Before 1632, Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore was a bare rock with a few fishermen's houses on it. Carlo III Borromeo had to bring thousands of tonnes of soil across the lake by boat, from the Piedmontese shore, before the first of its ten terraces could be planted. The garden that now appears on every postcard of the lake was imported, one boatload at a time.

It is a good way into a larger story. For most of their history, Como, Maggiore and Garda were working landscapes: transport corridors, fishing waters, farmland. The villas along them were productive estates. Garda carried the weight of strategy for longer than the others; the Scaligeri of Verona, the Visconti of Milan and the Venetian Republic all fought over its shores and left towers where later centuries planted gardens.

Then European taste changed. Mountains stopped being obstacles and became views.

The northern lakes lay on the Alpine crossings of the Grand Tour, and they offered exactly what the new sensibility wanted: cultivated land in a dramatic setting.

The villas were rebuilt around that idea.

At Lenno, the promontory of Villa del Balbianello held a small Franciscan hermitage founded around 1600. When Cardinal Angelo Maria Durini bought the site in 1785, he built the villa's three-arched loggia around the walls of the old chapel. The loggia became an instrument for looking across the lake in three directions at once. At Tremezzo, Villa Carlotta lays out its gardens as a sequence of framed views stepping down to the water. In these houses the view is not a bonus. It is the plan.

Those framed views are the reason the same villas still anchor so many journeys through the northern lakes, centuries after they were laid out for other purposes.

The full essay, on how the lakes went from working shores to the stage of the romantic journey:

Villas, Lakes and the Invention of the Romantic Journey

https://culturalheritageonline.com/magazine/villas-lakes-and-the-invention-of-the-romantic-journey-the-working-shores-before-the-story/

The places:

Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore

https://culturalheritageonline.com/places/isola-bella-lago-maggiore-1632-borromeo-dieci-terrazze-barocco-napoleone-grotte-stresa-piemonte-verbano/

Villa del Balbianello, Lake Como

https://culturalheritageonline.com/places/villa-balbianello-lenno-cardinal-durini-1787-guido-monzino-fai-lago-como-james-bond/

Cultural Heritage Online documents heritage places with their history, sources and exact location.

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REDITO FOTO DI COPERTINA

Cover: the terraced garden of Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore. Photo: FrDr, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.