Explore the lake

First Basin76

• TownsComoThe city of silk and rationalist architecture, with the lake reaching right into the centre.
• TownsCernobbioA square on the water ten minutes from Como, and the grand hotel behind the plane trees.
• TownsBrunateThe village above Como, seven minutes by funicular and five hundred metres higher.
• TownsTornoTwo small harbours, the church of San Giovanni with its Romanesque bell tower, and Villa Pliniana just outside the village.
• TownsArgegnoA medieval bridge, a red cable car, and the valley that leads to Switzerland.
• TownsMoltrasioThe village of Moltrasio stone, just past Cernobbio: houses stepped above the mill stream, the Scala Santa running down to the lake and the villas where Bellini lived.
• TownsLaglioFive hamlets of Moltrasio stone on the western shore, where the lake is at its narrowest and deepest: the waterfront with its sculptures, San Giorgio and the boatwrights' yard.
• TownsBlevioThe first village on the eastern shore after Como: seven hamlets on the slope linked by the Strada Regia, and the villas where Giuditta Pasta and Maria Taglioni lived.
• TownsCarate UrioTwo villages joined in 1927 between Moltrasio and Laglio: Carate below Santa Marta and the chapels of its Way of the Cross, Urio with its Romanesque bell tower and the boat pier.
• TownsBriennoTall, narrow houses down to the water below Monte Comana, between Laglio and Argegno: lanes and steps between the houses, the parish church sheer above the lake and, at the far end of the village, the church of the Immacolata on its spur of rock.
• TownsFaggeto LarioA shore on the lake and three villages halfway up the slope, Molina, Lemna and Palanzo, linked by the Strada Regia: churches from Romanesque to the seventeenth century, the gorge, and above it all Monte Palanzone.
• TownsPognana LarioStone houses between the shore and the slopes of Monte Preaola, once a fortified village: the parish church of the Trinity, at Rovasco a church grown from a Lombard oratory, and at Canzaga San Rocco, the old frescoed parish church, above the lake.
• AttractionsSpina Verde Regional Park, ComoThe wooded hill west of Como, a regional park since 1993: thirteen trails of the park authority among Castel Baradello, the remains of proto-historic Como at Pianvalle, the Sant'Eutichio cross and the trenches of the Great War.
• Villas & gardensVilla OlmoThe Odescalchi family's neoclassical villa on the lake at Como, now owned by the city, with a formal Italian garden towards the lake and an English park behind.
• Villas & gardensVilla del Grumello parkThe four-hectare romantic park of a sixteenth-century lakeside villa in Como, at the centre of the Chilometro della Conoscenza; Ugo Foscolo stayed here as a guest of the Giovio family.
• Villas & gardensVilla ErbaLuchino Visconti's childhood villa, now an exhibition centre.
• Villas & gardensVilla BernasconiA silk industrialist's Art Nouveau villa in Cernobbio, decorated with silkworms, butterflies and mulberry leaves: today a municipal museum.
• AttractionsBaradello CastleThe medieval tower on the Baradello hill south of Como: what remains of the castle of Barbarossa and the Visconti, with a terrace over the city and the lake.
• Villas & gardensVilla d'Este, CernobbioCardinal Tolomeo Gallio's sixteenth-century villa at Cernobbio, renamed in 1815 by Caroline of Brunswick and a hotel since 1873, with the Hercules avenue and a plane tree over five hundred years old.
• AttractionsPalazzo Lambertenghi, ComoAn early seventeenth-century palazzo in Como's walled town, with a stone portal, an inner garden and, on the ground floor, the hall frescoed in the seventeenth century; it is private and opens only for events.
• AttractionsFrank's Pyramid, LaglioA granite pyramid some twenty metres high above Laglio's cemetery: the tomb of the physician Joseph Frank, a pupil of Volta, raised in 1851, with his marble portrait and three Egyptian doors.
• AttractionsPini Tomb, LaglioThe tomb Franco Albini designed in 1945 for two children of the Pini family, in Laglio's cemetery: two tall parallel walls with no roof and, between them, two copper angels hanging in the void.
• Villas & gardensVilla Sucota, ComoThe villa on the road to Cernobbio where the Fondazione Antonio Ratti keeps more than three thousand textile fragments and a library on silk, at the end of the Chilometro della Conoscenza.
• AttractionsGaribaldi Monument, ComoVincenzo Vela's bronze Garibaldi on Piazza Vittoria in Como, unveiled in 1889 on the spot where the Austrians surrendered in 1848.
• Villas & gardensVilla Pasta and Villa Roccabruna, BlevioThe site of the villa of the soprano Giuditta Pasta, Bellini's first Sonnambula, on the Blevio shore: from the lake you can still see the park and one of the guest houses.
• Villas & gardensVilla Taglioni, BlevioThe villa on the shore at Blevio where the ballerina Maria Taglioni retired, and where in 1769 Emperor Joseph II took shelter when a storm caught him on the lake.
• Villas & gardensVilla Troubetzkoy, BlevioThe steep-roofed villa-chalet built around 1850 on the Blevio shore by the Russian prince Troubetzkoy, nicknamed “turbascogli”, the rock-rattler, for the rock excavations.
• AttractionsPietra Nairola, BlevioA slab of granite more than seven metres long, carried by the glaciers from the Val Masino, jutting from the slope above Mezzovico at 750 metres.
• AttractionsPalazzo Terragni (former Casa del Fascio)Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio, fifty metres from the cathedral apse.
• AttractionsMonument to the FallenThe thirty-metre tower on Como's lakefront, dedicated to the dead of the Great War and based on a drawing by the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia.
• AttractionsLife ElectricDaniel Libeskind's steel sculpture dedicated to Volta, at the tip of the breakwater in the middle of Como's first basin.
• AttractionsTeatro SocialeAn 1813 Italian-style theatre, its horseshoe auditorium beside the cathedral.
• AttractionsPorta TorreComo's medieval gate, forty metres high: since 1192 the way into the walled town from Milan.

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• ViewpointsVolta LighthouseThe lighthouse built in 1927 at San Maurizio, above Brunate, for the centenary of Alessandro Volta's death.
• AttractionsBrunate's Liberty villasThe Liberty and eclectic villas built on the hill of Brunate between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, from Villa Pirotta Bonacossa below the funicular to the town hall decorated in sgraffito.
• AttractionsSeaplane hangar — Aero Club ComoThe Aero Club Como's hangar on the lakefront, recognised by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest seaplane club, with aircraft landing and taking off in front of the town.
• AttractionsComo's walls and the Torre GattoniThe walls that still enclose Como's old town, Roman in origin and raised again under Barbarossa, with the tower where Volta made his first experiments.
• AttractionsMonument to the European ResistanceGianni Colombo's monument in Como's lakeside gardens, with stones from the Nazi camps and from Hiroshima and the words of people condemned to death in the Second World War.
• AttractionsNovocomumThe apartment house the young Giuseppe Terragni finished in 1929, which Como calls the Transatlantico, the ocean liner, for its shape.
• AttractionsTomb of Alessandro VoltaThe small neoclassical temple on the hill of Camnago Volta, raised by Alessandro Volta's widow and sons, with the relief of the battery presented to Napoleon.