Bracciano & Ceri

Most cruise guests who stop at Civitavecchia take the motorway south toward Rome. Fewer know that thirty minutes in the opposite direction — north and inland — a volcanic lake of extraordinary stillness is waiting, with a medieval castle rising directly from its western shore. The lake bracciano shore excursion civitavecchia route takes you past Etruscan hillsides and through olive groves before the water appears below, vast and pewter-grey in the morning light.

For a half day excursion civitavecchia, Bracciano and Ceri represent a combination that almost no organised tour offers: the Orsini-Odescalchi Castle on the water's edge, lunch at a lakeside restaurant where the specialty is freshwater fish caught the same morning, and then the short ascent to Ceri — a medieval village of perhaps two hundred souls perched on a tufa promontory so dramatic it seems sculpted rather than settled. You are back at the port by early afternoon, with the rare pleasure of having seen a side of Lazio that most visitors never find.

A volcanic lake, a castle and a medieval village

• Castello Odescalchi on the water

  One of the best-preserved Renaissance castles in Italy, standing directly at the edge of the lake — the same Odescalchi family who have owned it since the seventeenth century still receive visitors.

• Lunch with a view — freshwater fish

  Lakeside restaurants in Bracciano serve coregone and other freshwater fish caught from the volcanic lake each morning. A mid-excursion lunch here is among the quieter pleasures of Lazio.

• Ceri: the village time forgot

  Balanced on a narrow tufa outcrop above the surrounding plain, Ceri has barely changed in five centuries. The church, the single main street, the silence — it is one of those places that ask nothing of you except to look.