Giardini a Lago (Como Lakefront Gardens)

About this place

Como waited roughly seventeen years to get its own waterfront back. The strip between the town and the lake disappeared behind hoardings in the late 2000s for the flood-barrier works, and the stretch from Piazza Sant'Agostino to Piazza Cavour only reopened in December 2024. The gardens themselves are still half a building site: the lawn in front of the Tempio Voltiano was handed back in May 2026, while a large section remains fenced off waiting for the works to finish, and the promised new playground has still not been built. What is open is simple and enough: mown grass, tall plane trees, benches facing the first basin of the lake and the mountains that close it in. At the western end, furthest from Piazza Cavour, stands the Tempio Voltiano (it has its own page here), and out on the breakwater in front of you the two opposing curves of polished steel that make up Life Electric, Daniel Libeskind's 2015 sculpture, reachable in about five flat minutes along the paved breakwater. In the other direction the promenade carries on past the neoclassical villas to the park of Villa Olmo, about twenty-five level minutes on foot. Say it plainly: this is a pleasant free stroll, not a destination. Do not give it a line in your itinerary and do not travel for it. It is where Como itself walks after sunset, and the natural waiting room for a boat, since the Piazza Cavour pier is right alongside (Como to Bellagio is about two hours on the slow ferry, around forty-five minutes on the fast one). Twenty to forty minutes covers it completely. Getting here could hardly be easier. Como Lago station, an hour from Milano Cadorna with a train roughly every half hour, is four hundred metres away; Como San Giovanni, 35 to 40 minutes from Milano Centrale, is about a kilometre downhill, ten to fifteen minutes on foot. In autumn, October and November above all, the lake rises and can push water across Piazza Cavour and parts of the promenade, as the new barriers have still never actually been raised. In winter the trees are bare, the wind is cold and ferry schedules thin out on the winter timetable, roughly November to late March. The whole thing is flat and paved, fine for strollers and wheelchairs, and free at any hour.