COMO can be a dispiriting place to arrive, with none of the picture-postcard prettiness you may be expecting from a lakeside town. As the nearest resort to Milan and a popular stopoff on the main road into Switzerland, it's both heavily touristed - though the atmosphere doesn't feel as forced as in some of the other lake towns as many of the tourists are Italian - and, on the outskirts at least, fairly industrialized. Apart from tourism, the main industry is a rarefied one - Como is... [More]