ORTA... A DREAM TO REMEMBER !

In Orta San Giulio everything invites people to walk, cars cannot enter the centre, from the large granite flight of steps which goes down towards piazza Motta among two wings of frescoed sixteenth century houses, the cobbled paving of the lanes which opens into small quiet squares, the agile but austere Palace of the Community, the antique shops, the delicatessen sellers with their typical liver “mortadella”, the living meeting-places, to the famous tree lined “sitting-room square” from which one admires the magic island of San Giulio.
This is the ideal setting for good music festivals held in June and in September.
The island can be reached by motor-boat or rowing-boat.
There are places, like the berth of Villa Bossi, where you can really feel the verses of Guido Gozzano and understand where Bonfantini and Calderara found their inspiration.
Noises are far away.
On the top of the Orta promontory there is the Holy Mount consisting of twenty chapels in which are recreated some scenes from the life of San Francesco d’Assisi.
Jasmine and wisteria climb up to the steep roofs made of dark grey beola, a local slatelike stone.Laundry lines tangle with honeysuckle, an enormous blue hydrangeas blossom in every corner.
The effect is so pretty and gay that you are convinced this place is entchanted before you even reach the lake itself.
The French novelist Honorè de Balzac remembers passing through the Orta Lake area and mentions it in a well known book of his:
“Immagine a traveller, tired of the thousand gorgeous aspects of Brazil, Italy and the Indies; on his journey home he encounters a delightful lake, Orta, an island simple and graceful, primitive and cosy, solitary and wellequipped, stretching out on its quiet waters: grandeur and tumult are far away, proportions are man-sized once more.”
Lake Orta really is a “man-sized lake” because, as Mario Bonfantini, writer and one of the most esteemed Gallist in the literary world, wrote:
it can “be embraced at a single glance”.
The famous French writer was just one of hundreds of enthusiastic visitors who have been seduced by the lake’s sweetness, richness of the vegetation and the intriguing little towns across the water.
No photographs can prepare you for the island of San Giulio, which gleams in the water like a fabolous jewel.
It is an intricate confection of narraw stone houses squeezed between fine villas whith lacy wrought-iron gates and magnolias blooming at the water’s edge.

“Orta, the Lord’s watercolour, seems painted on silk, with the Sacro Monte towering above it; its noble promenade flaked by close buildings the silent piazza and the austere façades behind the foliage of the horse-chestnuts, and, facing it, the Isle of San Giulio, resembling Dante’s airy purgatory, hesitant Between water and the Heavens” Piero Chiara "writer of the lakes"