The first ferry of the morning is nearly empty, and that is the secret nobody tells you. I have it almost to myself, a scarf against the cool off the water, a paper cup of coffee going lukewarm in my hands, and ahead of me the Borromean Gulf is doing the thing it does at that hour, holding the mist a little longer than the sky, so the islands seem to float free of their own reflections. Isola Bella comes up out of the haze like a stone ship under full sail, and I think, as I always think here, that someone once looked at a bare rock in a lake and decided it should become this. That is Lake Maggiore in a sentence. It is a lake that people could not leave alone, and I love it the more for that.
I came for a few days and, as usual, the lake rearranged my plans within one. You arrive with a list, and by the second morning the ferries have quietly taken it over. There is a timetable pinned by the jetty and a rhythm underneath it that has nothing to do with the printed times: the light, the appetite, the reluctance to leave a garden while a peacock is still deciding whether to cross the path. I gave the first whole day to the islands, because you should, and I did them slowly. Isola Bella first, up through the ten terraces to the top, where the whole gulf lies at your feet and the white peacocks patrol as though they built the place themselves. Then across to the fishermen’s island for lunch, which is the meal I would come back for on its own: a plate of perch at the water’s edge, a cold glass of something local, the palace of Isola Bella shimmering across the channel, and absolutely nowhere I needed to be.
By the afternoon I was on Isola Madre, and this is the one I never quite manage to describe to people who have not been. It is only a garden and a faded villa, and yet. The great Kashmir cypress stands at the centre of it like something out of an older, kinder world, and the peacocks here are quieter, and the whole island seems half asleep in the best possible way. I sat on a bench for longer than I meant to. There was a moment, the light going soft and green through the leaves, a peacock somewhere calling that strange rusty call, when I felt the particular happiness this lake specialises in, which is not excitement exactly but a kind of deep, unhurried contentment, the feeling of time widening out around you.
The second day I went to Villa Taranto, because a Scottish captain spent the back half of his life planting it and the least I can do is walk through it. In spring it is almost too much, the tulips banked in ribbons of colour, the azaleas, the terraced water gardens catching the sky, and I understood again why people have always come to Maggiore for the flowers before anything else. Then a boat across the water to Santa Caterina, the monastery that clings to its cliff as if it grew there, and I did what I always tell everyone to do, which is arrive from the lake so you get that first impossible view of it pinned to the rock. I climbed up, sat in the cool of the little chapels, and came back down to the boat feeling scrubbed clean.
What I love most about this lake, though, is not any single sight. It is the evenings. Maggiore grew up in the grand age of European travel, and something of that lingers in the way the towns hold themselves at dusk. On the Stresa lungolago the belle-époque hotels light up along the water, the last ferries slide home, and the whole promenade fills with people doing nothing in particular with tremendous style. I take a table, I order the lake fish, I let the evening go long. There is no rush here and there never was. That is the point of the place. Como will sell you glamour and Garda will sell you sport, but Maggiore sells you the lost art of the slow afternoon, and it turns out that is the thing I most wanted to buy.
On my last morning I did not go anywhere at all. I sat on the front with a coffee and a pastry and watched the boats fill up with people setting off to do the very things I had done, and I felt no need to move. The mist lifted off the water. The islands came clear. Somewhere across the gulf a garden opened its gates. I have been coming to lakes all my life, and I have learned that the good ones do not ask you to see everything. They ask you to sit still long enough to be changed a little, and then they let you go. Maggiore is one of the good ones. I will be back before the tulips are, I expect, to sit on that bench on Isola Madre and let the light do its slow green work all over again.
V.
Part of my complete guide to Lake Maggiore.
