The 6 best cheese towns within 90 minutes of Milan

1. Vogogna

Best for a walk through the old town. It is on the list of Italy's most beautiful villages.

1 h 28 min from Milan · homes €900 to €1,300 a m² in the center · 1,679 people

Why visit Vogogna

Vogogna sits at 226 meters on the floor of Val d'Ossola, at the narrow point of the valley where the Toce bends south toward Lago Maggiore. The castle went up on the spur above the village as part of a broader reinforcement of the Duchy of Milan against Swiss incursions over the Sempione, built alongside an older fortified rock that had already held the same defensive line.

Together they anchored the town's promotion to administrative seat for the lower half of the valley, in balance with Domodossola further up, which held the upper half. Spanish rule from the sixteenth century onward reduced the castle's strategic weight, and in 1798 it passed into municipal hands, used at one stage as a prison, before the long restoration that closed in 2005.

The borgo carries Borghi più belli d'Italia and the Bandiera Arancione, and Val Grande National Park borders the commune on the west. What the town amounts to is a lower valley's seat of government grown around a fortress that outlived its military purpose by centuries, wedged between wilderness on one side and the river's bend on the other.

What to see in Vogogna

• Castello Visconteo. Restored from 1990 to 2005, the castle is now open to visitors with a multimedia conference room installed inside its walls.
• Rocca di Vogogna. Earlier fortified rock above the Visconti castle, the original medieval defensive post over the narrow point of the Toce valley.
• Centro storico. Medieval core below the castle with stone houses, narrow streets and the Palazzo Pretorio, the historic administrative seat of Ossola Inferiore.

How to get to Vogogna

It has its own railway station. Milan is about 1 h 28 min away by road. The full route from Milan.

Everything we know about Vogogna

2. Mergozzo

Best for a slow weekend. The Touring Club gives it its orange flag for small inland towns.

1 h 20 min from Milan · homes €1,300 to €1,900 a m² in the center · 2,139 people

Why visit Mergozzo

The lake is 74 meters deep and sits at 204 meters, separated in antiquity from its larger neighbor when sediment from the Toce river closed the channel between them. The village faces the water from the western shore, folded behind a lakefront piazza where the parish church holds a painting from 1623 already showing the elm that gives the square its character.

Behind the piazza, narrow stone-paved lanes called strece climb toward terraced gardens, the houses built of the same granite quarried on neighboring Montorfano hill. Stone has long been the local economy, tying Mergozzo to the wider region: the same quarries that cut the lanes' paving supplied material used in Rome and across northern Italy.

Trailheads above the village lead into Val Grande, so the same slopes that shelter the piazza from behind also open, higher up, onto one of the wildest valley systems in the Alps. What holds the place together is this stacking of scales: a small, closed-off lake at the bottom, a worked hillside of stone above it, and beyond that, wilderness.

La Fugascina Ristorante (MICHELIN) and La Quartina (MICHELIN) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Mergozzo

• L'Olmo di Mergozzo. Hollow-trunked field elm on the lakefront piazza, still standing and shading the square it has watched over for generations.
• Lago di Mergozzo. 2.5 km lake separated from Lago Maggiore by Toce sediment, motorboat-free and ranked among Europe's cleanest waters.
• Centro storico. Stone-paved lanes (strece) and granite houses climbing the slope behind the lakefront piazza.

How to get to Mergozzo

It has its own railway station. Milan is about 1 h 20 min away by road. The full route from Milan.

Everything we know about Mergozzo

3. Porto Ceresio

Best for a World Heritage site. UNESCO lists a site in the comune.

1 h 6 min from Milan · homes €1,200 to €1,550 a m² in the center · 2,820 people

Why visit Porto Ceresio

Porto Ceresio sits on the south shore, 11 kilometers northeast of Varese and directly on the Swiss frontier. The lake is also called Ceresio, a name of uncertain origin that some trace to the Latin word for cherry.

Boats run from the pier across to Lugano and Morcote in Canton Ticino, and the railway from Varese, which reached the lake in 1894, ran on electric power from 1902, among the first lines in Italy to do so. The mountain behind the town covers a tropical sea floor from 240 million years ago, and the 2010 UNESCO extension tied Porto Ceresio to Besano and Viggiù and to the original Swiss site across the water.

The lakefront promenade, with its colored houses, sits between that green mountain slope and the lake itself, looking straight across to the Swiss shore. The town reads as a hinge point: a rail line built to reach the water, a pier built to cross it, and a mountain behind that turns the crossing into a border between two countries and two geological eras.

What to see in Porto Ceresio

• Lungolago di Porto Ceresio. Lakefront promenade with the ferry pier and the colored houses that face Lake Lugano and the Swiss shore opposite.
• Chiesa di Sant'Ambrogio. Parish church in the centro storico, the religious center of the village since the medieval era.
• Monte San Giorgio. Rises to 1,097 meters across the water in Canton Ticino, the world's richest Middle Triassic marine fossil site, its green slopes forming the backdrop to the lake.

How to get to Porto Ceresio

It has its own railway station. Milan is about 1 h 6 min away by road. The full route from Milan.

Everything we know about Porto Ceresio

4. Ornavasso

Best for walks in a national park. Part of the comune lies in a national park.

1 h 30 min from Milan · homes €1,000 to €1,400 a m² in the center · 3,310 people

Why visit Ornavasso

Ornavasso sits on the Toce river just upstream from Gravellona, where the valley narrows toward the southern threshold of the Val Grande. The quarries worked the right bank of the Ossola valley opposite Candoglia, and their stone traveled well beyond the commune: besides the Milan cathedral, it went into the facade of the Certosa di Pavia and the Octagon of the Duomo di Pavia, a supply line running from the fourteenth century onward.

The town's frazione, Migiandone, formed part of the same Walser settlement, colonists from the Simplon who kept a German dialect alive here into the late nineteenth century, longer than in any Walser community further up the Ossola. The ground beneath the town has its own older history: two pre-Roman necropolises, Celtic and Italic, with burials spanning the second century BC to the first century AD.

Above the centro, the devotional life of the upper Toce climbed the hillside, and in 1944 that same high ground sheltered soldiers and then partisans of the Valtoce division, in the brief Allied-recognised partisan state that held the upper valley that year. A quarry town, a language outpost, and a wartime redoubt turn out to be the same few square kilometers, stacked in time rather than spread across it.

The catch: It is the longest drive on this list: 1 h 30 min from Milan.

What to see in Ornavasso

• Santuario della Madonna del Boden. Sanctuary above the town, standing 475 meters over the centro, reached by a climb that has drawn devotion from the surrounding valley since it was built.
• Santuario della Madonna della Guardia. Hilltop sanctuary that housed Italian army troops and then partisans during the brief Allied-recognised partisan state of autumn 1944.
• Cave di marmo. Quarries on the right bank of the Toce, still legible in the rock face, the source of stone for both the Duomo di Milano and the Arco della Pace.

How to get to Ornavasso

It has its own railway station. Milan is about 1 h 30 min away by road. The full route from Milan.

Everything we know about Ornavasso

5. Laveno-Mombello

Best for a long lunch. A food guide lists La Tavola here.

1 h 14 min from Milan · homes €1,350 to €1,700 a m² in the center · 8,319 people

Why visit Laveno-Mombello

Laveno-Mombello sits on Lake Maggiore's eastern shore in the province of Varese, where a limestone wall drops directly to the water at the town's back. The ferry here crosses to Verbania and the Borromean Islands on the opposite shore, making the town as much a hinge point between Lombardia and Piemonte as a destination in itself.

Cerro, the lakefront hamlet folded into the town, kept the workshops after the ceramics factories closed in the 1990s, and its Palazzo Perabò now holds the museum that charts that industry from 1856 forward. South along the shore, a fifteen-minute drive reaches the monastery built into the cliff face, reachable by stairs, lift or boat where the road does not reach directly.

The town's shape follows the lake and the rock in equal measure: industry and transit at the shoreline, the mountain rising straight behind it, and the monastery holding on to the cliff a short way south as if the same geology that made Laveno a port also made it a place for building into stone.

La Tavola is listed in the MICHELIN Guide and Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Laveno-Mombello

• MIDeC – Museo Internazionale Design Ceramico. Ceramics design museum in the sixteenth-century Palazzo Perabò at Cerro, covering Laveno production from 1856 to the 1990s.
• Sasso del Ferro. Limestone summit reached by the bucket funicular, with a terrace looking across Lake Maggiore to Lago d'Orta and the southern Alps.
• Santa Caterina del Sasso. Fourteenth-century monastery clinging to a cliff above Lake Maggiore, fifteen minutes south, reached by stairs, lift or boat.

How to get to Laveno-Mombello

It has its own railway station. Milan is about 1 h 14 min away by road. The full route from Milan.

Everything we know about Laveno-Mombello

6. Casale Monferrato

Best for a wine weekend. It belongs to the national association of wine towns.

1 h 18 min from Milan · homes €560 to €840 a m² in the center · 32,428 people

Why visit Casale Monferrato

Casale Monferrato sits at 116 meters on the right bank of the Po, sixty kilometers east of Torino, at the foot of the Monferrato hills. Casale fell to the Marquess of Montferrat in 1292 and rose as capital of the Marchesato in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, on the strategic edge of the Po Valley.

The Duomo di Sant'Evasio is its oldest stone: consecrated on January 7, 1107 by Pope Paschal II on the site of a Roman temple to Jupiter and a Liutprandian-era church to Saint Lawrence, the basilica is one of the most important Romanesque-Lombard cathedrals in Piedmont, with five naves and a matroneum of trifore and quadrifore galleries. The Castello dei Paleologi, raised in 1352 by Giovanni II Paleologo, runs an asymmetric hexagonal plan with circular corner towers and a dry moat.

The Sinagoga, completed in 1595 in the old Jewish quarter, holds a gilded Piedmontese Baroque interior and a museum of Jewish history. The town is also the historic capital of Italian cement and Krumiri biscuits.

Osteria Bar Sport (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Accademia Ristorante (MICHELIN) and Cascina Faletta 1881 (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Casale Monferrato

• Duomo di Sant'Evasio. Romanesque-Lombard cathedral consecrated 1107 by Pope Paschal II, with five naves, barrel and cross vaults, and a matroneum of trifore galleries.
• Castello dei Paleologi. 1352 castle by Giovanni II Paleologo, asymmetric hexagonal plan with circular corner towers and a dry moat, now used for exhibitions.
• Sinagoga di Casale Monferrato. 1595 synagogue in the old Jewish quarter, gilded Piedmontese Baroque interior, restored 1968 with a Jewish history museum on the upper floor.

How to get to Casale Monferrato

It has its own railway station. Milan is about 1 h 18 min away by road. The full route from Milan.

Everything we know about Casale Monferrato