Lake Iseo

If you’ve never heard of Lake Iseo, you’re not alone. Nestling shyly between chocolate-box Como and glamorous Garda, the smallest of Lombardy’s four major lakes has quietly resisted the limelight over the centuries. Fashionistas may frolic on photo shoots in Garda’s ritzy spas, while excursion boats patrol Como’s west bank in the hope of spotting George Clooney in his front garden. But pint-sized Iseo shelters beneath cascades of forest, her charms undisturbed by tourist hordes. Iseo’s waters shimmer benignly amid nothing more disruptive than birdsong, the splashing of traghetti boats and the occasional peal of church bells.

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Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

Inevitably, a few cognoscenti have rumbled Lake Iseo’s unique brand of magic over the years. ‘Dear child,’ wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to her daughter in 1747, ‘I am now in a place the most beautifully romantic I ever saw in my life.’ (She duly bought a half-ruined palazzo in the waterfront town of Lovere, acquired a dairy and then set about introducing locals to what she called ‘the science of butter-making’.) Another fan was the novelist George Sand, who described the lake and its ambience in 1857 as ‘gentle and fresh, like one of Virgil’s Eclogues’. But other converts, especially in recent years, seem (happily) to have opted to keep their discovery to themselves.

Lovere is one of just three small towns on the shores of the lake, the others being Iseo itself, with its cheery array of pizzerias and gelaterias, and exquisite Sarnico — full of cobbled streets, stone gateways and iron balconies. Elsewhere around the lake, -dinkier settlements are linked like a daisy chain by an attractive coastal road — with even the tiniest of villages boasting an elaborate church, a flagged square and medieval alleyways. At sleepy Sale Marasino and neighbouring Sulzano, elegant mansions parade their finery in the evening lamplight like fashionable old ladies on a volta.