By David Gourley
Over
my dozen or so years of contributing to Visa
I have written about a number of countries spanning all seven continents. But I have yet to write about one of our
favourite, and most visited countries, Italy.
It’s time to remedy this omission.
Our
first proper holiday in Italy, as distinct from just passing through, was a
quarter of a century ago (that sure makes me feel old). We had a fortnight in a resort on Lake Como
and fell in love with the area and its harmonious bringing together of natural
and manmade beauty. As a fellow
traveller put it, the beauty “seeps into the soul”. Since then we have had city breaks in Venice
(twice), Florence and Rome, and longer stays on Lake Garda (taking in three
visits to the Verona Opera) and in Tuscany.
Not
so long ago we finally made it to the South, staying a week in the lovely town
of Sorrento, in a hotel that gave us a room with fine views over the Bay of
Naples. Tours included the Amalfi
Coast, Capri and Pompeii. And also
Naples. This city doesn’t always get a
good press and some in our party preferred to stay in Sorrento. But what we saw of it, including the
excellent Archaeological Museum, was fine.
At any rate we saw Naples and didn’t die.
Our
most recent stay, and the subject of this article, was in Stresa, on Lake
Maggiore. With Como and Garda, this is
one of the trio of big lakes in Northern Italy and, as noted, we had stayed on
the other two. We had in fact done a day
trip to Stresa, travelling down by rail from Interlaken in Switzerland, where
we were staying. Rather indignantly we
had enquired, when purchasing our ticket, why we weren’t getting the half fare
to which our Swiss Pass entitled us.
Because, said the young lady without missing a beat, Stresa is in
Italy. We had on the whole enjoyed good
weather in Interlaken but today it was raining.
Having walked around Stresa in bright sunshine, we arrived back to find
that it had been raining all day in Interlaken.
The
bad news was that our flight was with a ‘no-frills’ airline. The good news was that it wasn’t
Ryanair. We landed at Malpensa Airport,
a rather odd name since it translates as ‘bad thought’. But at least Silvio Berlusconi, the
egotistical former Prime Minister whose power base is nearby Milan, didn’t get
round to renaming it after himself! We
stayed in one of the ‘grand’ hotels, right by the Lake, and enjoyed our after
dinner strolls alongside it.
Our
week’s stay included several excursions.
On day one it was a fairly short trip: to two of the Borromean islands,
which are the proverbial stone’s throw from Stresa. The visitor to Stresa is likely to hear a
fair bit about the aristocratic Borromeo family who have over the centuries
been important in this area and are still going strong. They give their name not just to the islands,
of which there are four, three of which are open to the public, but to the bay
on which Stresa is located. On one of
the islands, Isola Bella, they own a magnificent palace. They also give their name to the grandest of
the grand hotels, the Hotel Borromeo, which is a short distance from our
own.
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| Isola Bella |
We
first visited Isola Bella, which aptly translates as ‘beautiful island’ though
‘Bella’ is actually named from a lady called Isabella who married, no prizes
for guessing, into the Borromeo family.
The Palace has many fine rooms and we were expertly taken round by a
local guide with a great sense of humour.
He decided to get his Berlusconi joke in first: “this is the room where
we hold our bunga bunga parties”. At time
of our visit the ‘technocrat’ Mario Monti was the Prime Minister and he was
endeavouring to clear up the economic mess left by Berlusconi. No headache as far as I’m concerned if Berlusconi is prone to make a laughing stock
of himself. But I didn’t like the fact
that there was a danger that his antics would make Italy itself a laughing
stock. The observer might be surprised
that he nevertheless attempted to stage a comeback in the recent elections and
that millions still voted for him.
The
room was pointed out to us where the Stresa Conference had taken place in
1935. This was a last throw of the dice
to maintain harmony in Europe and followed on from the successful conference
held a few years earlier in Locarno, which is also on Lake Maggiore. The scene had very much changed for the
worse. Hitler had by now seized power
and Germany was absent from the Conference.
Mussolini had not yet thrown in his lot with Hitler and France was represented by Pierre Laval,
seemingly a good democrat though he later headed the collaborationist Vichy
regime and was executed after WW2.
Adjoining
the Palace, and also owned by the Borromeo family, are some fine multi-tiered
gardens. They had not long before been a
bit battered, but not seriously damaged, by a hurricane. At night the tiers are brightly lit, giving,
when viewed from Stresa, an almost Las Vegasish appearance. We then proceeded to Isola Pescatori (or
Fisherman’s Island). This is very
picturesque but also tiny so there’s not a lot to do once one has wandered
along the main street. We indulged in a
somewhat pricey lunch at the Verbano Hotel, restricting ourselves to just one
course. It was pleasant indeed to sit in
idyllic surrounds, looking across to Isola Bella, enjoying exquisitely cooked
lamb cutlets and a glass or two of vino
rosso.
Next
day we had a boat trip up to the
northern tip of Lake Maggiore, taking us to the city of Locarno and thus into
Switzerland. Most of the Lake is in
Italy where it forms the boundary between the provinces of Piedmont and
Lombardy; Stresa is on the western shore and thus in the former. Yet it is much easier to get from there by
public transport to Milan than to Turin,
the main cities in, respectively, Lombardy and Piedmont.
Italy
has such a wealth of historic art and architecture that one is liable to forget
that it is still a relatively new country, unified only in 1860, before which
‘Italy’ was just a geographic expression.
Much of Italy was part of, or otherwise associated with, the Habsburg
Empire but Piedmont was a genuinely independent kingdom and, under its astute prime
minister, Count Cavour, played the lead role in unifying Italy, rather as
Prussia under Bismarck was around the same time doing in Germany. To start with, Turin was the capital of the
new country and what had been the royal family just of Piedmont was to rein
over Italy until the monarchy was abolished after WW2.
Our
tour guide was an English lady who had lived in Stresa for twenty years. She volunteered that, though it’s close to
Switzerland, she never went there other than when leading a tour. It was, she said, too expensive. She also thought, correctly, that, on the
whole, the buildings on the Italian part
of Lake Maggiore were beautiful whereas those on the Swiss were functional and
box-like. This was not the first time a
guide on the Italian side of the border had spoken disparagingly of Switzerland. The chap who had accompanied us on a day trip
to Milan way back in 1988 had, as we approached Lake Como from the south and
thus looked into Switzerland, told us, almost believably, that the Swiss want
to charge the Italians for their view into their country! And “they say it’s such a clean country but that’s because they send all their
rubbish down the rivers to us”.
I
hasten to add that Switzerland too is one of our favourite and most visited
countries. Indeed our daughter lived in
Geneva for about eighteen months. I
would count that city, and also Zurich, as among the finest in the world. But Locarno, it has to be said, is not a city
of any great interest, despite its fine location. Our return to Italy was via the scenic Centovalli (‘hundred valleys’) Railway. This
terminates in Domodossola, a town
that gets a lot of visitors passing through, located as it is on the southern
side of the Simplon Pass, though it is
not otherwise a place that one would go out of one’s way to see.
We
returned to Switzerland on day three, travelling this time by bus, a three hour
drive over the Simplon Pass to Zermatt. We
were blessed with good weather throughout our stay so it was blue skies every
day. The party who had stayed the
previous week had been a good deal less fortunate and rain and mist meant that
they had seen scarcely anything on this trip, which affords fine scenery the
whole way. Truly frustrating.
We
paused on the Swiss side of the Pass where some of us ascended the memorial to
the WW2 Mountain Brigade. Aspersions are
sometimes cast on how neutral Switzerland really was in WW2. I believe these to be unfair: it’s easy to sit
in the comfort of one’s armchair and criticize a small country that found
itself entirely surrounded by Axis powers.
The local Nazis always got derisory support and it provided a safe haven
for Jews who managed to escape across the border. I had not realized, until I went to a moving
exhibition about Anne Frank, that, when it fled Nazi Germany, her family split
and went in two directions, both equally safe at the time: west to Holland and
South to Switzerland. The Swiss branch
of the family lived safely in Basle, just a mile or two from the German border,
throughout WW2. Apparently the Swiss
plan, if ever the Nazis had invaded, was to have strategically withdrawn from
the northern cities and then fought to the death in the Mountains. Hitler must have decided that he would have
been biting off more than he could have chewed and that conquering Switzerland
was business that could be left until he’d won the War.
Switzerland
is a country that doesn’t much like joining things. It has never joined NATO for example. Nor is membership of the EU, let alone the
Eurozone, likely to happen any time soon; indeed a proposal to join the
European Economic Area, which links the EU to Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein,
was defeated in a referendum. Switzerland even stayed outside the United
Nations for many years, despite the fact that the Organization’s European HQ,
formerly the HQ of the League of Nations, is located in Geneva. When I visited it, guides had a trick
question: name the three countries that don’t belong to the UN. Few would have guessed that it was the very
country that they were standing in (Vatican City was one of the others and I
can’t remember the third). But realism
does kick in and Swiss shops and restaurants will accept the Euro, though
change will be given in Swiss francs.
We
by-passed Brig, an attractive town which I had previously visited. A lot of
Italians commute over the border to work in Brig and its environs –
there is a bus service to and from Domodossola.
They do rather well since they get paid at Swiss rates but benefit from
Italian prices.
We
had been to Zermatt before, staying there with our daughter when she lived in
Switzerland. As it is traffic-free we
had to get off at the previous station, Täsch, and complete our journey by
train. Being without cars does not mean
that Zermatt is all that pedestrian friendly for there are plenty of small
electric vehicles plying their way
around town. Last time we had done a
trip on the Gornergrat Railway which affords splendid views of the
Matterhorn. Such a trip could just
about have been fitted in to our visit this time but we’d have had no time to
look round the town. We went instead for
the alternative, and significantly less expensive, option of taking the Sunegga
Funicular. Nothing to see on the way up
since it’s in a tunnel but at the top there was, on this clear day, a beautiful
panorama that took in the Matterhorn.
There is a café which at first sight didn’t look promising but the pork
schnitzel with chips turned out to be rather good. All the more so as we ate al fresco looking at the
Matterhorn.
Back
in the town we wandered though the historic area with its quaint wooden
houses. There is a statue here of a
local mountaineer who continued to lead expeditions into his nineties. Then we strolled along the handsome main
street before starting our return journey to Stresa.
The
next day was free. Our guide put forward
various suggestions for spending it, one of these being a trip to Milan. We had visited that city twice when staying
on Lake Como, once as part of a tour and once under our own steam using boat,
train and metro. We did not feel in need
of a third visit. It is worth a visit,
if only for the magnificent Duomo. But in my view it lacks the charm that one
associates with most Italian cities. It
almost feels unItalian, like a bit of northern Europe that somehow found itself
south of the Alps. It is a businesslike
sort of place, Italy’s financial centre and renowned as a centre of the fashion
industry, something in which I have about zero interest.
In
any case we much preferred to spend a day enjoying Stresa and its beautiful
surrounds. We went up in a cable car
which, higher up, turns into a chairlift.
On a clear day one can apparently see seven lakes but, though we
continued to enjoy fine weather, there was a lot of haze meaning we could see only
Lake Maggiore. The location around the
top of the chairlift looked a bit uncared for though there were all manner of
walks which would doubtless have taken one into some beautiful areas. We headed back to Stresa and a leisurely
lunch.
In
the afternoon we took a boat across to the third, and largest, of the Borromean
Islands that can be visited by the public, namely Isola Madre. We rather miscalculated our timings for we
thought that little time would be needed, since there is no settlement of any
sort. We got the last boat, only to find
there are some magnificent gardens. We
had to hurry round them in the limited time before the last boat back to the
mainland. A good couple of hours or so
would have been needed to do them justice.
There is also a small palace which we didn’t much take to. The art exhibits that were scattered around
rather jarred: pictures of such dismal sights as Chernobyl and the notorious
slums that adjoined Hong Kong’s former international airport. It was as if, in our Italian idyll, we had to
be reminded that there is a big bad world out there.
We
had especially looked forward to the next day since we were returning, after
all too long an interlude, to Lake Como.
We were driven to Como city and from there proceeded on a slow stopping
boat to Bellagio. Lake Como has the
shape of an inverted ‘Y’ with Bellagio at the apex. There was plenty of time in which to relax
and enjoy the stunning scenery. Lakes
Maggiore and Como are not at all alike.
The scenery around the former might be said to be mellower and more
tranquil whereas that around the latter is by comparison dramatic with much
steeper sides. One is hard put to say
which is the more beautiful.
One
of our last stops was at Cadenabbia, directly across from Bellagio. It was here that we’d stayed in 1988, lodged
in a grand hotel where Queen Victoria had once stayed. Sounds impressive but we had the feel that it
had known better days (though it has apparently since had a massive
refurb). Dinner was included but
portions were miserly. So, there was
nothing for it: no option but afterwards to walk the short distance to Giorgio’s and there enjoy ice cream of
the type only the Italians know how to make.
Giorgio had an English wife, Marion.
She told us how English visitors might say to her, very slowly, “you –
speak – very – good – English”. Bellagio is considered by some to be the most
beautiful town in Italy. Can’t offer an
opinion myself since I haven’t been to every town in Italy. But it could be true. Alas, timings meant we had to take the fast boat back to Como, so
had less time in which to soak up the scenery.
The
trip on our last day was to what is billed as a hidden gem, Lake Orta. It is, as the Guardian has put it, the Italian lake that tourists haven’t
discovered. It’s not far from Stresa so
this was a shorter trip giving some free time back at our hotel. The town of Omagna, at the northern end of
the Lake, is industrial and cannot really be described as beautiful. But the blurb was certainly not
misleading. Further down the small town
of Orta San Giulio is
beautiful and located in idyllic lakeside scenery. It is traffic-free so we had to walk in from
the coach park (arrangements are made though for those not mobile enough to do
so).
We
enjoyed a good lunch in a restaurant overlooking the Lake. The journalist and wine critic Simon Hoggart
has observed that whereas in France, which boasts rather more loudly about its national cuisine, one
can often end up disappointed with a restaurant meal, in Italy one seldom
does. That has been our experience too
in Italy. If I had to single out one
meal for mention it would be in Florence.
We had left things late for lunch as it was mid-afternoon and we kept
going into places that had stopped serving it.
Then, a bit to the south of Ponte Vecchio, in an unprepossessing small shopping
precinct, we found a ‘Mama and Papa’ establishment. Papa told us they had closed but Mama wasn’t
having that. The food was plain but
exquisite, so much so that we went back there for dinner on our last evening. There was a wonderful dish that simply
comprised grilled vegetables: courgettes, aubergines, mushroom, peppers Then
there was Florentine steak - no sauce, just
the right sort of olive oil - with the steak shown to one before cooking, in
the customary manner.
On
the way back from Lake Orta we paused at a huge statue of Carlo Borromeo, Cardinal
Archbishop of Milan for twenty years in the late sixteenth century, who is
honoured as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. Unfortunately the huge ears had been added on
as an afterthought and looked decidedly wrong.
One can ascend from inside but that would not have been a good idea
since it is made of copper and the temperature was in the eighties.
We
had time on our final day for a last look round Stresa since we were not
leaving for the airport until after lunch.
On our previous visit we had noticed, alongside the Lake, a memorial to
the victims of 9/11. Today was the
eleventh anniversary and there was a short and moving ceremony of remembrance
featuring local firefighters, in honour of their New York colleagues who had
played such a vital role on that terrible day.
We
finished off with a stroll along the lake.
A last chance to enjoy the view from a town that is sometimes associated
with La Belle Époque. This term was originally applied just to
France but later become associated with the era, around the turn of the last
century, in Europe more generally. This
was a time when Europe was peaceful and growing more prosperous. After all, most of the reigning families
were somehow related to Queen Victoria so there couldn’t be a war, could there. As we know all too well, the history of the
first half of the twentieth century was to be tragically different.
We
had, the year before, become first time grandparents. Twins Alexander and Phoebe were now a year
old. I reflected, as we enjoyed for the
last time the wonderful scenery, that I’d been born a couple of years after WW2 and that Europe
(parts of former Yugoslavia excepted) had been at peace throughout that period. Democracy had initially been confined to the
western half of the continent but, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, had
spread east. Yet now democratic Europe
was facing perhaps the greatest of its postwar challenges, with an economic
crisis that had plunged many into joblessness, poverty and despair and which
was stubbornly persisting. As in
thirties Germany, extremists can thrive in times of economic hardship, exploiting grievances in
the hope of seizing power. In Greece
right now an unashamedly neo-Nazi party was flexing its muscles.
I
prayed that Europe would get through its crisis and that better times lay
ahead. And that, sometime in the 2070s, sixtysomethings
Phoebe and Alexander would stroll alongside the Lake in Stresa and be able to reflect
on a Europe that had been peaceful and democratic throughout their lifetime. A belle
époque that had endured for a century and a quarter, and would go on
enduring.
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