Lake District between Verbano and Ceresio

Between Lake Maggiore and Lake Lugano lies a stretch of Lombardy that the international geographic press has identified with the phrase "Italian Lake District," coined in a well-known National Geographic article. The territory, largely contained within the province of Varese, cannot be reduced to its two principal basins: around the Verbano and the Ceresio gravitate at least a dozen smaller lakes, making this one of the densest lake concentrations on the European continent.

Lake Varese, Lake Comabbio and Lake Monate represent three of the most significant secondary bodies of water, each with its own ecological character. Lake Monate, in particular, is considered among the clearest in Lombardy, its oligotrophic waters standing in contrast to the eutrophication that affected the nearby Lake Varese over the course of the twentieth century. The latter, connected to Lake Maggiore via the Brabbia canal, covers an area of roughly 14.8 square kilometres and sits within a densely populated basin, where environmental pressures have required decades of remediation work.

The landscape connecting these bodies of water is far from uniform. The pre-Alpine slopes descend toward the shores at varying gradients, alternating broadleaf woods — hornbeam, oak, chestnut — with bands of riparian vegetation where reed beds and alder groves mark the boundary between land and water. The glacial moraines that shaped the entire area during the Pleistocene ice ages left behind a gentle yet intricate relief, with hills separating the basins and creating distinct microclimates within just a few kilometres of one another.

The Ceresio, or Lake Lugano, occupies a peculiar position: it is divided between Italy and Switzerland by a border that runs through the lake itself, with the peninsula of Campione d'Italia — an Italian municipality enclaved within Canton Ticino — forming one of the more curious administrative anomalies in European cartography. Its waters reach a maximum depth of 288 metres in the northern basin, while the southern arm, which laps the Varese shores of Porto Ceresio and Lavena Ponte Tresa, is considerably shallower and displays different hydrological characteristics.

What sets this district apart from the better-known Como shoreline is the quiet layering of its inland landscapes. While Lake Como has drawn international visitors for centuries, well documented in travel writing, the smaller lakes of the Varese area retain a more discreet profile, with lakeside villages that have not undergone the more rapid transformations of mass tourism. This is not the result of deliberate choice, but of a geography that distributed accessibility and visibility differently, leaving intact territorial balances that elsewhere have changed irreversibly.