LAKE MAGGIORE

Departing from Pallanza passing the tiny San Giovanni island and the Castagnola Point, the tip of the splendid promontory, called thus because of the chestnut trees that one time covered it and where, between 9th and 10th cent., they built villas in eclectic and liberty forms. Immediately after you land at Villa Taranto, complex of the end of the 19th cent., that the Scottish Captain Neil MacEacharn donated to the Italian State in 1939, that became its effective property only in 1963, with the completion of the exceptional park, presently managed by State-owned Villa Taranto Gardens. The park that stretches some 20 hectares of area, is among one of the richest botanical gardens of Europe: begun in 1930 with enormous works of reconstruction that literally "recreated" the landscape producing a great variety of environments (a tiny dale, drives, flowered terraces, a small waterfall, a pond, a conservatory, etc.) where more than 30.000 specimens of plants are gathered. It took its name from the ancestor of the captain, the General McDonald nominated by Napoleon Duke of Taranto. To the south of the park and to the east of the promontory of Castagnola rises in a super elevated the precious Romanesque church of San Remigio of the 13th cent. And then in the direction of Intra, the largest of the fractions chat make up the Commune of Verbania, and major industrial center and commercial port of the lake. Here reins the ferry vehicle service that connects the Piedmontese shore to the Lombardy, at intervals of half-hour. The city, that probably got its name from its position between the streams of San Bernardino and San Giovanni, preserves some 17th -18th buildings among which the baroque Palazzo Peretti and the ancient church of San Vittore, restored between the 18th-19th cent. The lake-front instead, with ample view onto Laveno and on to the rest of the Lombard coast, still preserves the characteristic 19th century metallic structure of the wharf.

For more informations: www.villataranto.it