Ticino

Mountains.87

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 :-).

City Views.262

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.

Mountains.81

This is it, folks: last of the Swiss mountains, some from my walks in and around Morcote (above), Bissone and Lugano, several from around the Centovalli town of Camedo, and also some from the hanging-bridge walk in the mountains on the north of the valley that runs between Bellinzona and Lago Maggiore / Locarno. (E.g. the bigger photo at the bottom with a lovely crescent moon.) It’s a lot, but some of them sure are lovely, eh?

Lake Living.71

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.

City Views.261

Last city images from Bellinzona – Ticino’s capital and home of the UNESCO World Heritage Site three castles, which we identified in an earlier post.

Village Views.110

Some last shots of Bissone, the lovely little village on the eastern shore of Lake Lugano where I stayed for four nights last November :-). The serpents are the city (village, really) symbol, taken by the public pool.

Bridges.30

Last bridge pics from my lovely Centovalli afternoon trip down from Locarno last year. Interestingly, I saw these hills and lakes from the air en route to Rome from Amsterdam, two Sundays ago: look for it in upcoming posts :-).

Urban Garden.230


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Urban Entrances.160


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Lake Living.70


Lake Living.69

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? 🙂

Bridges.29

Above, the footbridge / steps up and over the highway wedged between the lake and the mountains in Bissone. Below, left to right: foot and bike paths next to a big bridge across the Ij during my bike ride out to Muidersloot last May; bridge in Parc de Bercy last October; and a foot bridge at Ålesund in January.

Mountains.78

During the walk to and back from the hanging bridge itself, so same mountains; above, looking south across the narrow valley of the Fiume Ticino.

From the Air.78

Last photos from the cable car up (with sun) and down (without sun) during my manic effort to see and walk across the Tibetan-style hanging bridge in the hills north and west of Bellinzona, back in November. For orientation, in the photo above, the main city of Bellinzona with its three UNESCO historic castles is to the left, west, around the corner and between the ridge of mountains we’re descending, and the ridge formed with the moutain across the valley. In case you were curious…

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