Varenna in a day, on foot

Six stops on foot, a single real climb, and no boat.

1. Transfer: Train1 h 05· Milano Centrale → Varenna-Esino-Perledo, then downhill into the village

   Morning

   

   Piazza San Giorgio and its two churches

   From the station you walk down into the village. On the square, San Giorgio, consecrated in 1313, stands between Romanesque and Gothic: three naves on columns of Varenna's black stone and, beside the portal, a great Saint Christopher painted in the fourteenth century. A few steps away is San Giovanni Battista, the village's mother church, from the eleventh century, with sixteenth-century frescoes in the apse.

2. Transfer: On foot25 min

   Morning

   

   Up to the Castello di Vezio

   Twenty-five minutes up a steep mule track bring you to the early medieval fortification, at about 350 metres, above the point where the lake forks. You cross the drawbridge, climb to the top of the tower and go down into the Cadorna Line tunnels; in summer the castle has its ghosts, white plaster figures modelled on volunteer visitors.

3. Transfer: On foot15 min

   Lunch

   Lunch in the village

   Back down to the square. In Via IV Novembre, through the infopoint, you enter the small Ornithological Museum born of schoolmaster Luigi Scanagatta's collection, over eight hundred specimens of the area's birds and mammals: it opens during the tourist office's hours.

4. Transfer: On foot10 min

   Afternoon

   

   Villa Monastero and Villa Cipressi

   South along the shore you reach Villa Monastero, founded as a convent in the twelfth century and turned between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the eclectic house you visit today; in 1954 Enrico Fermi gave his last course here. Next door, the garden of Villa Cipressi, now a hotel, steps down in terraces above the lake.

5. Transfer: On foot15 min

   Afternoon

   

   On to the Fiumelatte

   Another quarter of an hour along the shore brings you to the river that bursts from the rock above the hamlet and falls white with foam, hence its name, to reach the lake after about two hundred and fifty metres. It starts in spring and dries up in autumn, by a karst mechanism not yet fully explained; Leonardo noted it in the Codex Atlanticus.

6. Transfer: On foot20 min

   Evening

   

   The walkway over the water

   Walk back towards the village along the shore to the walkway that links the pier to the centre, fixed to the rock face above the water. The train to Milan leaves from the station, about ten minutes higher up.