plk.voyage

Pierre-Luc and Karine's travel log

Lakes and Northern Italy 2024

This was less a “new country” trip and more a return to an old friend — our sixth time in Italy, bookended by a few days in Switzerland. Instead of chasing the headline cities (we skipped Venice and Rome on our first plan, then caved on Rome), we built the trip around the northern lakes, a stretch of coast and islands, and the places we already love enough to keep coming back to. Over about four weeks we went from Alpine lakes to terraced vineyards to a volcanic island, mostly by train and ferry, mostly in the rain.

If you’re planning something similar, the sections below break the trip into bases you can lift, stretch, or trim to fit your own time.

Map of everywhere we stayed on this trip.

At a glance

Duration: ~30 days
When we went: late August – mid-September 2024
Style: Alpine lakes + canal & art cities + coastal hiking + a volcanic island + food pilgrimage

🚊 Getting around

No rental car at all. We flew into Zurich and did the whole thing by train and ferry — Swiss trains into the lakes, lake ferries between villages, Italian intercity trains between cities, and boats out to Ischia and along the Amalfi Coast. Every base is walkable; the one thing a car would help with is the quieter corners of the lakes.

🧭 Route

  • ✈️ Fly into Zurich, then train on
  • 🚆 Lugano (Switzerland), 3 nights
  • ⛴️ Train + ferry to Bellagio (Lake Como), 4 nights
  • 🚆 Stresa (Lake Maggiore), 2 nights
  • 🚆 Venice, 3 nights
  • 🚆 Milan, 3 nights
  • 🚆 Monterosso al Mare, Cinque Terre, 2 nights
  • 🚆 Florence, 2 nights
  • 🚆 + ⛴️ Ischia, 4 nights
  • ⛴️ Amalfi Coast, 2 nights
  • 🚆 Rome, 3 nights
  • ✈️ Fly back to Zurich, 1 night
  • ✈️ Fly home

🏆 Absolute Best of the Trip

The full trip details

📍 Lugano, Switzerland – 3 nights

An easy, pretty landing pad after the long haul. Lugano sits on its own lake in Ticino, the Italian-speaking corner of Switzerland — so you get Italian food, Italian on the street, and a palm-lined promenade before you’ve even crossed the border. We flew into Zurich, grabbed brunch in the centre, then trained a few hours south. Days here were deliberately slow: a lot of sleep to shake the jet lag, pizza for breakfast, and two hikes — Monte Brè (there’s the option of a funicular-assisted climb to the best view in town) and a soggier second one the next day on
Mount San Salvatore. A good, low-stakes warm-up before Italy proper.

🏆 Best of Lugano

  • 🍳 Brunch in Zurich: Babu’s Bakery & Coffeehouse — Somewhere to stop for a brunch before catching the train to Lugano (day 2).
  • 🍳 Breakfast: Acqua e Farina — a Neapolitan-style margherita, perfectly cooked, makes a surprisingly great breakfast (day 3).
  • 🍽️ Dinner: Osteria Trani — won Lugano on the strength of the octopus and the white wine (day 4).
  • 🥾 Hiking: Monte Brè — the best views and the most accessible trail we did in the region (day 3).

✍️ Detailed log entries with photos

📍 Bellagio, Lake Como – 4 nights

Train to Como, then a ferry up the lake to Bellagio, which sits right on the point where Lake Como splits into its two southern arms — the view everyone’s seen on a postcard. This was the heart of the lakes leg: steep cobblestone lanes, lakeside villa gardens, a port-to-port hike, and a wonderful discovery — Mr. Panino, a tiny sandwich shop whose warm panini we’re still thinking about. Bellagio empties out at night; it’s built for the day-trippers who pour off the ferries, so staying over buys you the quiet early mornings and evenings when the village is yours. Four nights also made it an easy base for hopping the ferry across to Varenna and Menaggio. The lake is probably the most accessible by boat but even then, they are pretty slow.

🏆 Best of Bellagio

✍️ Detailed log entries with photos

📍 Stresa, Lake Maggiore – 2 nights

Ferry back across to Varenna, then trains over to Lake Maggiore and the belle-époque lakefront town of Stresa. The whole reason to come is just offshore: the Borromean Islands (Isole Borromee) — Isola Bella with its terraced palace gardens, the little fishing village of Isola dei Pescatori, and greener Isola Madre. We’d penciled in longer, but quickly realized getting anywhere on Maggiore eats hours on slow ferries each day, so we traded our extra lake days for two more in Venice. Two nights turned out to be exactly right.

🏆 Best of Stressa

✍️ Detailed log entries with photos

📍 Venice – 3 nights

The first of the “we said we weren’t going to” cities — and worth breaking the rule for. The one tip we want to make sure to pass on: get off the San Marco conveyor belt and lose yourself in the back canals and quieter sestieri, where Venice is more of a lived-in city. Our favourite stop was the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, her modern-art house in a low palazzo on the Grand Canal over in calm Dorsoduro. We also climbed the Campanile di San Giorgio Maggiore across the water for the best view back over the lagoon to St Mark’s — the same panorama as the main bell tower, at a fraction of the crowd.

🏆 Best of Venice (this trip)

  • 🍽️ Dinner: al CoVino — a tiny room of about 18 seats and an open kitchen. The chef can walk you through every ingredient in detail, including how confident he is that the flour has never so much as looked at a nut (I’m allergic to nuts, so this raised my confidence tenfold). Dishes are small and come in three themes — fish, meat, and garden — with a chef’s menu in either fish or meat. Everything was excellent; the experience is a must (day 11).
  • 🍽️ Dinner, runner-up: Ai Mercati — a very close second to CoVino, with great execution and outdoor seating on the plaza.
  • ☕️ Coffee: Caffè del Doge — a single-origin menu, with two different origins pulled really well.
  • 🖼️ Art: Peggy Guggenheim Collection (day 13)

✍️ Detailed log entries with photos

📍 Milan – 3 nights

Our first Italian stop that felt genuinely lived-in rather than touristed — Italy’s capital of fashion and design, and a city that mostly just gets on with its day. The headline sight is the Duomo and its rooftop forest of spires, with the glass-roofed Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II right beside it, but the real pleasure here was lower-key: good coffee, unhurried meals, and the simple luxury of existing somewhere for a few days with nothing to tick off. (It’s also where Karine’s phone staged a slow-motion meltdown — see day 16 if you want the saga.)

🏆 Best of Milan

  • 🍳 Breakfast: Obicà — debatable as a breakfast spot, but the gran degustazione is a gloriously cheesy way to start the day (day 15).
  • 🍽️ Dinner: Cantina Piemontese (day 15).
  • ☕️ Coffee: Nowhere Cafe — both the coffee and the food were top tier. Don’t miss the cinnamon buns (day 16).

✍️ Detailed log entries with photos

📍 Monterosso al Mare, Cinque Terre – 2 nights

Our most-visited spot in all of Europe — fifth time in six Italy trips. Monterosso is the largest and northernmost of the five Cinque Terre villages, and the only one with a proper sandy beach; it splits into a medieval old town and a newer resort stretch linked by a short tunnel. It’s also the traditional trailhead for the Blue Trail, the coastal path that threads all five villages (Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, Riomaggiore) through terraced cliffside vineyards above the sea. The trail is well kept and genuinely gorgeous — just be ready to share it.

🏆 Best of Monterosso

✍️ Detailed log entries with photos

📍 Florence – 2 nights

Fifth time in Firenze and still mixing old favourites with something new each visit. One last seaside coffee in Monterosso, an easy train via Pisa (you can totally skip the leaning tower by the way), and we arrived to full sun for once. The city rewards return visits precisely because the greatest hits are packed so tightly together: Brunelleschi’s dome over the Duomo, the Uffizi and the Accademia’s David, the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio, and the quieter artisan workshops across the river in the Oltrarno. We’d done the big-ticket museums on earlier trips, so this time leaned more toward wandering, eating, and the best gelato of the whole trip.

🏆 Best of Florence (this trip)

✍️ Detailed log entries with photos

📍 Ischia – 4 nights

Our volcanic-island interlude in the Bay of Naples, reached by hydrofoil from the mainland. Ischia is the biggest island in the bay — greener and more lived-in than glossy Capri next door — built around a dormant volcano, Monte Epomeo, with thermal spa gardens and the striking Aragonese Castle perched on its own islet at the end of a stone causeway. Verdict: not blown away, not disappointed — though the cold, the rain, and a genuinely chaotic bus system coloured our stay. The highlights were that castle and the climb up Epomeo. Four nights was a touch long given the weather; pace yourself, and don’t build your days around the buses.

🏆 Best of Ischia

✍️ Detailed log entries with photos

📍 Amalfi – 2 nights

A multi-boat journey off Ischia and down to the Amalfi Coast, that impossibly vertical stretch of cliffside towns south of Naples. We based ourselves in Amalfi town itself with its striped Duomo di Sant’Andrea rising over the main piazza. The small town harbour is where the ferries and coast buses connect pretty much everything on the coast. The centrepiece of our stay (and our reason to come) was the Path of the Gods (Sentiero degli Dei), the high trail along the ridge connecting to Positano. True to this trip, we hiked in the sun and poring rain. Short stay, big payoff.

🏆 Best of Amalfi

✍️ Detailed log entries with photos

📍 Rome – 3 nights

The second city we swore off and visited anyway. We’d been twice before, so this time was less about sightseeing and more about eating our way across the centro storico — we mostly just wandered. The short list: Barnum for the best coffee of the trip, and a proper pizza pilgrimage between Forno Campo de’ Fiori (old-school pizza al taglio) and the much-hyped Forno Roscioli (great pizza, feral queue, and not as good as the Campo de’ Fiori in our book). A fitting, carb-forward finale before the long way home.

🏆 Best of Rome (this trip)

✍️ Detailed log entries with photos

Useful links

Know before you go

A grab-bag of practical stuff we learned planning this trip, or the hard way on the road.

Trains & ferries over cars

  • This whole trip works beautifully without a rental car. Swiss and Italian intercity trains connect every city; lake ferries and the Ischia/Amalfi boats handle the rest. Travelling carry-on makes station-to-station hops painless. Avoid rolling suite cases as you’ll find the uneven surface, multiple stairs makes them more a pain than a convenience.
  • The one tradeoff: the quieter edges of the lakes (especially Maggiore) eat hours on ferries. We cut our Maggiore time short and reinvested the days in Venice — no regrets. We would have explored more of the lake with a car however.

Weather

  • It rained on nearly every travel day. Pack a proper rain layer and expect to hike at least one marquee trail (hi, Path of the Gods) in the wet. That’s not our normal Italian travel experience but it was a reminder that it’s not because the “average” weather calls for little rain and warm that it’s what you’ll get.
  • Weather forecasts apps in the hills and on the coast keep disagreeing with each other constantly. Keep plans flexible and look at radar maps.

Ischia buses

  • The island’s bus system is genuinely chaotic — the number Google and the local app told us to take (the 197) doesn’t exist. Check the posted timetables at the stop, build in buffer time, and don’t count on buses to make a tight connection. It’s back from 2024 so things might have improved since.

Food & reservations

  • The best meals were often the simplest: panini in Bellagio, pizza-for-breakfast in Lugano and Rome. Chase bakeries and sandwich shops, not just sit down restaurants.
  • Reserve ahead for the small, chef-driven rooms (al CoVino in Venice is one huge exemple of that). Popular walk-up spots like Forno Roscioli in Rome draw crowds that swarm rather than queue — go hungry but be patient.