A village stacked on the deep

Above the eastern shore at Varenna, August 2023. From the air the village reads as a single stack of stone and ochre, stepping down its promontory to the water with boats moored at the edge; across the lake the far shore climbs into haze. This is the middle of Lake Como, where the water pinches to the point off Bellagio and splits into its two southern arms — the inverted-Y that the old Adda glacier gouged out of the mountains.

Como is deep. It runs past 400 metres at its lowest — 425 by the survey — and because the surface sits only about 198 metres above sea level, the bed lies more than two hundred metres below it. Few lakes in Europe go deeper. From overhead the colour gives it away: a cold, dark blue that never lightens toward the shore the way a shallow lake would.

Behind the village, out of frame, sits the Castello di Vezio, a stone fortress that has watched this reach of the lake for something like a thousand years and was once walled down to Varenna itself. The settlement below it began with fishermen; local accounts trace a wave of it to 1169, when refugees from the sacked Isola Comacina rowed across and rebuilt here. For centuries the catch was perch and shad, the shad salted and pressed into missoltini.

Varenna is one corner of the mid-lake ferry triangle — Bellagio and Menaggio are the other two — and the car ferries cross more or less all day. Just south of the village a river called the Fiumelatte runs about 250 metres from a cave in the mountain to the lake, one of the shortest in Italy; it flows only from spring to autumn, and Leonardo noted it five centuries ago. The eastern shore faces west, so the village takes the afternoon and evening light on its front while the far mountains go to silhouette behind it.