Stresa

The town's name first appears in a document of 998 as Strixsya. In 1014 the Emperor Henry II gave Stresa to the Benedictine nuns of San Felice in Pavia, and in the 15th century it grew into a fishing community owing allegiance to the Visconti of Milan, before passing to the Borromeo family, who were building their palaces and gardens on the islands offshore from the 16th and 17th centuries.

The modern resort grew on its position on the road and rail routes to the Simplon Pass. Villas went up along the shore, among them the Villa Ducale of about 1770, which passed to the philosopher Antonio Rosmini in 1848, and in 1857 a local pastry cook created the Margheritine biscuits in honour of Princess Margherita of Savoy, who was living there. Ernest Hemingway set part of A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929, in a Stresa grand hotel, and visited the town in 1948. Stresa also gave its name to the Stresa Front of 1935, when the United Kingdom, Italy and France met here and agreed to contain Nazi Germany, and in 1958 to the conference that laid the foundations of the European Community's Common Agricultural Policy.

In September 1943 four of the 57 victims of the massacre of Jews around Lake Maggiore were rounded up in Stresa. More recently, on 23 May 2021, a cabin of the cable car from Stresa to the Mottarone fell, killing fourteen people.

Stresa's culture is that of an old lake resort. Its elegant lakefront of grand hotels and historic villas has made it one of the most visited places in Piedmont, and the Borromeo palaces and gardens on Isola Bella and Isola Madre are its great showpieces. Villas and hotels on the shore have served as film locations for Italian comedies and thrillers since the 1940s.

Music has been a central part of the town's identity since 1962, when the Settimane Musicali di Stresa were inaugurated with a concert by the orchestra of La Scala. Now the Stresa Festival, it brings concerts to the Palazzo dei Congressi, the tapestry hall of the palace on Isola Bella and the gardens of Isola Madre, and to churches and hermitages around the lake. In June the town also holds a literary festival.

Isola dei Pescatori, Fishermen's Island, keeps something of the older lake culture: it is the only one of the islands lived on all year round, and unlike its neighbours it never belonged to the Borromeo family.

Stresa has about 4,600 residents. The municipality includes the shore around the historic centre and Carciano, three of the four Borromean Islands, and a string of hill villages above the lake, while Isola dei Pescatori had only about 25 residents in 2018.

Tourism is the economy. The hotels, restaurants, ferries and island palaces employ much of the town, and the season runs from spring, when the gardens flower, to autumn, after which the town is very quiet. Stresa is also the seat of the Capitaneria di Porto, the harbour authority for the whole of Lake Maggiore, and one of the main landing points of the lake's tourist boats.

Daily life follows the timetable of the ferries across the gulf and the trains on the line between Milan and Domodossola, and in the hill villages above the lake life is quieter and more residential than on the busy shore. Until the 2021 crash, the cable car from Carciano linked the town with the Alpinia garden and the ski area of the Mottarone.

Lake Maggiore supplies the town's traditional food. The lake holds two kinds of whitefish, the less widespread of them the lavarello, as well as perch, pike, chub and eel, and fish dishes are the speciality of the restaurants on Isola dei Pescatori and many in town.

The Margheritine are Stresa's own sweet: small biscuits created in 1857 by the pastry cook Piero Antonio Bolongaro for Princess Margherita of Savoy, later the first queen of Italy, who was then living at the Villa Ducale. Ice cream is sold on the central square, close to the lakefront.

Beyond the lake, menus draw on the cooking of Piedmont: risotto, the blue cheese Gorgonzola and Piedmontese wines such as Barbera and Dolcetto. A meal on Isola dei Pescatori, reached by ferry or, after the last boat, by water taxi, is a long-standing part of a stay, and the island's dozen or so restaurants serve both lunch and dinner.