Country Roads of Switzerland

Day Seven

19 July 2015

Weather: Italy in July. Guess.

I woke early and looked out to see a clear blue sky and the Matterhorn hugging the only cloud in the sky. Darn.

So, I didn’t bother going out for a photo and went down for breakfast instead. The restaurant was as nice as the rest of the hotel. I really liked the stain glass that celebrates the town, the mountains and mountaineers.

We took electric taxis back to the coach and headed out through the Simplon Pass which Napoleon used on his way to Italy.

There was a huge stone statue of an eagle that was looking down towards Italy at the entrance of the pass.

It is a monument to the defence of the Swiss borders early in the Second World War. It can also be a monument to Napoleon as he used the eagle as a symbol.

We approached the Italian border and there was no need for passports. Vincenzo said they may look up from their paper for a sip of coffee, but other than that, it was smooth sailing through the border.

Switzerland qualified but is not a member of the European Union as the nation has no interest in supporting poorer nations. It prefers to stay isolated and its banking industry keeps its well afloat. But even that industry may be under threat now. Following the 2008 economic crisis, the US, France and other nations were able to get Swiss banks to break their golden rule of confidentiality in order to get information on tax evaders. With the promise of iron clad confidentiality now looking like a block of Swiss cheese, will their clientele go elsewhere now?

As Vincenzo puts it, this may lead to the demise of the Swiss banking system and Switzerland will have to go back to selling chocolate and Heidi posters.

With no natural resources, it could find itself between a rock and a hard place and looking for help would be pretty hypocritical. At least after Norway disconnected itself from the union because of the ban on whaling, its newly discovered oil industry enabled it to give Europe the finger. But could Switzerland survive on tourism, cheese, chocolate, watches and Heidi posters?

We went down the switchbacks into Italy and Vincenzo expressed concern because Marcel is apparently afraid of heights and likes to drive these steep roads with his eyes closed.

Marcel replied with what is likely a few choice words in German. Colourful ones, I imagined.

Being Italian, Vincenzo was a wealth of information about the country. And added in a few jokes.

Do you know what they call an Italian without arms? A mute.

And that you know when you’ve crossed from Switzerland into Italian because of the potholes.

He pointed out the Italian flag which is red, white and green. The red symbolizes spilled blood and refers to charity. The green refers to life in a desert and refers to hope. White is nothingness and refers to faith.

Modern Italian politics were developed after the Second World War and modeled on the US system with twenty regions or states. The collapse of the government in 1994 led to a complete reorganization of the government into a more decentralized federal system with more power given to the regions.

The region we drove into was Piedmonti (foot of the mountains). This area used to be under Savoy control as well as under control of the Lombardi (long beard) family. (Likely they were Celts). Milan was their capital.

But one of the most important influences on modern Italy was Napoleon. He believed himself to be the reincarnation of a Roman emperor. When he started his very own tour of Europe, he did it with the idea that he would bring the ideals of the French Revolution to the rest of Europe. In 1797, he crossed through the Simplon Pass and stopped to stay in Stresa as a host of a local noble. The next morning, before he left, he destroyed the castle he was staying in.

Guess he won’t get his damage deposit back.

He continued on from there to take northern Italy and went on to take Rome. As an act of humiliation, he forced the Pope to go to Paris and there the Pope was forced to crown Napoleon as the emperor of Europe.

Since Josephine was unable to give Napoleon an heir, he took Austria and married Maria Louisa who gave him a son. Napoleon II was named king of Rome at the age of three days but he never ruled. He returned to Austria and grew up in Schronnbrun, out of the eye of the public. He joined the Austrian military but was forbidden from travelling outside of the country for fear he might get some ideas. In the end, he didn’t live long enough to get any. He died of TB at the age of twenty-one.

When Hitler came to power, he had the body of Napoleon II moved to France to be with his father. With the theory that Napoleon had been poisoned with arsenic, his son’s body was also tested and found to have similarly high levels of arsenic, as did Josephine. This led to the conclusion that they were exposed through the environment and not as a direct result of being poisoned.

Napoleon’s time in Italy saw some benefits for the country. He reduced the number of states from twenty-thousand to a more manageable number and simplified the Italian government. He standardized Italian time, introduced surnames, introduced road names and street addresses. He also introduced them to the metric system and standardized the Italian language. His actions would eventually lead to the unification of Italy in 1871.

We arrived in Stresa just after eleven and almost everyone had opted to do the island optional. On our way to the dock, we passed the Hotel Barromeo which was used in the novel A Farewell to Arms.

The city sits at the same latitude as Boston but due to the hot Sahara wind coming north and being corralled by the Alps, the area is actually semi-tropical. It’s on the shore of Lake Maggiore, the second largest lake in Italy at sixty-five kilometres in length.

Borromean Islands are three small islands and two islets on the western side of Lake Maggiore. They were named for the family Barromea who started to acquire the islands in the 16^th century.

The largest island, Isola Bella, was named after Isabella, the wife of Carlo III of the House of Borromeo, when he built a palazzo dedicated to her on the island in 1632. The gardens were completed in 1671 and from 1751 to 1837, the island hosted a number of dignitaries including Napoleon and Josephine, Edward Gibbon (author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) and the Princess of Wales.

Isola Madre is an artificially raised island where Lancillotto Borromeo built a residence for his mother in the early 1500s. What better way to keep your mother out of your affairs. Build her an island on the other side of the lake. He also planted citrus fruit on the island. The island was eventually ceded to the local population and today it is unoccupied and known for its gardens.

The third island is known as Fisherman’s Island. It is home to five families.

The optional was a visit to the largest island – Isola Bella.

We took a boat a few hundred metres across the lake and dock on the north end of the island. Our guide, Marco, met us there. The island is divided between where the Borromeo lived and where the estimated six thousand they needed to run the household lived. The divide, called a curtain wall, is actually very obvious. Instead of having windows in the far wall, they painted them on so that they wouldn’t have to look at the common folk.

Marco showed us into the main palace and said no pictures are allowed inside.

But we were free to take pics of him.

Nope. Don’t have one of Marco. But here’s the palace.

He said the palace was actually still used as the Borromeo family still exists and still owns it. It took seventy years to build and contains fifty rooms on the upper levels that are not opened to the public. We can see about twenty rooms on the main floor and in the basement. We see a two hundred and eighty year old chandelier and a guest book containing the signatures of Grant (1877), Wagner (1858) and Roosevelt (1916).

(The four interior photos below are courtesy Wiki Commons).

The bedroom was massive and had a great view to the north and east. Next to it was the library which contained a few hundred books that are brought down for tourist season out of the more than twelve thousand in the library upstairs. In the middle was a four hundred year old rifle that required two men to operate.

Marco showed us a table with a rose mosaic made from nine thousand tiles. An impressive work of art.

Downstairs, where they would retreat in the heat of summer, contained a puppet theatre and some two thousand puppets were preserved. A few are on display.

The next six rooms are impressive. They are decorated, from top to bottom, with marble, lake stones and lava rock – all inlaid into the floors, walls and ceilings. Very impressive.

The rooms contained gifts the family had received over the generations including these harnesses.

On the way out, we passed through a hall containing a number of intricate tapestries that are up to five hundred years old. They were made with silk, cotton, gold and silver and took fifteen women eight years to create.

We were done by 12:45 and said farewell to Marco. From here, we had until two to explore the island and get something to eat.

Didn’t think I’d find McDonald’s on the island.

I took a walk through the gardens, some of which was decorated in the same style as the basement rooms.

The Borromeo symbol is the unicorn and there is one rising high above all else on the island.

When I was done, I went down to visit the area where the common servants lived and find cats!

And ice cream. There were some shops along the shore and I got my obligatory fridge magnet and a Coke. At two, we all met up at the dock and made the short trip back to the shore.

We left Stresa and actually skirted the city of Milan on our way to Lugano.

Vincenzo told us that Leonardo Da Vinci may have had a hand in the design of the city’s canals which were needed to bring water to Milan because the city had no natural rivers. Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan, had invited Da Vinci to Milan to help improve the city. One of the treasures he left behind was the Last Supper.

And those canals? Well, in the summer when it was dry, they became a source of mosquitos which carried diseases. However, the people of Italy blamed the hot air and swamps for the disease, so it was call bad air.

In Italian, that translates to Mal Aria.

This area of Italy is well known for the mansions owned by foreigners. Apparently, after the First World War, Italy was scammed out of land it had been promised in exchange for switching sides in the war. Instead of being rewarded for joining the western allies, it was hit with heavy war reparations like Germany. To help pay for this, the government introduced a death tax in which inheritances were taxed at fifty one percent. As a result, many Italians had to sell the inherited properties in order to pay the tax.

Many of the properties were bought up by wealthy Americans who were enjoying the boom of the 1920s. The properties continued to change hands, and in the 1970s, many were bought up by wealthy Arabs who come to Italy to escape the heat in summer.

Personally, I think they’re coming to the wrong place. Norway or Iceland might be more along the lines of what they’re looking for.

The influx of Americans lead to the discovery of the Lake Como region. The climate there proved to be perfect for the mulberry bush that was brought back from China by Marco Polo and planted there in 1520. The result was a silk industry that still produces the best silk in Europe. Italy’s fashion industry also started in this region.

We made a stop at a silk factory outlet for about a half hour and there are a few purchases, including a couple of bolts of silk fabric. The prices are pretty good. The fashion show by tourmates was just as good.

We got into Lugano around 4:30, and since we were only there for the night, we got an hour to check out the downtown before we went to the hotel. There was a month long lakeside festival going on, so the lakeside road was closed. I went for a walk and checked out the Church of Saint Mary of the Angels at the far end of the lakeside road.

There was a painting of the Last Supper by Bernardino Luini, one of Da Vinci’s students.

He painted himself into the piece in the place of Judas (far right).

With his cat!

I like this guy.

The painting was in three sections as it was cut to fit onto a monastery wall. The Apostle John actually looks pretty feminine. Mary Magdalene, perhaps?

I walked back along the shore, checked out a park and listened to some good music. There was a mini VW van being driven around with six people squashed into it.

They’re having fun.

At 5:30, we headed to the hotel and had about an hour to get ready for the evening optional. It was a cruise on Lake Lugano and dinner in a lakeside village.

We boarded the boat and headed out with clouds threatening from the south. It was very hot and humid and gorgeous on the top deck.

We headed out of the harbour and went down the right-side finger of Lake Lugano and the ship captain told us about the town of Campione d’Italia.

It was a town founded by a rich family and in 777 CE and it was given to the archbishopric of Milan. In 1521, the area surrounding the town was transferred from the bishop of Como to the Swiss by Pope Julius II as thanks for their help in the War of the Holy League. Campione remained Italian and managed to continue to remain part of Italy through the centuries. In 2007, the church built a casino in the town and the proceeds go to Milan.

A church next to the casino was closed because of its proximity to the casino and a new one built a little farther down the shoreline with casino proceeds.

At the north end of the town is a cemetery that was built into the mountain wall and the remains of a gondola station that was abandoned when they realized that the gondola would strike the mountain face in high winds.

Then we passed two posts in the water. We just crossed from Italy back into Switzerland.

We sailed farther down the lake into the finger to the left and pulled into the hillside town of Gandria.

The area was originally inhabited around 800 BCE by the Celts and remnants of its Celtic heritage remain. The town, for example, sits under Mt. Bre which is Celtic for “mountain.” The Romans conquered the region in 196 BCE.

The first written reference to the town dates back to 1237 when it was a village located higher on the slopes of Mt. Bre. That village was eventually abandoned and a new one emerged on the lakeside below. Since the town was hard to access, it had to be self-sufficient, maintaining farms, livestock and a vibrant fishing industry. In the mid-19^th century, it developed a silk industry.

Due to its location on the border with Italy, smuggling cheaper goods from Italy became common. In 1935, a road finally connected the town to Lugano, and in 2004, the town merged with the city.

If we kept sailing, we would have found Italy at the end of that finger.

Our ship actually had both the flag of Italy and Switzerland flying. When the lake is predominantly surrounded by Switzerland, it flies the Swiss flag up front and the Italian in the back. On Lake Geneva, the French flag was up front and the Swiss flag was at the back since France dominates the shoreline.

Dinner is at Restaurant Roccabella and the owner is a hoot.

He welcomed us with a horn and we went upstairs for a great lasagna dinner.

I had a tiramisu for dessert.

And the owner and his wife thanked us for coming in their own special way.

He was a lot of fun.

As the sun set, we went back down the ship and crossed back to Lugano at a leisurely pace. With the temperature still above thirty degrees, it was an absolutely gorgeous crossing.

Tomorrow, it’s back to the mountains.