Bellagio or Varenna: Two Ways to Live on Lake Como

Bellagio is on the tip of the promontory that divides the lake into its two southern branches. That is not a scenic detail but the organising fact of the place: water on three sides, two entirely different aspects within a fifteen-minute walk, and a position at the pivot of the whole lake. Everything crossing the centre passes it.

Varenna is on the eastern shore opposite, on the Lecco-branch side of the fork, built onto a steep slope with almost no flat ground and a lakeside walk carried out over the water because there was nowhere else to put it. It looks west and slightly south, and it is compact in a way Bellagio is not: a single village on a hillside rather than a village with a district attached.

This produces the difference people register without being able to name. Bellagio has directions; Varenna has one direction. From Bellagio you can look down the Como branch in the evening, down the Lecco branch in the morning and out at the mountains at the head of the lake at midday, and the village behaves differently on each side. Varenna faces one way and does one thing with great consistency.

Varenna is a west-facing village: a slow start in the shadow of its own hillside, then light on the front until very late on a summer evening. It is the classic eastern-shore condition, and why the village looks as it does in photographs taken at seven.

Bellagio is the only place on this lake where you can choose. The western flank of the promontory faces the Como branch and takes the evening; the eastern flank faces the Lecco branch and takes the morning; the point at the top sees both, and the hamlets on the ridge behind sit above the shadow line and hold sun after both shores below have gone into shade. Two houses in the same comune can have entirely different days.

The mechanism behind all of this, why a north-south lake has only two aspects and what the winter shadow line does to a shoreline house, is set out in full in our piece on the light on the western shore, and it is the most useful thing to read before committing to either place. The short version for this comparison: in Varenna, aspect is decided for you, so the question is which floor and which side of the lane. In Bellagio, aspect is a choice you are actively making, and should make deliberately.

Varenna has a railway station. That sentence carries more practical weight than anything else in this comparison: a person can leave Milan, or an airport served from Milan, and reach the village with luggage, without a car, without a driver, and without anybody at this end having to collect them. For an owner who comes often and briefly, it removes the largest piece of friction in the whole proposition. The cost is that the railway is physically there. The line runs along the eastern shore in a mixture of tunnel and cutting, squeezed into the same narrow band as the road, and its position relative to any given house is a thing to check rather than assume.

Bellagio has no railway and never will, because the promontory does not lead anywhere. It is reached by a long road down the ridge, or by the car ferry, or by the passenger boats, of which it is the natural hub. The central lake's routes converge there, which is why the waterfront is busy from mid-morning. Being at the end of a road carries an advantage that is easy to miss: no through traffic. Nothing passes Bellagio on its way to somewhere else, which is not true of the villages strung along either shore.

The two therefore produce different habits. Varenna owners arrive by train and use boats to move about. Bellagio owners arrive by car and often find they need it less than expected. Be honest about how you will actually arrive, eight or ten times a year.

Both are busy, and anyone claiming otherwise is describing a week in March. The useful question is what shape the pressure takes.

Bellagio takes a large volume of people and has somewhere to put them. The waterfront, the stepped lanes and the gardens absorb a crowd, and the promontory behind is an escape valve: a ten-minute climb takes you out of it entirely, and the upper hamlets carry on as though none of it were happening. It also holds its visitors later into the evening, because more of them are staying rather than passing through.

Varenna takes a smaller volume through a much smaller aperture, so it can feel more concentrated: the lakeside walkway and the old lanes are narrow, with stretches offering no way round. But a good share of its daytime population arrives on trains and boats and leaves on them, so the village empties earlier and more completely than its afternoons suggest. A summer evening in Varenna is quieter than a summer afternoon in Varenna by a wide margin, and that is one of the strongest arguments for owning there.

Out of season it reverses. Bellagio is larger, has a genuine resident population and a hinterland of hamlets behind it, and keeps more of itself open through the winter, a subject we have written about separately. Varenna in February is very small indeed. Whether that is an attraction or a problem is a question about you rather than about the village, but answer it beforehand.

Bellagio's water is busy and, at the point, lively. The promontory sits where two branches meet and the wind coming down from the north funnels past it, so the tip can have real movement on it when the shore a kilometre back is calm. That makes for superb sailing and an occasionally uncomfortable mooring, and it is why sheltered frontage on the flanks of the promontory is valued so differently from frontage near the point. It is also the best base on the lake for going anywhere by boat: the whole centre is within a short crossing in three directions, and the practical radius of a modest boat covers more shoreline than from anywhere else.

Varenna's frontage is more sheltered from the north and more exposed to the afternoon southerly that makes up over the middle of the day, so the water in front of it is typically flat in the morning and has texture on it by mid-afternoon. That is the ordinary rhythm of this lake rather than a defect, but it decides when you swim and when you leave a mooring. The village's shoreline is short and closely held, so private frontage there is scarce.

The buildings tell you what each place has been. Bellagio was a resort of substantial houses with grounds, and the promontory carries estates with terraced gardens running down to the water, along with village apartments in the stepped lanes and, above, stone houses in the hamlets with land, olives and views along both branches. The range is wide enough that a buyer with a specific brief can usually find something answering it.

Varenna is vertical and tight: tall narrow houses on a steep slope, frequently with no garden and no parking, sometimes with a terrace worth more than the rooms behind it. The prizes are the handful of properties with real frontage and a garden, and the houses on the slope above the village with a view down the branch. There is much less of everything, it turns over rarely, and the practical constraints are tighter than in almost any other village on the lake: access, parking, whether anything can be altered.

Three reader types cover most of the people who ask us this, and the answers are not evenly balanced.

Take Varenna if you will come often and briefly and would rather not drive: the long weekend from Milan, the two nights on the way through, guests who arrive under their own steam. The station is worth more than any other single feature available on this lake, and no amount of Bellagio's charm compensates for everybody arriving having to drive or be driven. Take the west-facing evening light as a bonus and accept that the house will be small, vertical and probably without parking.

If the house is the point, if you want grounds, a garden that goes somewhere, a mooring, a family in residence for a season rather than a weekend, a village that still functions in January, take Bellagio. It has the stock, the hinterland and a resident community, and its position means you can leave by water in three directions on a day when the roads are impossible. Choose your side of the promontory deliberately: the morning flank and the evening flank are different houses.

And if what you want is the lake rather than a particular village, with days spent moving about it, swimming somewhere else, meeting people off boats, then Bellagio again, and not close. It is the pivot of the central lake and everything is a short crossing away. Varenna is a superb place to arrive at and an awkward place to range from, unless you keep a boat, in which case the station tips it back and the two become genuinely hard to separate.