Verbania

On the Borromean gulf of Lake Maggiore, Verbania is the garden of Piedmont: the botanical gardens of Villa Taranto, begun in 1931 by the Scottish captain Neil McEacharn on land bought from a marchioness, hold twenty thousand varieties and species gathered from all over the world, and in spring they erupt in tulips. The name of the villa has nothing to do with Apulia: it recalls an ancestor of the captain, marshal McDonald, whom Napoleon had made duke of Taranto. That an English garden should do so well here is no accident, for this is one of the rainiest corners of Italy. Opposite lie the Borromean Islands, Isola Bella, Isola Madre and the fishermen's island, the boat trip by definition.

The town is as young as its name, a calque of the Latin Verbanus: it was created in 1939 by joining Intra, busy and full of markets, to Pallanza, elegant along its lakefront promenade, and it became a provincial capital only in 1992. Luigi Cadorna was born at Pallanza. At Fondotoce, on the twentieth of June 1944, the Germans shot forty-three men after marching them on foot through Intra, Pallanza and Suna behind a placard of mockery: one of them, wounded, played dead and survived, which is why the town's memory speaks of forty-two martyrs. The main road that passes the spot carries their name, and Verbania holds the gold medal of the Resistance. Behind rises the Val Grande, the largest wilderness area in the Alps: lake and absolute silence, half an hour apart.