Lake Lugano, Maggiore Valley and Departure

Trip Log 4: Ticino, Switzerland Fall 2006

October 1, Sunday LUGANO


Back to Lugano today for the Autumn Festival…lots of good food and entertainment and people watching. There were about a half dozen organizations that set up huge tents, where they cooked in gigantic pots, often singing as they stirred. I had polenta with a meat and vegetable stew, which was delicious. I went through the line, offering my plate for what I wanted, paying at the end.

The festival also featured a variety of food and folk art vendors and roaming musicians. Truly a melange of sights, sounds and tastes.







Later we walked through City Park (picking up a gelato, of course) to a theatre for a marionette show, which was hard to follow but fun to watch the children. We also watched folks playing a giant chess game and saw trees carved by a contemporary sculptor, Ugo Giacometti. The carvings were of human figures, very reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti’s work, and we wondered if the present sculptor is related, especially since Alberto Giacometti was from Lugano.




October 2, Monday GANDRIA AND FAREWELL LUNCHEON

Oour farewell luncheon and outing began in Lugano, where the group of us took the boat to the small town of Gandria for lunch at one of the many small restaurants perched on the hillside. We had a choice of meat sauce or pesto (the pesto was very rich and very good). After lunch, we walked around the town and its small shops and then went by boat to Porlezza, an Italian town on the far eastern side of the lake. We had about an hour to look around and had another (guess what?) gelato, before returning to Lugano. We were there during the mid afternoon closing time.

Tonight we attended our third evening concert at Chiesa San Francesco: Orchestra Filarmonica di Varsavia (Warsaw), conductor Antoni Wit, Soloist Olga Kern, pianoforte. They played Richard Wagne’s “Rienzi” overture, Piotr Iic Ciaikowsky’s Conecerto No 1 with pianoforte, and Sergie Prokofief’s “Romeo and Juliet, selections from Suite No 1 and 2 for the ballet. This was another memorable musical event. The tickets for this festival have been very reasonable and the musical experience superb. We exited to another rainstorm.



October 3, Tuesday MAGGIA VALLEY AND CEVIO


We slept in until 9 a.m. and then packed. Rolf and I left about noon, in the rain, for the Maggia Valley. We had read about the museum in Cevio and thought it a good rainy day activity. The bus (#10) was a double decker and we sat in the front of the top, having it almost to ourselves. The valley was filled with waterfalls cascading down both sides, created by the consistent rain. The driver dropped us off right in front of the Museo di Vaolmaggia in Cevio. They had a special exhibit by Rudolf Zinggeler, a photographer from the early 1900’s. A slide show compared his photos with a contemporary view of the same scene. We also had the opportunity to go through a grotto, one of many underground caves formed in this area after a landslide. This one was roofed by a huge slab of granite and was used for food preparation and storage.

We had hoped for lunch in a cafe, but it was raining very hard and no café in sight, so we bought a few things at the Coop grocery store and rode back to town on the bus (this time with many students), quite wet. After the rain slowed down, we went for supper at the Hotel St. Angelo at the base of our hill on the edge of the Piazza Grande. It was raining even harder, and we were very wet. HINT: Take or buy TWO umbrellas.



October 4, Wednesday DEPARTURE AND FURTHER ADVENTURES

We were up early and caught the 7:23 train to Bellinzona, after a quick light breakfast on the Piazza Grande. In Bellinzona we changed easily to a direct train to Luzern, where we stayed two nights in a welcoming family owned hotel in one of the small towns on Lac Luzern, before going on to my brother’s home in St. Gallen. We left the world of Italian language behind, and become immersed in the German speaking part of Switzerland. Sometimes we longed for the melodic sound of Italian, the stucco lakeside buildings and the warm days. But it was now more like fall, with cooler days, beautiful colors, more mountains, more cows, more alpine cheese, bratwurst and apple strudel. We are glad to know both Switzerlands!