Posts tagged “Lake Lugano

Signs of the City.106

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.

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Mountains.61

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 :-).

Lake Living.51

This is the gorgeous town of Morcote, at the southern tip of the peninsula that starts with Lugano, being wrapped around by two arms of Lake Lugano. At the bottom I’m showing you some of the towns streets, which are quite remarkable; the neighboring and smaller village of Vico Morcote has even more amazing little pedestrian staired streets and gorgeous houses built into the hillsides, which I’ll share at some point as well.

In the gallery below you’ll also see a “photo spot” which is part of something called the Grand Tour of Switzerland, and is apparently a thing. I’ve of course seen these, and folks posing for selfies or real photos by them, in many places…this time, with ten minutes to spare while I waited for the boat to take me back over to Campione d’Italia, I decided you might as well know you can do this as well, if you come to Switzerland. (More about that boat ride later, too: it went from Switzerland to Italy then back and forth another time while I was on it. Fun!)


Lake Living.50


Mountains.59

This and the last post are all from a lovely walk between Gandria, on the northern shore of the northeastern-most arm of the many-armed Lake Lugano, and the city of Lugano itself. (I’d taken a boat out to Gandria so I could walk back.) Below, you see a panorama which shows you the sunlit hill which marks the northeastern point of the bay on which Lugano sits, after which you get into that northeastern-most arm of which the majority is in Italy. As is the southwestern-most part, and also a wee exclave in the arm on which sits Bissone where I stayed. That arm, which connects to the rest of the lake further south & west, extends between the rounded mountain on the far right and the range in the middle (at the top of which it’s Italy again, fyi). Just sayin’ in case you wonder what you’re seeing or want to check it all out on a map :-). The photo at the top is looking from just below the sunlit hill (below) south towards the mountain that sits at the top of the arm I lived on. Sorry if this is TMI…


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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.


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Lake Lugano in Bissone, Ticino, Switzerland. We’ll be sharing mostly Lake Living and Mountains images for a bit now, eh? 🙂