Lake Como: One Lake, Five Different Trips

Bougainvillea on white walls. Boat crossings on still water. Villas glimpsed through iron gates. That version of Italy is real. It is called Lake Como.

The mornings here have a quality that is hard to describe and easy to understand the moment you are there. The water below the terrace. The mountains above it. The espresso that arrives without hurrying.

Como has its own version of the beautiful Italian life. People have been coming here for it since Pliny the Younger built a villa on this shore two thousand years ago. Some of those villas are hotels now.

The ferry is how the lake reveals itself. On any crossing, the mountains are beside you, the water is below, and a village with its own character is growing on the other shore. Eight to fifteen minutes between Varenna, Bellagio, and Menaggio. They run all day.

Milan is an hour away by train, with direct connections to Como and Varenna. Arriving by car works too.

Five bases carry this lake. Each holds a different version of what a stay here can feel like. Where you sleep determines the one you come home with.

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Varenna

The village is small enough to know in a morning and beautiful enough that you will want to spend the afternoon in it too. Painted houses above the water. A walkway on stilts that runs along the lake edge. Lanes that climb steeply between the upper town and the waterfront, with the lake appearing among the buildings as you go.

The train from Milan arrives at Varenna-Esino, and when the doors open the lake is right there. The ferry terminal is a short walk from the station. Bellagio is fifteen minutes across the water. The whole lake opens up before the bags are down.

The hotels in Varenna are built as close to the water as the village allows. Hotel Royal Victoria has been on this waterfront since 1829. Lake-facing rooms give you the full breadth of that view from the first morning. The terrace is where Varenna watches the afternoon light move across the water. Villa Cipressi, also by R Collection Hotels, is one of those historic villas: terraced gardens stepping down to the lake, and a quiet that comes from a building that stood here long before it welcomed its first guest.

See rooms at Hotel Royal Victoria and Villa Cipressi. Browse more hotels in Varenna.

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Bellagio

Bellagio is the image most people carry before they arrive. The promontory between two branches of the lake. The grand waterfront. The salite: stone stairways rather than streets, climbing between houses with flower boxes on every sill. It earns all of it.

The mornings here fill quickly with day visitors. The early hours and the late evening are when the village belongs to the people who slept here. The journey from Milan involves a connection and a short ferry transfer at the end, worth knowing in advance so the arrival feels expected.

The hotels here carry the same assurance as the village. Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni has been on this waterfront since 1873, with terraced gardens, a private beach, and views over both branches of the lake from the upper floors. Stepping onto this waterfront is what Bellagio looks like in every photograph. It delivers. Hotel Belvedere is a considered alternative on the hillside, with a free ferry shuttle that makes every morning departure simple from the first day.

Explore Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni and Hotel Belvedere. Browse more hotels in Bellagio.

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Menaggio

Menaggio is quieter. More residential. The kind of place where you see locals doing their weekly shopping alongside tourists without either group dominating the experience. The Saturday market is genuine. The café on the ferry pier has been there for decades.

The ferry to Varenna takes five minutes. The crossing to Bellagio takes eight. Menaggio is close enough to everything that the rest of the lake becomes a series of easy afternoons rather than full days of planning. Longer stays work well here. After a few days the morning coffee place is already yours, the ferry schedule is second nature, and the lake has started to feel like somewhere you have always known.

The hotels here suit the village’s ease. Grand Hotel Victoria Concept & Spa, by R Collection Hotels, has a full waterfront position and the kind of service that makes a longer stay feel simple rather than planned. Hotel Garni Corona sits on the main square, five minutes from the ferry, and has been run by the same family for three generations. Small, warm, and lake-facing, it is the version of Menaggio that feels like staying with people who know the village rather than checking into it.

View Grand Hotel Victoria and Hotel Garni Corona. Browse more hotels in Menaggio.

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The Tremezzina Shore

The Tremezzina shore is where the hotel is the trip. The stretch between Tremezzo, Lenno, and Lezzeno is where you wake up inside a terraced garden above the lake and find that the day is already complete.

Villa Carlotta holds one of the great botanical collections in northern Italy: camellias, rhododendrons, azaleas filling terraces above the water. Villa del Balbianello is on its own small peninsula, a place so often photographed that arriving by boat still manages to surprise you. Ferry crossings are there for the days that call for movement. The days here tend to find their own shape.

The hotels on this shore were built for people who understood that the lake itself was the destination. Grand Hotel Tremezzo opened in 1910 and added a floating pool onto the lake in the 1920s, which remains something worth waking up early for. Villa La Mirabella, in Cadenabbia, is a restored nineteenth-century villa with eleven rooms, a pool set into the hillside above the lake, and the same family running it since it first opened its doors.

Check Grand Hotel Tremezzo and Villa La Mirabella. Browse more hotels on the Tremezzina shore.

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Como and Cernobbio

The station opens onto a proper city. The Duomo is minutes away on foot. The silk shops in the centro storico sell fabric by the meter, much of it destined for the couture houses of Milan and Paris. Como has been making silk and building cathedrals since the fifteenth century, and that history is in every street. An hour from Milan by train, fifty minutes from Malpensa by shuttle, it is also one of the easiest arrivals on the lake.

Cernobbio, a few minutes along the western shore, is where the lake takes on a quieter character. Passalacqua is in Moltrasio, just north of Cernobbio. It was built in 1787 as the summer villa of a Milanese family and remained in private hands for two centuries. The World’s 50 Best Hotels named it the world’s best boutique hotel in both 2024 and 2025. A stay here is the lake in its most private form: unhurried, complete, and entirely at its own pace.

Hotel San Giuseppe in Cernobbio offers the same quiet western shore character in a smaller property, close to Como and within easy reach of the mid-lake ferries.

Reserve at Passalacqua and Hotel San Giuseppe. Browse more hotels in Como and Cernobbio.

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When to Come

Late May through June is when the lake is at its most generous. Gardens are in flower. Light is warm and long. Mornings carry a clarity the rest of the season works toward. June is the answer that comes up most in conversations about when to go.

September carries its own version. The summer energy has softened, the water is at its warmest after months of sun, and the light in the late afternoons turns amber and low. September is often the month people come back for.

July and August are the lake fully alive. The ferries are busy through the middle of the day and the towns are animated. Early mornings and late evenings, after the day visitors have left, return the lake to something quieter and very beautiful. Menaggio and the Tremezzina shore carry the high summer well.

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Lake Como has a way of making itself felt long after you have left it. The mountains and the water together. The particular quiet of a morning on the lake before the ferries begin. The version you chose will be the one you find yourself describing to someone months later, usually while trying to explain why they should go.

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