TheVerbano Cusio Ossola area has always been the destination of cultural and religious travels and pilgrimages thanks to its warmer climate and to its beautiful landscapes. It has always fascinated poets and artists such as Stendhal, Hemingway, Leonardo da Vinci, Fogazzaro, Queen Victoria and the Saudi Arabian King.
This type of holiday has been fostered through the building of the railway (1855) and the building of the Sempione street, started in 1801 as the will of Napoleon, which makes this area an international crossroad.

Besides the different families who ruled the territory, Visconti, then Sforza and finally Borromeo many artists has witnessed the religious architecture of the territory.
Since the nineteenth century this land became the permanent summer residence of important writers such as Byron, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Gautier, Manzoni, Turgenev. Stendhal wrote in 1817 the following passage: "Nothing in the world can be compared to the fascination of these burning summer days I spent at the lakes…in the chestnut-tree woods, the trees are so green that made me thought that their branches have been plunged in the water...".

Ruskin wrote in 1837: "I call this region of the Lake Maggiore the Eden of Italy".
Other travelers and pioneers such as Franz Ludwing von Welden and Horace Benedict de Saussure celebrates the Mount Rosa discovering its beauties.
Few areas in the world have in such a narrow space so many natural beauties: the Mount Rosa Himalayan wall in Macugnaga, the Toce fall in the Formazza Valley, the Vigezzo Valley also known as the painters Valley, the triptych of the Borromee Islands (Bella, Madre and Pescatori) and the Lake Maggiore historical villas, the Sanctuary of the Madonna of the Stone, its eight natural reserves, the Val Grande National Park, the Lake Maggiore regional parks, Veglia Devero, the Domodossola, Griffa and Orta sacred mounts. And other beauties are the botanical gardens, the hot spring waters, the archeological sites.
Verbano Cusio Ossola is all this and more. A fascinating land, rich of tradition, ready for a new era.