Today I did the thing you are contractually required to do on Lake Como: I caught the ferry to Bellagio, the “pearl of the lake”. The town sits on the point where the lake splits in two, the Grand Tour painters adored it, Liszt swanned around it, and every travel writer since has been paid by the superlative.
The arrival is the best bit, and I have the footage to prove it:
It is genuinely lovely. It is also heaving. July crowds move through those steep little lanes like slow porridge, and after two days of quiet villages it was a shock to be back in elbow country. My plan read like a proper working brief: the old fishing hamlets around the back of the point, crowd movement studies up the famous Salita Serbelloni staircase, the galleries tucked between its boutiques. The salita happened, the galleries happened, and then the crowds and the heat rewrote the rest… the fishing hamlets are still on the list for a return visit, and honestly, having a reason to come back to Lake Como is not a tragedy.
What I climbed to instead was the walk out toward the point where the two arms of the lake split apart. And the thing that grabbed me hardest up there was not the villas or the views. It was a wall of bicycles.
Someone has mounted their old bikes up the face of their stone house, saddle to eave, like a museum that refuses to go indoors. This is serious cycling country… the climb behind Bellagio goes up to the little chapel of the Madonna del Ghisallo, patron saint of cyclists, where the walls are covered in bikes and jerseys from a century of racing. So a house wearing its bicycles is not decoration here. It is a family tree.
I took exactly five photos in Bellagio. Five! In Como I would take sixty-two (spoiler for later in the week). Partly the crowds, but mostly a choice: some days the camera is a net and some days it is a fence. Today I wanted to stand in the laneway and let the place go past without me trying to keep any of it. The five I did take are all texture and geometry, reference for linework, the kind of shots nobody else on that ferry wanted.
That is the strange economy of a working trip. The famous view was free and I left it on the shelf. The bicycles were worth the whole ferry ticket.
Tomorrow I am heading up the valley north of the lake, to a town that got buried by a mountain four hundred years ago. Bring your good shoes.
Sunday was meant to be a rest day. Instead: a red train over the Alps, a walk through a century of melting ice, and two donkeys with the best address in Switzerland.
A sketching day in Varenna on Lake Como. Train up, walking trail through the olive trees to Castello di Vezio, eagle owls at close range, then gesture studies on the ferry pier as the lake week wraps up.
A business day in Como and Cantù, where silk built a city and lace built its neighbour. Talks with a silk printing house about printing ink work on fabric, plus 62 reference photos for the studio year ahead.
