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Lake Lugano snakes between Italy and Switzerland, and its principal resort, Campione d’Italia, is in fact an Italian enclave within Switzerland’s borders. Campione is a slightly raucous island of pizza restaurants and gambling casinos interrupting the more staid Swiss shoreline, where to the south, outside Melide, is the delightfully kitsch Swiss Miniatur, with its vaguely accurate “map” of Switzerland, including all its major monuments reproduced at 1/25 of their actual size.

Lake Lugano

Three verdant islands, one still dominated by a fishing village, the other two clad in the sumptuous villas and ornate gardens of the local ruling Borromeo clan.

Varese is part of a quartet of small lakes (along with Monate, Comábbio and pond-sized Biandronno) that were popular with 18th-century Lombard landscape painters for their bucolic settings, Romanesque churches, mirror-like waters and Alpine backdrops. A few factories notwithstanding, the area is largely unchanged today. Roads rarely touch the lake shores, forcing detours into lakeside villages. This marshy region has yielded some important prehistoric finds, most especially on Lake Varese’s Isolino islet (catch a boat from Biandronno, June–September), though the actual finds are kept at the Musei Civici in Varese town.

You can relive the Middle Ages by exploring Lombardy’s castles, scrambling up watch-towers and patrolling the ramparts like a soldier of old. The Castello Sforzesco in Milan is mostly a museum, though regular tours take you up onto the battlements. Those on the lakes can be more atmospheric, some with intriguing museums, others romantically half in ruins. The best fortresses are at Varenna, and Arco, Malcésine and Sirmione (see Grotte di Catullo, Sirmione) by Lake Garda.