Italy
Orta San Giulio
A village on a lake you've never heard of, facing an island with one silent monastery.
The village ends at the water and the water holds an island. Isola San Giulio sits in Lago d'Orta like a hallucination — a Benedictine monastery, a Romanesque basilica, and a handful of stone houses on a scrap of land barely 300 metres across. The silence is so complete you can hear oars dipping from the far shore.
Orta San Giulio is a village on the eastern shore of Lago d'Orta in Piedmont, Italy, one of the least-visited Italian lakes despite sitting just 40 minutes from the shores of Maggiore. The Isola San Giulio, reachable by a five-minute boat crossing, has been a monastic site since the 4th century and now houses a Benedictine convent where the monks maintain a 'Way of Silence' — hand-painted meditative signs line the island's single path. Above the village, the Sacro Monte d'Orta is a UNESCO World Heritage Site of 20 chapels containing life-sized terracotta statues depicting the life of St Francis of Assisi, set among woodland overlooking the lake. Nietzsche wrote part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra while staying in Orta San Giulio in 1882.
Solo
The Way of Silence on Isola San Giulio was designed for solitary reflection. The village is small enough that a solo day becomes a rhythm — walk, boat, climb to the Sacro Monte, sit, repeat.
Couple
A lake without the crowds of Como, an island you cross by rowboat, a dinner on a terrace facing the monastery — Orta San Giulio is the Italian lake town that hasn't been discovered yet.
- The island of San Giulio — a five-minute ferry — is home to a Benedictine monastery where the nuns ask visitors to walk in silence.
- The lake is small enough to circumnavigate on foot in a day, the path passing through chestnut woodland with open water views throughout.
- The Sacro Monte above the town holds 20 chapels with life-sized frescoed scenes on a forested hillside — UNESCO-listed and almost never crowded.
- The town has been associated with Saint Julius since the 4th century — he is said to have crossed to the island on his cloak, and the story is still told as fact.
Risotto al Barbaresco in a lakeside terrace restaurant, the wine staining the rice deep red.
Tajarin pasta with butter and sage, the noodles so thin the yolk shows through.
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