The best towns worth staying overnight that eat well in Lombardia

Torno

Why visit Torno

Torno sits on the eastern shore of Lake Como, five kilometers north of the city of Como and forty-five from Milan. The village climbs in narrow lanes from the small port up the steep slope behind it, a core compact enough to cover on foot in fifteen minutes.

Above the village stands a second, older church, its marble portal carved by the Maestri Comacini in the 16th century, a quieter counterpart to the more elaborate church below near the port. The church nearer the port was first mentioned in 1208, in correspondence between Pope Innocent III and the abbot of Sant'Abbondio of Como, and its Romanesque bell tower predates the rest of the structure, including the rose window, frescoes and 1480 portal added later.

Outside the built-up part of the village, at the lake edge, the villa grounds hold the spring at the center of the town's reputation, and the villa itself has passed through a long list of owners since it was built. The village, in other words, is arranged around two poles: a compact inhabited core stacked on the hillside above its harbor, and an isolated lakeside property outside it that has drawn attention, scientific and otherwise, for far longer than the village itself has been documented.

Il Sereno Al Lago (MICHELIN) and Al Lago del Sereno Hotel (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Torno

• Chiesa di Santa Tecla. Romanesque-Gothic church first documented in 1208, with a Gothic rose window, statue niche and entrance dated 1480.
• Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista. Romanesque parish church above the village, with a marble portal carved by the Maestri Comacini in the 16th century.
• Villa Pliniana. Villa at the lake's edge built by Giovanni Anguissola, its grounds enclosing the spring that rises and falls on a rhythm Pliny the Younger recorded and that later drew Leonardo to study it.

How to get to Torno

Monza is about 56 min away by road.

Everything we know about Torno

Limone sul Garda

Why visit Limone sul Garda

Limone sul Garda sits on the western shore of Lake Garda at the foot of vertical limestone cliffs, the northernmost commercial lemon-growing town in the world at almost 46 degrees north. The Latin limes, meaning border, gave the place its name; the Bettoni counts gave it its industry.

From the seventeenth century, limonaie, stone-pillared greenhouses heated and covered through winter, allowed lemons to be exported to Austria, Germany, Poland and Russia. The road to Riva del Garda, the Gardesana Occidentale, was carved into the cliff and finished in 1932; until then the town reached the outside world by boat or mule track.

In 1974 a Milanese pharmacologist traced a mutant apolipoprotein, ApoA-1 Milano, to a single eighteenth-century resident, Giovanni Pomarelli. Roughly forty of his descendants in town carry the variant, which suppresses cardiovascular disease and helps a handful of residents past one hundred.

Senso Lake Garda Alfio Ghezzi is listed in the MICHELIN Guide.

What to see in Limone sul Garda

• Limonaia del Castèl. Restored seventeenth-century lemon greenhouse on stone pillars above the lake, demonstrating the heated wooden cover that protected the trees through winter.
• Chiesa di San Benedetto. Eighteenth-century parish church on the lake front, with a single nave and Baroque altars rebuilt over an older medieval foundation.
• Centro storico. Tight grid of stone alleys between the old harbor and the cliff, with narrow porticoes that survive from the pre-road fishing and citrus village.

How to get to Limone sul Garda

Trento is about 57 min away by road.

Everything we know about Limone sul Garda

Gardone Riviera

Why visit Gardone Riviera

Gardone Riviera sits at 71 meters on the western shore of Lake Garda, in the province of Brescia. The lake here runs deep against the wall of Monte Pizzocolo, and the climate stays mild enough that lemons, olives and bamboo grow within walking distance of each other.

The town divides between the lakefront and the hill above it. Along the water, Gardone Sotto holds the promenade and harbor; above the centro storico, the ground rises toward the estate grounds and, further up, toward the garden that has drawn on the same mild hillside climate since the start of the twentieth century.

The boathouse on the estate holds a torpedo boat from a 1918 wartime raid, alongside the villa called the Prioria, an amphitheatre and a circular mausoleum. The garden above town spent six decades being arranged, one man working a single hillside into bamboo groves, alpine ravines, Japanese ponds and waterfalls.

The lakefront promenade carries the Bandiera Blu. What holds the town together is that division of altitude: a working lakefront below, and above it two hillside projects, one architectural and one botanical, each built slowly and by a single hand over decades on the same slope.

Il Fagiano (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Osteria Antico Brolo (MICHELIN), Villa Fiordaliso (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and 2 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Gardone Riviera

• Vittoriale degli Italiani. Nine-hectare hillside estate occupied by Gabriele D'Annunzio from 1922 to 1938, with villa, amphitheatre, mausoleum and the cruiser Puglia.
• Nave Puglia. Protected cruiser of the Regia Marina set into the slope above the lake, gifted to D'Annunzio in 1923 and assembled on land at the Vittoriale.
• Giardino Botanico Hruska (Heller Garden). Botanical garden begun around 1901 by Arturo Hruska, with bamboo, Japanese ponds, alpine ravines and waterfalls on a single hillside.

How to get to Gardone Riviera

Brescia is about 53 min away by road.

Everything we know about Gardone Riviera

Bellagio

Why visit Bellagio

Bellagio sits on the promontory that divides Lake Como into its three arms, the Como branch to the west and the Lecco branch to the east, with the upper lake running north. Paleolithic settlement traces date back 30,000 years, and an Iron Age castellum stood on the high point around 600 BC.

From the late 13th century the Visconti incorporated Bellagio into the Duchy of Milan. Villa Serbelloni was built in the 15th century on the site of an old razed castle and rebuilt several times; in 1788 Alessandro Serbelloni filled it with 17th- and 18th-century art, and in 1959 the Rockefeller Foundation took ownership, turning the villa into an international conference center.

Villa Melzi, built on the western shore by Francesco Melzi d'Eril (Vice President of Napoleon's Cisalpine Republic), made the village a fashionable summer station for Milanese nobility in the early 1800s.

Mistral (MICHELIN and L'Espresso), Alle Darsene di Loppia (Gambero Rosso) and La Punta (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Bellagio

• Villa Serbelloni. Fifteenth-century villa on the high promontory, owned by the Rockefeller Foundation since 1959, with gardens open by guided tour only.
• Villa Melzi. Early 19th-century neoclassical villa built by Francesco Melzi d'Eril on the western shore at Loppia, with public botanical gardens along the lake.
• Punta Spartivento. Northern tip of the promontory where the lake splits in three, with a park, marina, and panoramic view up the Bellagio branch.

How to get to Bellagio

Monza is about 55 min away by road.

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Bormio

Why visit Bormio

Bormio sits at 1,225 meters in upper Valtellina, at the junction where three high passes, the Stelvio, the Gavia, and the Mortirolo, converge inside the Stelvio National Park. The park ranges from 650 to 3,905 meters, and the springs that feed the town's baths rise separately at 1,420 meters, well above the settlement itself, before being carried down to the three thermal centers: QC Terme Bagni Vecchi, QC Terme Bagni Nuovi, and Bormio Terme.

The town's layout follows this same split between high and low. The Bagni Vecchi sit above the town in caves cut into the rock, closer to the mountain than to the streets, while the medieval center, the Kuerc, with its ninth-century podestà building, holds the civic and commercial life down in the commune itself.

The pass road above, meanwhile, belongs to a separate register entirely, an engineered climb rather than a settled place. What holds Bormio together is this vertical arrangement: water, rock, and road stacked above a small alpine commune that has stayed the administrative and social center while the mountain around it accumulated separate identities, as thermal ground, as national park, as pass, as ski slope.

Al Filò (Gambero Rosso), Gavioli (Gambero Rosso) and Vecchia Combo (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Bormio

• QC Terme Bagni Vecchi. Stone rooms and caves above the town, where the same water has run over Roman-era construction for two thousand years.
• QC Terme Bagni Nuovi. Belle Époque thermal complex below the Bagni Vecchi, with outdoor pools facing the Alpine peaks and the Valtellina valley.
• Kuerc e Palazzo del Podestà. Medieval civic center of Bormio, the Kuerc loggia and the ninth-century Podestà building in the heart of the centro storico.

How to get to Bormio

Bolzano is about 1 h 59 min away by road.

Everything we know about Bormio

Tremezzina

Why visit Tremezzina

Tremezzina was created on 25 May 2014 from the merger of Lenno, Mezzegra, Ossuccio and Tremezzo, four villages along the central western shore of Lake Como facing Bellagio. The new comune holds Villa Carlotta, built in the late 1600s for the Marquis Giorgio Clerici and later named for Princess Carlotta who received it in 1850, with seventeen acres of gardens and one of the great rhododendron collections in Italy.

Isola Comacina, the lake's only island, was the wealthiest place on the lake before Como's destruction of it in 1169; nothing has been built there since, and it is now an archaeological site. The Sacro Monte di Ossuccio is one of nine Lombard and Piedmontese Sacri Monti inscribed by UNESCO in 2003: fourteen Baroque chapels built between 1635 and 1710, climbing the prealpine slope two hundred meters above the lake to a sanctuary of 1532.

Mussolini was captured in Dongo north of here and shot in Giulino di Mezzegra on 28 April 1945; the black cross by the road still marks the spot.

La Terrazza Gualtiero Marchesi del Grand Hotel Tremezzo is listed in Gambero Rosso.

What to see in Tremezzina

• Villa Carlotta. Late seventeenth-century villa built for the Marquis Giorgio Clerici, with seventeen acres of gardens, more than 150 rhododendron and azalea species, and a sculpture collection.
• Isola Comacina. Lake Como's only island, the wealthiest medieval settlement on the lake until its destruction by Como in 1169, now an archaeological site.
• Sacro Monte di Ossuccio. UNESCO site of fourteen Baroque chapels built 1635-1710, climbing two hundred meters above the lake to the Beata Vergine del Soccorso sanctuary of 1532.

How to get to Tremezzina

Monza is about 1 h 23 min away by road.

Everything we know about Tremezzina

Cernobbio

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 12th-century Benedictine convent called Coenobium, from which the name derives.

The 19th century brought silk mills and lakeside villas, and two of these sit close together inland from the water: 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 from before 1905, now a municipal 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.

Ristorante Trattoria del Vapore (Locali Storici), Materia (MICHELIN and L'Espresso), Casa Perrotta Restaurant (MICHELIN) and 2 more places are listed in food guides.

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. Pre-1905 Liberty villa by Alfredo Campanini, built for silk industrialist Davide Bernasconi, now a municipal museum of Art Nouveau.

How to get to Cernobbio

Monza is about 1 h 1 min away by road.

Everything we know about Cernobbio

Livigno

Why visit Livigno

Livigno sits at 1,816 meters in a high valley between the Stelvio National Park and Switzerland's Engadine, one of the few Italian communes whose waters drain north to the Black Sea rather than south to the Mediterranean. The name probably comes from an old German word for avalanche; the last one to hit the village killed seven people in 1951.

Until the 1970s this was a farming village of shepherds and small farms. The duty-free status, first granted by Austria around 1840 and confirmed by Italy in 1960, is what changed it.

Today the slopes of Carosello 3000 on one side of the valley and Mottolino on the other carry the ski traffic that arrives by the busload from Milan and the rest of Europe. Saint Mary's parish church, rebuilt at the end of the 19th century around its older predecessor, still anchors the center.

The duty-free shops along Via Plan handle the rest of the visitor economy.

Al Persef (MICHELIN and L'Espresso), Camana Veglia (MICHELIN), Stua Noa Fine Dining (MICHELIN) and 3 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Livigno

• Chiesa di Santa Maria Nascente. Late 19th-century parish church built around the older church it replaced, so that services continued during construction.
• Chiesa di San Rocco. Small votive church built at the start of the 16th century as protection against plague, on the edge of the historic settlement.
• Chiesa della Madonna di Caravaggio. Country church holding ex voto paintings and a picture traditionally attributed to Caravaggio.

How to get to Livigno

Bolzano is about 2 h 32 min away by road.

Everything we know about Livigno

Sirmione

Why visit Sirmione

The peninsula runs four kilometers into the southern end of the lake, narrow enough that the old town occupies a triangle of land just over a mile long. Three low hills organize it: Cortine, San Pietro, and the rise at the tip where the Roman villa stands.

The fortress sits at the single entrance to the walled town, so the only way in by land passes through its gate, and the water it once enclosed as a fortified port is still shut in behind it. Past that gate the medieval streets are packed between the hills, and the ground rises toward the church at the highest point before falling away again toward the villa ruins at the peninsula's end.

The name attached to the villa is literary rather than archaeological: the poet's return in his thirty-first poem was to a family property on this tip of land, and nothing dug from the ground proves the two are the same place, but the name has held for a thousand years regardless. Maria Callas kept a villa here through the 1950s and 60s.

Between the enclosed water at one end and the hot spring at the other, the peninsula reads as a strip of land defined entirely by what edges it: lake on three sides, a gated approach on the fourth, and a history that settled into the name of a poem long before anyone could confirm it belonged there.

Caffè Grande Italia (Locali Storici), Tancredi (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), La Rucola 2.0 (MICHELIN) and 2 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Sirmione

• Castello Scaligero. Fortress at the entrance to the old town, with a 37-meter keep and a fortified port still enclosing a piece of the lake.
• Grotte di Catullo. Villa complex built late first century BC to early first century AD, its ruins scattered across olive terraces at the tip of the peninsula.
• Terme di Catullo. Thermal spa drawing on the same mineral spring that surfaces offshore in Lake Garda.

How to get to Sirmione

Verona is about 36 min away by road.

Everything we know about Sirmione

Bergamo

Why visit Bergamo

Bergamo's upper town occupies a spur of the Bergamasque foothills, and the lower town spreads onto the plain that runs southwest toward Milan. The walls that ring the hilltop cost the old town more than 250 buildings, including the original cathedral of Sant'Alessandro, demolished to clear ground for the defenses.

The circuit was built as part of a much larger Venetian project, inscribed together with the fortifications at Peschiera, Palmanova and sites on the Dalmatian coast: one defensive system spread across the Republic's frontier, of which this hilltop was the western anchor. The two halves of the city keep their own centuries.

The walled hilltop holds its medieval and Renaissance fabric inside the fortifications, reached by a funicular that has run the same route since the nineteenth century. The lower city is the newer half, built up through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the flat ground below.

Bergamo works as a place because that separation stayed intact instead of being built over: a fortified hill town and a modern city sharing one name but occupying two distinct centuries.

Caffè Del Tasso (Locali Storici), Pasticceria bar Cavour 1880 (Locali Storici), Villa Elena (MICHELIN and L'Espresso) and 11 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Bergamo

• Mura Venete. Eight bastions and four gates carry the circuit around the ridge of Città Alta, the walkway open along most of its length with views down over the lower town and the plain.
• Piazza Vecchia. Ringed by the Palazzo della Ragione, the Campanone tower, the Contarini fountain and the Biblioteca Mai, this is the square at the top of the funicular climb, the meeting point of Città Alta's streets.
• Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. The Romanesque exterior gives no hint of the Baroque interior inside, gilded and heavy with stucco, where the composer's tomb sits among the furnishings.

How to get to Bergamo

It has its own railway station. The full route from Milan.

Everything we know about Bergamo