Baveno

Baveno sits 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, a tribe of the Ligures, 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.

From Milan (BGY), about 1h 36m by car.

Turin (TRN) is about 1h 37m away.

By car from the centre of Brescia 2 hours.

There is a railway station in the comune, so you can arrive without a car.

Coming from Milan, Turin or Genoa?

Coming by train into Milano Centrale? Baveno is about 1h 8m away by road.

Every town within reach of Milan airport.