Discover Lombardy

Introduction

Lombardy is Italy's most populous region and the one where the country's money is made: roughly one in six Italians live here, and the region generates about a fifth of national GDP. That weight shapes what a visitor finds — a working capital in Milan rather than a museum city, and a countryside whose towns were rich enough, early enough, to build well.

It also holds three distinct landscapes within about two hours of each other. The Po plain in the south carries the farm towns and the river cities — Pavia, Cremona, Mantua. The pre-Alpine lakes sit in the middle, Como and Iseo and the Lombard shore of Garda, filling valleys gouged by glaciers. North of them the Alps rise to the Stelvio pass and the Valtellina.

The region takes its name from the Lombards, the Germanic people who ruled northern Italy from Pavia after 568. Almost everything that followed — the Visconti and Sforza dukes, Spanish and Austrian rule, the industrial north — left something still standing.

Geography

Lombardy runs from the Po to the Alps in about 200 kilometres, crossing three landscapes: a flat, intensively farmed plain, a belt of deep glacial lakes, and high mountains along the Swiss border. Water — from Alpine snowmelt to the irrigation canals of the plain — is what connects them.

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History

Lombardy has twice been the centre of something larger than itself: as Mediolanum, capital of the late Western Roman Empire, and as the Lombard kingdom that gave the region its name. What followed — dukes, foreign rulers, industrialists — kept rebuilding on top of both.

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Culture

Lombard culture is more industrial than folkloric: opera, design, violin-making and textiles are trades here before they are traditions. The region's reputation for reserve and hard work is partly self-image, but it does describe how things actually run.

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Climate Patterns

The plain has a continental climate with hot, humid summers and cold, foggy winters, and some of Europe's worst winter air. The lakes are milder year-round, mild enough for olives; the Alps are colder and far wetter.

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Food & Traditional Cuisine

Lombard cooking runs on butter, rice and slow braises rather than olive oil and tomato — a northern, dairy-fed kitchen. It changes sharply with altitude: saffron risotto and veal in Milan, buckwheat and mountain cheese in the Valtellina, pumpkin pasta on the Mantuan plain.

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See Lombardy through traveler photos →

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