The Italian Lakes, Compared

Como, Garda and Maggiore for the discerning traveller — a frank guide to a region that most international visitors meet only through one of its three faces.

There is a tendency among visitors to Italy to speak of the Italian Lakes as though they were a single phenomenon — a region, a shared character, an experience that one chooses simply by deciding to spend a few days at altitude on water. They are not. The three major lakes — Como, Garda and Maggiore — are each genuinely different in topography, in climate, in social register, and in the kind of holiday they reward. The visitor who arrives expecting one and finds another is rarely satisfied; the visitor who has been advised carefully in advance is rarely surprised.

Como: The Vertical Lake

Lake Como is shaped like an inverted Y, narrow and deep, with mountainsides that rise almost vertically from the water on both shores. This is the lake of the cliché, and the cliché happens to be accurate: it is the most cinematic of the three, the most dramatically vertical, and the most visited by the international fashion-and-finance set. The hotels are the headline ones — Villa d'Este, the Tremezzo, Il Sereno, the Mandarin Oriental, Passalacqua — and the social register on the lake in summer is, by some distance, the highest of the three.

It is also the smallest. The lake is barely two kilometres across at its widest point, and most of the visitor experience is concentrated along a fifteen-kilometre stretch of the western shore between Cernobbio and Tremezzo. This concentration is, for the right client, a virtue: every great villa, every great hotel, every interesting town is within an hour by boat. For a different client, it can feel claustrophobic — particularly in July and August, when the lake is at heavy capacity and the lakeside road moves slowly.

We send to Como the clients who want the headline Italian Lakes experience, the clients with a strong interest in nineteenth-century gardens and architecture, and the clients who simply enjoy the social pageant of the place. We do not send to Como the clients looking for solitude. There are quieter lakes.

Garda: The Wide One

Lake Garda is the largest of the three by some margin — it is, in fact, the largest lake in Italy — and its character is correspondingly different. The southern shore is open and almost Mediterranean, with vineyards, olive groves, and beaches that are genuinely beach-like. The northern shore, where the lake narrows between high cliffs, has an Alpine character closer to the upper part of Como, but with a wind regime that has made it, for thirty years, one of the great European centres for serious sailing.

Garda is a more democratic lake than Como, and we say this with respect. It accommodates families on a holiday week, German cyclists doing the lake circuit, the wedding industry of the southern shore, the wellness traveller at the major spas around Sirmione. The luxury hotel offering, until recently, was thinner than at Como, but the recent opening of the Eden Reserve at Garda and the steady investment in older institutions like the Villa Feltrinelli at Gargnano have raised the standard considerably. Villa Feltrinelli, in particular — Mussolini's last residence, now a Relais & Châteaux property of twenty-one rooms with a kitchen that earned a star last year — is for the right client one of the best small hotels in Italy.

We send to Garda clients who want a quieter lake than Como, families with children, and clients with an interest in the wines of the Lugana zone, the olive oils of the eastern shore, and the small operatic festivals that the southern lake has cultivated.

Maggiore: The Aristocratic One

Lake Maggiore is the connoisseur's lake. It is larger than Como but more lightly visited, and it has a quality of nineteenth-century European grandeur that the other two have, in different ways, partially modernised away. The Borromean Islands — Isola Bella, Isola Madre, Isola dei Pescatori — sit in the centre of the lake's western basin and are the great set-piece of the visit, with the Borromeo family's gardens at Isola Bella ranking among the most theatrical baroque gardens in Europe.

The hotel scene is led, at the highest level, by the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromées at Stresa — the hotel that Hemingway used as the setting for the closing chapters of A Farewell to Arms — and by the Villa Aminta. Both are excellent in their slightly traditional way. The newer additions are smaller and more contemporary: the Hotel La Palma at Stresa, the recently restored Villa e Palazzo Aminta. The luxury private villa offering is, frankly, less developed than at Como, but for the right client this is part of the appeal.

We send to Maggiore the clients who have already been to Como and are looking for the next, quieter Italian lake. We send the clients with a strong interest in baroque gardens and Italian aristocratic family histories. And we send the clients who simply want a lake that has not yet been photographed to death.

How to Choose

The honest answer is that the choice depends almost entirely on the kind of holiday the client is looking to have. Como for the headline experience and the densest concentration of luxury hotels and gardens. Garda for the wider, more Mediterranean lake with a stronger family and wellness offering. Maggiore for the quieter, more aristocratic, less photographed alternative.

We sometimes propose, for clients with two weeks and a willingness to travel slowly, a multi-lake itinerary: three days at Como at the start, four days at Maggiore in the middle, and a final long weekend at Garda before flying out of Verona.

This sequence — east-to-west to east — works particularly well in late May and early June, when the lakes are at peak garden bloom and the social load has not yet arrived in earnest. It is, for the right client, the most considered way to understand the region as a region rather than as three separate destinations.