Laglio

Navigazione Lago di Como publishes two timetable editions a year and a complete chart of stops. Laglio appears in neither the summer sheet, valid 1 July to 4 October 2026, nor the autumn sheet, valid 5 October to 1 November 2026, and it appears on no stop list. The stops along this stretch of the western shore, running north from the city, are Tavernola, Cernobbio, Moltrasio, Urio, Brienno and Argegno, with Blevio, Torno, Faggeto Lario, Pognana Lario, Careno and Nesso opposite. Laglio sits between Urio and Brienno and is not among them. Its own comune's tourism site states the position outright and directs visitors to the Brienno and Urio stops instead.

So the nearest piers are Urio to the south, stretch 2 from Como at €4.50 or about $5.24, and Brienno to the north, stretch 4 at €8.00 or about $9.32. Neither is in Laglio and neither has a connecting shuttle that anybody publishes. There is one ticket that makes this shore work from the water without needing to land here at all.

• A circular ticket allows intermediate stops and expires when you land back at the pier it was issued from
• The car ferry never comes near this shore: it runs only between Bellagio, Cadenabbia, Varenna and Menaggio
• Neither is there a fast-service stop, because there is no stop of any kind

The bus, and the line number that has changed

ASF Autolinee runs C110, Como to Argegno to Menaggio to Colico, along the SS340 Regina, and it calls at Laglio between Moltrasio and Brienno. The number is the trap. ASF renumbered its network to three digits, and the two-digit numbers still printed on the comune's own transport page and on most travel blogs match nothing on the operator's site. If you search a timetable for C10 you will find nothing and conclude, wrongly, that there is no bus.

ASF prices its long-distance journeys by kilometre band and does not publish which band a named journey falls in, so we cannot print a Como to Laglio fare and neither can anyone else: the band is produced by the ticket office or the app. For scale, band 1 is €1.70 and band 3 is €2.60, while buying on board pushes band 1 to €3.10. The exception is the contactless Swipe on Lake scheme, where the whole C110 journey from Como to Menaggio is a published flat €4.90, about $5.71, with no on-board surcharge; tap the green validator on board, watch for the green light, and know that no paper receipt exists. The current C110 sheet is the winter weekday one, valid 14 September 2026 to 8 June 2027.

George Clooney bought Villa Oleandra in Laglio in 2002, for around ten million dollars on the comune's own account, and added the neighbouring Villa Margherita in 2004. It is a private residence. No official page states that it can be visited, because it cannot: there is no ticket, no open day and no garden tour, and the property is a home rather than a monument.

What the comune did do is pass an ad-hoc regulation protecting the household's privacy. In its own words on its own tourism site, it prohibits people from stopping in the immediate vicinity of the villa's entrance, including from the lake, with residents excepted. Read that carefully: the ban covers the water side as well as the road, so hiring a boat and holding position off the gate is the same offence as loitering on the pavement in front of it. The comune publishes no fine on that page, and we print none rather than invent one.

The practical consequence is simple. There is nothing to see at the gate, standing there is prohibited, and the only lawful and remotely rewarding way to see the house is from a boat under way on the lake, at a distance, on a cruise that runs this shore. The small-group cruise out of Como does exactly that, and the self-drive rental does it on your own schedule, with the ordinance in mind.

The purchase dates and the stopping rule are the comune's own words, on its tourism site's page for the villa.

Where the village actually earns its reputation

Strip the celebrity out and Laglio still has the geography that attracted the buyer: a west-facing shelf of old houses, the water directly below the road, and a mountainside behind that rises to 1,356 metres inside the comune's boundary. It is quiet in a way the towns with piers are not, precisely because no boat unloads two hundred people onto it four times a day. That is the honest appeal, and it is worth an hour on the way north, not a day.

The Buco dell'Orso, the bear's hole, is a karst cave in the Torriggia district about 400 metres above the lake. In the summer of 1849 Vincenzo Barelli found the first bone fragment in it, and the excavations that followed produced large quantities of fossilised cave-bear remains. It is the comune's signature sight and you cannot go in: the spring that flows from the cave now supplies Laglio's aqueduct, and drinking-water protection rules have kept it closed to visitors for years. That is a negative finding worth having before you climb.

The rest of the comune's list is a handful of small things, all of them free, none of them publishing an opening hour: the parish church of San Giorgio; the church of San Bartolomeo; an eighteenth-century pyramid monument in the cemetery to Joseph Frank, the Habsburg court physician who was a friend of Alessandro Volta; the war memorial; the Tomba Pini; and the Cantiere Ernesto Riva, a boatyard that has built wooden lake craft for generations. On a lake full of ticketed gardens, a village where everything is free and nothing is timed is a different kind of morning.

There is no tourist office, and the town hall opens by appointment

The Comune di Laglio publishes no infopoint. The municipal offices are at Via Vecchia Regina 57, on +39 031 400148, and they open to the public by appointment only, Monday to Friday 09:00 to 11:00 with an extra window on Thursday afternoons from 14:00 to 16:00. The tourism site's contact address is [email protected]. Plan on arriving with your answers already in hand.

One small discrepancy, since it says something about the sources: ISTAT counts 841 residents at the start of 2025 and estimates 813 for 2026, while the comune's own page says about 950. We print the ISTAT figure and note the difference rather than pick the flattering one.

Under a regulation of 2006, amended in July 2021, up to 40 per cent of the on-street spaces in Laglio may be reserved for residents. Those bays are marked in yellow and they are reserved from 17:00 to 08:00 Monday to Friday, and all day at weekends and on public holidays. The annual fee for one is set by the Giunta and is not published anywhere we could reach.

Read that as a visitor and it says this: on the Saturday and Sunday you are most likely to come, up to two in every five spaces in a village pinched between a main road and a lake are off limits to you all day. There is no public car park with a published tariff, no blue-bay price and no park-and-ride. The SS340 through the village is a working main road with no room to leave a vehicle on it, and stopping near one particular gate is separately prohibited.

Our advice is unambiguous: do not drive to Laglio to look at a house you cannot see. Take the C110 bus, or see the shore from a boat, and use driving and parking on Lake Como to plan the car days around towns that publish a tariff, like Cernobbio at €1.50 to €2.00 an hour or Brunate at €2.00 for the first hour.

Laglio suits someone who wants to sleep on the quiet part of the western shore within half an hour of Como by bus, who has a car only for the mountains behind rather than for the shore itself, and who reads the €2.00 a night tax on a holiday flat as the bargain it is. It is a genuinely peaceful base on a lake that has very few of them left, and the reason is exactly the thing this page opened with: no pier means no crowd.

It does not suit a day-tripper hunting the actor's house. There is no pier to arrive at, no viewpoint, no tour, and an ordinance that prohibits standing near the gate from the road or from the water. You would spend two hours of a short holiday travelling to see a wall. And it does not suit anyone whose itinerary is boat-based: every excursion from here starts with a bus, and the villages that put you on the water are Cernobbio to the south and Nesso opposite.

If we had an afternoon on this shore and wanted the view Clooney bought, we would take the circular ticket from Como to Urio at $12.12 (€10.40), which allows intermediate stops and expires only when you land back in the city.

The other towns on this shore are set out in the whole lake, town by town, which compares them on the same four questions: which boats call, what a bed is taxed, where the car goes and who the place suits.