Lake Orta

Lake Orta is the westernmost and one of the smallest of the great lakes below the Italian Alps, a narrow sheet of water some 13 km long and about 18 square kilometres in area, wrapped in wooded hills in northern Piedmont. Its centrepiece is the tiny island of San Giulio, which rises straight out of the water opposite the village of Orta San Giulio and is almost entirely covered by a Romanesque basilica, a Benedictine convent and a ring of tall old houses. Seen from the shore, it looks less like an island with buildings than a single walled cluster floating on the lake.

Local tradition holds that Saint Julius came here at the end of the 4th century, found no boatman willing to take him across, spread his cloak on the water and sailed over on it, then drove out the serpents and dragons living on the island before founding a church. The basilica that stands there today was enlarged over the centuries and reached its present Romanesque form around the end of the 11th century. On the hill above Orta rises the Sacro Monte, a devotional park of twenty chapels built from 1591 onwards and filled with painted terracotta figures that tell the life of Saint Francis of Assisi; since 2003 it has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy.

The lake is unusual in other ways too. It reaches 143 metres at its deepest, and its only outlet, the Nigoglia, leaves the northern tip at Omegna and flows north, toward the Alps, a rarity among the subalpine lakes that otherwise drain south to the Po plain. In the 20th century the water was badly poisoned by copper and ammonia from a rayon factory on the southern shore, until plankton and fish all but disappeared. Between 1989 and 1990 about 10,900 tonnes of powdered limestone were spread on the lake to neutralise its acidity, and plankton and fish soon returned.

Getting there

The nearest town is Borgomanero, about 13 km to the south. Orta-Miasino station, on the Novara–Domodossola line, serves Orta San Giulio, and boats cross from the village to the island. The nearest airport is Milan Malpensa (MXP), about 33 km away.