Stresa

Stresa is a classic Grand Tour resort town and perfect base for exploring Italy's Lago Maggiore (Lake Maggiore)—especially the Borromean Islands

Stresa, seen from Monte Mottarone. (Photo by Mbdortmund)

Stresa is the perfect base for exploring Maggiore. It is centrally located on the lake—within 90 minutes' drive or ferry ride from most sights—plus it is packed with hotels, which helps keeps prices down and room availability wide open.

That said, Stresa itself is fairly unexciting. It's a pretty enough resort town. The handful of streets in its center are pocketed with restaurants. Its shores are lined by large and stately (and, for the most part, large and dull) hotels.

Stresa itself really has only four things going for it:

1. The ferry dock for the boats over to the Borromean Islands, by far the top sights on Lake Maggiore
2. A fairly major summer music festival (www.stresafestival.eu)
3. A cable car up to Monte Mottarone with nice little hikes back down (see below)
4. Hemingway memories

The Borromean Islands

• Isola Bella - "The Beautiful Island," a terraced pyramid of gardens around a whimsical little pleasure palace packed with paintings, tapestries, elaborately decorated rooms, and World War II memories... » more
• Isola Madre - "The Mother Island," a lovely botanic gardens strutting with peacocks and other exotic birds around an historic villa with quirky collections... » more
• Isola Superiore - More poetically called Isola dei Pescatori ("The Isle of the Fishermen"), the lived-in island has a pair of hotels (Hotel Verbano is the best) and some restaurants and souvenir shops... » more
  

A cable car ride up to the Mottarone plateau

The view over Lake Maggiore from Monte Mottarone. (Photo by Mbdortmund) At the north end of Stresa, at Piazzale Lido 8, is a funivia (cable car), which glides up the steep lakeside hills, pauses at an Alpine garden, and ends up 20 minutes later at Mottarone, a 4,920-foot plateau high above the lake. (tel. +39-0323-30-295; www.stresa-mottarone.it).

To get back to the lakeside, you can (a) ride the cable car back down, (b) hike, or (c) plan ahead by renting a mountain bike from the station at the bottom, take it up with you to help explore, and then simply coast back down.


A trail on Monte Mottarone, Lake Maggiore. (Photo by Mbdortmund) Best advice: The ferries back from the Borromean Islands stop at Stresa's "Mottarone Funivia" stop before chugging down to the main dock, so hop off here, check out the high Alpine plateau, then take the fast descent by bike.

Back by the lakeside, return the bike and stroll back into town in a pleasant 20 minutes along a lakeside path: stunning lake views to one side; to the other a procession of villas and mini-palaces—some stately, some crumbling, some weirdly festooned with modern sculptures.

Hemingway and Lake Maggiore

Ernest Hemingway set several important parts of A Farewell to Arms here on Lake Maggiore, and in Stresa in particular.

The hero of the novel is a young American ambulance driver who is wounded fighting for the Italian army in World War I.

He falls in love with his nurse, then after several more adventures—including inadvertently deserting while escaping the Germans—he reunites with his love in Stresa.

Before fleeing by boat to Locarno on the Swiss end of the lake, the lovers shack up in the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromees, where Hemingway himself often stayed—and, if you have about $1,500 a night to burn, you, too, can stay in the perfectly preserved Hemingway Suite. (Rooms for mere mortals start around $250 online.)

By the way, those black and white pictures to the right aren't stills from the movie version of A Farewell to Arms.

Those are pictures of a very young Papa himself. See, Hemingway was an American who volunteered to fight in World War I as an ambulance driver. He was wounded in Italy, where he met a nurse and fell in love…

Well, at least he followed the maxim to "write what you know."

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