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A vibrant city of medieval streets, fashionable boutiques and Renaissance churches, Bergamo is one of the Top 10 of the region.

This town has been home to some of the world’s finest ever makers of stringed instruments, a craft that reached its pinnacle in the 17th century at the workshop of Antonio Stradivari. It is hardly surprising, then, that Cremona’s top sights are fiddle-oriented: the Raccolta dei Violini is a roomful of exquisite 17th- and 18th-century instruments; while Museo Stradivariano pulls out all the big names in violin-making (Amati, Stradivarius, Guaneri).

Piazza del Comune, Cremona

This is the prettiest of the smaller lakes, and the town of Iseo itself – with modest hotel complexes and watersports facilities – is as touristy as it gets. Further north, at Lovere, Galleria Taldini has a small but perfectly formed collection of paintings by the likes of Jacopo Bellini, Tintoretto and Tiepolo. The interior of the church of Santa Maria della Neve, on the edge of Pisogne, is a visual delight of equal merit, its abundant frescoes painted by Romanino in 1532–4 (if the church is locked, enquire at the café inside the adjacent cloisters).

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

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.

The palaces, churches and artworks by Mantegna and Giulio Romano help make Mantova, too, one of the entire region’s Top 10.

Mantova

Mantova