A weekend in Lake Como and Milan

In May, I visited Lake Como, a place which was at the top of my bucket list, for 4 days! Lake Como is the most beautiful place I have travelled to, and there was so much to see. We found some cheap flights with great times, and after searching for a while for a budget-friendly Air BnB, we found one in the town of Nesso and booked our trip!

The best way to get to Lake Como is to fly to Milan, then get a train to Como, so we took an early flight from Manchester to Milan Malpensa. From here, we walked down to the train station in the airport and took the train to Milan Central and from there the train to Como San Giovanni, which took about an hour.

We arrived in Como San Giovanni, instantly greeted by breathtaking views. A short walk brought us right to the Lake.

After strolling through Como, we found a restaurant named Stilo overlooking the lake. Here, we enjoyed wine and freshly made pizza, with great service.

Next door to the restaurant was a gelato shop, so we decided to try the gelato here as the line was huge all the time we were there! We stopped here before getting the ferry to Nesso and quickly realised why the line was so long! The gelato was well priced and delicious!

Getting to Lake Como was the easy part, getting around Lake Como can be slightly more difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing! We researched the best way to get around Lake Como before we travelled here so we were well prepared, and found that ferries and buses would be the best option for the place we were staying.

There was an extremely long queue for the ferry tickets, and since we only had around 15 minutes before our ferry was due to depart, we risked it and asked if we could pay on board, which we were assured we could.

The ferry journey was a beautiful experience, and gave us a chance to get views of the lakes, towns, and buildings which we would have missed had we taken the bus to travel into Nesso. Although the ferry takes longer than the bus, it is an absolute must at least once on your trip to Lake Como.

We arrived in Nesso ferry port with google maps telling us it would be around a 10 minute walk to arrive at our Air BnB. However, we were confronted with extremely steep paths and stairs, making the 10 minute walk around 45 minutes! This was something which we had not been warned about and definetly zapped a lot of energy out of us, so much so that we had to take a 3 hour nap when we arrived at the Air BnB! On the bright side, we got to see perfect views of the lake.

When we woke up from our nap, we were hungry from a long day of travelling, but looking on maps we saw that only one restaurant in Nesso was open and the shops were all closed too. We took a 5 minute walk (again uphill) to the only open restaurant in the town and ordered pizzas and a bottle of wine to take away. The food was tasty and we enjoyed it inside our Air BnB as there was a thunderstorm!

The next day, we took a walk around Nesso, and found a small cafe with an overlooking view of the waterfall. We then decided to go back to explore more of Como. The streets are filled with shops, restaurants, bars, and amazing architecture.

Our plan for the evening was to take the ferry to Lezzenno, a town on the Lake, and luckily the line was not as long as yesterday so we joined the queue in plenty of time and bought our tickets at the desk. The tickets this time were more expensive because Lezzenno is a longer trip.

The views on the ferry were different today and we saw different towns as this ferry took a different route.

A short walk away from the ferry port we found a restaurant called Aurora and ate here because of the stunning view of the lake. This restaurant is part of Hotel Villa Aurora, close to the lake and in a great location. Although we did not stay here on this trip, we will definitely consider looking into it on our next trip to Lake Como!

We had the most delicious lasagne and wine, with the most stunning view of Lake Como. Everything about this meal was perfect and I absolutely recommend this place! We enjoyed it here so much that we stayed sat here for around an hour after eating and watched the sunset.

Remembering the exhausting walk from yesterday to the Air BnB, we opted to get a taxi back to our Air BnB as opposed to getting the ferry. The taxi from Lazeno to Nesso took around 15 minutes and dropped us off just down the road from where we were staying as the roads are so narrow!

On our last day, the day we were flying, we had around half a day to explore Milan. We took the bus into Como instead of the ferry to get a different view of the towns. The bus took around 30 minutes but was extremely busy, we only just managed to get a seat, but many people were stood up and the bus was completely packed. The bus dropped us off almost right next to the train station, where we got the train to Milan central. We walked out of Milan Central train station to an unexpected view of the Duomo straight in front of us!

Having not eaten all morning, we decided to have McDonalds before waling around the shops in Milan for a few hours. Unfortunately, we did not buy much as we only brought hand luggage, but had we more space, I am sure we would have splurged!

It was such a beautiful sunny day that cocktails were a must, so we sat in Motto Milano right next to the Duomo. We later ordered food here, which was good and reasonably priced, considering we were next to a major tourist attraction.

We then took the train from Milan Central to Milan Bergamo airport ready for our flight back to Manchester.

Our visit to Lake Como was definetly one to remember and we got to see so much in such a short time. I highly recommend taking a trip to Lake Como!