Thirty hours in Ticino

Neither Ticino nor Tuscany are in Southern Germany, but here they are, happily opening the shutters to Wadlstrumpf's 2014 blog space. Our annual trip to visit S's mom is preceded this year by a southerly detour, thanks to a conference S has in Barga, Italy.

I'm playing photo-blog catch-up, because internet access was nonexistent-to-sketchy for our first week here. This was surely a good thing for us, although we felt a little lost without Google. Thankfully we had our old friend, das Navi, in the car with us. Unsere Route wurde berechnet.

E and I began our trip in Zürich. S had flown to Berlin the week before to give a talk, and our original plan was to meet up in Freiburg so I could give some workshops. After we bought tickets, assorted factors led us to change plans, and we decided we'd travel together to Italy before going to Germany. S took a train down to Freiburg, picked up our rental car, and drove to Zürich to pick us up. So here we are a week and a bit later, S in Barga, and E and I bumming around Tuscany.

Given the monkey wrenches that kept whapping us at home the month before our trip, we were grateful that the chaos that followed us to Europe was mild. S had a dramatic mid-flight mishap involving beverage service, and then had the misfortune of being rerouted in Newark, armpit of airports, so it took him 20 hours to get to Berlin instead of 12.

As for me and E, we both arrived in Zürich on time despite two near-miss connections, but our suitcase was not so lucky. Swiss Air gave us a claim number and handy shoulder bags ("dark gray for the gentleman, light gray for the lady") containing T-shirts (XL for the gentleman, L for the lady), toothbrushes, wee shampoolets etc. Gray bags in hand, we headed south to Cavagnago, Ticino, for the night. Wildflowers, rustici, and alps were refreshingly beautiful through the haze of jetlag.

The next day, we extended our stay in Ticino by several hours, as Swiss Air had promised to forward our missing bag to the Lugano airport by early afternoon. We spent part of the morning revisiting Castelgrande in Bellinzona.

Our suitcase ended up being several hours late coming into the airport, so we had an unplanned afternoon in Lugano. We walked along the lake through a city park and splurged on a ride up the funicular.

Suitcase reclaimed by early evening, we headed belatedly into Italy to spend a night on Lake Orta, which will get a blog post of its own.

Bellinzona

Beautiful Bellinzona, capital of the canton Ticino, is situated along the Ticino River at the southern end of the Valle Leventina. It is an old city: people have occupied this spot since the Neolithic era, and written records of the city's name date back to 590 B.C. As a bastion along key trade routes between Italy and the rest of Europe, Bellinzona has been coveted and conquered by numerous tribes and states over the past few millennia.

The time period we tourists were most interested in when we visited the city last Thursday was the latter half of the 15th century. It was then that ruling Milan reinforced the two fortresses--Castelgrande, site of fortifications since at least the 1st century B.C., and Castello di Montebello, begun in the 13th century--and added a third castle, Sasso Corbaro (completed 1479), and then connected the fortifications with a new town wall (the Murata) to protect Bellinzona from the threat of the Swiss confederates--who nonetheless successfully and permanently took over the city in 1500, thanks in part to French King Louis XII's 1499 invasion of Milan.

The Swiss military didn't make much use of the castles, which subsequently fell into disrepair. In 1920, Bellinzona began restoring the ruins, a project that was finally completed in 1992. Since 2000, the three castles and town walls of Bellinzona have been on UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites.

And so, at long last, we've been able to see authentic, non-ruined ruins in their fullest glory.

Castelgrande from afar



On the ramparts of Castelgrande



Pigeons roosting in the Castelgrande walls



Castello di Montebello



One of two authentic functioning cantilevered drawbridges in Castello di Montebello



Sasso Corbaro