls, with tall gate towers. On the hill above the city, the old castle of Baradello was restored, with a great square tower, which in time rose to about twenty-eight metres.

And in eleven sixty-nine, Como had its revenge on the island that had fought against it for so long. The men of Como destroyed almost everything on the Comacina, and threw its stones into the water, so that it could never be built again. The islanders crossed the lake to Varenna, which for a time was called the New Island.

After that, the Comacina was quiet for a very long time. A writer of nineteen-oh-five described it like this: A few peasants cut its hay crops or gather its olives, returning after their day's work across the green and jewelled strait to the mainland.

And once a year, on the Sunday nearest to the feast of Saint John, in late June, the boats still go out in a slow procession around the island. There is a mass in the little church. And when evening comes, there are fireworks over the dark water.

Let us leave Lake Como for a while, and travel west, to the southern end of Lake Maggiore. Here the hills grow lower, and on either side of the water, facing one another, stand two small towns. Arona on the western shore, and Angera on the eastern. And above Angera, on a high rock, stands a great castle, the Rocca of Angera. With its battlements against the sky, it gives the whole landscape, as one writer put it, a medieval look.

Angera is an old place. Roman remains have been found all around it. Some old antiquarians went much further, and claimed that Angera had been founded by a nephew of Aeneas, the hero of Troy, and dedicated to Angerona, the goddess of silence. An Italian travel writer, Carlo Amoretti, in a guidebook printed in eighteen twenty-four, repeated these stories only as marvels, and not as history.

The castle first belonged to the archbishops of Milan. Its oldest part is a square tower on the western side, built no later than the time of the Lombards. Around the year thirteen hundred, it began to grow. Over the centuries, five buildings were joined together on the rock: a castellan's tower, a wing called the Scaliger wing, a Visconti wing, a tower of Giovanni Visconti, and a wing of the Borromeo family.

The Visconti were a family of Milan. In the thirteenth century, one of them, Ottone Visconti, was archbishop of the city, and he was a warlike archbishop. His great rivals were another Milanese family, the della Torre. In twelve seventy-seven, at Desio, Ottone defeated the della Torre, and after that, the power of the Visconti grew strong.

Soon after the battle, in a great hall of the Rocca, now called the Hall of Justice, a painter covered the walls with the story of Ottone's life, and of his victory at Desio. The painter's name is unknown, and he is called simply the Master of Angera. His paintings are still there, more than seven hundred years later. A guidebook by Carlo Amoretti, printed in eighteen twenty-four, describes them as old and precious, in a hall that had been abandoned.

In thirteen fifty, Pope Clement the Sixth granted the Rocca to the family of Bernabo Visconti. One wing carries painted coats of arms that are linked with Bernabo's wife, Regina della Scala, and so it is called the Scaliger wing.

Then, in the time of the Ambrosian Republic in Milan, the castle changed hands. On the eighteenth of January, fourteen forty-nine, the Council of Nine Hundred of that republic approved the sale of Angera, its castle and its lands, to a rich man named Vitaliano Borromeo. The price was twelve thousand eight hundred imperial lire. And the Borromeo family still owns the Rocca today.

In fourteen ninety-seven, Angera was raised from a village to a town, with a market, and two fairs every year. But for a long time, the castle itself was neglected. In sixteen twenty-three, the King of Spain made Cardinal Federico Borromeo the Marquis of Angera, and the cardinal sent an expert to see what work was needed. The great restorations came later in that century, under two other members of the family, and painters came to decorate the rooms again.

An English guidebook of eighteen seventy-seven found the castle scarcely lived in, but kept in good repair. From its walls, it said, there was a fine view over the southern part of the lake, and over the country around Varese.

Today, the Rocca still keeps watch over the southern end of Lake Maggiore. Below its walls, a medieval garden has been planted again, with herbs and roses, pergolas and a fountain, following the pictures in old illuminated manuscripts. And in the evening light, the old stones look out quietly over the water.

North of Angera, along the eastern shore of Lake Maggiore, the land rises in steep cliffs of rock, straight out of the water. And on one of these cliffs, near the village of Leggiuno, a small monastery clings to the rock, just above the lake. It is the hermitage of Santa Caterina del Sasso, Saint Catherine of the Rock. A travel writer of nineteen-oh-seven called it a little church perched in a seemingly inaccessible position, high above the lake.

Its story begins with a legend. According to tradition, around the year eleven seventy, a merchant and moneylender named Alberto Besozzi, from the village of Arolo, was crossing the lake when his boat was wrecked. He prayed to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and he made a vow. If he was saved, he would spend the rest of his life in prayer, alone, in a cave on that shore. He was saved. And so he kept his promise, and built a little chapel to the saint.

The story is told in different ways, and no one can say how much of it is true. But the oldest part of the hermitage is real enough. It is a small chapel from the year eleven ninety-five, built to the same size as the tomb of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai. In fifteen thirty-five, the remains of the hermit were moved into it, and he rests there still.

Other chapels followed. One was begun in twelve seventy, as a thank-offering, because the people had been freed from a pack of wolves that kept attacking their flocks. Another was dedicated to Saint Nicholas, the protector of sailors. Much later, the separate chapels were joined together into a single church.

Over the centuries, different friars lived here. First, for a short time, came the Dominicans, and in their time the chapel of Saint Nicholas was painted with frescoes. One of them, a Madonna, is thought to be by the same hand as the frescoes in Sant'Abbondio, in Como. Then came other friars, who stayed for well over two hundred years, and in the sixteen hundreds, Carmelites from Mantua. And in seventeen seventy, under the Empress Maria Theresa, their community was closed.

Then there are the stones. Long ago, perhaps in the sixteen hundreds, or around seventeen hundred, five great boulders broke away from the cliff above and fell onto the church. They broke into the vault of the chapel where the hermit had first been buried. But instead of crashing to the floor, they stuck fast there, wedged in the roof, hanging above the heads of the people at prayer. From then on, it was called the chapel of the stones.

In a guidebook printed in eighteen twenty-four, Carlo Amoretti tells of a great boulder hanging in the vault, which seemed, he said, to stay up there against the force of gravity. Looking more closely, he saw that it was held up by another rock, pressing against one end. And then, on the night of the eleventh to the twelfth of May, nineteen ten, the boulders finally dropped to the floor, without doing any further harm.

The full name of the place is Santa Caterina del Sasso Ballaro. People like to say that Ballaro comes from the wobbling of those stones. But it more probably comes from a nearby village, called Ballarate.

A long staircase leads to the hermitage, built after a landslide in the eighteen hundreds carried away part of the old path. And a small bell tower, about twelve metres tall, stands right above the water.

In nineteen thirteen, a traveller could hire a rowing boat from Pallanza to cross the lake to the hermitage. And from up there, a guidebook promised, there was a charming view, across the water, of the islands and the snowy mountains to the west.

Further north, Lake Maggiore grows narrower, and the mountains come closer to the water. On the western shore, near the village of Cannero, three small rocky islets rise out of the lake. On two of them there are ruins, broken walls and roofless towers, standing in the water like old ships at anchor. They are called the Castles of Cannero, or sometimes the Castles of Malpaga.

The first castles there were built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And toward the end of the fourteenth century, five brothers lived there. Their family name was Mazzardi, and people called them the Mazzarditi. They came from a little place called Ronco. One old writer even gives their names: Giovanolo, Beltramino, Simonello, Petrolo and Antonio.

It was a troubled time on the lake. In the town of Cannobio, nearby, two parties had been quarrelling for years. At the end of fourteen-oh-three, and the beginning of fourteen-oh-four, the brothers took their chance. They seized the main palace of Cannobio, took over Cannero, and made the castles on the rocks their own. From there, for several years, they raided up and down the whole lake. It seems they hoped to build a little private state.

The old guidebooks remember them well. One calls them robber brothers, famous along the lake for their raids. Another, from nineteen-oh-seven, says they were five brigand brothers, Mazzarda by name, who terrorized the whole lake district until the ducal Visconti of the day besieged and destroyed their robber castle.

And that is just what happened. In fourteen fourteen, the people of the lakeside begged the new Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, for help. He sent five hundred men, under a captain named Giovanni Lonati. After a short siege, the castles were pulled down, and the brothers went away into exile.

There is a story, told by one old writer, about the name Malpaga. He says the brothers made the men of the village build their castles almost without pay, and so the workers, with a bitter smile, called them the Malpaga castles, the castles of bad pay. It is only a folk explanation. But it has stayed with the ruins ever since.

Then the islets passed into new hands. In fourteen forty-one, the lordship of Cannobio, and with it the little rocks in the lake, was granted to Vitaliano Borromeo, the same man who would soon buy the Rocca of Angera. And in fifteen nineteen, Ludovico Borromeo began a new fortress there. He called it the Vitaliana, in honour of the Vitaliani of Padua, the family from which the Borromeo descended.

In fifteen twenty-three, and again in fifteen twenty-four, the Duke of Milan, Francesco the Second Sforza, who was quarrelling with the Borromeo, sent boats to besiege the castles. Both sieges failed. But after Ludovico died, the fortress was slowly abandoned. It stood too close to the shore to be easily defended. It is said that, in later centuries, smugglers and fishermen used the ruins, and once, even a band of forgers.

A guidebook of nineteen thirteen notes the two ruined castles on their rocky islets, the property of Count Borromeo. And the village of Cannero, on the shore, was crowned with vineyards and orchards.

Today, swans and gulls and goosanders nest among the old stones. The water laps quietly at the foot of the walls. And the name of the ruins, the Vitaliana, still remembers the Vitaliani of Padua, and through them, the Borromeo, a family of merchants and bankers who would shape this lake for centuries, with castles and churches, with a saint, and with islands of gardens. And it is their story that we will follow next, slowly, along the water.

The family that would one day hold so much of Lake Maggiore did not begin beside a lake at all. It began in Tuscany, in the small hill town of San Miniato, where records of the late twelve hundreds speak of a family of merchants called the Buonromei, or Borromei.

In the years around thirteen seventy, San Miniato rose against Florence, and the rising failed. The family scattered, some to Padua, and one of them, Giovanni, to Milan, where he grew rich in trade and banking.

Giovanni had no children. But his sister in Padua had a son named Vitaliano, and in fourteen hundred and nine, when the boy's father died, Giovanni adopted him, on one condition. The young man must take the name Borromeo. And so he became Vitaliano Borromeo, the first of that name.

Vitaliano was a banker, with branches as far away as Burgos and Barcelona. He became treasurer to the Duke of Milan, and the duke rewarded him with land. Around fourteen forty he was granted Arona, near the southern end of Lake Maggiore, and soon he was made Count of Arona. In fourteen forty-nine, Angera, just across the water, came to the family as well.

In time, the Borromeo lands became almost a small state of their own, reaching from Arona and Angera in the south, up the lake as far as Cannobio, and into the valleys beyond. The boats that carried goods along the lake paid tolls at Arona. This little state lasted until the French armies came, in seventeen ninety-seven.

Among the family's emblems were a unicorn, and three rings, linked in such a way that if any one of them is broken, the other two fall apart. Mathematicians still call them the Borromean rings.

On the second of October, fifteen thirty-eight, between eight and nine in the morning, a boy was born in the castle above Arona, in a room that was then called the Room of the Three Lakes. His name was Carlo Borromeo. His mother was the sister of a man who would one day become pope.

As a young man, Carlo played the lute and the cello, and he liked hunting, and chess. He studied law at Pavia. Then, at Christmas, fifteen fifty-nine, his uncle was elected pope, as Pius the Fourth, and called him to Rome. A few weeks later, at the age of twenty-one, Carlo was made a cardinal.

When his elder brother died suddenly, in fifteen sixty-two, the family urged Carlo to marry and carry on the line. Instead, he chose to become a priest. He took a leading part in the last sessions of the Council of Trent, and in fifteen sixty-four he was named Archbishop of Milan. Two years later he went to live there, very simply, almost in poverty.

He was a tall man, taller than most men of his time, and for years he wore a beard. But when plague came to Milan, in fifteen seventy-six, he shaved it off, as a sign of penance. Through that plague, and on into the next year, he organised help for the sick and the hungry. He walked barefoot through the city in procession, carrying a wooden cross that held a precious relic, a holy nail.

The writer William McCrackan put it simply in nineteen-oh-seven: "Such acts endeared him to the people and caused his memory to be specially cherished throughout the Italian lakes region."

In the autumn of fifteen eighty-four, on his way back from a visit to Lake Maggiore, Carlo fell ill with a fever. He was carried to Milan by boat, along the canal called the Naviglio Grande, and he died there on the evening of the third of November, at the age of forty-six. In sixteen ten, he was declared a saint.

Above Arona, on a green hill about half an hour's walk from the town, there stands a giant.

He is Saint Charles himself, Carlo Borromeo, and he is made of copper. The statue alone is about twenty-three metres tall, and it stands on a granite pedestal of nearly twelve metres. The people of the lake simply call him the San Carlone, the big Saint Charles.

The idea came soon after Carlo was made a saint. Around sixteen ten, a priest of Arona, Father Marco Aurelio Grattarola, imagined a holy mountain on the hill behind his town, with a path of chapels telling the story of the saint's life. The plan was taken up by Carlo's cousin, Cardinal Federico Borromeo, now Archbishop of Milan himself, and the founder of the great library of Milan, the Ambrosiana. Some years later, Federico laid the first stone.

Only a few of the chapels were ever built. But the great statue, which was to crown the whole design, was finished in the end. It was designed by a painter, Giovanni Battista Crespi, known as il Cerano, and made by two craftsmen, Siro Zanella of Pavia, and Bernardo Falconi, from the shores of Lake Lugano. Inside, there is a tall pillar of masonry. Around it, fixed with nails and iron bars, they hung great sheets of copper, beaten by hand into the shape of the saint's robes. The copper is said to be only about a millimetre thick. The head and the hands were cast in bronze.

The work went slowly, through most of the sixteen hundreds. The money came from the people around the lake, and above all from the Borromeo family. At last, at the very end of the century, the giant was complete, and in May, sixteen ninety-eight, it was blessed.

The saint stands in his long cassock, with a book resting in his left arm. His right hand is raised in blessing, over the town and the lake. An English handbook for travellers, published in eighteen seventy-seven, found grace in his attitude, in spite of his gigantic size, and kindness in his face.

The same handbook explains how a visitor could climb inside. A man who lived close by would bring two ladders, tied together, and set them against the pedestal, up to the hem of the saint's robe. The climber squeezed through a gap between the folds of copper. Inside, it was dark. He climbed the stone pillar, his feet on the iron bars, all the way up into the head. This, the handbook warned, was not for the nervous, and not easy for anyone stout. But at the top there was a reward. "Here he may rest himself by sitting down in the recess of the nose, which forms no bad substitute for an arm-chair."

An Italian guide of eighteen twenty-four agreed. Anyone could sit quite comfortably inside the nose, it said, unless he happened to be of enormous size.

Today there are stairs, and a door hidden in the folds of the cassock, and at the top, small openings at the eyes, the ears and the nostrils, through which visitors have long looked out over the water.

In eighteen sixty-nine, a French sculptor, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, came to Arona to study how the giant had been made. Bartholdi was the artist who designed the Statue of Liberty.

And the old Italian guide adds one more small thing. On a clear day, it says, travellers in the boats crossing to the islands could look south and still see the giant, a good ten miles away.

Up the lake from Arona, the water opens into a wide bay, between Stresa on one shore and Pallanza on the other. In that bay lie the little islands that carry the family's name, the Borromean Islands.

Four hundred years ago, the island nearest to Stresa was nothing special. People called it simply the lower island. It was a rock in the water, with a tiny fishing village, a few vegetable gardens, and two small churches.

In sixteen thirty-two, Count Carlo Borromeo, the third of that name, began to build a palace there. According to an old tradition, he dedicated the island to his wife, Isabella d'Adda. It became the Isola Isabella, and then, with time, simply the Isola Bella, the beautiful island.

An architect from Milan, Angelo Crivelli, drew the plan, and it was a strange and wonderful plan. The whole island was to look like a great ship, sailing on the lake. The palace would be the bow, and the gardens, rising in terraces, would be the stern.

But there was hardly any soil on the rock. So boats went back and forth across the water, carrying earth from the shore. The English handbook of eighteen seventy-seven remarked that every handful of earth on the island had been brought there from somewhere else.

In the middle of the century, plague came to the Duchy of Milan, and the work stopped. When it began again, it was in the hands of Carlo's son, Vitaliano Borromeo, the sixth of that name, a soldier and a diplomat who loved letters and the theatre. He called in architects and sculptors, and over the following decades the rock slowly became a palace and a garden. The family still remembers him as the founder of Isola Bella. When he died, in sixteen ninety, his heart was buried on the island.

The garden rises in ten terraces, one above another, to about thirty metres above the lake. At the top stands the Teatro Massimo, a great stage of stone in three tiers, crowded with statues, and on its summit stands a unicorn, the emblem of the Borromeo. Plays were performed in this garden, under the open sky. And on the lawns and paths, white peacocks walk slowly, trailing their pale feathers.

By around sixteen seventy-one, the garden was largely complete. Lemon and orange trees grew against the warm walls of the terraces, and in winter the walls were covered with boards, to keep out the cold. Later travellers found camellias and magnolias, laurels and oleanders, and even a camphor tree, all within sight of the snow on the Alps.

Beneath the palace there are grottoes, cool rooms whose walls are covered in pebbles and shells. And in a long gallery hang old Flemish tapestries, woven with silk and gold, in which a unicorn appears again and again.

In seventeen ninety-seven, Count Giberto Borromeo welcomed two famous guests, Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife Josephine, and the room where Napoleon slept is still shown. There is a legend that he cut a word into the bark of a great laurel in the garden, the word for battle. But by eighteen seventy-seven the laurel was only a stump, and the word, if it was ever there, had gone.

Travellers never quite agreed about Isola Bella. Some found it too artificial. Others were enchanted. Gibbon called it "an enchanted palace, a work of the fairies, in a lake accompanied with mountains."

And McCrackan felt a little of both. Whatever one thought of its fancies, he wrote, there was at least surprising merit "in having hung these opulent gardens against the sky-line of the barren Alps and caused the naked rock to bloom."

A short row from Isola Bella lies the largest of the Borromean Islands, the Isola Madre.

A document of the year eight hundred and forty-six already mentions it. In those days it was called the island of San Vittore, and there were a few houses on it, a little church, and olive trees, whose oil was probably used in the church.

In fifteen hundred and one the island passed to Lancillotto Borromeo, who brought citrus trees from Liguria, and a gardener to care for them. Then, in the early eighteen hundreds, the old orchards became a romantic garden in the English style. Count Vitaliano Borromeo, the ninth of that name, loved botany, and he brought in rare plants from far away.

Isola Madre lies farther from the mountains than Isola Bella, so it keeps the autumn sun a little longer, and its winters are milder. The handbook of eighteen seventy-seven noticed that tea plants flowered there in October. And it noticed something else: "On the island are many pheasants, a rare sight in Italy, these birds being as it were imprisoned, from their inability by flight to gain the opposite shores."

In the summer of eighteen fifty-four, the writer Ruskin was staying at Baveno, across the bay. He wrote to his mother that he meant to draw part of the garden of Isola Madre, and to study its aloes, with bees humming about their yellow flowers.

Close by lies the third island, and it is quite different. Its proper name is the Isola Superiore, the upper island, but everyone calls it the Isola dei Pescatori, the Fishermen's Island. It is only about three hundred and fifty metres long, and people have lived on it for at least seven hundred years. Of all the Borromean Islands, it is the only one where people live all year round.

The houses stand tall and close together, with long balconies where fish were hung to dry. In autumn and spring, when the lake rises, the water floods the path along the shore. But the old builders knew this. They set the doorsteps higher up, on the narrow lanes inside the village, so that the houses stay dry.

McCrackan loved this island. "It contains a medley of fishermen's homes of many colours, yellow, pink, or terra-cotta, that jostle each other to the very water's edge." The boats, he wrote, were mostly painted black, though he once saw a bright blue one. Nets were spread to dry on the grass at the western end, and a cream-coloured church tower rose above the brown-red roofs.

The fishermen knew the bed of the lake as a farmer knows his fields, and they knew where the hidden ridges lay. There was perch and pike, trout and eels, and two kinds of whitefish, the lavarello and the bondella. And there was the agone, a small lake fish of the shad family.

On Lake Como, the agone had a season of its own. In the first half of June, every fisherman had his own place on the shore, and no one would dare to take it. One end of the net, called the pendent, was fixed to the shore, and a boat drew the other end round in a wide half-circle.

Then the little fish were cleaned and salted, and hung in long rows on strings, in the summer sun, in front of the lakeside houses. When their heads crackled under the fingers, they were ready. They were laid in a wooden tub, in circles, like the petals of a rose, with bay leaves between the layers and a weight on top. These were the missoltini, the dried fish of Lake Como, kept for the long winter.

Between Lake Maggiore and Lake Como, the land rises into green hills. Below them lies the town of Varese. And above it, on a mountain covered with woods of beech and chestnut and hazel, a small village of stone gathers around a church. It is called Santa Maria del Monte, Saint Mary of the Mountain.

People have climbed up here to pray for a very long time. A legend says that Saint Ambrose himself built a little chapel on this summit, in the fourth century. A church certainly stood here by the eleventh century, and its crypt still survives. In the second half of the fourteen hundreds, two devout women came to live as hermits beside the church. Others followed them, and soon there was a convent of nuns on the mountain.

But the only way up was a steep path. Early in the sixteen hundreds, one of the nuns, Sister Maria Tecla Cid, had an idea. Why not make a proper road from the plain up to the church, with places along the way where pilgrims could stop, and rest, and pray?

A Capuchin friar, Giovanni Battista Aguggiari, took up the idea. He persuaded noble families of Milan to give money, and he gathered gifts from the people of many villages around. An architect, Giuseppe Bernascone, known as il Mancino, designed the chapels and the road. And Cardinal Federico Borromeo, the same man who began the giant of Arona, watched over the work.

It began in sixteen hundred and four, and the work went quickly. Within twenty years, thirteen of the fourteen chapels were standing. Plague interrupted the work in sixteen thirty, but the painters and sculptors returned, and by sixteen ninety-eight, the same year that the giant of Arona was blessed, it was all complete.

The road climbs for about two kilometres, paved with cobbles. Along it stand fourteen chapels, each showing a mystery of the Rosary in painted statues and frescoes, with great arches between the groups, and fountains where pilgrims could drink. First come the mysteries of joy, then the mysteries of sorrow, and then the mysteries of glory. The church at the top is counted as the fifteenth.

The English writer Samuel Butler came here, and wrote about it in eighteen eighty-one. He peered through the grating of the first chapel, the Annunciation, and found that the Virgin had a real washing-stand, with a basin and jug and a real piece of soap, and her slippers placed neatly under the bed. He found the chapels lovely. "They come as fresh one after the other as a set of variations by Handel."

Butler arrived on a great feast day. Thousands of pilgrims were climbing the road, decked out with coloured feathers, with priests and banners and music, and at the top there were stalls selling strings of beads. When the processions were over, he wrote, "the pilgrims went into the shadow of a great rock behind the sanctuary, spread themselves out over the grass and dined."

On a June evening in eighteen seventeen, the French writer Stendhal had made the same climb. His party kept stopping at the chapels, to turn and look back at the view, and at sunset, he wrote, they could see seven lakes. That night a friar played the organ for them, and they asked him for pieces by Mozart.

In two thousand and three, the Sacro Monte of Varese was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, together with eight other holy mountains of Piedmont and Lombardy. One of them looks down on Lake Como, at Ossuccio, from a cliff facing the little Isola Comacina. Its fourteen chapels hold two hundred and thirty life-size statues, dressed as the gentry and the peasants of the lake were dressed in those days.

If you had travelled through the country around the lakes in early summer, a century or more ago, you would have seen rows of low, leafy trees along the edges of the fields. And in June, or early July, you might have seen men perched in their branches, stripping off the leaves and stuffing them into long sacks.

These were mulberry trees. Their leaves were food for the silkworms.

An English handbook of eighteen fifty-two put it plainly: "The culture of the mulberry, and the rearing of the silkworm, have, in commercial value, become the most important branch of Lombard industry." The worm, it added, seemed to work more delicately in the dry, fresh air of hilly country.

The silkworms were raised in the farmhouses, and the work fell above all to the women and the children. The peasants' houses here were large, airy and clean, the handbook said, because the worms did better in good rooms.

On wide shelves, the worms lay in their thousands, each about two inches long. Fresh mulberry leaves were scattered over them, and they ate, and ate. McCrackan described the sound: "If you put your ear to the shelf, the sound of the feeding is like that of the gentle pattering of rain upon a tin roof."

At last the worms turned a little yellow, and were ready. Dry branches were set up at the back of the shelves, a small forest called the bosco, the wood. The worms climbed into it, and each one wound a thread of silk around itself, until it was hidden inside a cocoon. The cocoons were usually a rich salmon colour. Heaped in great baskets at the silk markets of the towns, McCrackan said, they seemed almost to glow.

There was only one harvest a year, in June and early July, and the cocoons could not wait. The moth inside would soon eat its way out, and break the thread. So the cocoons were taken to the filanda, the silk mill.

The mills were tall buildings, with big windows to let in the light, often built beside a stream. The cocoons were dried in ovens, and sorted. Then they were dropped into basins of very hot water, to soften the natural glue that held the thread. With a little brush, a woman caught the loose end of each thread, drew it out, and wound it onto a reel. It took eleven or twelve pounds of fresh cocoons to make a single pound of raw silk.

This work, McCrackan wrote, was done by women and girls only. It needed such skill, and such a delicate touch, that no machine had yet been able to take their place.

Como had long been a silk town. According to McCrackan, a man named Pietro Boldoni, from Bellano on the lake, first brought the silk industry to the city in fifteen hundred and ten. After that, silk never quite left the city. The handbook of eighteen fifty-two even said that there had once been a time when more looms were at work in Como than in the French city of Lyons.

Silk was everywhere around the lakes. At Luino, on Lake Maggiore, a large filanda once sent its silk across the border to Lugano. The country around Varese, McCrackan said, was busy above all with feeding silkworms and spinning their shining thread. And in nineteen thirteen, the Baedeker guide wrote that the people on the banks of Lake Como were much occupied in the production and manufacture of silk.

One small picture remains from those shores. When Caroline, the Princess of Wales, went walking among the cottages near her villa on Lake Como, in the years after eighteen fifteen, she wore, so we are told, a light silk Como scarf thrown across her shoulders.

In the city of Como, on the eighteenth of February, seventeen forty-five, a boy was born who would give his name to a word we still use every day. His name was Alessandro Volta.

In seventeen seventy-four he became professor of physics at the school of his home town, and a year later he perfected a clever electrical device, which he called the perpetual electrophorus.

In the autumn of seventeen seventy-six, he went to stay with a friend, Teresa Castiglioni, at Angera, on the shore of Lake Maggiore. Near a little islet there was a marsh, where the water lay still and shallow. Volta took a stick and stirred the muddy bottom. Bubbles rose to the surface, and he caught them in bottles. When he brought a lighted candle to the gas, it burned.

He called it the inflammable air of the marshes. Today we call it methane. And he began to imagine new things. A spark made in Como, he thought, might be carried along iron wires, hung on poles, all the way to Milan, and there it might fire a little pistol, as a signal.

In seventeen seventy-nine he took the chair of physics at the university of Pavia. Some years later, a professor at Bologna, Luigi Galvani, had been making the legs of frogs twitch, by touching them with arcs of metal. Galvani believed the electricity came from the animal itself. Volta thought it came from the meeting of two different kinds of metal, and the two men, and their followers, argued about it for years.

In seventeen ninety-nine, war closed the university, and Volta went home to Como. At the end of that year, he took what he called his great step.

On the twentieth of March, eighteen hundred, he wrote a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society in London. He began with his long silence, for which, he said, he would offer no apology. Then he described something new. "The apparatus to which I allude, and which will, no doubt, astonish you, is only the assemblage of a number of good conductors of different kinds arranged in a certain manner."

It was a pile of small discs, each about the size of a coin. A disc of copper, or better still of silver. Then a disc of tin, or zinc. Then a piece of card or leather, soaked in salt water. And again, and again, thirty, forty, sixty times or more. Volta compared it to the natural organ of the electric fish, and he called it an artificial electric organ. It gave a steady current of electricity, and it was the forerunner of every battery.

On the seventh of November, eighteen-oh-one, in Paris, Volta showed his pile to Napoleon himself. A medal was struck in his honour, and later he was made a senator, and then a count. In eighteen nineteen he came home to Como for good. He died at Como in March, eighteen twenty-seven, and he was buried at Camnago, close to the city, in the family chapel. The volt, the unit of electric potential, is named after him.

In eighteen ninety-nine, a hundred years after the pile, Como held a great exhibition in his honour. The king came to see it, and Giacomo Puccini wrote a little march for the occasion, called Electric Shock. Then, in July, a short circuit started a fire, and in less than an hour the pavilions were gone. But they were rebuilt, and within a few weeks the exhibition opened again. Much later, in nineteen twenty-eight, a temple in the classical style, the Tempio Voltiano, was opened on the shore at Como, to keep the memory of his work.

And one more small thread ties Volta to the lake. When Caroline, the Princess of Wales, bought a villa on the shore at Cernobbio, it was Alessandro Volta who acted as legal agent in the deed of sale.

At five o'clock on a summer morning, the eighteenth of July, eighteen seventeen, a boat set out from Como under a fine awning of blue and white. On board were Stendhal and a party of friends, beginning a long day on the lake.

Their first visit was to a villa at Cernobbio, a little way up the western shore. Stendhal called it simply the villa of the Princess of Wales.

Its story was already long. A convent of nuns had once stood here, beside a stream called the Garovo. In the fifteen-sixties, Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio pulled down the old convent and built himself a residence, with fine gardens. Over the next two centuries it passed from owner to owner. A former ballerina of La Scala, known as la Pelusina, married one of Napoleon's generals, and built him a little mock fortress among the trees.

In eighteen fifteen the villa was bought by Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales, the estranged wife of the future King George the Fourth. She named it the New Villa d'Este. She had the park made over in the English style and a road built to Como, and one of her first improvements was a double avenue of limes and horse-chestnuts along the water.

The writer Edgcumbe Staley, in nineteen twelve, liked to picture her there, in a plain muslin dress and a coarse straw sunbonnet. She visited the cottages of the peasants and the huts of the fishermen, he wrote, with a large bag of good things for the sick and the poor. And long after she had gone, he wrote, "the blue water laps her marble steps as musically as when the royal Princess tripped up and down."

Later, the Tsarina of Russia rented the villa for two years, and filled the gardens at night with torchlight and fireworks. And in eighteen seventy-three, the Villa d'Este became a hotel.

From Cernobbio, Stendhal's boat crossed to the Pliniana and went on, where the lake grows dark and wild, and the mountains fall almost straight into the water. Then the party rounded a wooded headland, the point of Balbianello. The ladies on board, he wrote, were frightened.

On that headland, near Lenno, stands the Villa del Balbianello. It was built in seventeen eighty-seven by Cardinal Angelo Maria Durini, on the site of an old Franciscan monastery. The cardinal added a graceful loggia, an open gallery between two small pavilions, and in summer and autumn he invited poets and men of letters to stay. Later owners, who counted Alessandro Manzoni among the guests of their salon, placed a small tower, like a lighthouse, with a clock and bells, at the entrance to the little harbour.

Beyond Balbianello, Stendhal saw the shore called the Tremezzina, and he found it delightful. Its little valleys, sheltered from the north by a high mountain, enjoyed the climate of Rome, he wrote. Palaces multiplied on the green hillsides, and were reflected in the water.

Here, at Tremezzo, stands Villa Carlotta. It was begun around sixteen ninety for the Marquis Giorgio Clerici, president of the Senate of Milan. In eighteen-oh-one it was bought by Gian Battista Sommariva, a politician and a great collector of art. He filled it with sculpture, by Canova and his followers, and by Thorvaldsen, whose marble frieze shows Alexander the Great entering Babylon in triumph. There is a famous marble copy, after Canova, of Cupid and Psyche.

In eighteen forty-three the villa was bought by Princess Marianne, the wife of a Prussian prince, and around eighteen fifty she gave it to her daughter Charlotte, on her marriage. Charlotte died in eighteen fifty-five, but the villa still carries her name.

Its garden climbs an old moraine, left behind by the glaciers. The Baedeker guide of nineteen thirteen said of it: "It is especially beautiful in May, when the azaleas and rhododendrons are in bloom."

At three o'clock in the afternoon, Stendhal's boats came to rest in a small harbour on the Tremezzina shore, across the water from the Villa Melzi. The ladies needed rest. But Stendhal and three Italian officers crossed the lake, in ten minutes, to Bellagio.

Bellagio lies at the heart of Lake Como. Here, at the end of a long green promontory, the lake divides into two branches. One runs down to Como, on the west. The other runs down to Lecco, on the east. The Baedeker guide of nineteen thirteen called the little town "perhaps the most delightful point among the lakes of Upper Italy."

Stendhal walked up through the gardens, to the top of the steep promontory, among tall trees. Below him, a precipice of some five hundred feet fell straight into the water. It was very hot, he wrote, and very still. Now and then a little breeze from the east wrinkled the surface of the lake, and carried across to them the songs of the peasants on the far shore.

On this promontory stands the Villa Serbelloni, and it has a long history. An old tradition says that Pliny the Younger had a villa on this promontory, the one he called Tragedy, though no one can be sure. In the Middle Ages there was a castle here. Near the end of the fourteen hundreds, a Milanese nobleman, Marchesino Stanga, built a house on its ruins, simply for pleasure. Among his guests, it is said, was Leonardo da Vinci.

In fifteen thirty-nine the promontory was bought by Francesco Sfondrati, who rebuilt the house after a fire, and in seventeen eighty-eight it passed to Alessandro Serbelloni, whose name the villa still bears. Its park, with its old palms, reaches to the very end of the promontory. McCrackan saw the whole headland as a great lion lying down. The big white house on the lion's neck was the Villa Serbelloni, he said, and the park of noble trees was the lion's mane.

Down by the water, on the road towards Como, stands the other great villa of Bellagio. The Villa Melzi was built between eighteen-oh-eight and eighteen ten for Francesco Melzi d'Eril, who in Napoleon's time had been vice-president of the new Italian Republic. It has a chapel, an orangery, and long gardens beside the lake, and in the gardens there is even a Venetian gondola.

In eighteen thirty-seven, two famous visitors came to Bellagio. One was the pianist and composer Franz Liszt. The other was his companion, the Countess Marie d'Agoult. They stayed from early September until November, and Liszt worked hard here. He finished a set of twelve great studies for the piano, and much of the first book of a collection he called the Album of a Traveller. In the gardens of the Villa Melzi there is a statue of Dante and Beatrice, and it is said that it inspired one of his best-known pieces, the Dante Sonata.

In November they moved to Como. And there, on Christmas Eve, eighteen thirty-seven, their daughter Cosima was born. Cosima lived for more than ninety years, and she later became the wife of another composer, Richard Wagner.

In the early nineteen hundreds, Bellagio was a place of visitors, and along the waterfront McCrackan found a little bazaar of souvenirs, with things of olive wood, Como blankets and lace, and even English groceries.

Stendhal remembered this place in a novel, too. His heroine, as a girl, used to walk here, by "the bold promontory which divides the two arms of the lake, that of Como, so voluptuous, and the other which runs towards Lecco, grimly severe."

The promontory still divides them, one soft and one stern. And the little town of Bellagio rests at the point where they meet.

For a long time, the way over the mountains to the north of Lake Maggiore was only a local route, known to the people of the valleys. At the top of the pass stood a hospice, first mentioned in the year twelve thirty-five, kept by canons from the Great Saint Bernard.

Then, in the first years of the eighteen hundreds, Napoleon ordered a new road to be built across the Simplon. The work was directed by an engineer named Nicolas Ceard, and it was finished around eighteen hundred and five. Its first purpose was a military one, to move heavy guns between the valley of the Rhone and Italy. But once it was open, carriages could cross the Alps here.

The road climbed from Brig, in the upper valley of the Rhone, to the pass, a little over two thousand metres high. Then it went down through the deep rocky gorge of Gondo, and entered Italy at the village of Iselle. It followed the valley of the river Toce, through Domodossola, until at last the traveller saw the wide water of Lake Maggiore.

From there, the road ran along the western shore of the lake. It passed through Baveno, and Stresa, and Belgirate, and Lesa, and Meina, and Arona, and then went on to Sesto Calende, at the southern end of the lake, and across the plain to Milan. For the people of these quiet lakeside villages, the wide world was suddenly passing by their doors.

Baveno was known for its stone. Since ancient times, men had cut a pink granite from the hills behind the town, and the quarries appear on the town's coat of arms. In the nineteenth century, a Swiss businessman named Nicola Della Casa turned the quarrying into a real industry. According to an old guidebook, the granite of these hills was used for the great church of San Paolo fuori le Mura in Rome, and for the Galleria in Milan.

A little further south lay Stresa, facing the Borromean Islands across the bay. A guidebook later called it cooler and more breezy than most other places on the lake. A young princess, Margherita of Savoy, the future queen of Italy, lived for a time at a villa in Stresa. In eighteen fifty-seven, a local pastry cook made little biscuits for her, to celebrate her First Communion, and they are still called Margheritine.

Many travellers came this way. In June of eighteen seventeen, the French writer Stendhal spent two days on the Borromean Islands, and went to see the great statue of Saint Charles near Arona. Then he took a boat to Belgirate, a quarter of an hour from the islands, where his carriage was waiting. And then, he wrote, he crossed the Simplon like a child.

About fifty years later, in May of eighteen sixty-nine, the writer Ruskin came over the pass the other way, from the north, by carriage. He wrote to his mother from Domodossola. "I left Brieg at six exactly, light clouds breaking away into perfect calm of blue." There was heavy snow at the top, he said, with drifts in many places higher than the carriage. Then, coming down, he saw white crocus all over the fields, and a waterfall that fell in a pillar of spray and became a rainbow altogether. Tomorrow, he wrote, he hoped to get news of them all, at Baveno.

For many years, the Simplon road carried post carriages and private coaches. Later, when the railways came through other passes, it grew quieter for a while. But the villages along its route kept their new life, as places where travellers stopped, and rested, and stayed.

Some years before Napoleon's road was built, two friends from Cambridge walked across the Alps. One of them was William Wordsworth. They had no carriage. Wordsworth later remembered them as two travellers plodding slowly along the road, side by side, each with his little knapsack on his shoulders.

They came down to Lake Como, and walked along its shores. In seventeen ninety-three, Wordsworth published a long poem about the journey, called Descriptive Sketches. Its lines on the lake begin like this. "More pleased, my foot the hidden margin roves, of Como, bosomed deep in chestnut groves."

The poem is full of small pictures. Flat-roofed towns that touch the edge of the water. A little pathway twining round the steep slopes. Cottages under the rocks, each with its household boat beside the door. And in the morning, the bell ringing from the church towers, calling the woodman to early mass, and the sound of oars passing over the misty water.

Wordsworth added a note for his readers. If any of them should ever visit the Lake of Como, he wrote, they should take a stroll along that charming little pathway. But they must choose the evening, because it lay on the western side of the lake. He and his friend had followed it from the foot of the lake to its head, and only once had they needed a ferry. Then the poem moves on, towards Locarno, which he pictured among walnut slopes and citron isles.

In April of eighteen eighteen, another English poet came to the lake. Percy Bysshe Shelley was staying in Milan, and he went to Como for two days, to look for a house for the summer. He sailed up the lake to the Tremezzina. He wrote to a friend that the lake exceeded anything he had ever seen in beauty, except only the arbutus islands of Killarney, and that it looked like a mighty river, winding among the mountains and the forests.

On the sunny shore, he wrote, the olive, orange and lemon trees were so loaded with fruit that there was more fruit than leaves. He hoped to rent the old Villa Pliniana, half in ruins, with its tall cypresses and its great waterfall. But it was not to be, and at the end of the month he set off for Pisa.

The most famous writer of the lakes, though, was an Italian. In eighteen twenty-one, Alessandro Manzoni began a novel, and it was first published in Milan in eighteen twenty-seven. Its title was I promessi sposi, The Betrothed. It has been called the most widely read novel in the Italian language.

The story begins on the branch of Lake Como that turns south towards Lecco, where the lake narrows between the mountains and becomes a river once more. On an autumn evening in sixteen twenty-eight, a timid village priest is walking slowly home along a lane, reading his prayers. And from there, the long tale of two young people, Renzo and Lucia, begins to unfold.

At one point, they must leave their village by night. A boat carries them across the lake in the moonlight, and the water lies smooth and polished, stirred only by the dipping of the oars. Lucia looks back at her home and weeps in silence, and the book gives her farewell. "Farewell, ye mountains, source of waters! farewell to your varied summits, familiar as the faces of friends!"

The little fishing boat of Lake Como, the batell, is also called a lucia. It was usually not more than six metres long, with high sloping sides, a hull of chestnut wood and oars of fir. Nobody seems quite sure how it came by its other name. But it is hard not to think of the girl in the novel, crossing the lake by moonlight.

For centuries, the boats on the lakes had moved by oars and by sails, and they went where the winds allowed. On Lake Maggiore, the tramontana blew down the lake from the north in the morning, and in the afternoon the inverna came back from the south.

Then, in February of eighteen twenty-six, something new slid into the water at Locarno, at the northern end of Lake Maggiore. It was a steamboat, called the Verbano, after the old name of the lake. It was the first steamer to go into service on Lake Maggiore.

A great crowd gathered at the boatyard that day, local people and foreigners too. Before the launch, the archpriest of Locarno went on board to bless the boat. An account written at the time describes the Verbano decked with garlands of laurel and myrtle, and tells how, when she was let go, she rushed very fast into the lake, among the cheers of all the spectators.

On the first of May, eighteen twenty-six, the Verbano began her regular service, from Magadino, at the top of the lake, to Sesto Calende, at the bottom. Every day, she carried passengers and mail along the whole length of the water. This was no simple thing, because the lake was shared by three states. The northern end belonged to the Swiss canton of Ticino, the western shore to the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the eastern shore to Austrian Lombardy. So the new service needed agreements between all three. Even the company that owned the boat carried all three names, Lombardo-Sardo-Ticinese.

Steam came to Lake Como in the same years. The first steamer there was named the Lario, after the old name of that lake, and soon there was a second, the Plinio. One account says the Lario carried a mast for sailing as well, just in case. And another says that the two boats used to meet off the point of Bellagio, where passengers stepped from one boat to the other on movable gangways.

Soon there were rivals. In eighteen thirty-five, Duke Carlo Visconti di Modrone brought another steamer, the Otello, to Lake Como from the river Po. To end the competition, a new steamboat company for the lake was founded in eighteen forty-six. The first boats had wooden hulls, and later came larger boats of iron. By eighteen ninety, the company on Lake Como had fourteen steamboats and a tug.

Not every village had a pier. In many places the steamer simply stopped out on the water, and small rowing boats came out to meet it, to carry passengers and letters to the shore. An English handbook of eighteen seventy-seven noted that at Isola Bella, passengers were carried to and from the steamers free of charge, as at all the other stations on the lake.

By nineteen thirteen, the Baedeker guidebook listed three steamers a day from Como to Colico, at the far northern end of Lake Como, a voyage of four and a half to five hours, and six a day from Como to Bellagio. "Some of the boats are handsome saloon-steamers, with good restaurants on board," it said. And about Lake Maggiore, it added a small warning. "The steamers are often late."

One of those paddle steamers, built in nineteen-oh-four, is still on Lake Maggiore today, under the name Piemonte. Imagine sitting on a deck like hers, on a summer afternoon, with the great wheels turning beside you, watching the villages and the mountains slowly pass by, just as travellers did more than a hundred years ago.

In the spring of eighteen forty-eight, the cities of Lombardy rose against Austrian rule. In Milan, the people fought for five days in March, and those Five Days are still remembered. And in Como, at the foot of the lake, something similar happened.

On the eighteenth of March, the people of Como gathered around their town hall, to ask for a civil guard of their own. Two days later, exiles and volunteers came down from Switzerland to the Villa Olmo, on the shore, and five hundred more arrived by steamboat from the villages around the lake. When Austrian troops marched out of their barracks, the townspeople drove them back with stones and roof tiles.

From the very start, the rebels had held the military bakery. So by the morning of the twenty-second of March, the garrison, shut up in an old convent without food, was ready to give in. The soldiers surrendered, and handed over their regimental flag to the citizens of Como.

But the hopes of eighteen forty-eight did not last. The Italians lost the battle of Custozza, and Lombardy was once again ruled by Austria.

Eleven years later, in eighteen fifty-nine, war came again. Garibaldi now led a corps of volunteers called the Hunters of the Alps, the Cacciatori delle Alpi. Many of the volunteers were exiles from Lombardy, who had slipped across the border into Switzerland along the old smugglers' paths, and then travelled down Lake Maggiore by steamer to Piedmont.

In May, they marched towards Lake Maggiore. Garibaldi sent orders ahead to Arona for food and lodgings, so that any spies would think he meant to stop there. Instead, his men went to Castelletto, a little to the south, where boats were waiting. On the night of the twenty-second to the twenty-third of May, they crossed the river Ticino. The boats were heavy and closely packed, and some drifted downstream. And on the morning of the twenty-third, they took Sesto Calende, and its ferry, on the Lombard side.

That evening, they marched into Varese. It was raining heavily. Yet Garibaldi wrote that not a single citizen, man, woman or child, stayed at home.

On the twenty-sixth of May, an Austrian force under General Urban came along the road from Como and attacked. The volunteers were waiting behind barricades, and the attack was driven back. The Austrians withdrew towards Malnate.

On the twenty-seventh, the volunteers climbed to the pass of San Fermo, in the hills above Como, where the Austrians held a church and an inn. After a hard fight, the position was taken. Among the fallen was a young captain, Carlo De Cristoforis. The village is still called San Fermo della Battaglia, San Fermo of the Battle.

That night, Garibaldi's men came down the winding road into Como. It was very dark, and at first every door and window stayed shut. But when the people heard that the soldiers spoke Italian, Garibaldi wrote, the town lit up in a flash. The windows filled with faces, and all the bells began to ring.

On the night of the thirtieth to the thirty-first of May, a small force tried to take the Austrian fort at Laveno, on Lake Maggiore. In the darkness, one company was led astray by its guides, and the attack failed. At dawn, the volunteers withdrew.

Through all these days, the wounded were cared for, on both sides. "The women of Varese supplied a mother's place to our wounded," Garibaldi remembered, "and, it must be confessed, even our enemies shared their pious care."

On the fourth of June, the French and the Italians won the battle of Magenta, and the Austrians withdrew from Milan and the lakes for good. In July, an armistice was signed at Villafranca. Como and Varese, Luino and Laveno, now belonged to Piedmont, and soon to the new Italy.

After eighteen fifty-nine, the frontier on the lakes no longer ran between Austria and Piedmont, but between Italy and Switzerland. The northern end of Lake Maggiore, with Locarno, belonged to the Swiss canton of Ticino. Most of Lake Lugano was Swiss too, with only a small part of it in Italy. And here and there, the border ran across the water itself.

On the western shore of Lake Maggiore, the last Swiss town was Brissago, with its two green islands lying just offshore. In the days of the Visconti, it had been ruled from Milan. But on Saint George's day, the twenty-fourth of April, fifteen twenty-one, the people of Brissago chose to join the Swiss. Across a little frontier stream, further south, lay the first Italian town, Cannobio.

Travellers on the steamers crossed the frontier without ever setting foot on land. According to the Baedeker guidebook of nineteen thirteen, the Italian customs officers examined the luggage on board, somewhere between Brissago and Cannobio, and the Swiss officers did the same between Brissago and Magadino. On Lake Lugano, too, on the steamer from Porto Ceresio, both examinations took place on board.

On Lake Lugano there was a stranger case still. The village of Campione is Italian, yet it is entirely surrounded by Switzerland and by the lake. The reason is very old. In the year seven hundred and seventy-seven, a landowner named Totone of Campione left his lands to the archbishop of Milan. A few years later they passed to the abbey of Sant'Ambrogio, in Milan, and for centuries the abbey ruled the little village. So when the Swiss took the land all around it, in fifteen twenty-one, Campione stayed apart.

On the eastern shore of Lake Maggiore, Luino was known for its market. In fifteen forty-one, the Emperor Charles the Fifth granted Luino the right to hold a market, taking turns with the nearby village of Maccagno. People came to it from all around, and from the Swiss valleys too. It was held in the old square by the harbour, where a little statue of the Madonna, on a column on the quay, served the fishermen as a landmark. The market is still held every Wednesday.

Wherever there is a border, there is smuggling. Men called spalloni carried goods over the mountain paths, especially around Lake Como, in a basket of woven straw on their backs, called a bricolla. The loads came down at night from the Swiss frontier by some remote pass, and were put into boats at a quiet creek along the shore.

In his book of nineteen-oh-five, the writer Richard Bagot described torpedo boats lying at anchor in a quiet bay on Lake Como, one of them with steam kept up, ready to chase the smugglers. The cargoes, he wrote, were mostly tobacco and cigars, and spirits. Every night, from dusk to dawn, a powerful electric searchlight swept the dark water of the lake, and of the branch towards Lecco. And there were the customs guards themselves. "Light boats, directed by an officer and rowed at a great pace by strong, able-bodied young doganieri, who ply their oars in a standing position, patrol the shores of the lake at all hours of the day and night."

Travellers on the roads were searched as well. In a book of eighteen eighty-one, the writer Samuel Butler described driving from Mendrisio, in Switzerland, to Varese. He had perhaps a couple of ounces of tobacco in his pouch, and he had to pay duty on it. He advised others to leave their cigarettes behind, because, he wrote, "the custom-house official at the frontier takes a strict view of what is due to his employers."

So the border on the water was a quiet one, but it was always watched. By day, the steamers crossed it with their passengers. By night, the long beam of the searchlight moved slowly over the lake.

In the years after eighteen sixty, a new kind of building began to rise along the shores of the lakes. It was the grand hotel.

At Stresa, a family of brothers formed a company, and in the spring of eighteen sixty they bought land on the shore, directly facing Isola Bella. Building began in the winter of eighteen sixty-one. And in March of eighteen sixty-three, the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromees opened its doors. Only five years later, it needed a new wing. By nineteen thirteen, it had two hundred and forty beds, and an Anglican church in its grounds, with services from April to October.

In eighteen seventy-three, two more grand hotels opened on Lake Como. At Bellagio, a company bought a villa built in the eighteen fifties for the Frizzoni family, added long wings facing the lake, and opened it as the Grand Hotel Bellagio, with a Swiss manager. The aristocrats of Germany and Russia liked to stay there, while the English and the Americans preferred its rival in the village, the Hotel Grande Bretagne. Later, the old Villa Serbelloni, on the hill above, became its most luxurious annex.

In the same year, at Cernobbio, the Villa d'Este, where a Princess of Wales had once kept her little court, became a hotel too. An English handbook of eighteen seventy-seven called the hotel beside it, the Regina d'Inghilterra, large and comfortable, with baths and big pleasure grounds, and an English church service in the hotel. Board and lodging cost ten francs a day in summer, it said, and less in winter, and the owner had fitted up the house as a winter retreat. Years later, the writer Edgcumbe Staley called it "one of the most comfortable caravanserais in Europe."

Winter guests came too, looking for the sun. Already in eighteen seventeen, Stendhal had noticed that the Milanese who felt the cold came to spend the winter in the Tremezzina, on the sheltered shore of Lake Como. By nineteen thirteen, Pallanza, on Lake Maggiore, was known as a winter resort, a resting place on the way between the Riviera and the colder lands to the north. And the mild climate of Locarno drew winter residents as well.

The most famous guest of all came in the spring of eighteen seventy-nine. From the twenty-eighth of March to the twenty-third of April, Queen Victoria stayed at Baveno, at the Villa Clara, a red-brick house in the English Gothic style, built a few years before by an English engineer, Charles Henfrey. Her daughter, Princess Beatrice, was with her. On the third of April, the queen painted a small watercolour of the lake, with the mountains rising behind it, called Lago Maggiore, Baveno.

What brought the greatest numbers, though, was the railway. In eighteen eighty-two, the Gotthard railway opened, with its long tunnel under the Alps, and a line came down from Bellinzona to Luino, on Lake Maggiore. Then, on the nineteenth of May, nineteen-oh-six, the King of Italy and the President of Switzerland opened the Simplon tunnel, nearly twenty kilometres long, at that time the longest railway tunnel in the world. The new line ran along the western shore of Lake Maggiore, past Baveno and Stresa and Arona. At Stresa, the number of visitors simply exploded. The grand hotel enlarged its veranda, and in nineteen eleven and nineteen twelve, three more storeys were added on top.

The guidebooks of those years are full of small details. Most of the large hotels closed from November or December until the end of February. And at Stresa, a one-horse cab to the station cost sixty centesimi, or ninety at night.

An author named McCrackan summed it all up in nineteen-oh-seven. "The grand hotels, equally with the unpretentious pensions and wayside inns, have opened their hospitable doors."

Between Lake Maggiore and Lake Como, at the foot of its holy mountain, lies the town of Varese. In the eighteenth century, it caught the eye of a duke.

Francesco the Third d'Este was the Duke of Modena, and he also served as governor of Austrian Lombardy. He first came to Varese in September of seventeen fifty-five, as the guest of a local marquis, and perhaps it was then that he decided to build a summer palace there. In seventeen sixty-five, the Empress Maria Theresa gave him Varese as his own fief, and he became the Lord of Varese.

The duke bought an old house in the town, and the Milan engineer Giuseppe Antonio Bianchi rebuilt it with two wide wings. Its front is painted pink, with white pilasters, and on top there is a sundial, crowned by the ducal eagle. Behind it, Bianchi laid out a great park, modelled on the gardens of the imperial palace of Schoenbrunn, in Vienna. And it was there that the duke died, in the winter of seventeen eighty.

Later, the gardens were reshaped in the romantic fashion, with paths winding among tall conifers. In eighteen eighty-two, the town bought the whole property, and the next year it opened the gardens to the public. From the top of the wooded hill, there was a fine view over the Lake of Varese to the western Alps and Monte Rosa. Laura Ragg wrote of an evening there. "Steep ilex-shaded paths lead to the summit of a boundary hill, where roughened marble statues assume in the twilight a ghostly air, and the tall trunks of pines are reddened by the sunset glow."

Where the duke led, others followed. From the eighteenth century until the First World War, noble families, and later industrialists, most of them from Milan, built villas all around Varese. At least a hundred large villas with parks went up, and there were so many gardens that Varese came to be called the garden city. When Stendhal came in June of eighteen seventeen, he wrote that it was a small town where every house had turned into a palace in the last ten years. There he went to a concert given by the singer Madame Grassini for her fellow townspeople, and the prettiest women of Milan were there.

These were summer houses. Laura Ragg noticed that most of the villas were not lived in all the year round, but were simply the hot-weather homes of their Milanese owners. The Baedeker guide of nineteen thirteen agreed. "The environs are charming, and the summer-heat is endurable." There were horse races in September, and coffee houses under the arcades of the main street.

Above the town rises the long ridge of Campo dei Fiori. In nineteen-oh-seven, a group of businessmen engaged the Milan architect Giuseppe Sommaruga, one of the masters of the Liberty style, the Italian form of Art Nouveau. He designed the stations of a funicular railway, a smaller hotel, and a great hotel with two hundred rooms, the Grand Hotel Campo dei Fiori, built between nineteen ten and nineteen twelve. The funicular took twenty-five minutes to climb from Vellone to the top. And from the summit nearby, on a clear morning, you could see the little lakes of Comabbio, Monate and Biandronno, the Lake of Varese, two arms of Lake Maggiore, part of Lake Como, and far away to the west, Monte Rosa.

Below the town lies the Lake of Varese itself, shallow and quiet, shaped a little like a shoe. In that same June of eighteen seventeen, Stendhal went out fishing on it for perch. Near its shore lies the small island where the pile dwellers once lived. In eighteen seventy-eight, its owner, Andrea Ponti, renamed it the Isolino Virginia, after his wife.

And now, the evening comes down over the lakes.

On Lake Como, the shadow of the mountains creeps slowly up the slopes on the far shore, turning them from green to deepest purple. For a little while after the sun has gone, the high crags of the Grigna still glow rose-red against the darkening sky. Then the colour fades, and the mountains turn black.

At Bellagio, the lights come on. McCrackan watched them, more than a hundred years ago. "As the evening wears on, lights appear one by one on the quay of Bellagio, until there is a line of fire along the base of the dark peninsula." The hotel windows shine, the villas light their long corridors, and the little town is mirrored in the lake. It grows so still that the music of a small band drifts across the water to Cadenabbia. And along the shore, the fishermen put their boats to rights for the night, and carry their nets indoors.

Out on the dark water, the nets are marked by floats, and the fishermen tie cow-bells to them. At night, their soft sound carries over the lake. From the church towers on the hillsides, the bells ring out, and the water softens their sound as it travels from one shore to the other.

In the gardens of the Villa Carlotta, on a still night with a moon, the nightingales sing, and the nightingales across the lake answer them. Fireflies drift between the trees. And somewhere a sail is coming home. Wordsworth saw it, long ago. "Slow glides the sail along the illumined shore, and steals into the shade the lazy oar."

On Lake Maggiore, the last steamer of the day comes in, a little late, as the old guidebook warned, and its paddle wheels go round more slowly, and then stop. The islands lie dark in the bay. Tomorrow morning, the tramontana will blow down the lake from the north, as it always has. And in the afternoon, the inverna will come back from the south.

We have travelled a long way tonight. From the glaciers and the pile dwellers, to Roman Como and the villas of Pliny. Past the castles and the hermits, the saints and the island gardens. Through the silk and the villas, the poets and the steamboats, the volunteers and the smugglers in the night. And at last, to the grand hotels, and the gardens of Varese.

The people of all those years have gone. But the water is still here, and the mountains, and the little lights along the shore.

So let the lakes carry you now. There is nothing more you need to do tonight.

Thank you for spending this evening by the lakes with me. Sleep well. And goodnight, from Lake Como, Lake Maggiore and Varese.