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 :-).
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 was in Locarno, on the shores of Lago Maggiore, nearly five months ago already. These are all from a lovely walk around the city on my first morning there. Below you’ll see some of the old “Castello Visconteo,” or viscount’s castle I guess, which is one of the older buildings in this city which dates to the 12th century but does have some Roman history as well, I believe. I mostly just walked around and enjoyed the views – didn’t go into the museum housed in the Castello, sorry…
We’re in the hills above Bellinzona, walking toward Castello di Sasso Corbaro, which you can see at the top. It’s one of the three castles guarding three key passes into this valley which gives access to Lake Lugano, into which this stream above and below will flow. (More about all that, quite soon.) Below, you’re looking pretty much west to where you can just make out Lago Maggiore’s northeasternmost arm.
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.
My last few days in Ticino I moved over to Locarno, at the northernmost part of Lago Maggiore where it’s Swiss. (I showed you a few views from the train of bits of the Italian parts farther south, a while ago.) Above and below middle, you can basically see from Locarno on the NW corner of the lake, to the northeastern corner which means these shots cover maybe half the Swiss parts of this enormous lake.
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.
(so much world, so little time....) 