The best lake towns within two hours of Turin

1. Orta San Giulio

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

1 h 33 min from Turin · homes €1,700 to €3,000 a m² in the center · 1,102 people

Why visit Orta San Giulio

The town occupies a promontory pushed into the eastern shore of the lake, facing the small island 275 meters long and 140 meters wide. The two are close enough that the island reads as an extension of the town rather than a separate place, and a five-minute motorboat from the piazza is the only way across.

The old town holds three of Italy's quality marks at once: Borghi più belli, Bandiera Arancione, and the UNESCO inscription of 2003. The relationship between the three parts of the town explains how it works: the waterfront square and its lanes sit at lake level, facing the island directly across the water, while the hill above holds the devotional complex, reached by climbing away from the shore rather than along it.

Piazza Motta was also the seat of the Comunità della Riviera di San Giulio, an autonomous federation of lake towns that survived from the Middle Ages to the mid-eighteenth century, which is why the square, not the hill or the island, was built as a civic center. What results is a town in three registers at once: civic life at the water's edge, monastic life offshore, and devotional life on the hill above, each occupying its own ground and visible from the others.

The center sits at 294 meters, by the lake.

What to see in Orta San Giulio

• Basilica di San Giulio. Serpentine ambo inside and a silver shrine dated 1697. Reached by boat, the basilica stands close to the water's edge, the focal point of the view from every point on the promontory.
• Piazza Motta and Palazzo della Comunità. The broletto's arcades face the water directly, and the square narrows toward the boat landing where the crossing to the island begins.
• Sacro Monte di Orta. The chapels climb the wooded hillside in sequence, each framing a scene, with the town and the lake opening up in views between them as the path gains height.

How to get to Orta San Giulio

It has its own railway station. Turin is about 1 h 33 min away by road. The full route from Turin.

Everything we know about Orta San Giulio

2. Mergozzo

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

1 h 49 min from Turin · 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.

The center sits at 204 meters, by the lake.

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. Turin is about 1 h 49 min away by road. The full route from Turin.

Everything we know about Mergozzo

3. Ghiffa

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

1 h 57 min from Turin · homes €1,600 to €2,400 a m² in the center · 2,227 people

Why visit Ghiffa

Ghiffa runs along the west shore of Lake Maggiore between Verbania and Cannobio, a strip of lakefront at 201 meters facing the Lombard side of the lake. Above the village, at 360 meters on the slope of Monte Carciago, the ground rises to the Sacro Monte della SS. Trinità, inscribed by UNESCO in 2003 among the nine Sacri Monti of Piemonte and Lombardia.

The village below and the sanctuary above form the two halves of Ghiffa: one built on the lake trade and the ferry crossings to the Lombard shore, the other set apart in woodland on the mountain. From 1879 the Panizza hat factory turned Ghiffa into one of Europe's hat-making centers, and the trade employed most of the village for a century before the factory closed.

What is left of that trade sits in the same lakefront ground the sanctuary looks down on: a village shaped as much by an industry that has ended as by the devotional complex that has outlasted it.

The center sits at 201 meters, by the lake.

What to see in Ghiffa

• Sacro Monte della SS. Trinità. Sanctuary plus three chapels and porticoed Stations of the Cross set in a 200-hectare reserve, built around an older medieval chapel.
• Museo dell'Arte del Cappello. Lakefront museum in the former factory building, holding molds, stamps, and records from a century of Ghiffa hat-making, including the Borsalino style made and exported here.
• Riserva Naturale del Sacro Monte. Two hundred hectares of beech and chestnut woods around the sanctuary, with marked trails to Cappella del Porale at 470 meters.

How to get to Ghiffa

Turin is about 1 h 57 min away by road. The full route from Turin.

Everything we know about Ghiffa

4. Baveno

Best for a trip without a car. The train stops in the commune.

1 h 37 min from Turin · homes €1,550 to €2,200 a m² in the center · 4,545 people

Why visit Baveno

Baveno sits at 205 meters on the west shore of the lake, twenty-one kilometers north-west of Arona. The town was occupied in the Iron Age by the Lepontii, an Alpine people of Celtic speech, before the Romans reached the lake, and its historic core still gathers around the raised church and its baptistery above the shore road.

To the north-west, the granite quarries have cut into the hillside since the early sixteenth century, and the stone they produced left Baveno for Milan and Rome, built into a cathedral, a basilica, and a shopping gallery. Along the water, a line of nineteenth-century villas marks the period when Lake Maggiore became a fixed point on the European Grand Tour, and from that same shore the Isole Borromee sit a ten-minute ferry away, close enough that the gulf reads as one continuous view rather than a lake and its islands.

The town's quarries built landmarks elsewhere while its own shore stayed a place people came to look at the water.

The center sits at 205 meters, by the lake.

What to see in Baveno

• Chiesa dei Santi Gervasio e Protasio. The Romanesque church and the older baptistery, fifth-century behind its later face, form the religious center of the historic core, raised above the road that runs along the water.
• Cave di Granito Rosa. The quarries lie north-west of town, cut into the hillside, the source of stone that traveled to two large churches and a shopping gallery.
• Golfo Borromeo. The gulf opens out between Baveno and Stresa, the water broken by three islands, Isola Bella, Isola dei Pescatori and Isola Madre, each reachable within minutes.

How to get to Baveno

It has its own railway station. Turin is about 1 h 37 min away by road. The full route from Turin.

Everything we know about Baveno

5. Stresa

Best for everyday life on foot. All ten everyday services we look for are mapped within 500 meters of the center.

1 h 39 min from Turin · homes €1,800 to €2,500 a m² in the center · 4,634 people

Why visit Stresa

Stresa sits at 200 meters on the western shore of Lake Maggiore, ninety kilometers north of Milano on the line of the Simplon railway. The town first appears in documents in 998, as Strixsya.

From the seventeenth century the lake stage here belonged to the Borromeo family: the palazzo on what had been called l'isola inferiore was begun in 1632, the island renamed after its patron's wife. The other two islands of the group lie 400 meters offshore alongside it, reached by regular ferry from the two town piers, one still inhabited, one given to its park.

Villa Pallavicino, established 1855, sits apart from this cluster on the southern edge of town, its own botanical and wildlife ground answering the islands' gardens without belonging to the same estate. The town's other identity, as a resort, dates to 1863 and the lakefront hotel building that opened international tourism here, later drawing the festival that has filled the town each late summer since 1962.

What Stresa amounts to is a small lake shore town organized almost entirely around water it faces rather than land it occupies: the islands offshore, the piers that reach them, and a lakefront built for arrival rather than settlement.

The center sits at 200 meters, by the lake.

What to see in Stresa

• Isola Bella. The island sits close to the town piers, its terraced Baroque gardens rising in tiers above the water and the palazzo facing the lakefront directly.
• Isola Madre. The largest of the group, given over almost entirely to its park: paths through subtropical planting and glimpses of the villa between the trees.
• Isola dei Pescatori. The one island still lived in year-round, its lanes narrow between the houses and the trattorie facing the water where the fishing boats once worked.

How to get to Stresa

It has its own railway station. Turin is about 1 h 39 min away by road. The full route from Turin.

Everything we know about Stresa

6. Angera

1 h 43 min from Turin · homes €1,300 to €1,600 a m² in the center · 5,329 people

Why visit Angera

The town sits on the southern shore of Lake Maggiore, facing Arona directly across the water on the Piedmontese side. The two towns read as a pair, close enough that the crossing between them is a short ferry ride rather than a journey, and the view from the promenade is framed by that opposite shore as much as by the lake itself.

The town's built order rises from the water: harbor and promenade at lake level, then the limestone bluffs behind them, then the castle on its spur above everything, with the Caves of Bògia cut into the same limestone the castle stands on. The Rocca Borromea has belonged to the Borromeo family since 1449, and Justice Hall, inside it, holds one of the most important 13th-century fresco cycles in northern Italy.

The Diocesan Museum and the Doll Museum occupy the same upper rooms, so the visit to the castle moves from religious art to costume dolls without leaving the building. What this adds up to is a single vertical town: prehistoric cliff, medieval seat, and lakefront strolling ground stacked on top of each other rather than spread apart, which is why the place reads as compact and walkable next to the crowds and day-trip traffic of the lake's better-known resorts, while still holding the same family's seat of power at its summit.

The center sits at 205 meters, by the lake.

What to see in Angera

• Rocca Borromea. The castle stands on a limestone spur with the lake below it on all approachable sides. Inside, the Sala della Giustizia is reached through a sequence of bare medieval rooms, so the fresco cycle opens without warning after plain stone.
• Museo Diocesano + Doll Museum. Two collections share the castle's upper rooms: medieval religious art in one wing, a run of over a thousand antique dolls in period costume in the other. The contrast between the two, armor-adjacent stonework giving way to glass cases of costume dolls, is more jarring than either collection alone.
• Lungolago di Angera. The promenade runs level along the water from the harbor to the base of the limestone bluffs, with the castle visible above for most of its length and open water toward the Piedmontese shore for the rest.

How to get to Angera

Turin is about 1 h 43 min away by road.

Everything we know about Angera

7. Gozzano

Best for a swim. The comune's beach holds a Blue Flag.

1 h 28 min from Turin · homes €1,050 to €1,500 a m² in the center · 5,499 people

Why visit Gozzano

Gozzano sits at 367 meters above the southern tip of Lake Orta, the smaller of the Italian subalpine lakes. The Latin name Gaudianum meant 'place of enjoyment,' a Roman villa from the late imperial era.

By the fourth century the area had been evangelized by two saints who arrived together, brothers by tradition, and their memory shaped the town's religious geography for centuries after. Gozzano is the largest town on the southern Orta shore and the main road access to the lake from the Po valley, the point where travelers from the Po valley meet the water.

The basilica sits at the center of town while the lookout tower stands above it on higher ground, watching the lake rather than living beside it, one building for worship and pilgrimage, the other for defense and signaling. The lake itself holds a Bandiera Blu for water quality, one of the few inland lakes in Italy to qualify.

Together the low church and the high tower mark Gozzano as a place shaped by both the water at its feet and the routes passing over it.

The center sits at 367 meters, by the lake.

What to see in Gozzano

• Basilica di San Giuliano. The bell tower dates to the eleventh century, older than the reconstruction around it. The building follows the model of the basilica on Isola San Giulio and the old Novara cathedral, a copy of a copy standing at the water's edge.
• Torre di Buccione. The tower is the remnant of a vanished castle, standing alone where walls and keep did not survive. Three internal wooden decks remain inside, a climb above the lake rather than a ruin at ground level.
• Lago d'Orta lungolago. Southern shore lakefront at 290 meters of water elevation, the gateway to Orta San Giulio and the Isola San Giulio.

How to get to Gozzano

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

Everything we know about Gozzano

8. Cernobbio

Best for a long lunch. Food guides list five tables here.

1 h 59 min from Turin · homes €1,550 to €2,650 a m² in the center · 6,225 people

Why visit Cernobbio

Cernobbio sits at 201 meters on the western shore of the lake, two kilometers north of the city of Como, at the foot of the ridge that rises behind it. The village grew up around a Benedictine convent documented from 930, the Coenobium from which, by the leading account, the name derives.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries brought silk mills and villas: Villa Erba, built in the 1890s by the Erba pharmaceutical family on the old monastery site and later inherited by Luchino Visconti's mother, and Villa Bernasconi, an Alfredo Campanini Liberty house of 1906, now a museum. The lakefront itself, with its ferry pier and promenade, marks the entry point to the western shore for anyone arriving from the city.

The town's layout, then, traces its own history: a monastic name at the center, silk-era villas set back from the water, and the shoreline still working as the gateway it has been since the village first grew.

The center sits at 201 meters, by the lake.

The catch: It is the longest drive on this list: 1 h 59 min from Turin.

What to see in Cernobbio

• Villa d'Este. Built for Cardinal Gallio, the villa's gardens and lakefront wings now house the hotel guests and, each September, the delegations arriving for the Ambrosetti Forum.
• Villa Erba. Nineteenth-century villa built by the Erba pharmaceutical family on the site of a Benedictine monastery, later inherited by Luchino Visconti's family.
• Villa Bernasconi. Liberty villa of 1906 by Alfredo Campanini, built for silk industrialist Davide Bernasconi, now a museum of Art Nouveau.

How to get to Cernobbio

Turin is about 1 h 59 min away by road.

Everything we know about Cernobbio

9. Arona

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

1 h 33 min from Turin · homes €1,650 to €2,450 a m² in the center · 13,655 people

Why visit Arona

Arona sits ninety kilometers north of Milano, the first stop most travelers reach when they leave the city for the lakes. The town came under the Borromeo family in 1439 and stayed there for centuries: the castle on the hill above town was their stronghold, and the next hill over holds the statue raised in the family's honor, so the two high points of Arona both belong to the same lineage looking down on the water and on each other.

The lakefront below connects the two hills to the church on the shore and to the promenade that runs north with Angera visible across the water on the Lombard side. The natural park on the southern edge of the commune sits apart from this Borromeo core, its pile-dwelling remains far older than anything else in town and unconnected to the family's centuries of rule.

What the place adds up to is a town organized around one family's presence in stone and copper, with a much older, unrelated settlement preserved at its edge.

The center sits at 212 meters, by the lake.

What to see in Arona

• Sancarlone. Copper colossus of San Carlo Borromeo, designed by Il Cerano and built between 1624 and 1698, standing above the Sacro Monte.
• Rocca di Arona. Ruined fortress on the hill above town, the walls broken into towers since the demolition, with views over the water below.
• Collegiata di Santa Maria Nascente. Late medieval church on the lakefront, holding a polyptych by Gaudenzio Ferrari completed in 1511.

How to get to Arona

It has its own railway station. Turin is about 1 h 33 min away by road. The full route from Turin.

Everything we know about Arona

10. Omegna

Best for a ski week. There is a mapped ski area in the comune.

1 h 47 min from Turin · homes €1,150 to €1,650 a m² in the center · 14,185 people

Why visit Omegna

Omegna sits at 295 meters at the northern tip of Lake Orta, in the Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, where the Nigoglia leaves the lake and runs north toward the Toce, one of the few Italian rivers that flows uphill on a map. The town first appears in records in 1221, when it swore allegiance to the commune of Novara.

The Sant'Ambrogio collegiate church goes back to the tenth century, with a Romanesque nave and a Porta Romana that survives from the medieval walls. The real shift came after 1900, when Alessi (founded 1921), Bialetti, Lagostina and Girmi turned the Strona valley into the production hub for Italian pots, moka pots and pressure cookers.

Gianni Rodari was born here in 1920; the lakefront still carries the Parco della Fantasia named after him. The Forum, a steel works converted into a museum, holds the permanent collection of the local household-goods district.

The lake stays close on three sides.

The center sits at 295 meters, by the lake.

What to see in Omegna

• Collegiata di Sant'Ambrogio. Tenth-century Romanesque collegiate church with three naves, side chapels and an ossuary, the oldest building in the centro storico.
• Porta Romana. Eleventh-century medieval gate, the last surviving of the five gates of the original city walls, standing above the Nigoglia.
• Ponte Antico. Late fifteenth-century Sforza-Visconti bridge over the Nigoglia, built after 1490 on Duke Ludovico Sforza's prompting.

How to get to Omegna

It has its own railway station. Turin is about 1 h 47 min away by road. The full route from Turin.

Everything we know about Omegna