Our plane flew over Lago di Brecciano shortly before landing at Rome’s Fiumicino airport on Sunday afternoon. Another short work trip in a lovely and ancient city near the Mediterranean.
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.
Reasonably confident I took these as our train approached the town of Stresa at the southwestern, Italian corner of the many-armed Lake Maggiore. And that the island most readily visible is probably Isola Bella, one of several Borromeo Islands that grace the lake.
In traveling from Zermatt to Melide in early November, I changed trains at Domodosola, just south of the alps in Italy’s Piedmont region. I had roughly an hour’s layover here, during which I found an outside bench and took these photos while I ate the portable lunch I’d packed that morning before taking the first train down from Zermatt. In one of the shots of the train station below, you’ll see a reference to the Centovalli rail line that runs from here up to Locarno – a bit of which we’ve shown you before, when I came down the other direction later that week. 🙂
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....) 