Isola dei Pescatori — the lane and the quay

Isola Superiore, which everybody calls the fishermen's island, is a hundred metres of houses on a sandbank with a church at one end. Around fifty people live here through the winter. There is no garden and no palace, which is exactly why it photographs so differently from Isola Bella two minutes away.

The main lane runs the length of the island and is barely wide enough for two people abreast, with tall houses, external stairs, drying nets and hanging washing over your head. It is a corridor of reflected light: warm on the walls, cool from the water at either end, and workable at almost any hour because the sun never gets straight into it.

The quay at the northern tip is the other frame — flat stone, moored boats, and Isola Bella sitting in the water behind, which makes it the natural place to end a session. In late afternoon the light comes down the lake and lands along the whole waterfront.

Restaurant terraces take up much of the shoreline in season, and lunch fills them from noon; before ten and after five the island belongs mostly to the people who live there.