It started as a bet among three wine-happy men, one of whom was my husband. But I don’t blame them, really.
The bewitching beauty of Orta, a secluded jewel of a lake just a mile wide and to the west of Maggiore, tucked in the Italian Lakes District, is well chronicled: Friedrich Nietzsche, Honoré de Balzac and Robert Browning all wrote about how sublimely gorgeous the lake and its surroundings were (Balzac called Orta’s island “a spot coyly hidden and left to nature, a wild garden”).
Was it any wonder we were drawn in, too?