Day 60 - Varenna to Cannobio - Oh The Places You'll Go - 2025

June 9, 2025

Day 60 - Varenna to Cannobio

Two Countries, Two Ferries, Three Lakes

So another nice day of riding the Italian Lakes. We were moving on from Lake Como to Lake Maggiore and doing so would also entail spending a good potion of the day riding along the shores of Lake Lugano in Switzerland.

The weather was perfect, no clouds but still hazy skies, temps in the low 20’s to start, and a bit of a wind that would be at our backs.

The only irritant in this whole equation was the need to catch a couple of ferries to cross Lake Como to start and Lake Maggiore at the end. There are a variety of ferries and many many different routes. Some take cars (just a few) plus people and bikes, some just take people and some take people and a few bikes …. If there is room for them. So if you’re on a bike, the only certainty you have is the larger car ferries, and they aren’t that frequent.

So when we loaded up the bikes at 8:30 and took the nice fun downhill ride back to the lake at Varenna, we were a bit uncertain what was going to unfold. The ferry schedule indicated that there was a 9:15 car/bike/people ferry to Cadennaiba, a few km’s south of where we ideally wanted to go, but it would work fine. When we pulled up to the ferry quay and ticket kiosk, the was a VERY large crowd of people queuing up for tickets and or lined up at the dock!

Turns out that 90% of them were there for the 9:00 ferry to Bellagio (that place must be a zoo even now!) and we had no trouble getting our tickets for the 9:15 to Cadennabia. Our ferry was even called the ‘Stelvio’ and when we pulled into Cadennabia we saw on the ferry named the Adda just leaving port. Nice touch and a little reminder of our tour!

The ride from Cadennabia to Managgio along the coast was uneventful and the traffic was fairly light. At Menaggio we turned west and started the first climb of the day, a short 200 m or so that would get us into the lake Lugano basin. Once we hit the outskirts of Menaggio, we were on a very nice bike trail, a rail trail conversion, all the way to Porlezza on the eastern end of Lake Lugano. From there to the city of Lugano it was mostly separate bike trails with a little bit of highway travel. Traffic was light, the road was in great shape so it was pretty good for road travel.

We could tell that we’ve been spoiled for the last few months with the vast majority our travels in small towns. It seemed like a bit of a shock to come into Lugano … a big city … yet it’s only about 60,000 people. It seemed like the GTA to us though! We grabbed a quick lunch, some fizzy water and some more coffee and then were back on the road.

Up to this point we had been following (in reverse) Jacquie Gaudet’s route and GPS track from her 2022 tour through these parts. West of Lugano though we made a few on the fly changes that worked out quite well.

Much of the remainder of the ride followed the Tresa river valley downstream to Luino on the eastern shore of Lake Maggiore. This river also is the border between Switzerland and Italy for much of its length. Jacquie’s route looked like it followed designated Swiss bike routes that were high (100 -150 m) above the river with a few hills involved, in particular right before reaching Luino.

Looking at the maps, the main road between Pont Tresa, where the Tresa river starts, and Luino just followed along the river with no hills. In fact one of the most important things I learned while studying engineering a long time ago it that water runs downhill! since traffic was light, it seemed like a good idea to just follow the highway downhill.

So that’s what we did! Turns out there were two highways to pick from, one on the Swiss side and one on the Italian side. We started out on the Swiss road and it was good; light traffic, very good pavement. We then decided to try the Italian side ….. same pavement and almost no traffic. Bellisimo!

It was an easy cruise into Luino where we had an hour or so wait to catch our final ferry to Cannobio so we called this the end, stopped the recorded GPS of the ride on our Garmin watches (that’s all we use them for) and had our post ride debrief bevy!

The ferry ride was great, a passenger only ferry that does allow bikes if it’s not too crowded, and we were then in Cannobio for the next two nights. It’s a beautiful place and I’ll say more about it in the next post.

Great dinner at Antica Stallera, great B&B (B&B 21 … same one Jacquie and Al stayed at) and we’re set up for a great unloaded day ride for tomorrow!

This does not show the ferries connecting Varenna to the start of the track nor the ferry from the end of the track in Luino to Cannobio. There’s also a couple of KM’s at the start and finish in each town not shown… but who’s counting!

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