The excursion will include a tour of the famous Borromean Islands.
First you will go to Madre Island by private boat. You’ll see the Renaissance House and the Botanical Garden. Then you’ll go on to Pescatori’s Island, a characteristic little village, where you will be able to have lunch in a typical restaurant.
Afterwards you’ll reach Bella Island, where you will visit the elegant baroque Palace and the Italian-style terraced garden.
At last you’ll come back to Stresa, where you will have free time for wandering around town and shopping.
Tourist Hints
Isola Madre: This is the largest of the Borromeo Islands. Its gardens, where all manner of peacocks, parrots and pheasants roam freely, are full of rare plants and exotic flowers, helping to create the charm of a tropical land.
Isola Madre is particularly famous for its azalea, rhododendron, and camellia blossoms but also for the pergolas of ancient wisteria, for the Cashmere Cyprus, which is more than two hundred years old and is the largest example in Europe, and for the espaliers of citrons and lemons, for the collection of hibiscus and the Ginkgo biloba.
The exhibition of “Teatrini delle Marionette” (small puppet theatres) dating from the seventeenth/nineteenth centuries is also truly exceptional.
Isola Bella: The Borromeo family home offers visitors an elegant and sumptuous setting, and it contains priceless works of art such as tapestries, furniture, statues, paintings, and stuccoes. It also has an unusual mosaic grotto, a cool and delightful place. Once you have visited the palace, there is access to the garden for a pleasant walk. The gardens form an extraordinary, flowered monument laid out over a series of ornate and overlapping terraces, a classic and inimitable example of seventeenth century “Italian garden”.
Isola dei Pescatori: A beautiful interlacing of picturesque lanes lined with the typical white houses, this island takes its name from the century-long traditional occupation of its inhabitants. Jewel of the island is the marvelous church of San Vittore, which still preserves an absis dating back to the XI Century.
