What to see · Arona

A copper statue 35 metres tall, blessed in 1698: you can climb inside it, right up into the saint's head.

A former abbey church of 979: a Bergognone altarpiece of 1488 and relics displayed every 13 March.

Only fragments remain of the fortress where Carlo Borromeo was born in 1538, dismantled by the French in 1800.

The Sacro Monte that was never finished: of fifteen planned chapels only three were built, and the colossus remained.

A church of 1204 with a surprise beneath the floor: a Gaulish burial ground and a Roman smelting furnace.

A nineteenth-century villa below the Rocca with frescoes by Giacomo Casa, left empty for decades after 1943.