Stresa
Piedmontese town on the western shore of Lake Maggiore, with Isola Bella and Isola Madre: associated with Rosmini, the Dukes of Genoa, Hemingway, and the 1935 conference.
Stresa is a town on the western shore of Lake Maggiore, in northern Piedmont, at about 200 metres above sea level at the foot of Mottarone. Its municipal territory includes Isola Bella and Isola Madre, the two largest of the Borromean Islands, with the palaces and gardens of the Borromeo princes.[1] From the mid-19th century it became an elite tourist resort:[2] the philosopher Antonio Rosmini died here, the family of the Dukes of Genoa, a branch of the House of Savoy, stayed here, Ernest Hemingway passed through, and in 1935 the heads of government of Italy, France and Great Britain met here.
The Simplon road and the first travellers
Stresa's fortunes began with a road. On 7 September 1800, after Marengo, Napoleon decreed the construction of a carriage road from Briga to Domodossola, fit for artillery; work on the Italian section began in 1801 and the inaugural journey took place on 9 October 1805. Along the lake the new road ran for 23 kilometres, from Arona to Feriolo, passing through Stresa.[2]
Steam and the railway followed. In May 1826 the steamship Verbano began linking Magadino and Sesto Calende, and from Arona one could reach Locarno in six hours; in 1855 the tracks coming from Turin and from Genoa reached Arona, joining the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia to the Simplon road; in 1859 Stresa got its first landing stage.[2] Between 1871 and 1931 the municipality's population, including its hamlets, rose from 3,086 to 4,539 inhabitants, and already in the 1930s the Enciclopedia Italiana noted that the place's importance depended chiefly on tourism: the station was also served by international trains such as the Simplon Orient Express.[1]
Rosmini and the Dukes of Genoa
The link with Savoy Piedmont runs through a villa. Around 1770 Giacomo Filippo Bolongaro, a man from Stresa who had made his fortune in Antwerp in the tobacco trade thanks to a new curing method, had a residence built on the lake so large that locals called it the "Casa d'oro" (golden house).[3] The priest Antonio Rosmini was a guest there for the first time on 18 February 1828, on his way to Domodossola.[2] In 1850 the builder's niece, Anna Maria Bolongaro, gave him the villa; Rosmini died there on 1 July 1855, attended in his final days by Alessandro Manzoni. The friendship between the two men is recalled by a bronze plaque by the sculptor Pietro Canonica.[3] The philosopher is buried in the church of the Crocifisso, where the tomb is the work of Vincenzo Vela (1859).[1]
In 1857 the Rosminian fathers sold the building to Elisabeth of Saxony, widow of Ferdinand, Duke of Genoa, the second son of King Carlo Alberto.[3] Her daughter Margherita, the future queen of Italy, always kept fond memories of her stays in Stresa;[2] the duchess lived there for long periods until her death in 1912, and since then the residence has been known as Villa Ducale. The Rosminians bought it back in 1942, and since 1966 it has housed the International Centre for Rosminian Studies.[3]
Belle Époque: the grand hotels
The Grand Hôtel des Îles Borromées, built between 1860 and 1863, opened in 1863 under the management of the brothers Giuseppe and Luigi Omarini. In 1907 majority ownership passed to a Milanese company, the Unione dei Grandi Alberghi, and between autumn 1911 and winter 1912 the building was raised by three floors in 96 days, taking on its present appearance with lifts and central heating. Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra signed the guestbook; in 1909 the children of Theodore Roosevelt arrived. On 27 June 1908 a rival hotel had opened, the Regina Palace, designed by the Swiss architect Giuseppe Pagani.[4] From 1911 a rack railway carried holidaymakers from the shore to the summit of Mottarone, at 1,491 metres.[1]
Hemingway on the lake
Wounded on 8 July 1918 at Fossalta di Piave, where he was serving as a Red Cross volunteer, Ernest Hemingway spent a short convalescent holiday that September at the Grand Hôtel, in suite 106. He wrote to his parents: "I'm up here in Stresa, a little resort on Lake Maggiore. One of the most beautiful Italian lakes".[5] In the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) the hotel becomes the refuge of Lieutenant Frederic Henry and Catherine before their escape by boat to Switzerland:[6]
"The hotel was very luxurious. I went down the long corridors, down the wide stairs, along the salons to the bar."
The writer returned in October 1948 with his wife Mary Welsh, took trips to Pallanza, to Mottarone and to Lake Orta, and signed the guestbook "an old client".[5]
International conferences
From 5 to 20 September 1932 the salons of the Grand Hôtel hosted a conference of fifteen states on the economic and financial relations of central and eastern Europe, chaired by the Frenchman Georges Bonnet, which produced no concrete results.[7] Better known is the conference of 11-14 April 1935, held in the Music Room of the Palazzo Borromeo on Isola Bella: Benito Mussolini, British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald with foreign secretary John Simon, and French prime minister Pierre-Étienne Flandin with foreign minister Pierre Laval sought to reaffirm the spirit of Locarno and contain the expansionism of Nazi Germany.[7][1] The understanding lasted only a few months: in October Italy attacked Ethiopia.[7]
Music: the Settimane Musicali
On 27 August 1962 a concert by the orchestra of Teatro alla Scala opened the Settimane Musicali di Stresa, a festival founded by the Venetian lawyer Italo Trentinaglia de Daverio and known today as the Stresa Festival. Besides the Palazzo dei Congressi, concerts are held on Isola Bella and Isola Madre, at the hermitage of Santa Caterina del Sasso, at Villa Pallavicino and at the Rocca di Angera; performers there have included Arthur Rubinstein, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, David Oistrakh and Maurizio Pollini. For twenty years the artistic director was Gianandrea Noseda; since October 2020 it has been the cellist Mario Brunello.[8] Noseda, from Milan, has also been music director of Turin's Teatro Regio and principal guest conductor of the RAI National Symphony Orchestra.[9]
The cable car and the Mottarone disaster
The rack railway closed on 13 May 1963. In its place, after three years of construction, a two-section cable car was inaugurated on 1 August 1970: from the lake to the Alpino intermediate station, at 805 metres (2,351 metres of line), and from there to the summit (3,020 metres), with a span of about two kilometres. The last major works dated to 2016.[10]
On 23 May 2021 the breaking of the haul cable caused a cabin on the second section to plunge: 14 people died and only one passenger survived, injured. According to the public prosecutor's office of Verbania, the emergency brake failed to engage because it had been blocked by so-called "forchettoni" (fork-shaped clamps); compensation of 25-30 million euros has been paid to the victims' families.[11] On 18 September 2025 the preliminary hearing judge in Verbania, Gianni Macchioni, accepted plea bargains for the operating company's owner, Luigi Nerini (3 years and 10 months), the operations director, Enrico Perocchio (3 years and 11 months), and the service chief, Gabriele Tadini (4 years and 5 months) — sentences that do not involve imprisonment; Martin Leitner and Peter Rabanser, executives of the manufacturer Leitner, were acquitted at the same prosecutor's request.[12]
Pages linking here
Sources
- Treccani – Enciclopedia Italiana
- Archivio storico Grand Hôtel des Iles Borromées
- Piemonteis
- Archivio storico Grand Hôtel des Iles Borromées
- Alto Piemonte MAG
- Casa della Resistenza (Verbania Fondotoce)
- Archivio storico Grand Hôtel des Iles Borromées
- Stresa Festival
- Treccani – Enciclopedia
- NovaraToday — 16 April 2024
- ANSA — 23 April 2025
- Il Giorno — 18 September 2025