Bellagio in a day, on foot

Six stops on foot round the promontory, and the boat only to arrive and leave.

1. Transfer: Boat15 min· From Varenna or Menaggio; from Como the fast boat takes about fifty minutes in season

   Morning

   

   Up the village's stepped lanes to San Giacomo

   From the piers the village climbs in flights of steps. At the top stands San Giacomo, built between the eleventh and twelfth centuries by the Comacine masters, with the medieval columns of the nave, the pulpit carved with the symbols of the Evangelists and the apse mosaics of 1914; a little below, beside the town hall, San Giorgio, from the late eleventh century, has its bell tower astride the porch that once closed the way into the medieval village's first ring of defences.

2. Transfer: On foot10 min

   Morning

   

   Punta Spartivento, where the lake divides

   Ten level minutes north and the promontory ends in a point that looks at once down the Como branch, the Lecco branch and the upper lake towards the Alps.

3. Transfer: On foot20 min

   Lunch

   

   Lunch at Pescallo, on the far side of the promontory

   Cross the promontory on foot and drop down to Pescallo, Bellagio's fishermen's harbour on the Lecco branch, with the boats pulled up on shore. From the centre it is twenty minutes.

4. Transfer: On foot15 min

   Afternoon

   

   The gardens of Villa Melzi

   Back to the shore of the Como branch, and south along it to Villa Melzi. Francesco Melzi d'Eril, vice-president of Napoleon's Italian Republic, had it built between 1808 and 1810 with a park that broke with the Italian garden: no symmetry, open lawns, single trees and the lake as backdrop.

5. Transfer: On foot15 min

   Afternoon

   

   Loppia and San Giovanni

   Beyond Villa Melzi the road towards Como passes Loppia, where the eleventh-century Romanesque bell tower of Santa Maria shows among the cypresses of a private park, and reaches San Giovanni. The church has the Baroque forms of an eighteenth-century rebuilding and, in the right aisle, Gaudenzio Ferrari's altarpiece of the risen Christ among saints and donors.

6. Transfer: On foot30 min

   Evening

   The lakefront and the last boat

   From San Giovanni it is half an hour's walk back to the village, or the boat from the hamlet's stop if the timetable allows. On Bellagio's lakefront, under the arcades, you wait for the last run to Varenna or Menaggio, looking across at the Tremezzina shore.