Laveno-Mombello

Laveno-Mombello sits on Lake Maggiore's eastern shore in the province of Varese, at the foot of Sasso del Ferro, a 1,062-meter limestone wall that drops directly to the lake. The town is the ferry crossing to Verbania and the Borromean Islands on the opposite shore. From 1856 onward, Laveno was one of Europe's leading industrial ceramics centers: Società Ceramica Italiana made tableware and tiles here for over a century, working with designers including Giò Ponti, Guido Andlovitz and Antonia Campi.

The factories closed in the 1990s. The MIDeC, the International Museum of Ceramic Design, opened in the sixteenth-century Palazzo Perabò in the lakeside hamlet of Cerro, charts that history from the mid-nineteenth century forward. Above town, an open bucket funicular built in 1958 climbs Sasso del Ferro in fifteen minutes; the summit terrace looks across the lake to Lago d'Orta and the southern Alps. Santa Caterina del Sasso, the cliff-clinging fourteenth-century monastery, is a fifteen-minute drive south.