Milan and Lake Como

Having crammed five weeks of stuff (including winter clothes and Doug's camera equipment for our photo workshop in the Dolomites) into two suitcases and two backpacks...

...we arrived in Milan on October 2nd after an overnight flight and a transfer in Munich. Paolo Olivero, who lived with us as an au pair in 1994, was at the airport to greet us and took us to her home in the city for a two-day stay. It was great to see her, and meet her partner Alessandro and their six-year-old son Enea.

On the afternoon of our arrival day, we walked down to an area of shops and restaurants for an apperativo (sort of like Happy Hour), where you buy drinks and they keep bringing free food to the table. Jeannette tried a "spritz," one of the popular drinks.

Paola took off from work on Monday (she's the administrator at an international school two minutes walk from their house, where Enea is in first grade), and we traveled to the city center. We visited Milan's Duomo (cathedral)...

...and the nearby Duomo Museum which features windows and sculptures from the building that have been replaced.

There was a full-size copy of the Madonnina statue that tops the Duomo, made from copper and then gilded, and also the old armature that held the statue together.

We then walked to the Castello Sforzesco, the 15th Cenury home of the Duke of Milan.

On Tuesday we picked up our first rental car, a Fiat 500 hybrid. It's small (that's a useful thing in Italy given the width of the old roads in medieval towns - sometimes just a lane-and-a-half) and the manual transmission saves on rental rates and gas.

We headed 90 minutes north for a six-day stay on Lago di Como (Lake Como) where we'd booked a hotel in the town of Argegno (pronounced Ar-GEN-yo). Lake Como is shaped like a wishbone, and we were on the left leg of the lake.

Argegno is a small town with a central piazza around which restaurants cluster. There were enough restaurants that we could try a different one just about every evening!

At night, the local church is lit up and we're sure people can see it up and down the lake.

We realized, on arrival at the Hotel Villa Belvedere, that Doug had lucked into picking amazing accommodations on hotel.com with a room right on the water and our own private terrace overlooking the lake. Also, breakfast with a fantastic view every morning!

Our next door neighbor was a lakeside villa with its own swimming pool. And before you ask, this was not George Clooney's villa.

Getting around the area is easiest using the extensive network of ferries that operate on Lake Como. There are passenger ferries, car ferries, and even fast ferries on hydrofoils. There was a ferry terminal about a one minute walk from our hotel.

Among the advantages of traveling by ferry is that you get to see beautiful hotels and villas that line the shore.

Based on recommendations from friends, we visited the beautiful town of Varenna on Wednesday.

Varenna has a walking path along the river, cobblestone streets, and narrow alleys that wind to the upper part of the town, with stairs that have been ground down by centuries of feet.

We also visited the extensive gardens of both a hotel and a historic villa in town.

Thursday we drove about an hour west of Lake Como to Lake Maggiore...

...and took a short ferry ride to Isola Bella, which Paola had recommended to us. Most of the island is taken up by the palazzo of the Borromeo family and its extensive gardens, both built in the 1600s.

The house was over-the-top excess and boasted, with 20-foot-high crests, about various family over-achievers, including a knight, two cardinals, a king, a pope, and a saint!

The palazzo included a "grotto" area in the lower portions of the house.

The formal gardens were truly beautiful.

On Friday we decided to visit the famous town of Bellagio which sits at the point where Lake Como divides into two legs. The ferries in the middle section of the lake cross much more frequently, so we took the bus from Argegno to the town of Cadenabbia...

...then grabbed tickets for the traghetto, the vehicle ferry.

We had beautiful views of both Cadenabbia and Bellagio during our 10 minute crossing.

We arrived early before many tourists were in town, and walked along the promenade.

Bellagio is definitely a tourist town with tons of exclusive shops along both the lake and up narrow, steep medieval alleyways (which don't seem to daunt drivers). There's also an old church in the upper part of the town.

We'd signed up for a cooking course, and a van picked us up and drove us uphill to the Hotel Il Perlo Panorama, which caters to cyclists among other guests. It had an amazing view of the Bellagio peninsula below.

Justin and Taylor - a young couple who'd gotten engaged just three days before - joined us for the experience. Chef Allesandro Ridolfi took us through the paces of making two types of pasta, two sauces (tomatoes and herbs, zucchini and salmon), and tiramisu for dessert. He also shamelessly praised the virtues of the local olive oil which ensured we made high-quality pasta.

Then we got to sit in the sun and eat everything we'd prepared. The food was delicious! And so was the view!

While in Bellagio, we also took a tour of the gardens of Villa Serbelloni, a 60 acre estate that occupies the "hill" behind the town.

The Villa has belonged to the Rockefeller Foundation since 1959, which provides has provided residence opportunities for people to work on projects of their choice. These have included Nobel Prize recipients, artisans, authors, scientists, political leaders, RBG, the author of "The British Patient," and the economist who developed the concept of microfinance.

Tours are conducted by Bellagio's tourist office with proceeds going to local charities. We had a very educational walk through the grounds, hearing about the area's history, but to ensure privacy for the current residents we could not visit the Villa itself.

We walked up sloping paths, and soon were high above Bellagio.

As we continued up, we got to a viewpoint where we could see both branches of the lower lake.

Finally, at the top, we found the ruins of an old fortress.

From the flat area on top we could see the whole upper part of Lake Como, as well as Varenna on the eastern shore.

As we hiked down the other side of the hill, we could see the natural defenses that enhanced the fortress' protection.

We said goodbye to our guide, walked back down to the lakeside...

...and bathed in the beauty of the Golden Hour as we waited for our ferry ride back to Cadenabbia.

The evening bus ride back down to Argegno was much more crowded than our morning ride up!

Just above Argegno sits the mountain village of Pigra. On Saturday we rode up to it on a funivia (cable car). The lower station was just a 5 minute walk from our hotel.

On arrival, we hiked to the Belvedere Lookout, where you can get great views of the lake and the villages on the steep slopes connected by an amazing array of narrow roads.

With binoculars, we could make out Bellagio at the end of its peninsula, and Varenna beyond Bellagio.

During our hike, we passed what could only be described as a fairy tree. It even included a hobbit hole.

We decided to hike up through Pigra to the "Punkt Viewpoint" at the top of the village. Thank goodness for Google Maps, which led us through many narrow alleys that wound uphill.

For a reason unclear to us, the whole village was decorated with paintings of cats.

After some steep uphill hiking, we reached the Punkt Viewpoint, ate a snack, and looked down on the town below.

We hiked back down to the funivia station and rode down to Argegno, where we took a well-earned nap before a delicious dinner in town!

It was raining steadily on Sunday, our last full day on Lake Como, but we forged ahead with plans to visit the Villa del Balbianello, the most beautiful villa on the lake. It sits at the end of a peninsula jutting out into the lake and has appeared in a number of movies including Casino Royale (where James Bond is recovering in a sanitarium toward the end of the movie) and Attack of the Clones (where Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala are married).

Driving our Fiat through the narrow streets of towns on the way reminded us how glad we were to have a small car! Motorhomes, buses, and 18-wheelers passed us going the other way. It was an exciting ride that featured several stops to allow alternating traffic lanes to squeeze through narrow twists and turns in some of the towns. The scars and scrapes on ancient walls bore witness to drivers whose spatial awareness was not up to snuff for these roads.

The Villa del Balbianello sits at the end of the peninsula that makes up the estate. After parking the car in the town of Lenno, and we trekked for a kilometer to reach the entrance to the villa.

The first structure on the peninsula was a monastery built almost 1,000 years ago. The current villa and gardens were built by a cardinal in the 1700s and have been owned by FAI, the National Trust of Italy, since 1988. It was donated by its last owner, Guido Monzino, a department store heir and adventurer famous in Italy for expeditions to the North Pole and Everest. Monzino completely renovated the villa in the 1970s, and it holds his extensive collections of antiques as well as mementoes of his adventures.

Monzino's tomb is on the grounds of the villa in a grotto topped with a slate roof.

We had originally booked just a tour of the gardens because villa tours are typically booked up weeks in advance. However, rain cancellations allowed us to score an inside tour! While we waited for our villa tour we walked in the gardens and watched a wedding in progress. We were told that weddings are held almost daily at the villa.

The house was impressive...

...and the gardens were stunningly beautiful, even in the rain!

After our tour and hike back to the car, we did our laundry at a local laundromat. Not only was it spotless, but since this is Italy there was a complimentary espresso machine!

On the drive back to Argegno, we stopped to take a photos of a ancient church bell tower that Doug was particularly taken with and a small (and exclusive) offshore island.

Leaving Argegno on Monday, October 11, we drove to Venice's Marco Polo Airport to drop off our rental car and stay overnight before a morning pickup for our eight-day photography workshop in the Dolomites.

More about workshop week in our next blog entry.