From Baveno you can see three little islands: Isola Bella, Isola Pescatori, and Isola Madre. On Isola Bella is a palace (or palazzo, if you're Italian). Isola Bella ("Beautiful Island") is on the right. You can see the palazzo to the left and the gardens beyond. The small buildings were once a fishing village, and now they hold shops and restaurants.
In 1632, a Milanese aristocrat named Borromeo began building the palazzo. Construction, interrupted at one point when the plague hit Milan, took fifty years. 343 years after that, we hopped on a boat in Baveno and visited the place. We were in august company: Napoleon and Josephine stayed there once, and Caroline of Brunswick, the Princess of Wales, loved the island so much she tried to buy it. The Borromeos would not sell.
Photography isn't allowed inside the palace, so I recommend looking at Google Images ("Isola Bella Palace"). My favorite rooms were the grottos. They're on the bottom floor, with arches open to the outside and groin vaults overhead. The walls and ceilings are completely covered with pebble mosaic. I imagine people went there to cool off.
As soon as we stepped into the gardens, though, I pulled out my camera.
On the pots behind me, you can see a design that resembles a Venn diagram. I saw this motif all over the island, so finally asked my phone, (O, wise one) what it was. The interlocking circles represent the Borromeo, Visconti and Sforza families, who enjoyed great influence in Milan back then. The design symbolizes the families' agreement that they would support one another, intermarry, and thus retain power in the region.
(The name Sforza sounded familiar, and nagged me the rest of the trip. Back home, I rooted among my old National Geographics and found a piece - February 2012 - about "La Bella Principessa," a painting of a lovely, red-headed Milanese girl, Bianca Sforza. She lived a hundred years before work began on the Isola Bella palace, and was child-bride to the commander of the Milanese troops. She died in her early teens, probably from an ectopic pregnancy, but not before Leonardo Da Vinci made her portrait.)
No chasing the peacocks!
Sheez.
