TRAVEL IN A GARDEN: Hydrangeas, Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore, Italy.

Springtime does not exhaust the flowering season of one of the most famous garden in Northern Italy: the baroque garden at Isola Bella, on the Lake Maggiore. In a cloudy morning of late September, the panicles of pinkish hydrangeas revealed the incoming autumn. Their shades warmed the stone terraces and the white statues of the Amphitheatre, or stood out against terracotta pots and the spiral shape of the dark taxus. They were accompanied by the intense scent of Olea fragrans, shorter days and cooler nights.

In 1631, Carlo Borromeo decided to built a small house and a garden of citrus plants and flowers for his wife, Isabella d'Adda, on this tiny island that he renamed Isola Bella 'Beautiful Island,' in her honour. Eventually, the magnificent garden was inaugurated in 1671 by Vitaliano Borromeo. Ten overlapping terraces in the shape of a trunk pyramid that jut towards the lake and the mountains, full of symbolic statues, obelisks and flowers surrounded by rare trees and shrubs, and dormant azaleas and camellia that are preparing the extraordinary spring blooming.