🇮🇹 2023 Autumn Como & Bellagio

I've started to regret that I named the blog topic with seasons because I don't know whether November counts as Autumn or Winter. But oh well, Autumn it is!

I had a chance to go to Milan for a three-day course in November, so I decided to take a few days off beforehand to explore Lake Como. I've been to Milan before when I was doing my Masters. To be honest, I am not a big fan of Milan. Being in Milan after Florence, me and my friends commented "Zero points for Milan", after all, Florence feels much better.

My aim for this trip was to rest, but my boyfriend wanted an adventure, he wanted to go hiking and do all sorts of activities. In the end, we decided to have four days of relaxation and one day of hiking. Fair. For transportation, we chose to drive and take the ferry across the lake since bus service was last frequent in Lake Como in November.

I let my boyfriend handle the car issues, from hiring to driving. But! When we arrived at the car rental company, we found out that his credit card was frozen. Why is it? Let me bring you back to our Amsterdam trip in April (here)... that's right, his card was frozen because he forgot his PIN and didn't resolve it after over half a year. We had to pay a bit more with debit card, but finally, we got the car.

My boyfriend stopped me when I was going to open the boot to put our luggage in. He said, "It'll be fine to put it in the backseat." I said that it would trigger the seatbelt alert because of the weight, but he thought not. "Ding, ding, ding!" Three minutes into driving, the alert started to go crazy. He pulled over and put the luggage in the boot, while I sat in the car with a 'I told you' face. Back on the road, the alert was still going. Guess what? We turned around to find out that he forgot to close the boot. And here we go, two tourists driving from Miilan to Lake Como - safely.

The first night we drove to Como to have a look and bought our breakfast for the next few days. On our way back, some drivers flashed at us. We were so confused until we realised we were on full beam the whole way. Sorry people in Como, our bad.

On our second day, we drove to Tremezzo to visit Villa Carlotta. Villa Carlotta is not just a villa, there is a botanical garden and an art exhibition. We spent the whole morning there walking around the villa. Lake Como is famous for the villas here (George Clooney has one here as well). We were planning on visiting other villas, but many of them are closed in November, so ended up only going to one.

We left Villa Carlotta and took a ferry from Tremezzo to Bellagio. The ferry was less frequent during off-season periods, so make sure to check the timetable beforehand. We arrived in Bellagio in the afternoon and soon found out that lots of the nice restaurants we saw online are closed because it was off-season (yup). I was so hangry and my poor boyfriend was taking up all my attitude.

We finally found a pizza place called Le Grotto, it was surprisingly good! (And to be honest, one of the few nice foods we had in Italy.)

We walked around Bellagio and took some nice photos afterwards. I found out that the composer, Leist, had lived in Bellagio for a while. With such a great view of Lake Como, no wonder he could get inspired to compose beautiful music. Being here during the off-season period means places were not open, but it was amazing to enjoy Lake Como with less tourists around. You can also see a beautiful snow cap on the top of the Alpes like the mountain is wearing a little beanie, so cute.

Before we left Bellagio, my boyfriend said he was craving for gelato. I was worried that we would miss the ferry, so I ditched him in the queue for gelato and went straight to the pier. When he walked over with gelato in his hands and victory on his face, I hadn't seen our ferry.