Lago Trasimeno | Never Compete with the Sea
The silence of the carps
Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. To come along, join free, and go paid if you want to keep us on the road.
I simply can’t write about Italian lakes without addressing two things: the sea itself, and Lake Balaton in Hungary. Both will make sense, but since I have more readers who are not from Hungary, let’s start with the sea first.
I say “lakes in Italy” and 99.99% of people would say Lake Clooney, I mean, Como. A few would say Lake Garda. Maybe, just maybe, the ones who are really into this might mention Lake Maggiore. But I am sure almost everyone would name a lake under the Alps, up in the North. No one would mention anything south of Garda.
And why would they? If you go that far down in Italy, you are going for two reasons as a tourist: spend some time in Rome, Florence, or Naples, or vacation by the sea. Maybe see some hilltop towns in Tuscany. If you are a travel connoisseur, you might check out Abruzzo and its hilltop towns, maybe Calabria. But who the heck would go to a lake in Umbria, a region most travelers have never even heard of, that is at best 7 meters deep, basically a geological rain collector, where the closest place tourists have actually heard of is an hour’s drive away (Siena)?
Well, we did.
But it would be hypocritical to say that we would pick this destination over the option of a sea, since we literally live 50 meters from the sea. We went there because there was an event in Perugia with some friends we wanted to meet, and we didn’t want to stay in the city. The lake is a 30-minute drive from the regional capital, so why not book a calm and relaxed house overlooking the lake instead of a city apartment?
Our main question for today: why pick a lake when you can pick the sea?
I’ll explain with Lake Balaton. In case this is new for you, I’m Hungarian originally. I grew up there and, like any other Hungarian, I spent many summers at Lake Balaton. The lake is the largest lake in Central Europe, according to Wikipedia, which also thinks Hungary is Central Europe. Cute. Anyway. Balaton has everything that a large lake can offer to a country with no sea access: hotels, beaches, ferries, some local food culture, some local wine, and it is Europe, so it has old palaces, castles, and fortresses. Of course, Balaton is not Como or Garda, so there is nothing grandiose in the built environment, mostly post-socialist-era buildings mixed with old Habsburg-style centers, and it is also not like the Austrian lakes up in the mountains, so the water is not that cold and clear, and there is an absence of cows (though I think this is a good thing). But, all in all, it is a lake, big-ass water, and it is wonderful during summertime.
It costs the same, if not more, than a vacation by the sea. And, because of this, tourism at Lake Balaton is a dying industry. Well, there are other reasons, of course, this is Hungary, so people are absolutely incapable of innovation and change, and, on top of this hard-headed mindset, most of the lake’s tourism infrastructure is controlled by oligarchs who are the same hard-headed idiots just with more money. But Hungary being Hungary is just a small piece of the puzzle if you look at the map. Just 3-4 hours more driving or a short flight and you are by the sea in Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, or Greece. If you don’t have a vacation home by the lake, or a friend with one, and you need to pay for accommodation anyway, why would you pay the same for a lake when the sea costs a couple of hours more of travel? To most people, the answer is obvious. You wouldn’t.
But what if you want something completely different?
And this is the most important advice I can give to anyone doing hospitality business by a lake. You should never compete with the sea, because that’s a race you can’t win, ever. Especially if your lake is like Balaton or Trasimeno. Hard pill to swallow, but just as not all seas are created equal (the Aegean versus the Black Sea, for example), lakes are also different. A super-deep, up-in-the-mountains lake has tranquil, clear, cold water. The lakes in Austria or Northern Italy are fundamentally different from the lakes below Florence, or from Balaton. These lakes are shallow. Lake Trasimeno is almost the same size as Como, but while Como is 400 meters deep, Trasimeno is 7 meters at best. Even Lazio’s volcanic lakes, Vico, Bolsena, Bracciano, run between 50 and 165 meters. Balaton is around 10 meters, super shallow.
So it is shallow, which makes it hard to sell as a beach destination, and as a big surface of water it competes with a sea that is a couple of hours away by car. The water is clean, but not as clear and cold as a mountain lake. Oh, and I forgot to mention that there are no big palaces, no famous sights, and no celebrities doing anything worth the news of any relevant magazine. I would bet multiple figures that most of my readers heard about Lake Trasimeno for the first time from this very article.
So: why pick Lake Trasimeno, and who should?
If you are Hungarian and reading this, imagine if Lake Trasimeno = Balaton. Because they are almost perfectly identical, and I am not joking here. During my time at the lake, I had this question in my mind all the time:
“Why didn’t we have this thing at Balaton? It’s so simple to do, it’s so easy to do?”
or
“Interesting, I’ve been here for three days, and no one tried to sell me an overpriced menu, or a frozen food, or a shitty product, just because I’m one of the few paying customers who’s visiting this place.”
Looking at you, practically any Balaton restaurant… Be it a local csárda (Hungary’s version of a trattoria) or a fancy dining place in Balatonfelvidék where they sell pörkölt (meat stew) for people from Rózsadomb (fancy area in Budapest), who, when they see a red iron pan with white flower design and steaming meat in it, they lose their minds and shout out mindlessly, “oh this is countryside, the essence of poverty food, nice, let’s pay 5X more for it than we should”. Or the lángos (deep-fried dough, kinda like Italian panzerotti but thinner) and hekk (hake, a saltwater fish, yes, a lake’s favorite fish is a saltwater one) kiosks, or anyone selling anything to anyone in Balaton… It’s mind-blowing and astonishing how disrespectful that place has become.
None of this is happening at Trasimeno, for multiple reasons.
The ideal location for…
I have one type of traveler in my mind who can value Lake Trasimeno, aside from local Italians who are visiting this place anyway. And this person is the one who is doing multiple weeks in the middle of Italy, discovering Southern Tuscany, the hills of Umbria, and the North of Lazio, also known as Tuscia.
Siena is close by (our Siena piece is here). Arezzo is also near (our Arezzo piece). And you can freely roam Maremma and Val d’Orcia from here. You will definitely need a car, obviously. You will definitely need a car, obviously. But with one, you can cover this part of Italy with a couple of hours of driving daily, spreading your day trips out from the lake.
We did two weeks here. If this had been my first time in Southern Tuscany and Umbria, I would have spent more, probably a month. But the only places we hadn’t seen until then were Assisi and Perugia. Two weeks were enough. We spent a full week just around the lake. It was the perfect home base for us. It was also my birthday (in April), and the place we booked was a private house overlooking the lake from the borgo of San Savino. The lake itself was calm and relaxing, and the house doubled it. The owner is a photographer, from a family of photographers, and the whole house was built around one floor-to-ceiling window facing the water, letting in as much light as the sky had to give. Even when the April rain kept us inside, we had the lake.
On the wall of the house hangs a photograph the owner’s father took, decades ago: a fisherman alone in his boat, working the water. I looked at it every morning over coffee and thought nothing more of it than that it was a good photograph. Then we took our first walk up to the borgo. The castello of San Savino is one simple street bent into a circle with a small piazza inside, and people actually live in it, laundry and flowerpots and all. On the only bench of the piazza lay a huge red cat, a big hairy beast, sleeping, minding a business that consisted of exactly zero items. He was definitely the king of the castle. His name, we learned, is Leone. What else.
Then a door opened in one of the small houses inside the walls, his owner came out, greeted us gently, picked Leone up off the bench, and carried him inside. On the walk back we stopped at the edge and looked down at the lake, and there were two small boats below us, fishing, not out on the open water but tucked inside the reed beds along the shore, moving so little they could have been painted there. The photograph in our house was taken something like fifty years ago. It could have been taken that afternoon.
The three touchpoints of the lake
I don’t know how or why this works, but almost every lake where I have been has the same three towns: the working town, the postcard town, the party town. In Balaton terms: Veszprém, Keszthely, Siófok. In Trasimeno terms: Magione, Castiglione, and Passignano.
Magione is the working town. It has a big forest-like castle, and it has the economic and industrial life of the lake. People work here, live here, eat here, and get by here. If you need to buy something, you probably end up here. It’s not on the lake, and it doesn’t live directly from the lake. But it is next to the lake, and things happen here, mostly because it sits between the lake and the regional capital, Perugia. As a traveler, I would keep an eye on Magione, but I wouldn’t stay here.
Castiglione del Lago is pretty much the town described by its own name: the lake’s castle. It sits on a rock formation, high above the water. It’s a proper fortress with panoramic views of the lake and the surrounding Umbrian landscape. It’s probably your first stop by car if you are coming from Florence or Siena, as we did. There is a small borgo inside the walls, 2-3 streets, with bars and cafés worth the stop. Definitely worth a walk. The shops sell local Umbrian products, and several places sell the local torta al testo, a flatbread sandwich they fill with meat, mostly pork or wild boar.
Passignano sul Trasimeno is where you get the best of what the lake can produce for you. Unlike Castiglione, it’s flat, it has a walkable promenade along the water, and a compact center that makes you slow down. It’s perfect for a walk after the main selling point of this town: its restaurants. Of course, most lakeside places sell you the same type of food, which is local here, but not all of them can offer a proper walk after platters of fried and stuffed carp, fish stew, and grilled and smoked fish, all from the lake.
We picked a place in San Savino, which is basically like Castiglione del Lago, but even smaller.
Where the sea can’t compete
A shallow lake should never compete with the sea, because it can never win. And it works the other way around too. There are three things where the sea can’t compete with a lake like this, ever, because the lake always wins. This is true for any lake. Balaton, Trasimeno, Como, it doesn’t matter.
The first one might be surprising. The lake is like a sanatorium compared to the sea. It’s relaxed. It’s calm. It’s silent. To find this level of almost disturbing quietness, you either go up into the mountains, or you really need to know your way around the sea to find that particular spot not overrun by vacationers and beach people. In Trasimeno, this is easy. Even the most popular towns like Castiglione or Passignano sit in quiet harmony with the stillness of the water.
For me, Trasimeno was a place where you relax, chill, and recharge. We didn’t pick a wellness spa hotel (I’m not even sure there is one by the lake), but I would next time. Someone, please just massage me, feed me, and help me into the water, thanks. Or, if I were into yoga or any kind of spirituality, I wouldn’t do a yoga camp by the sea. I would do it here, overlooking the lake. There is something in humans that unclenches when we can watch a big surface of calm water do nothing.
The second one is obvious: the food. The lake produces something the sea can’t: freshwater fish. In Trasimeno, this mostly means carp, perch, and eel. Because the lake is huge and shallow, the carp especially grow mindlessly big, reaching 10-15 kilograms. Fishing is highly regulated, and most of what gets caught ends up immediately on the plates of the locals. It’s also mixed into the traditional Umbrian cuisine, which is heavy on pork and wild boar, since Umbria is full of forests and hunting is part of everyday life. On the coast where I live, most restaurants have two menus: a fish menu and a terra menu. Fish is from the sea, meat is from the earth. In the restaurants by the lake, it’s one menu. You find wild boar stew next to grilled perch.
The classic dishes alone are worth a day trip from Florence. The carp (carpa regina in porchetta) is stuffed with lard, garlic, fennel, and pepper, then roasted until the skin goes crispy. Much like a porchetta, but fish. The perch gets the same treatment, but since it's smaller, it goes on the grill to smoke without stuffing. Then there is the tegamaccio, which is basically caciucco fish stew but with local freshwater fish. And there are the battered, deep-fried eels, which you find in small kiosks on the promenades, sold like fish & chips, in small paper cups.
Small wink for Hungarians. It was so great to visit a lake that lets locals fully enjoy whatever it gives them, without fuss, pretense, or shallow mockery. The stuffed carp should be the main dish of any Hungarian restaurant, except instead of fennel and pepper we would put smoked paprika on the skin, maybe bacon. The grilled perch should be sold at every beach kiosk instead of the lunacy of the hekk. The tegamaccio is halászlé (Hungarian fish soup) without the paprika. And the eels show how freshwater fish can be sold as street food right next to lángos. Every one of these was priced under a rántotthús (Wiener schnitzel, but from pork) in Siófok. This is how it is done. This is how it should be done.
Lastly, a lake is fundamentally different from a sea. No shit, Sherlock. But listen to me, for real. The way you go into the water. The things you can do in the water. The feeling you have by the water. It’s just simpler, more down to earth. More natural, I don’t have a better word for it. And one thing was clearly visible by the lake: there were almost no hotels or big establishments. The place was full of campsites, glamping, and infrastructure for ecotourism, geared toward people who simply prefer something closer to nature. If I were cynical (which I am), I would say this is a German’s wet dream with their Volkswagen Westfalia and tent. I haven’t looked, but wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a nudist beach somewhere by the lake.
Also, there were no jet skis on the lake. No water parks. No paid beaches, aside from some paid campsites that happened to sit on the shore. There wasn’t even a ferry, except the ones running out to the islands (Maggiore and Polvese). No theme parks. No multistorey hotels. The entire lake area looked as if the country’s tourism board had simply forgotten the lake existed and handed it over to the locals with a shrug: do whatever you want, we don’t care.
Everything screams ecological preservation. We are not locals, so it’s hard to know precisely, but the lake feels more like a place for conservation than a place for tourism. Which makes it an excellent choice for exactly one kind of tourism: the ecological kind. Everything is protected, regulated, conserved. I am sure the reason there is no big Hilton sign by the lake is not that big hotels aren’t interested. They just can’t build there. Which, contradictorily, is the best thing that can happen to this lake.
There is a harder truth under the stillness, though, and I would be lying by omission if I left it out. I did some research on this, and the lake is shrinking. Trasimeno is fed by rain and not much else, and the rains are failing it. There is no river that feeds the lake (same problem for Balaton, by the way). The beaches get longer every year, which sounds like a gift until you understand what it means. This summer the ferry from San Feliciano to Isola Polvese stopped running, because the hulls started touching the bottom. In Castiglione del Lago they switched the streetlamps on the lakeside promenade to red light, because red doesn’t attract the clouds of midges that rise off the low, warm water. There is talk of piping in water from the Montedoglio reservoir, and talk, as usual, is most of what there is. So the conservation posture I praised above is not only a choice. Part of the reason the lake feels handed back to nature is that nature is quietly taking it back. If you want to see those two boats in the reeds, I would not wait a decade.
April and May are off-season by the sea where we live. But people already come during this time. Florence, Cinque Terre, Pisa, all of Tuscany and the Ligurian coast are minutes away from us, and April and May are the best months to visit, not unbearably hot, no tourist hordes yet. So by April and May, our small village by the sea gets some visitors. Don’t expect too much. We just notice it’s not only the 20 people we know in the streets and us, but a couple more. Yet, when we came back from Lake Trasimeno, we felt as if we had arrived in a big city, full of noise and busyness.
I thought this kind of tranquility in Italy existed only up in the mountains, in the small old villages you reach on windy, curvy roads. I never thought this level of silence was possible by a lake in the middle of the country, only an hour drive from Florence.
My small Italian bolthole is about 40km south of Trasimeno, we go there a lot, especially to the nature reserve near San Feliciano. The water levels are visibly reducing year by year, but we love it. Exactly as you describe.