Our Italian vacation started in the town of Bellagio, situated essentially smack in the middle of Lake Como in the northern reaches of Italy. We arrived several hours behind schedule, after a long 26 hours of travel. Helpful Tip: Book those Eurostar trains in advance! We ended up waiting several additional hours in Roma - Termini after the first three trains to Milan were sold out, and this is not as much fun as you might expect. But after car -> plane -> plane -> train -> train -> train -> ferry, we finally arrived at our hotel.

Our first day on the lake was spent exploring the little town of Bellagio. It is set right on the lake, and many of the streets climb straight up the hill, and are pedestrian only. We wandered down to the small town of Pescallo, which the guidebook described as having a "seductive" square. Well we weren't really sure what they meant by that, but it was a pretty place indeed. We took in the town of Bellagio itself, and strolled around the grounds of the Villa Melzi, which had wonderful gardens.

On our second day in Bellagio we made our way down to the ferry terminal for our day on the lake. We had planned to take the ferry to a few different spots, but as you can see from the pictures below a strike thwarted our efforts! So we spend yet another day wandering and did not regret it. This time we explored the far reaches of the "island" (it's not an island, but set on the point like it is, it sure feels like an island), including the lovely Villa Giulia. This is a private residence, so we could not enter the grounds. Leading away from the villa, and stretching clear across to the opposite side of the point was a wide swath of land devoid of any buildings. This clearly used to serve as an approach to the villa for ships landing in ports on the opposite side. We were quite sad to only be spending the two full days here, and would love to go back some day and spend more time.