Swiss Ticino Untour, Fall 1997
by Joan Haines
Monday, Sept. 22.
Thalia took us to the limo, and thence to JFK, where we checked our 2 bags right through to Locarno, per Swissair and train! Would they arrive? The overnight flight to Zurich on Swissair was excellent. We took the train from the airport to the bahnhof and walked to the Florhof Hotel - about 20 minutes - on a lovely clear morning. The hotel is, as Karen Brown says, charming and we were welcomed with a cup of coffee and taken to our room - at about 9.a.m.! We spent the rest of the day out and about in Zurich, and ended with a visit to the Bóhrle art collection. We’d read up about it, and in fact bad quite forgotten that we bad been there on our last Swiss trip! Never mind, it is a very fine small collection in a lovely private house, with a wide range of art from medieval carvings through the years, and some excellent Impressionists, especially the Renoir “Little Irene”, which is really breathtaking - one of his very best works, I think. The next a.m. we took off by train, as per Idyll’s directions, with a scenic journey of real beauty and a passage through the St. Gotthard tunnel. (I think it’s over 9 miles long.) We came into the Ticino area and a broadening valley, where we changed trains at Bellinzano - to go to most places, one changes trains in Bellinzona, a small but historic city, with 2 grand castles keeping watch over it. Soon the lake, Maggiore, came into view with the town stretching along the shores and up into the bills behind it. Met at the station by our landlady/hostess, Barbara Herr, we also met other Idyll personnel, Elisabetta and Sylvia, and a dozen or so other Americans, coming for their 2 weeks in other apartments in the area. Barbara scooped us up and we were delighted to find our 2 cases awaiting us in the luggage room! What a wonderful service, with no customs or anything! A short drive up fairly steep inclines brought us to Condominium Collina and #28. B. told us that the locals call this complex Sing-Sing! We saw why - it’s 2 tall slim blocks of apt’s with iron walkways leading to each one from a central corridor, and open to the floors above and below, like - Sing-Sing! Our ‘pad’ was small, with a balcony view of the lake, between larch-like evergreens, and a gear-changing turn in the street just below - g-r-r! It was spanking clean, nicely furnished and well-equipped with all we could want,(except a tea-kettle and an English channel on the TV,)and all the makings of a meal, including Brie, Gruyere, salami, eggs, bread, coffee, milk and o.j.! As it was still early in the day, we made a lunch and began our explorations. It was important to find a grocery store, the bus stops, an ATM machine, etc. All this we did, on a warm afternoon, short-sleeve weather, and sun, although that day; as most others, there was a haze across the lake, dimming the view. (Rumour has it that some of this is smog from Milano, not too far away!)Thursday, Sept 25.
On our first full day in the Ticino we went by bus to Ascona - really only about 10-15 minutes away along the lake shore, and a very attractive little summer town. We visited the museum which had a wonderfull puppet exhibit, with school children visiting it. Also an interesting show of the paintings of Marianne von Werefkin (1 860-193 8), a Russian born artist with a wide range of styles. I particularly liked “SCHOOL” - painted in 1907, .with a ‘crocodile’ of little schoolgirl pairs, walking along a lakeside, reminiscent of “Madeline in Paris”. We ate lunch at Rickli’s on the main street. On returning home, we started up the bill to visit the church of the Madonna del Sasso, a noteworthy ‘sight’, eschewing the funicular! The road zigged and zagged endlessly, it seemed, but we were not to be deterred, and finally reached this landmark - a large orange-pink complex of buildings with much history over 3 or 4 centuries. The church does indeed have a lovely madonna and child, and a Capuchin monastery adjacent to it.Friday, Sept.26.
We took a bus to Brissago that morning, on lake Maggiore. It was a pleasant little town clinging to the hillside and with a boat station, like so many of the communities. We were interested to watch, while having tea and a florentine, a helicopter apparently moving huge bundles of building materials from one site to another, way up towards the hilltops, where many lovely houses are. On asking about it, we find out that this is the building technique of choice! Large items are deposited by truck on paved roads, near the construction site, and then the helicopter ferries them in, and brings out trees that have been cut down, and possibly even rocks and earth tha have been excavated to make a place for a house! Never thought of that one!We came back to Logano by boat - and had lunch at a cafeteria by the station. It’s called Innova and is run by the local department store. It’s very good, reasonable, and we ate there several times. (We’re into economy, rather than atmosphere and gourmet meals! It suits us to eat a late noon meal, and have a light supper chez-nous. Even though we have no English channel on TV, we can watch tennis, if on!) At 2.p.m. we foregathered with 15 or so others at the so-called Monk’s cell, a meeting facility attached to an old church. There we had a rather unorganized orientation by the girls who bad met us at the station, and also Sonja, in the final stages of her first pregnancy.
They were very cordial, served us soda, and took us through all the materials we had been given. We bad done pretty much of the work on our own - the transportation is fabulous, but you have to get the hang of the two large tomes which contain the full schedules of every bus, boat and train in the whole of Switzerland. So you can work out the most intricate journeys, with lots of alternatives! After the session we visited the adjacent church and went home. The hills are steep and the buses infrequent, but once you get their rhythm, you somehow manage to get there at the right time. Or walk!
Saturday, Sept.27.
We fared forth to Lugano, on the lake of that name, by train and via -Bellinzona! Actually, we stopped there and spent the a.m. cruising the town and admiring the lofty castles perched high above us. Lugano is lovely. I’d say a good deal more money and sophisticated travelers and residents are around here. (The tourists are mostly German, it appears.) We went to the Villa Favorita, owned by the wealthy Baron von Thyssen, the art collector who has most of his fabulous collection in Madrid - we saw it a couple of years ago.Here he keeps some of his treasures, and is currently exhibiting the art collected by his wife, Carmen, over the last few years. This is quite a small and eclectic collection, shown in these beautiful rooms, without any discernable ‘ground plan’ for their arrangement. I wonder if the pictures are hung just in the order in which she acquired them. She has some interesting and lovely things, and some from the lesser ‘end’ of the market place.
We ate a pleasant lunch at the very nice outdoor cafe set outside what must have been the coach houses, overlooking the lake. The gardens, mostly trees and shrubbery, are immaculate, with urns of annuals and statues here and there. Altogether a lovely place, though it lacked any leaflets in English, which was a pity. In the evening, Barbara H. and her neighbor drove us to Ascona, where we and they had tickets for a concert by 2 Italian male voice choirs. It was held in the chapel of a boys’ high school, an ancient building with beautiful frescoes and good acoustics.
We enjoyed it - the voices were by turns powerful and pianissimo, and the repertoire was mostly songs of the areas from which they came. They sang with great enthusiasm and were received likewise. Many in the audience knew the choir members and had a wonderful time. On driving back to Locarno, Barbara and Trudi treated us to a glass of white wine, outdoors on the Piazza Grande, which was fun - and we got in around 12!
Sunday, Sept. 28.
This day we made a leisurely start , walking along the esplanade by lake Maggiore. The walk is nicely landscaped and on a nice morning like this there were plenty of people enjoying it - local and visiting, alike. We had lunch at the Cafeteria and then took the bus to the Verzasca Valley, one of the many valleys that fan out from the lake. This is a really spectacular ride, as the whole valley is full of innumerable rocks and boulders, of all shapes and sizes. The river runs down at the bottom of the gorge, and there is a 720 foot dam, the Tenero Dam, quite soon after the road enters the valley. it is a great piece of engineering, with a walk across it, where we could see people enjoying the views of the beautiful green, green waters, as we rode along above the narrow road above.There is also a beautiful double-arched bridge across it, further up the valley - difficult to photograph from a moving bus! Sonogno is the village at the head of the valley, and the end of our bus route. The houses here, and en route, have been built with extensive use of the natural stone that abounds here. Even the roofs are made of flat slabs of stone, lapping over each other .
The structures below them must be able to bear tremendous weights. Many of these dwellings look old, but there is also quite a lot of building going on, mostly in the same style and material, so that the whole picturesque effect is maintained. Bright window-boxes of pellagoniums are everywhere, so the streets, with their short ‘snickets’, are colorful and invite you to explore, camera in band. Vegetable and flower gardens are by every home, and their produce is offered for sale.
We had an hour to walk and admire, to see the church and cemetery, and have a cup of tea under the grape arbor of the local grotto (or taverna). The grape leaves are still colorful, but all the grapes are gathered and the wine festivals are about to begin. (I actually saw .2 places, in the whole 2 weeks, where there were still a few grapes on the vines) What a pleasant day, with a ride beck on the sama bus, picking up hikers with backpacks, and families with baby buggies, as we went! We felt close to the life of this lovely valley.
Monday, Sept. 29.
Today we joined an excursion led by Sylvia, one of Idyll’s local staff Via - you guessed it -Bellinzano, we ‘trained’ to Capolago, on lake Logano, and walked the short distance to Riva San Vitale. This is another very small stone village, with 4 churches to its name! The chief sight is a baptistry dating from the 5th century. It comprises a large, LARGE, stone font, and was used for immersion baptisms. It is considered the oldest religious building in Switzerland. One of the other churches, privately built in later years, had some of the most elaborate faux marble painting and frescoes we bad seen.On our return to Locarno we went to the information office at the station to enquire about the Postbus trip to St. Moritz from Lugano, which we bad read a lot about. Such a nice young man, fluent in English, looked after us! He made our reservations on the Postbus and suggested that we might like to stay overnight, instead of spending just an hour and a half after so long a ride (around 3+ hours). We agreed - he found us a small hotel, 3 star, offering 30% discount for last-minute travelers, including breakfast, for 80 francs apiece! We put this on our Visa card, and then had him work out a wonderful train trip home for the next day! It went over St. Moritz, with 3 changes, and a stop of an hour or more in Andermalt. All this for the cost of the B.and B.!
Tuesday, Oct. 1.
We had an early start by train (and bus) to make the 8.40 a.m. Postbus in Lugano - which we did. The driver was skilful and speedy and the route was spectacular - first along the shores of lake Lugano. The road is narrow, hugs the shore and there are many swerves and stops to pass vehicles going the other way. The mountains loomed nearer, the villas were gorgeous, and after about an hour and a half, the bus turned inland, leaving the palm trees and tropical flowers for Alpine huts, Swiss cows and villages of wooden houses bedecked with flowerboxes.It started its long steep climb up the mountains, via one hairpin bend after another, till around noon we reached St. Moritz. It lies on quite a small lake, surrounded by mountains - the most distant ones snow-capped, and it looked, in the clearest blue sky and sun that we had seen, as if it were dreaming of the skiers and the rich and famous who would soon be coming to grace its slopes!! Our little Hotel Steinbock was just a few minutes walk uphill from the station and we were, of course, expected, and given a very pleasant, sparkling room (small, but with a lovely bath) overlooking the lake and the panorama beyond it.
The temperature was about 70 degrees, and the air like champagne - the altitude is just over 6,000 feet above sea level! We walked into town - it was quiet and almost deserted. Many of the smart, designer shops are closed still, and the grandest hotels too- with, we read, 100’s of workers imported (many from Portugal) for a month or so to clean everything within an inch of its life, ‘pour la saison!’ We ate outside - our main meal for the day - and browsed our way to the museum dedicated to the work of Giovanni Segantini - a turn of the century artist who made his home there for some years. The exhibition is a permanent one and had many paintings of interest and appeal. We ate an evening snack in our room, watching the sun leave our valley, and send its last rays onto the mountain peaks to East and West. Our sleep was sound and long, sans the Locarno traffic outside #28!
Wednesday, Oct.2
Th. sunrise lit the mountain tops just in reverse from its performance last evening. I tried to catch some of the dramatic contrasts on film, as the stars faded and the sun finally appeared. We had a very ample buffet breakfast, with eggs, meats, cheese, and of course, the most delicious croissants and crusty rolls, jams and preserved fruits! Great!We walked along the lake here for an hour and then entrained for our journey back to Locarno. The scenery was spectacular again - this time the traditional Alpine sights one has enjoyed on previous visits. The cows seem mostly to have come down from their summer pastures, they hay is in, the villages and their churches come one after the other- almost faster than one can count. We went over the Oberalp Pass, had an hour’s walk and lunch in Andermatt (shades of taking Jennie there years ago) and finally, through the St Gottahard tunnel once more, and (via B.) we caught the 6.37 bus to our stop at Simposio. What a lovely trip!
Friday, Oct.3.
This day our steps turned toward Italy and we took the famous train ride to Domodossola. This is a privately owned train, starting off in a tunnel from the Locarno station and crossing the One Hundred Valleys on the 2-hour ride. Again we were amazed at the engineering skill of the builders, as we skirted valleys, climbed through tunnels, or passed under colonnades through which we could glimpse rivers and gorges below us.The town itself is unpretentious, and perhaps a bit dusty and in need of a ‘refresher’! But we walked its streets, admiring many old buildings and more of those wonderful little ‘snickets’ or alleyways with inviting steps up them. We had a delicious pasta meal at such a nice restaurant, for which we had to get some lire at an ATM, before entraining for the return journey across the Centovalli, to see the wonderful sights in reverse!
Saturday, Oct. 4.
We had asked our nice ‘friend’ at the information booth work out several itineraries on Lake Como in Italy, for us. We were prepared to do another overnight, but he had no good hotels in town, and we didn’t want to be too far out on the lakeshore, so we said we’d find something when we got there. Via B... we went by train, crossing into Italy at Chiasso, and there showing our passports and paying for the Italian part of the journey, since Swiss railpasses don’t cover the last/first parts of the round trip.Members of our group bad told us how they loved Como, and it is, indeed, situated beautifully on the lake of the same name. We made our way to the esplanade, and looked around there, but didn’t see any hotels that particularly attracted us, near the center, so we started to explore the old town. There are many old, historic buildings, and many arcades, like cloisters..walks, with shops of all kinds lining them. The town itself was in need of a good, end-of-summer clean up - streets and parks etc. It has obviously been very dry lately, and the lovely plantings of hydrangeas and flowering plants were all dry and limp - especially around the station, where there is a park and some impressive steps.
After visiting several churches and a street market we found a restaurant we had read about and bad an excellent dish of pasta pomodoro - very simple and delicious - followed by a good pastry and a cup of tea, at a little side walk cafe. We decided to take train back to Locarno, by-passing Lugano’s street parade in honor of the wine festival, and came home for an evening snack and some Swiss tennis - from Basel I think, with some faces from the US Open - Rosedtsky, and Phillipoussis - can’t spell them! With a choice of Italian or German commentary, we pretty well did our own - we’ve watched enough over the past few seasons!
Sunday, Oct.5.
Once more by bus to Ascona - this time to climb Monte Verita. This is a mountain behind the town where, at the turn of the century, writers, thinkers and philosophers aspired to start a Utopian community of cultured, ethical people. Several names were mentioned; Thomas Mann and Erich Maria Remarque come to mind. It was such a lovely day that when we reached the place where there is a small museum and where seminars etc. are still held on current issues, we decided to carry on, up the mountain, over the top and descend to the little village of Ronco, clinging to the hillside near Brissago. The climb was pretty steep, though the path was asphalted, and it took us 2 hours to make our goal - the Hotel Ronco, with its terrace bathed in sunshine, and a delicious meal waiting to be served. The walk had been among trees, mostly, so we were not too hot, but we were delighted to sit and eat in leisurely fashion and also to find that we could take a bus back to Locarno. This we did, by a long and hairpinny route through Losone. Actually the distances weren’t that great between the towns and villages, but when you cover them up and over a mountain -even of Truth! - they add up to a good few miles!Monday,Oct. 6.
We had found out that we could not get seats for our return flight on Swissair until 72 hours before departure, also that the nearest Swissair office was in Lugana, so we had planned to go there on this Monday morning to get seats together. This we did - via B... - with the first sprinkle of rain we had seen. A brief one at that, although it is much needed. We got our seats assigned and took the boat to Morcote, at the end of the lake. This is a really charming town, full of flowers and lovely buildings, arcades and alleyways. It is obviously beloved by the tourists and the shops are full of souvenir kind of goods. We had no ambitions to shop here~(or in fact anywhere on this trip, so we walked along the narrow lakeside road to view some beautiful gardens, and had our lunch at an outdoor “grotto.” Minestrone and fresh bread and a glass of Frascati! Good. We took the bus and train home, and then met ‘le group Untour’ at the station to go out to a spaghetti dinner as guests of Idyll, with their two ‘Ladies’! This was a very nice event at a typical local restaurant. About 20 people were present and about half of them played a game of bocci, while the rest of us bad a glass of wine and watched, or compared notes on our doings. The meal was very good - again, simple - salad, pasta with a choice of three sauces (Bolognese, pomodoro orsalsa – and wine or cola! As it grew dark we bade our adieus and took our buses back to our respective haunts. Everyone agreed that they had had a wonderful time, and all spoke of wanting to return. We were of the same mind!Tuesday, Oct. 7.
Our last day, we spent on a shopping commission for Swiss army knives in the Old Town. This was a success, and the owner of the hunting/sports shop where we ended up was lots of fun, and very photogenic! Our last lunch in Locarno was at the Fiorentina - recommended by Untourists, in the Old Town, and a good choice. We shopped for a small gift (of gorgeous Swiss chocolate) fur our hostess Barbara, and took it up to her place in the evening. We asked her to phone a taxi fur us for morning, and she insisted that she would take us down herself. We were very glad, and happy to pay her for that help.Wednesday, Oct 8.
An early start with Barbara, and our cases were taken from us at the station, labelled and checked right through to J.F.L This is the same service we had going over, and it is so neat! We just carried one overnight between us and entrained for Zurich, after a wonderful 2 weeks. Soon we were there, checked in again at the Florhof and in no time taking a 2-hour boat trip on Lake Zurich.Such a nice ending to our sojourn, to sail past those lovely towns and houses, on a sunny, clear day in the 70’s! After that, we walked the main shopping street from the lake to the bahnhof- it is, in fact, the bahnhofstrasse, and has some of the best known European shops along its length. We ate at the St. Gotthard Hotel and returned to our hotel to catch up on affairs by watching CNN. ((I should add that we bad the International Herald Tribune every day of our trip, and the Sunday edition has the New York Times puzzle - How lucky can you get?)
Thursday, Oct 9.
Our flight home was picture perfect and on time - we bad good seats, forward and together, good food and a quiet neighbor. Not only that but our cases were on the carousel, carefully wrapped in large heavy-duty plastic bags! In fact, they went around a couple of times before Linda recognized them! It really works!P.S. I meant to include 2 other comments! One, about language: Most people in the Ticino area of Switzerland speak Italian, which, added to their animated style, including the two-kiss greeting. Bon giORnos and RivaDERcis, and the scarcity of blonds with blue eyes, makes the whole experience more like Italy than ever. German seems to be 2nd, and I could use my English more successfully than my French!
The second is: Ticinese love DOGS! We saw so many, on the streets, on the buses and trains, In the shops and cafes; poodles, Bichons, Yorkies abondanza, and Shepherds seem to be the most popular. You see so many in the late afternoon, at passagierio time, when people stroll the squares and arcades, or sit with a caffe, gelato or Coka, at the cafes, and their pets are a natural part of the scene. Nowhere did we ever see a dirty or soiled street because of this- and many places have bins with small graphic signs and a supply of plastic bags for ‘scooping’! What a difference that makes for everyone!