Colonia Motta

This one made me work for it. There’s no real path anymore — the forest has taken it back — so getting in meant pushing through bushes and undergrowth, following what was basically a wild-animal track up through the trees. The time of year wasn’t doing me any favours either: bare branches, low grey light, the weather turning. But that’s part of why it was so good. You earn a place like this.

And it’s huge. A whole abandoned colony spread across the hillside above Lake Maggiore — building after building, arcades and corridors and stairwells, far more than you’d guess from below. The kind of complex where you keep rounding a corner and finding another wing you didn’t know was there.

It’s a colonia — one of those grand old holiday colonies where children were once sent in groups to spend their summers by the lake. You can still feel the optimism in the architecture: the long loggias, the rows of windows, everything built wide and open and full of light. Now the light comes through collapsed roofs and the rooms are filling with leaves.

Building after building, all of it raised for summers full of children, all of it now being handed slowly back to the trees.

In places it’s barely touched. I found rooms with things still in them — old equipment, fittings, objects left exactly where they were when the place stopped working, as if everyone walked out one autumn and simply never came back for them. That’s always the part that gets me: not the grand ruin, but the small abandoned thing nobody thought worth taking.

The view they came for

And then, at the top, the payoff: the lake. One of the great overlooks of the whole Maggiore shore, the water laid out flat and silver between the mountains, mist sitting low on the far side. Whatever else this place was, it was built here for that — and the view doesn’t care that the buildings are falling down. It’s still doing its one job, perfectly, for an audience of nobody.

Of all the places I’ve explored around this lake, this is one of the best. Partly it’s the scale, partly it’s how untouched some of it still feels — but mostly it’s the effort. You crawl through the undergrowth, you get scratched and muddy and slightly lost, and then a ruined colony the size of a village opens up in front of you, with one of the finest views in the region thrown in for free.

Worth every thorn.