When you travel to Lake Como, you should dedicate one day of your holiday to finding out more about the town in which you are staying and its immediate surroundings.
There is much to see, no matter where you happen to be based – and often from more perspectives than one.
For our own holiday on the lake, we had come to the town of Como. Easily accessible by road and by train, Como serves as a good starting point for further explorations, and – as the provincial capital and largest city in the area – provides a wide choice of shops and restaurants.
It is also lively enough to make a walk through town an enjoyable experience …
… and can even boast a few architectural gems – such as its Gothic Cathedral.
The poet Shelley (yes, him again), never one for polite understatement, raves in his writings about the church’s “dazzling spires” that were “piercing the solid blue” of the Italian sky, “the serene depth of this Italian heaven”, and concludes that the effect of it all is “beyond anything I had imagined architecture capable of producing”. Well, we suggest you go and judge for yourself.
As for short walks in and around Como, you can stroll through the gardens of the Tempio Voltano and along the Romantic Promenade on the western shore of the lake.
Going up to Brunate – Balcony of Lake Como
This route will take you past several mansions to the Villa Olmo, the biggest palace in town. We, however, chose to walk to the eastern side of the marina and take the Funicolare …
… all the way up to the village of Brunate, known in Italy as the Balcone delle Alpi, a full-mouthed promise that most other languages opt to take down a notch or two.
In English, Brunate is usually referred to as the “Balcony of the Pre-Alps”, an important qualification that, I believe, reflects a more sober and realistic assessment. (Brunate sits at an altitude of approx. 700 metres.)
It is true, however, that the village, whether the balcony or the stalls of the Alps, offers stunning views across the landscape, even to those visitors who are too lazy to leave their funicular railway cabin.
For those of who feel like exploring the village and its surroundings on our own two feet, several walks further inland or higher up the hill are sketched out on a display near the Brunate station exit of the Funicolare.
Basically, you have the choice between two trails: one that leads to the Faro Voltiano, a lighthouse in name but essentially an architectural folly, since Lake Como, rarely wider than 1 km, does not really need a lighthouse for its pleasure boat traffic, which had managed all right until the Faro was built in 1927, and the other one to the Fonte Pissarottino.
If you have the time, you can do both walks (schedule approximately one hour for either one) or, alternatively, pick a longer route such as a hike up to the near-by summit of the 1200-metre-high Monte Boletto. We opted for the route to the Pissarottino spring, having heard that it offered a wonderful view over the lake.
Both of the two shorter trails start at the same spot behind the station and are well-marked. Just be careful not to miss the point where they separate just behind the local parish church of Sant’Andrea Apostolo.
The Pissarottino trail takes you back in time to the Golden Age of Brunate in the years before WWI, when the village was not just a hamlet on the edges of Como but a fancy resort town in its own right, and a much fancier one at that.
The rise of Brunate was, as it happens, inextricably linked with the construction of the Funicolare in 1894, which had provided the growing number of Lake Como’s visitors with easy access to the village, and many of the summer guests from Milan liked the cool mountain air and the grand vistas so much that they decided to build a summer house here.
Over the next 20 years, many magnificent properties were built on the slopes above the lake …
… that accommodated wealthy and important people from all over Europe.
Alongside the route, you will get an idea of how cosmopolitan Brunate must have been in those days. The names of Mara Belcheva and Pencho Slaveykov, which feature on a plaque that is attached to one of the villas you will see en route …
… meant little to me straight away, but I did a little research since then and it seems that the story of their passionate love affair is rather well-known in their native Bulgaria, well-known enough for a portrait of the couple to make it on to the country’s 50-Lev-bill.
Pencho Slaveykov was the son of one of Bulgaria’s leading 19th century writers and himself a nationally famous poet, Mara Belcheva a young, recently widowed lady-in-waiting of the king’s mother (Belcheva’s husband, the Bulgarian Secretary of the Treasury, had been killed in an assassination attempt on the country’s Prime Minister). When the two met, it was apparently a case of love at first sight.
Belcheva, herself a published poet, followed her lover on his travels throughout Europe, from Athens and Istanbul to Rome and Naples and eventually to Brunate, where Slaveykov died in 1912, aged 46.
The walk also features splendid views deep into the lake’s Alpine hinterland …
… and provides insights into the mind-set of the Milanese property owners who apparently found it difficult to decide where to take their architectural inspiration from: ancient Rome …
… or the Alpine vernacular.
After about 30 minutes, you will arrive at the Pissarottino spring …
… which, to be frank, left us a bit baffled. Springs like this are fairly common on the slopes of the Pre-Alps, but this particular spring had been decked out with statuettes as well as other religious paraphernalia and appears to be some sort of a local shrine.
What happened that made this one spring so special? There appears to be no explanation on site or, indeed, anywhere else, like on the Internet.
The real reason why people come here, of course, is the view of Lake Como just opposite the spring …
… which was just as magnificent as advertised, we are pleased to report. Not everything in life requires words to explain.
