We’ve shown you photos from this flight once before. It took a bit less than an hour to go from the flat green fields of NL to these shots of the alps as seen from above. Pretty sure these are mostly over Switzerland, and still pretty sure the lake below is more of Lago Maggiore, which means some of the southernmost parts are Italy. Sorry for the reflections in some of these; I just love seeing the map come alive to my eyes :-).
Our very, very last photos from that lovely visit in Switzerland’s Ticino canton last year. Above and several below from Locarno; also a last shot or two from Melide, Bissone, Campione d’Italia and Morcote.
The ground-level photos in this post are our last of Lago Maggiore at its northernmost end, in Locarno. I’m pretty confident that the shot at the very bottom of the post shows most of the rest of Lago Maggiore, and even a wee bit of the westernmost arm of Lake Lugano (the part you can see, looking down from an amazing overlook in Morcote, in this photo from an earlier post), as seen from the airplane on Sunday afternoon the 15th of June, as our plane flew south from Amsterdam to Rome.
I’ve trimmed them down a fair bit with past posts, and deletion or editing…but there are still a ton of photos in this last Lake Living post from Lake Lugano in Ticino Canton of southern Switzerland. Mostly I devote whatever I do post on this blog to reminding myself (and readers) how much beauty there is to see and be grateful for in the world around us, if we manage to engage with it directly by walking out our doors and feeling the wind in our hair, water and sun on our skin, and live a bit. So please pardon the excess … but answer me this: is excess beauty ever really too much? 🙂
A selection of entrancy photos from various parts of Ticino on my visit there more than 5 months ago. I need to accept that I’ll never get all those photos posted…
These are all from my first evening ‘living’ if only briefly in the village of Bissone on the southeastern shore of Lake Lugano. Curious about the Italian exclave, and noting that it was a short walk past the nearest grocery store where I’d be buying my dinner fixins and breakfast supplies, I walked on up the narrow road without decent sidewalk and caught these views, some of Campione d’Italia and others looking more south. In the gallery below is another image similar to the one above, which I’m sharing b/c it lets you better see the causeway that made overland travel possible between Melide and Bissone, early in the last century. John (and possibly others equally curious), you’ll be interested in the Wikipedia article on Campione and how it came to exist, and this arch, and the the boundary marker I showed in my last post from Campione.
An exclave of Italy within Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Lugano. Below is the dock as our boat pulled in – tap or click the photo to see it better, b/c the gallery auto-crops it a bit to fit. Probably the top of the mountain in that photo is already Italy again, but in between is a steep Swiss mountainside :-). My first four nights in Ticino were spent a 15-minute walk to the right of that marker below.
Not a camera error: the shadow versus light being shown past Monte San Salvatore by the setting sun managing to shine past some parts of other mountains south and west. As seen from the waterfront at Campione d’Italia, the exclave of Italy on this segment of Lake Lugano, after that cruise back from Morcote I mentioned in an earlier post :-).
A suite of images from yesterday’s morning walk to pick up a few groceries, though indeed with a detour or two along the way to savor the views. The nearby pyramid-tipped mountain is Monte San Giorgio, on the border w/Italy and apparently a UNESCO world heritage site, whatever that might mean.
This is Lago Maggiore as seen from the train I took from Domodossola to Gallarate on Saturday. Lago Maggiore is mostly in Italy, with only its northernmost part in Switzerland. This photo was taken from the train (hence the light reflections, sorry) as we pulled away from the station at Verbania Palanza, and below are two more train shots of the only lake I expect to be showing you which is fully inside Italy: the little Lago di Mergozzo which sits just west of this westernmost bay of Lago Maggiore.
These are all from my first evening ‘living’ if only briefly in the village of Bissone on the southeastern shore of Lake Lugano. Curious about the Italian exclave, and noting that it was a short walk past the nearest grocery store where I’d be buying my dinner fixins and breakfast supplies, I walked on up the narrow road without decent sidewalk and caught these views, some of Campione d’Italia and others looking more south. In the gallery below is another image similar to the one above, which I’m sharing b/c it lets you better see the causeway that made overland travel possible between Melide and Bissone, early in the last century. John (and possibly others equally curious), you’ll be interested in the Wikipedia article on Campione and how it came to exist, and this arch, and the the boundary marker I showed in my last post from Campione.
(so much world, so little time....) 