Luggage Storage in Varenna

The short answer

• A few hours, arriving by train, in daylight: the storage room in the station building, about €5 a bag.
• A full day, booked in advance: an app-based drop point in the village, roughly €4–6 a bag.
• Checking out but leaving later: your hotel will hold them free. Just ask.
• Your bags need to end up somewhere else: don't store them at all. Have them carried to where you're sleeping tonight.

Short on time? Send us your train time and where you're staying on WhatsApp and you'll have a price back in minutes. From €5 a bag, insured, rated 5.0 on Google.

The station storage room

Varenna–Esino–Perledo station has no lockers. It has something better and worse at the same time: a travel agency inside the station building, I Viaggi del Tivano, at Piazza Stazione 1, which takes bags into a staffed back room for about €5 each.

Better, because a person is watching your suitcase instead of a €2 padlock. Worse, because a room with a person in it keeps that person's hours. It runs through the day in high season and cuts back sharply out of it, closing on Sundays once autumn arrives. Their number is +39 0341 814009 and it is worth calling ahead in April or October.

The failure mode: your train pulls in at 9pm, or you want the bags back after dinner. Then this option does not exist.

App-based drop points in the village

Radical Storage, Bounce, Qeepl and Eelway all list partner points in Varenna — a bar, a shop, a reception desk that has agreed to take bags. You book online, walk in, hand them over. Expect roughly €4–6 a bag for the day.

The prices are honest and the apps work. What the listings don't tell you is how small Varenna is. There may be one or two participating businesses, and they are businesses first: they shut for lunch, they shut early, and on a quiet Tuesday in November they may not open at all. Book before you get on the train, not from the platform.

Your own hotel

Every hotel and B&B in Varenna will hold your bags free on checkout day, and most will hold them before check-in too. It costs nothing and nobody advertises it.

The catch is geographic. Your bags stay where you have already been, which is fine if you're coming back and useless if you're moving to Bellagio at 6pm.

The part nobody warns you about

The station is not in Varenna. It sits above the lake on the Perledo side, and the walk down to the water takes about ten minutes. Going down with wheels is fine. Coming back up with two full suitcases in August is the reason people remember this village less fondly than they should.

Every storage option above makes you cross that hill twice: once to drop the bags, once to collect them. The ferry pier, the old town and the lakefront path are all at the bottom. The trains are all at the top.

When storage is the wrong answer

Storage solves one problem: you have bags and you want a few hours without them. It solves nothing if the bags need to be somewhere new tonight, which on a lake with four towns and a ferry is most of the time.

That is the job we do. A local driver collects your bags from the hotel, the apartment, the station forecourt or the pier, and delivers them to your next place — Bellagio, Menaggio, Como, Milan, the airport — while you spend the day on a boat with your hands free. Oversized items included. Insured. From €5 a bag, and you cross the hill zero times.

“The bags reached Varenna station exactly on time that was discussed and we avoided any dragging and carrying of bags on cobblestones or the ferry!”

Groups are where this gets obviously cheap. Five bags across a family costs less than five separate storage fees plus five ferry luggage charges plus the taxi you end up calling anyway.

Questions we get asked