Overview
Orta San Giulio
"Orta, a watercolour of God, seems painted on a silk background, with its Sacro Monte behind it, its noble ramala flanked by closed palazzi, the silent piazza with its compact façades behind the foliage of the horse chestnuts, and in front of it the island of San Giulio, similar to Dante´s Purgatory, hesitating between water and sky"; this is how the writer Pietro Chiara describes Orta, and this is how it will appear to us on arrival, with its narrow alleys, old shops and wrought-iron balconies, suspended between the green of the mountains and the blue of the lake. Set like a jewel among the clear waters, then stands the Island of San Giulio, a veritable open-air museum to be explored to discover its artistic and environmental beauty, but also just to be enraptured by its gentle atmosphere, especially in the warm light of sunset, when everything becomes magical.
