The process was pretty simple, however I did read some blogs for tips. For example one tip I read about was "do not forget to validate your ticket before you get on the train". There are these small yellow boxes at the beginning of each train track to validate your ticket.
In any case it was a pretty easy one hour (3 train stop) trip. We took the short taxi ride (10 euro) to the Hotel Royal Victoria. The Royal Victoria is the perfect type of hotel for our taste, it is small (43 rooms) quite nice but not to fancy, in a central location, on the beach (or lake in this case), has a pool and has drop dead gorgeous views. Spending 4 nights here worked out well given that we needed to be in Münich on Friday to spend the weekend with our niece Kimberly.
We enjoyed the day walking around the small town of Varenna, the population is around 823 people. We ate lunch just across the square from our hotel at Albergo Del Sole. Nothing to really write about except as Beth was asking me about the taste of the "house red wine" I ordered an American women, Holly who was on the street walking by our table, struck up a conversation with us. She was with her daughter Min (so smart and cute - Holly adopted her from Korea). They are on a 2 month vacation and as it turns out they live like 10 blocks from us in San Francisco. We invited her to sit at our table until Min wanted to get going to the beach! We made plans to meet again for the day, lunch or dinner.
After lunch we sat around our hotel bar/lounge area/pool and read. When we were heading back to our room who did we see again....Holly and Min!
Tonight we had a very nice Italian (what else) dinner at Osteria Quatro Pass, we enjoyed it very much.
A few photo's of Varenna:
View from our room
One of the small alleys of Varenna leading down to Lake Como
Varenna from land
Varenna from the ferry ride to Bellagio
Tuesday, August 9th - it looked like rain in the afternoon today so we decided we would take the ferry to Bellagio and spend the day there.
Bellagio has a long history "Before the Romans, there are signs of a human presence around Bellagio in the Paleolithic Period (about 30,000 years ago), it is only in the 7th to 5th centuries BC that there appears on the promontory a castellum, perhaps a place of worship and of exchange which served the numerous small villages on the lake. The first identifiable inhabitants of the territory of Bellagio, from 400 BC, were the Insubres a Celtic tribe."
Bellagio population is 3,820 however it is a very busy tourist site with many top hotels, restaurants and lots of shopping. We thought these would be memorable tennis shoes to purchase from there.
Or these...
After "window shopping" we walked over to visit the I Giardini de Villa Melzi. It is a beautiful villa. It was built by Francisco Melzi D'Eril, VP of the Italian Republic founded by Napoleon (1801-1803). Beautiful gardens with Chinese inspired water-garden and many groups of giants rhododendrons and azaleas.
All of a sudden we were starving....we just lost track of time.... we had entered the villa on the north end but we walked out of the south end there was this little restaurant, that we loved, called Alle Darsene Di Loppia. For appetizers Beth had zucchini flower filled with sheep's ricotta cheese on candied tomatoes. I has the asparagus salad with burrata cheese, red prawns an a egg yolk. My first course was spaghetti from Gragnano with Carbonara lake fish. For Beth's main course she had Lake fish and vegetables fried in olive oil and for my second course I had the sliced grilled Spanish pork. For desert I had the Apple tarte tatin with hazelnut ice cream, what a lunch.
We walked back into the villa and across it to get back to the ferry back to Varenna. Just before we got onto the ferry it started teeming, we did get wet but since it was warm we didn't mind. When got back to our room it started to thunder and lightning. We loved it, how often do we every see rain in Northern California let along lighting bolts...it was awesome and continued into the night which was even more spectacular.
Given the wind and rain we just ate in the Victoria Grill, part of our hotel, however it is in front of the hotel and thus overlooks the central square.
Wednesday, August 10th - today we tried to go out kayaking but was still a bit windy from the storm and the lake water was choppy. So we spend the day sunning ourselves, reading, enjoying our pool and swimming in the lake, which was just a but cool but very refreshing.
Where we ate our breakfast each morning
Our pool spot
Our lunch spot
This afternoon we decided to take a one hour private (shared with 2 other couples) boat tour around Lake Como, on Taxi Boat Varenna, it is a beautiful boat. We took the central lake classic tour.
Map which shows some of the locations we visited on our boat tour
First we went south of Varenna past Fiumelatte, the shortest river in Italy, then across to Bellagio and down past Villa Melzi and San Giovanni, which has a church on the lake. We then went across the lake and down to Villa Balbianello. A number of feature films have used Villa Balbianello for location shooting, including "A Month by the Lake (1995), 007 Casino Royale (2006), it was also used for the lake retreat scenes in Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones (2002)
Excellent choice on a incredible day, so lovely!
After our boat trip we enjoyed a cocktail overlooking the lake as the sunset. Once the sun went down we met Holly and Min at the Varenna Monamour ristorante. Min order the best meal Paccheri with Lobster. The end of another glorious day on Lake Como.
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