3 Great Things to do with Kids on Italy’s Lake Maggiore

Kids have notoriously short attention spans for the usual tourist attractions: monuments, palaces, museums, churches (especially churches). But show them some action or something truly strange and they snap right out of their travel lethargy. Lake Maggiore, in northern Italy, may be just what they need on your Italian trip. Here are three places to start.

Take a Boat Ride

This is actually a good way to get around (and across) Lake Maggiore, and you have a number of options: steamers, hydrofoils (corse rapide) and car ferries (traghetti) operated by Navigazione Lago Maggiore to connect the towns along the lake shore and provide round-trip excursions from late March through mid-October. One of these, from Laveno, is a good way to see the Borromean Islands if you’re staying on the eastern shore of the lake. A cruise is also an easy way to visit the northern part of the lake, which reaches into the Ticino, the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland. Kids may enjoy the speed and sense of “flying” on a hydrofoil ride, but a conventional steamer gives better views of the scenery.

View from the top of Montarone, Lake Maggiore, Italy © Stillman Rogers

Visit Isola Bella

Here’s one palace the kids won’t mind touring. First, Isola Bella Palace is on an island, so the trip begins with a boat ride. Second, the palace is sheer fantasy, a riot of over decoration with larger-than-life figures, gold curlicues and even a series of fake grottos encrusted with shells and pebbles. There’s no standing around listening to a guide rant on: Your family can tour at your own speed. And after the Baroque palace, built by the powerful Borromeo family (you’ll hear a lot about them around Lake Maggiore) in the mid-1600s, you can explore the equally fantastic gardens, terrace after terrace (10 in all) filled to the last inch with clipped topiary shapes and statues, and flower beds in fussy patterns. It’s not big, so kids won’t get tired trudging down multiple paths, and you can see most of it — and the palace — from the top terrace.

Climb a Mountain the Easy Way

Right at the landing in Stresa, where you catch a boat to Isola Bella, is the station for an aerial gondola ride to the summit of Mt. Mattarone, so you can go directly from one to the other. Views from the Monte Mottarone Cable Car get better and better as you climb, and encompass the town, the lake, Isola Bella and the other Borromean Islands. At the top of the ride there’s a chairlift (free with your cable car ticket) to the summit. From there, the views stretch west across Lake Orta far below and into the Swiss Alps. On the way up and down the cable car stops at Alpina, where you can get off and follow a short trail to an Alpine garden overlooking beautiful views of Stresa and the lake.