Beyond Lake Como: Lake Iseo, the Lombard Lake with the Largest Island in Europe

Lake Como has become a playground for billionaires: villas with locked gates, hotels at a thousand euros a night, queues to get into Bellagio, and prices that would make the Côte d'Azur blush. If you want a Lombard lake with the same beauty — mountains plunging into the water, fishing borghi, ferries linking the shores — but with a soul that is still genuinely popular, go to Lake Iseo.

Lake Iseo has Monte Isola at its centre, the largest lake island in Southern Europe: a green cone of six hundred metres that shelters eleven hamlets, terraced olive groves, castles, and a network of trails walkable on foot or by bicycle (cars are banned). The ferry from Sulzano takes five minutes, and as soon as you land at Peschiera Maraglio you know you've entered another world: fishermen's houses, nets spread to dry, boats hauled ashore.

In 2016 Christo realised The Floating Piers — floating walkways linking Sulzano to Monte Isola — drawing 1.2 million visitors in sixteen days. The installation was dismantled, but it introduced the lake to the world. And yet, years later, tourism never exploded as feared: Lake Iseo remains a lake for Italians, not for Instagram.

The eastern shore — from Iseo to Lovere — is a succession of medieval borghi: Iseo has a compact historic centre with the Pieve di Sant'Andrea and a Tuesday market; Sarnico has an Art Nouveau lakefront with Belle Époque villas; Lovere, at the top of the lake, has the Accademia Tadini with a collection of Canova, Hayez, and Bellini that would justify a detour even without the lake.

Franciacorta — the wine region producing Italy's finest traditional-method sparkling wine — spreads across the hills south of the lake. The wineries accept visitors by appointment, the wines are extraordinary, and the tasting prices are a fraction of those in Champagne. Combining a day at the lake with a Franciacorta tasting is the perfect programme.

Eating at Lake Iseo is a simple pleasure: grilled lake sardines, polenta taragna with valley cheeses, Brescian casoncelli, and artisanal gelato that here is still taken seriously. Prices are those of the Brescian province: honest, with no tourist surcharge.

Lake Iseo is reachable from Brescia in forty minutes, from Bergamo in an hour, from Milan in an hour and a half. Iseo station is on the Brescia-Edolo railway line. Accommodation costs a third of Lake Como.