Lake Maggiore by Sean Thomas

People complain about the Italian lakes: that they are over-run with tourists. This completely misses the point of the Italian lakes: they are meant to be over-run with tourists. They wouldn’t be half as much fun without the busloads. Because the ludicrously beautiful landscapes of Lakes Maggiore, Como, and Garda, are landscape as theatre: the whole region, with its snow-capped Alpine backdrop, its lush sub-tropical shorelines, its necklacing of Renaissance villas and Napoleonic fortresses, is cinematic, photogenic, theatrical. And who wants to be the only person in the audience?

I was in Lake Maggiore to get over a broken heart. My mother recommended it as the best place to soothe a troubled soul: she was right. Something about the gentle plash of lacustrine water, the serenity of the distant mountains, the gorgeously runny tranche of Talleggio cheese I bought at the supermarket in Verbania, seemed designed to make the viewer, this viewer, take a different perspective on civilisation and its discontents. After all, a world where you can sit on a sun-drenched lakeside beach and sup granita as you gaze at the pier once used by Catullus, the great Roman love-poet, can’t exactly be all bad.

The ameliorative properties of Maggiore have been employed to soothe more than a broken heart. The splendidly situated lake isle, Isola Bella, with its kitsch Borromini palace and famously Frenchified formal garden, was once used by Mussolini as the venue for a 30s peace conference. The idea must have been that Neville Chamberlain and the French premier, and Il Duce himself, would find the tranquil environs so conducive they would come up with some marvellous way of placating Hitler. The earnestly hopeful Stresa communique that was the result of their talks can still be seen in the room where it was signed: all the more poignant when one knows what came after.

From Isola Bella it’s a short lake-bus-hop to the other ‘Borromini’ islands of Maggiore: Pescatori, and Isola Madre. Both are equally charming; both equally crowded with Germans, and Americans, and middle-aged British women getting over their divorces. I saw my mother on at least three occasions.

The central resort of Maggiore is Stresa town. All the boats stop here; as do the trains and buses. It’s also a good place to hire a car, if you want to take in the hinterlands. But it’s not the place to stay: for that the best place is Arona, a smaller, cheaper, equally attractive town a few miles south. One advantage of Arona is that it’s on the main Milan railway line: which means you can be in Milan airport in about an hour and a half.

But then again, why on earth would you want to do that? If you stay one more day you could visit the greenly gorgeous gardens of the Villa Taranto, or the gloomy beauty of the Angera fortress. Or indeed Cernobbio, or Locarno, or the mountains beyond. I came for a weekend, ended up staying a week. And at the end of it I’d quite forgotten I’d ever had a girlfriend-who-dumped-me in the first place.