Lake Orta
Twelve kilometres of water and an island with a monastery, half an hour from Maggiore.
Lake Orta lies behind the Mottarone, separated from Maggiore by a single mountain, and is entirely Piedmontese. It is small, twelve kilometres by one, and it is the only pre-alpine lake that drains northwards instead of south. Around it are villages of a few hundred people and thick woods.
Orta San Giulio is the main village: a peninsula with one street, closed to cars, ending in Piazza Motta open onto the water. Four hundred metres out lies the island of San Giulio, taken up almost entirely by a Benedictine monastery and the basilica; the little boats get there in five minutes and you walk round it in a quarter of an hour.
Above the village
On the hill behind Orta is the Sacro Monte, twenty chapels among the woods dedicated to Saint Francis, built between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and Unesco heritage since 2003. It is twenty minutes up on foot and the walk is shaded; from the top you see the whole lake.
There are only a few campsites, on the western shore and around Pettenasco. They are smaller and quieter than those on Maggiore, and the Borromean Islands are half an hour away: many people choose them for exactly that reason.