Varenna

Varenna is an old medieval town on Lake Como and, for me, was the highlight of our trip. The town, like most of the other towns on the lakeside, offer one of many excellent viewpoints of the lake and surrounding mountains.

And like Bellagio, Varenna is built on the mountainside, and thus many of the streets are sloped like this:

Many of the streets here are cobbled like a truly old village, and many of them are too small for cars to fit through. I bet the people here are generally fit because it seems like walking on the slopes is the primary means of transportation in this town.

The first place we stopped at was the Villa Monastero, which is one of many villas on the lake. These villas were home of the wealthy and powerful back in the day, but nowadays many of them have been converted into tourist attractions. This villa features an eclectic garden that is 1 km in length.

Of course, no fancy garden is complete without classical sculpture.

And this fountain amused me, because the face looks like it's puking!

The garden runs along the lakeside and has many spectacular views. Right at the center of the garden is the house, which was big, but actually not as big as I would have expected from a place as extravagant as this. Still, let's just say that they went all out with the furnishings.

Our next destination was the Fiumelatte, which is apparently the shortest river in Italy and only flows from March to October. On the way, we saw this and had a very confused moment.

There was a piece of paper stuck onto the car that said there was no parking, but this seems like a peculiar way to enforce that rule...

Well, we got to the river, which was a little bit of a walk away, and it was clear why the river was called Fiumelatte, which means "Milk River," because from the picture, it's believable that this could actually be milk!

A sign pointed us towards the source of the river, up the mountain. Since we read that this is the shortest river in Italy, we didn't expect too bad of a climb, but at 250m long, a steep climb is still a little strenuous.

We got as far up the river as possible and saw that the source was some kind of dark cave that was gated off. So this is as high up as we could get, and yes, the water still looks like milk.

I can pretty safely say that I haven't seen a river quite like this before. It's one of the unique things that made our trip to Lake Como awesome. Tomorrow, we'll wrap up our visit with scenes from Menaggio and Tremezzo. Arrivederci!