Northern Italy’s Lago Maggiore may be a big lake – so big that hiking around it will take you a week or more – but its three most celebrated beauty spots are packed into a tiny sub-section. In the Golfo Borromeo, the Lago’s narrow side arm between Stresa and Verbania, you can find all three Borromean Islands that top the list of the lake’s tourist attractions: the Isola Bella, the Isola Madre and the Isola dei Pescatori (the “Fishermen’s Island”).
Local ferries make it convenient for tourists to visit all three islands in one go, but you will need to budget an entire day for the trip. So, what if you only have the time to see one? This, ultimately, depends on your tastes and personal priorities.
If you are looking for a place of historic interest, you should pick the Isola Bella, converted in the 17th century by the aristocratic Borromeo family (who have owned most of the archipelago for centuries) into a showcase for their wealth and political influence.
If you fancy spending your time on a stroll between shops and restaurants in a picturesque setting, Fishermen’s Island will be just the ticket for you.
Isola Madre – The Most Voluptuous Place in the World
But if you are intrigued by the idea of a romantically landscaped fantasy world and want to see what Gustave Flaubert described as the “most voluptuous place in the world”, head straight for the Isola Madre.
With a surface area of eight hectares, the Isola Madre is the largest of the Borromean Islands. Before the Borromeos (originally bankers from Milan rather than land-owning noblemen) acquired the archipelago from the Bishop of Novara, the Isola Madre had been mainly used as a place to grow olives for the various convents in the diocese.
The Borromeos quickly extended the range of agricultural crops by planting grapes, cherries and citrus fruits. All of these orchards, however, disappeared in the 1800s, when the Borromeos commissioned a full-scale conversion of the island into a romantic garden. The idea was to combine English landscaping traditions with the Mediterranean love for ornaments and sub-tropical lushness.
A garden with a size of eight hectares – it practically occupies the entire island – covers a lot of ground and will grant you the space to breathe even on a busy day in the high season.
The Isola Madre is the only Borromean Island where you can roam freely without constantly bumping into other folks, …
… where you can engage in small journeys of discovery …
… and where you can find isolated places to sit down for moments of quiet reflection.
While the gardens may have changed with the times, the palace at its heart tells a different story. The house that the Borromeos commissioned in the late 16th century has survived largely unchanged and still reflects the classical restraint of the Italian Renaissance.
The palace is more modestly sized and less lavishly decorated than its counterpart on the Isola Bella, intended, so it seems, more as a summer residence for the Borromeos than as a means of projecting the social standing of the family.
Whereas royal guests of honour such as Napoleon and the Princess of Wales were housed on the Isola Bella, the palace on the Isola Madre appears to have been conceived on a more domestic scale.
It is relatively easy to imagine that people actually lived in these rooms, walked through these doorways, stood on these balconies.
Careful, however, because not everything around here is what is seems. Unlike the gardens of the Isola Madre, which have been part of the tourism itinerary for quite a long time, the palace was closed to the public until 1978 when it was thoroughly renovated and furnished with pieces from various Borromeo mansions across northern Italy.
Still, you get occasional glimpses of what aristocratic life may have felt like in ancient times during the long and hot summers of the Lago Maggiore. Peacocks and other colourful “birds of paradise” may be a fairly recent introduction …
… but the need for distraction – any kind of distraction – must have been pretty acute at times in such an isolated environment.
Entertainment for the members of the family appears to have been provided mainly by puppet theatre performances – a hobby that the Borromeos took so seriously that they hired the set designer of La Scala in Milan to equip their theatre with scenery panels and backdrops.
Several rooms in the palace have been dedicated to an exhibit of puppets and paraphernalia, but there is much else to see as well, and you can easily spend an entire day on the Isola Madre and in its extended gardens.
The island is easy to reach, with the regular Stresa-to-Intra ferries stopping there on the way. (Buy your tickets at the counter inside the ferry terminal building at Stresa.)
Most visitors, however, use one of the “hop-on-hop-off” boats that are operated by small independent companies. All of these boats use the same route, going from Stresa to the Isola Madre first, then to the Fisherman’s Island and the Isola Bella before returning to Stresa.
Such a round-trip takes the boats roughly 30 minutes, and they do this all day, picking up people at each stop to take them to the next stage of their journey.
Book your tickets online and pick them up at the hut outside the ferry terminal in Stresa. You will need a paper ticket because the different companies that operate these boats issue tickets in different formats and colours so that their captains can check at a glance whether the people waiting at the piers of the various islands have indeed booked their passage with his company.
The drawback of these round-trip journeys is that a trip around three islands in a single day can be a bit tiring as well as stressful and time-consuming if you are unlucky and miss more than one boat by a whisker – it will be 30 minutes (more on busy days) until a new one comes along.
They are, however, cheaper at 15 Euro p.p. You would need to pay roughly twice that amount for three separate trips by ordinary ferries. (And just so you know what kind of an outlay you will have to expect: on top of that, you have to purchase a 19-Euro-entrance fee for each of the palaces at Isola Madre and Isola Bella since you cannot go anywhere much on either island without having access to the palace grounds. At least, no entrance fee is charged for visits of the Fisherman’s Island.)
But here is the good news: the Borromean Islands are well worth the investment. We hope we have demonstrated that today – and will provide more evidence next week when we continue our journey around these beauty spots of the Lago Maggiore.
