Thank you to Geetika, Adelaidean, Coral22, TPAYT, and joannyc,
For all of your comments.

Coral22, no we did not buy the multi-day pass because we knew we wanted to spend at least one day in Varenna. To be honest, I don’t remember seeing a multi day pass at the ticket office. I wonder if it doesn’t exist? We did go to Menaggio the next day, and again there were no lines at the ticket office and no lines to board the boat.

TPAYT, we loved Villa Monastero, too. When doing my research and planning, all the guidebooks and online sources mentioned Villa del Balbianello and Villa Cartlotta as being the most impressive and the must-sees. We didn’t see Villa Carlotta so I can’t compare, but we were very impressed with Villa Monastero and consider it a highlight of our stay at Lake Como.

Adelaidean, Lake Como and the villages are beautiful! Crowded, but definitely worth seeing at least once. Have you been? I don’t remember.

I have to pause here for a few days. We are visiting our daughter in Vermont, and then visiting friends in NH on our way home. Will finish up next week. I have 3 days left to write about. The last day is our long journey home.

Karen, we have only stayed in the north part of Lake Como. Near Domaso.

But we enjoy lakes, and have based at Lake Maggiore and Lake Garda on other trips.

Your next trip is coming up very soon, IIRC. 2 trips a year sounds perfect to me!

This trip is just unreal! Your pictures are so beautiful and inspiring! I starting to think we are traveling wrong… long stays with day trips in a region. I must experience all of these places 😊

We have spent a lot of time in Tuscany. I really want to see Northern Italy, Emilia Romagna, the Lakes, Venice, the Dolomites.

Thank you Karen for so many ideas!

Can't wait for the next installment. Looking at the food pictures is dangerous when hungry!

Adelaidean, you have an excellent memory. We will be in Romania and Budapest for 3 weeks in September. So I hope to finish my Italy TR next week. I still have some reservations and organizing to do for our September trip.

From what little we saw of Lake Garda, we really liked it and commented if we ever return to this region, we would like to stay there. But I don’t think that will happen. There are still so many new places we want to visit and so little time.

Finally jumping on this thread. What a marvelous read so far, as always!

Thank you lrice!! I am happy to know that my trip report is inspiring you with new ideas.

I don't think there is only one way to travel. I keep saying I would love to have a long stay in one place and occasionally do day trips. I see the value and beauty in that way of traveling. But we are concerned because of our ages that we might not have many years left of international travel, so we want to see as much as we can right now. If we can stay healthy and mobile for many more years to come, we might some day choose a slower way of traveling.

Thank you, PegS and esm, for still following along.

June 5: Our Last Day on Lake Como, More Rain, and Menaggio

When we woke up this morning, it was raining very, very hard! The worse rain of our entire trip. Luckily, after breakfast, the rain subsided a bit, so we ventured out to the ferry and purchased a day pass so we could visit Menaggio on the other side of the lake. Again, there were no lines at the ticket office and no lines waiting for the ferry. By the time we reached Menaggio, the rain had stopped. Yeah!!!

We really like Menaggio! It’s much quieter than Bellagio and Varenna. Of course, I’m sure it’s much busier on a sunny day than on a rainy day. We enjoyed walking around the old quarter. Piazza Garibaldi is very pretty, and there are quite a few nice gift shops. We purchased a few gifts for ourselves and for our daughters. Then we stopped at a café for coffee, and after spending about 2 hours in Menaggio, we decided to walk back to the ferry dock. Along the way, we decided we would take the ferry to Bellagio and try again. Well, when we were waiting for the ferry, the skies opened up again and it was raining ferociously. So we nixed the idea of Bellagio! It was never to be!

When we returned to Varenna, we walked through Piazza San Giorgio and decided to stop for lunch at Albergo del Sole. We had drinks and shared a very good pizza.

It was raining extremely hard when we left the restaurant. In fact, the lane heading towards our hotel was gushing with water so we waited awhile under the canopy. When the rain let up, we made our way back to our hotel, very nervous about the very wet and very slippery cobblestones. So we decided to spend the rest of the afternoon in our room packing and resting before dinner.

We were very leery about looking for a restaurant. It was raining hard again and the lanes and stairs were very wet. So we called down to the front desk to see if La Vista had any openings for tonight, and luckily, they had one table so we grabbed it. I stopped taking notes at this point in our trip so I didn’t write down what we had. Our main dishes were seafood dishes, but I don’t remember if we ordered anything else. While we liked what we had tonight, both of us agree that our lamb chops we had our first night here were much better.

Walking along the waterfront in Menaggio

Menaggio street scene

Piazza Garibaldi in Menaggio

Pretty street off of Piazza Garibaldi with nice shops

I love lemons!

Nice shopping street

Santa Marta church

This is a special exhibit in Santa Marta Church

Pretty gardens along the waterfront in Menaggio

Along the Menaggio waterfront

Along the Menaggio waterfront

View from our side balcony - our last night in Varenna

View from our balcony

Ed's dinner at La Vista - pasta with shrimp

My last dinner at La Vista - gnocchi with a white fish

June 6: Farewell to Varenna; Say Hello Again to Milano

After breakfast, we made our way with our luggage to the sidewalk where we waited for our private driver to pick us up. I hired Airport Taxi Transfers to drive us to Hotel Gran Duca di York in Milano where we stayed for our last night in Italy. I decided to splurge on a private driver because I had been reading horror stories about the standing room only regional train from Varenna to Milano. People talked about dodging luggage and baby strollers on the train and having to stand for an hour. I knew that would be torture for us! The office called us while we waited to let us know our driver would be 20 minutes late because he was stuck in traffic because of a car accident. And sure enough, he arrived 20 minutes later! The drive was about 1.5 hours to Milano. It was so nice to be dropped off in front of our hotel.

We checked in and then walked over to Caffe Spadari Milano in Piazza Pio XI, not too far from our hotel. I forgot what we had, probably a salad or shared a pizza. The food was not great but good enough for 2 hungry and tired travelers.

I had originally thought we would do some last-minute sightseeing, such as visit the Pinacoteca di Brera, the art museum that we didn’t visit when we first arrived. But at this point in our trip, we were exhausted and done with sightseeing. So we wandered around the area, the Piazza del Duomo, admired the Milano Duomo, wandered through the elegant Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, stopped for one more gelato, and then headed back to our hotel to rest up and re-do our messy packing.

We stayed close to home for dinner tonight, too. We ate at Matilde Bakery, a bakery, café and restaurant somewhere between Piazza del Duomo and our hotel. The meal was satisfactory. We probably could have had a better meal in the Brera district but we were too tired to wander too far. We had to wake up early the next morning for our mid-morning flight home.

Farewell to Varenna . . .

. . . and return to Milano - Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II

One last look at the magnificent Milano Duomo!

Ravioli dinner at Matilde Bakery & Restaurant

One last Pasta and seafood dinner

What a wonderful trip you had! And this report will be a great resource for others who want to travel to these areas.
Just wondering, did you feel that the trip was too long? Would you limit future trips to four weeks? I'm curious, because I know I'd be happy to go for that long, but with fewer stops and longer stays at the stops I did make. (Of course, I have to admit that I wouldn't want to do the amount of walking that you did! Just me with my arthritic body!)

Hi SusanP, It's funny that you ask if 5 weeks was too long. I plan on doing a brief summary, and that's one thing I will talk about. We don't regret taking this 5-week trip because we saw so many places that I know I would have regretted not making the time for. And I feel we don't need to return to this part of Italy because we saw a lot. However, by the end of 5 weeks, we were very tired, and we both agree that it's probably not something we would do again. I think 3 weeks might be more our speed moving forward. In fact, we have a 3-week trip coming up in September. We might take a 4-week trip if we visit SE Asia, but we are still on the fence about that.

It will be very easy to fill four weeks in SE Asia! You might need to break it up into a couple trips.😀

We've passed through Milan a few times, but that photo of the Milano Duomo has me thinking we need to plan a proper stay there at some point.

We've taken several 4-5 week trips and have a six week trip coming up...only time will tell if six weeks is too much for us, but we can certainly relate to the end of trip travel fatigue.

I've really enjoyed traveling along with you Karen (and I wish I had your metabolism!)

Karen, traveling with you has been so much fun, thanks again for taking us along. DH and I made it to Milan this May after 40+ years, despite multiple visits to Italy in the interim. My husband doesn’t like long trips, this time we did 2.5 weeks, by when he was ready to go back! My sister, niece and I did 5 weeks in April/May 2022, 3 between Sicily and Naples/Amalfi, plus another two in Greece with the husbands, that’s the longest I’ve done recently.

I am thinking of Australia and NZ for end 2026, that will have to be 3-4 weeks to make it worth going all the way down. But that apart I think it’s going to be shorter rather than longer trips for me!

melnq8, we really enjoyed Milan! We liked it more than we thought we would. The Milano Duomo is amazing especially the rooftop tour that we took. We enjoyed wandering around the Brera neighborhood. And I wish we could have seen The Last Supper Painting. So I think Milan is definitely worth a proper visit. Where are you going for your 6-week trip? You and your husband certainly have a lot of energy. I've read many of your reports, and you both do a lot of strenuous hiking. I would collapse after some of the hikes you have done.

geetika, I hope you are able to visit Australia and New Zealand! Both countries are amazing, and NZ probably has the most stunning scenery I've ever seen. Think of the Dolomites except the entire country is like that; everywhere you go there are gorgeous and scenic vistas.

June 7: Our Long, and Stressful, Journey Back Home

Our hotel called a taxi for us. We had an early morning pick-up for our mid-morning flight. As I mentioned at the beginning of my report, we used miles for this trip. We have noticed in the last few years that the available flights when using miles are getting more inconvenient. For our return trip, we flew from Milan to Newark and then to Boston, our home airport.

After we checked our luggage at Milan’s Malpensa Airport, and started walking to our gate, at one point airport personnel made us stop and form 2 lines: one for the flight to Newark and one for the flight to Boston. Now I was wishing we were on that non-stop flight to Boston! We had to wait because we were a little early, and they wouldn’t let us go to our gate until a certain time. I thought that was weird.

We initially had plenty of time to make our connection in Newark; however, our flight left Milan late, about an hour late, I think, so we had much less time for our connecting flight to Boston. When we landed in Newark, we had to go through passport control, claim our luggage, and then follow signs to baggage re-check. At baggage re-check, there were some employees asking all of us where we were going next. When I told them Boston, they told us we better hurry! Not what we wanted to hear. We walked and walked until we got to the train that would bring us to the domestic terminal. However, the train does not actually stop in front of the domestic terminal. We then had to walk (fast) for 11 minutes to the terminal; then go through security, and then it was a very long walk to our gate. We were the last ones to board, and our flight took off almost immediately after we were seated. We have decided we aren’t going to do this again. If we can’t get a non-stop flight to Boston from Europe using miles, we will pay for our tickets. It’s not worth it to us to go through all this unnecessary stress. We will probably look into using our Star Alliance miles for domestic travel.