Bellano
The thing that stops people in Bellano is the gorge. The Pioverna River has been cutting through the rock for millions of years, and you can walk out over it on a suspended walkway — the water churning below, the walls close enough to touch — for three euros. It is an unlikely thing to find tucked behind a lakeside town of this size.
Bellano sits on the eastern shore of Lake Como, compact and lived-in, with a Gothic church from 1348, a hexagonal tower decorated with zodiac frescoes, and the bones of a nineteenth-century cotton mill built in Moltrasio stone still standing near the water. It was an industrial town before it was a tourist one, and that history gives it a different texture from the grander resorts to the south.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to arrive on the train from Milan — under eight euros, just over an hour — and head straight to the gorge before the midday crowds. The afternoon goes to the lakeside promenade and a slow lunch. The Chiesa di Santa Marta, with its 16th-century Pietà group, is easy to miss and worth not missing.
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How Bellano came to be
A judicial document from 905 AD names the place as 'Curtis sancti Ambrosii, que Belano dicitur,' placing it firmly within the orbit of the Archdiocese of Milan from early on. Control passed through the Torriani and then the Visconti, the town acquiring fortifications and a magistrate's seat along the way. Venetian troops looted it in 1447. From 1533 to 1788 it was feudal property of the Sfondrati family.
The nineteenth century gave Bellano a different kind of power. The Cotonificio Cantoni opened in 1868, survived a major fire, and by 1898 employed around a thousand workers — a significant industrial operation for a lakeside town of this scale. That era ended gradually in the late twentieth century, and Bellano has been reorienting toward tourism ever since, joining the association of Italy's most beautiful villages in 2021.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
See Bellano in motion
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summers are warm, occasionally pushing toward 85°F, with rain distributed fairly evenly through the season. Winters are cold — temperatures can drop to the high twenties — and the lake doesn't offer much shelter from the chill. May through September gives you the most reliable weather and the gorge at full operation.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.