Northern Italy Trip Review (UPDATED Final Day in Modena)

Let me start by saying this was a long trip (17 days) and so there’s going to be a lot of text and even more photos. Apologies, but there’s a lot worth covering from this trip, and I hope some of you find it interesting/useful. I’m going to break it down from each place, rather than a day by day breakdown. It’s going to take multiple days for me to get through this, so I’ll update the title as more is added.

We stayed in northern Italy, and covered: Lake Como, Modena, Florence, Cinque Terre, and Alba. There were a number of other places that we stopped at along our travels, but these were the five places we stayed in.

STOP 1: Lake Como

After flying Air France (which sucks, by the way) through Charles De Galle (which also sucks), we arrived in Milan and picked up our rental car. I have to give credit, I was very skeptical of our Smart car, but it treated us well throughout the trip. We then proceeded to make the drive to Perledo, a very small town tucked in the hills above Lake Como. Directly above Varenna, it was the perfect place to start the trip. Very calm and quiet, as most of the tourists tend to stay in the larger areas like Bellagio. Nothing at all against Bellagio, but we were very glad we chose Perledo. Here’s pretty much the entire town of Perledo:



The main reason we chose Perledo was because of the views out AirBnB had. It was a great place to drink coffee in the morning and wine in the evening. Here was our view from the balcony of our AirBnB:





Here’s a shot of Varenna from the ferry:



We stayed in Lake Como for three days, and it was definitely the least structured part of the trip in terms of planning activities/meals. It was nice to just start the trip off in a very relaxed and beautiful environment. On the first day, we walked to an old castle in the morning. It was about 800 years old I believe and they have added some interesting art around it, like this ghost-looking guy below.





We also spent some time in Varenna just enjoying the scenery and food/wine. We loved grabbing an apertivo whenever we could.









On our last full day at Lake Como, we took the ferry and hopped around to some of the other towns, including Bellagio and Tremezzo. Bellagio was surprisingly busy considering this time of year is the off season.



Had a great lunch at a place our AirBnB host had recommended, and I got the Truffle Butter Parmesan Risotto with a parmesan crisp, which was incredible.



There were so many stairs to be dealt with. Definitely worked off my meals:



In Tremezzo, there is a famous and very expensive hotel called the Grand Hotel Tremezzo. We stopped in for a drink:







I know this is terribly photo-heavy, but here are just a few more pictures of surrounding towns and from the ferry:







So that’s it from Lake Como. As I stated earlier, I’ll continue to post in this thread over the next few days until the entire trip has been posted. I hope everyone enjoys.