Lombardy

5-22 June 2000

We spent almost three weeks in Lombardy, in the top center of Italy, at the beginning of June. While our vacation plans are usually a series of points to visit (museums, churches, villas, gardens), the objective of a vacation on the Italian lakes is just being there. There are plenty of sights to visit, too, but the reason for going back to the lakes are the memories of ferry rides, the view from our hotel, eating dinner on a lakeside terrace, having a drink at an outdoor cafe, and looking at people walking by. The hills surrounding most of the four lakes we visited are steep, with rocky crests and heavy forests running down to the shoreline. The hills around the southern end of Lake Lecco are particularly rugged and spectacular, craggy and very close to Lecco. The towns that dot the shorelines mostly have red tile roofs, and pitch up steeply from the shore, where larger villas have boathouses or docks. Except at Lake Iseo, there are no industrial facilities on the lake shores, just forests or towns. It's even hard to see the road or the railroad in most places. The steepness of the hills makes roads very difficult to build, and they are either tunneled through the hills or very narrow, which discourages traffic.

We circled Milan, the second largest city in Italy, but didn't visit it on this trip. Our first stop was Torno, population 1 219, on the eastern shore of Lake Como. The largest city we visited, Brescia, has a population of almost 200 000. The cities and towns varied in their attempts to control the automobile and protect pedestrians. One extreme was Sirmione, at the end of narrow peninsula sticking into the south end of Lake Garda. No cars are allowed past the Scaliger Castle without a permit, and no one would want to drive through the crowds of tourists beyond that point. Parma, was a particularly attractive city, with several spectacular cultural sites (cathedral, baptistery, National Painting Gallery, Corregio frescoes).

Every hotel was different, with distinctive advantages. Our first stop (Villa Flora in Torno) had a balcony hanging over Lake Como, with a view of the far shore and a cooling breeze that was stronger than in any other hotel, all of which had larger rooms. There was even a view from the bathroom, and since no one could see in that was closer than 2 miles away, you could go about your business like an outhouse in the country with no one around and the door open.

The hotel on Lake Lecco (Il Griso) had the best restaurant and the best view, though there was no window in the bathroom. The balcony was large enough that Mariana could do Tai Chi outside. Arriving at noon from Torno, we promptly went upstairs to the dining room for lunch. One wall of the dining room has glass doors, which were opened to a spectacular view of the rugged hills across Lake Lecco rising behind the city of Lecco. The menu was inventive, the dining room was luxurious, the staff was friendly, and the cooking was superb. We ate dinner two nights running there, and would happily have worked our way through the whole menu, if we'd had the time.

The hotel above Lake Iseo also had a great view. It was in the hills well above the lake, and had been a farm and a roccolo. The name of the hotel was I Due Roccoli, but we didn't know what a roccolo was until we checked in and saw a picture book about i roccoli, which were stone towers surrounded with trees in which bird nets were concealed. The farmers living in the towers collected the birds and sold them for food, until it became a political/environmental issue. It seems birds for eating in Italy can't also be birds for singing in England. The English, among others, complained about the lack of song birds, that were being hunted to extinction in the south, where they migrated to spend the winter. So, eating song birds became illegal and i roccoli went out of business, or changed business in the case of I Due Roccoli.

We didn't see the variety of wildlife on this trip that you might have expected to see in the USA. There were swallows, pigeons, crows, and the occasional egret in the rice paddies near the end of the trip; but I think we have more species in our back yard in Arlington than we saw in cities or countryside in Lombardy. We also saw no road kill. In Burgundy we were worried about running into wild boars when driving through forests at night, and we did see some owls there. In England we have seen foxes. But there was nothing in Lombardy like the deer, foxes, opossums, raccoons, woodchucks, and dogs that you see by the roadside or alive in your back yard in the Washington area.

The biggest letdown of the trip was supposed to be one of the biggest deals: a dinner at the restaurant of Gualtiero Marchesi outside Brescia. Michelin gives him two stars (out of three possible) and D'Agostino gives him 90 points and the highest rating, three forks. We found the food unremarkable, however, and it took them 3 1/2 hours to serve us. When we arrived, I noticed a young American looking very bored at a table in the next room, and I thought he didn't appreciate good food. By the time I'd sat at the table for 3 hours I was at least as bored. The best entertainment of the evening was provided by the French couple at the next table, who called Gualtiero Marchesi himself out of the kitchen to upbraid him for cooking their main course the way he did, and to push it away and refuse to eat it.

We hadn't planned this trip very thoroughly, but even if we had, Lombardy, like Burgundy last year, was so full of interesting things to see that every day brought a surprise. The best surprises of this trip:

. There were other highlights of the trip, but they were expected: Here are some other photos I took: The Italian lakes are relaxing, full of good things to see, and have good food. I'm sure we'll go back for a third time.