Baveno

Baveno sits on the west shore of Lake Maggiore, twenty-one kilometers north-west of Arona, looking directly across the Borromean Gulf toward Isola Bella and Isola dei Pescatori. The town was occupied in the Iron Age by the Lepontii, a tribe of the Ligures, before the Romans reached the lake. Above the lakeside road, the Chiesa dei Santi Gervasio e Protasio rises in an elevated position.

The Romanesque church is first documented in 1133 and stands beside an octagonal baptistery of the same period, the two buildings forming the religious centre of the historic core. The Baveno granite quarries to the north-west of town have been worked since the early sixteenth century and produced the columns of the Duomo di Milano, of San Paolo fuori le Mura in Rome, and of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan. A line of nineteenth-century villas runs along the shore, built when the lake became a fixed point on the European Grand Tour. The Isole Borromee are a ten-minute ferry away.