Baveno - Lake Maggiore & Lake Orta Travel Guide

Baveno, mentioned as Bavenum as early as the Middle Ages, today has 4,600 inhabitants and lies nestled between mountains and hills on one side and the lake with the Borromean Islands just offshore on the other.

Baveno, too, is a very well-known holiday resort dating from the 19th century, with numerous stately villas, where Lord Byron, Queen Victoria of England, the German Crown Prince and later Emperor Frederick (1888) and Richard Wagner have all stayed, and where Umberto Giordano (1867-1948) is said to have written his opera "Andrea Chénier".

The Villa Fedora and its large park, where Giordano lived for many years, is open to the public and now houses the Chamber of Commerce.

The waiting room at the boat landing stage, in the finest Art Nouveau style, also bears witness to Baveno's standing in the 19th century.

But Baveno was famous much earlier for its quarries, whose pink granite was used to build, among other things, the Basilica of San Paolo in Rome and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan. Industrial quarrying of the pink granite only began at the start of the 19th century and continues to this day.

The district of Feriolo, three kilometres away on the gulf towards the mouth of the Toce, has retained the character of a stonemasons' and fishing village.

Worth seeing is the parish church of SS Gervasio e Protasio, a Romanesque basilica from the 11th/12th century that was remodelled in the 18th century.

Next to the church stands an octagonal baptistery from the 11th century, which goes back to even older buildings and to which a portico was added in the 16th century.

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