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 mirage: a basilica, a closed monastery and a handful of stone houses on a scrap of land. The silence is complete enough to carry the sound of oars from the far shore.
Orta San Giulio faces its island across a lake twelve and a half kilometres long, one of the least-visited in northern Italy despite lying minutes from Lake Maggiore. A cloistered Benedictine abbey keeps the island, and its Way of Silence circles the single lane past painted signs that ask you to stop, listen and walk quietly. Above the village, the Sacro Monte di Orta climbs through woodland in twenty chapels that tell the life of Saint Francis in sculpture and fresco, begun in 1590 and now part of a UNESCO listing. Boats make the crossing in five minutes, which somehow makes the island's separateness stranger.
Solo
Cross with the first boat and walk the silence path before the day fills, then climb to the chapels with the lake opening below.
Couple
An island crossing, a slow lunch on Piazza Motta and one of the smallest of the northern lakes; Como's scale feels a world away.
- The island's Way of Silence begins and ends at the same point, lined with painted meditations on quiet.
- Twenty chapels of the Sacro Monte above the town stage the life of Saint Francis on a wooded promontory.
- Rowing boats and small ferries make the five-minute island crossing throughout the day.
- Lago d'Orta runs 12.5 kilometres end to end yet stays off almost every itinerary.
Tajarin so rich with egg yolk it glows, tossed with butter in kitchens above the lakefront.
When autumn cools the lake, bagna cauda appears: Piedmont's hot anchovy and garlic bath for raw vegetables.
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