The Wonders of the Italian Lakes

Four days is exactly the right amount of time to fall in love with northern Italy — long enough to understand what makes this landscape so enduring, short enough to leave wanting more. This tour is the efficient, deeply satisfying answer to the question that every traveller to Milan eventually asks: how do I actually see the lakes?

The opening move is Verona — one of Italy’s most complete medieval cities, compact enough to read in an afternoon but rich enough to reward longer attention. From there the tour reaches Lake Garda, crossing to the narrow peninsula of Sirmione by boat. The medieval Scaligero Castle at the water’s edge is one of those rare things: a postcard image that delivers entirely in person.

Lake Como follows, and with it Bellagio — arrived at by ferry across glittering water, framed by mountains on every side. The final morning belongs to the town of Como itself, explored on a guided walk that moves through its cathedral quarter and lakeside promenades with the unhurried confidence of someone who actually knows the place. This is the version of the lakes that takes some people a week to assemble independently. Here it takes four days, cleanly.

Best of Milan, Last Supper, Italian Lakes, Bernina & Cinque Terre

Seven days is long enough to do northern Italy properly — and this itinerary makes a strong case that “properly” means beginning with Leonardo da Vinci. The Last Supper, viewed with skip-the-line access in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, is one of those experiences that reframes everything you thought you understood about Renaissance painting. The detail, the narrative tension, the scale of it in a room designed to contain it — no reproduction prepares you.

From there, the tour opens outward. A full day on Lake Como — sailing between Tremezzo, Cadenabbia, and Bellagio — offers the lake from every angle, at every pace. Then the Bernina Red Train, a UNESCO World Heritage railway, climbs from Tirano through the Swiss Alps to St. Moritz in a crossing that is arguably the most scenic train journey in Europe. The return to Italy brings Verona and Sirmione on Lake Garda before the tour closes in Cinque Terre, where a 90-minute coastal boat cruise reveals all five villages from the sea — the angle that turns a visit into a view.

A full day at leisure in Milan is built into the schedule. This is not a concession — it is the right acknowledgement that Milan, properly explored, takes time.

Bernina Train & Northern Italy with Cinque Terre

Six days is just long enough to understand northern Italy properly — and this itinerary uses every one of them well. It is our most consistently booked tour for a simple reason: it goes somewhere most Italy tours do not. The Bernina Red Train, a UNESCO World Heritage route, climbs from the Italian border through the Swiss Alps in a journey that is itself one of the great rail experiences in Europe. Snow-capped peaks, frozen lakes, and stone viaducts that make you catch your breath — all from the window of a Panorama carriage on one of the world’s most scenic trains.

That is before St. Moritz — a name that carries specific meaning: the best mountain air in Switzerland, in a valley surrounded by the kind of landscape that reminds you why people invented the word alpine. From there the tour descends back into Italy: Lake Como from its most beautiful vantage point in Bellagio; the Roman amphitheatre and medieval centre of Verona; the castle-crowned peninsula of Sirmione on Lake Garda; and finally the five clifftop fishing villages of Cinque Terre, where every view along the coastal path looks as if it has been slightly improved in post-production.

Based in Milan throughout, this tour is a masterclass in packing an extraordinary range of scenery and culture into a compact, comfortable schedule. Guided excursions are balanced with genuine free time in every destination.

Iconic Italy

This is the tour for the traveller who wants to move — who understands that Italy is not a single city or a single landscape, but a sequence of entirely different worlds compressed into one country. Seven days, two cities, one extraordinary journey between them.

It begins in Rome, with time to absorb the city independently before a guided tour of the Colosseum, Palatine Hill, and Roman Forum brings two thousand years of history into sharp focus. Few guided experiences anywhere in Europe deliver as much context in as short a time. Then the train north to Milan, and from there by boat onto Lake Como — arriving at Bellagio on the water, the way Bellagio is meant to be arrived at.

Cinque Terre follows: the UNESCO-listed fishing villages of Manarola and Monterosso al Mare, explored on foot and from the sea on a coastal boat cruise. The return to Milan leaves the optional extension open — the Bernina Red Train to St. Moritz is available for those who want to add a day in the Swiss Alps to the end of the journey. It is an addition worth considering seriously.

Best of Italy: Rome, Milan, Lakes, Cinque Terre & Swiss Alps

This is the tour you choose when you want to understand what Italy actually is — not just one city, but the whole extraordinary range. Nine days feels generous until you are standing in the Roman Forum at sunrise and realising you still have the Swiss Alps, the Ligurian coast, and the mirror-flat surface of Lake Como ahead of you. That is the particular pleasure of this itinerary: every morning is genuinely different from the one before.

Rome and Milan serve as your twin base cities — two of Europe’s most compelling capitals, separated by the entire length of Italy’s story. Between them, the tour moves through three of the continent’s most celebrated landscapes: the UNESCO-protected villages of Cinque Terre, clinging to cliffs above the Ligurian Sea; the aristocratic calm of Lake Como, where the Alps descend to the water in a sweep of green and stone; and the rarefied mountain air of St. Moritz in Switzerland’s Engadin valley — a world entirely apart from the cities below it.

Travel is aboard air-conditioned coaches and trains, guided by local professionals who know when to talk and when to let a view speak for itself. Free time is genuinely built in — this is not a schedule you survive, it is one you enjoy.

Sorrento, Positano, Amalfi Coast, Capri & Pompeii

The south of Italy operates on a different logic to everything above Rome. It is louder, warmer, less polished, and entirely more alive. The Amalfi Coast — a UNESCO World Heritage coastline — does not ease you in gently. It hits you immediately: the road carved into clifftops above an impossibly blue sea, lemon trees hanging over whitewashed walls, villages stacked vertically as if they were dropped from the sky and simply decided to stay where they landed.

Positano is the postcard — the pink and terracotta houses tumbling down to a beach that photographers have been returning to for a century. Amalfi is the history — a medieval maritime republic whose Cathedral of St. Andrew remains one of the most striking facades in southern Italy. Sorrento is the anchor: elegant, lemon-scented, the kind of town where you order a Limoncello not as a tourist, but because it would be unusual not to.

The tour crosses to Capri by scenic hydrofoil — and the island delivers exactly what its reputation promises. Anacapri’s quiet lanes, the Piazzetta’s aperitivo hour, the Augustus Gardens with their views over the Faraglioni rock stacks: this is the version of Italy that people move to when they have stopped deferring their life.

The final act is Pompeii with skip-the-line entry and a specialist guide. You can walk through Pompeii without context and see ruins, or walk through it with someone who knows the stories behind the bakeries, the baths, the election graffiti on the walls, and the haunting plaster casts — and understand an entire civilisation frozen at a single catastrophic moment. This tour gives you the second experience.