Rustici

From Bellinzona, we drove to the near edge of Locarno on Lago Maggiore and then turned northward into Val Verzasca. The only way to enter Val Verzasca by car is to come from the south: the Alps block access from the north. Several small villages perch on the valley's steep mountainsides and along the Verzasca River. Formerly farming communities (or probably more accurately, subsistence communities), these villages have largely given over to the tourist industry. Ticino is an especially popular destination for German tourists. Indeed, almost every other tourist we ran into during our off-season trip was German.

Rustici, the characteristic houses of Ticino's small villages, are constructed of dry-stacked stone supported by log beams. Walls, roofs, cantilevered steps: all stone. The houses are beautifully photogenic and the villages charmingly picturesque, but in the centuries before the rustici were renovated into comfortable summer homes and tourist rentals, they must have offered pretty rugged shelter for the year-round rural residents. The stone houses are prevalent from the valleys to the summer grazing lands high up on the mountain tops.

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

Complainant number two

Complainant number two was back again yesterday, vociferous as ever. Indeed, she's been back almost every Monday and Thursday since she first chewed me out a month ago. She chews me out not just for the benefit of God, but also on behalf of the invisible multitudes I'm driving away from the church by practicing. (Of course, I prefer to think of myself as defending the church against hordes of martens, but I haven't mentioned that yet.)

Yesterday, however, I was armed with a mediator: an organ teacher who speaks fluent German, who knows how to decline articles and implement all the formal-you pronouns without hesitation, and who wasn't going to let my lesson be interrupted. He modeled for me how to try to explain a situation, and how to give up, turn one's back, and just get on with things.

Biasca

The town Biasca sits in the Leventina valley at the confluence of the Ticino and Brenno rivers. In 1512, a rock slide off Monte Crenone crashed down upon Biasca, completely destroying parts of the town and damming the Brenno. A year later, the dam broke, and the flood waters coursed down the valley, wiping out farmland and bridges all the way south to Bellinzona.

One architectural survivor of that catastrophic time was Biasca's Romanesque church Santi Pietro e Paolo. The building, constructed at the tail end of the 11th century, has undergone a few architectural and decorative changes over the past 900 years, but a thorough restoration between 1955-67 de-Baroqued the interior, restricting the cherubs and gilded curlicues to the side-chapel to the right of the entrance.

Frescoes abound in the church, documenting changes in artistic styles from the 12th through the 17th centuries as well as the shift from anonymous farmer artists to known studios. The cumulative effect of the contrasting styles in the apse is rather, um, striking, with hardly any space left untouched. There are bucolic Renaissance landscapes on the wall, and black and white rectangles and symbolic animals--lion, snake, chicken, blacksmith--on the ceiling. Christ Pantocrator, painted in rich solid colors, smiles serenely from above, surrounded by a mandorla of pink and green circles, while portraits of individual saints adorn the archway.

It's a small world

We had company for dinner this evening: Elias's buddy Anne and her parents and three siblings. After Kaffee (the ritual 4pm German carbohydrate and caffeine fix), the kids went over to the school playground to expend some energy. When the doorbell rang a short while later, Stefan got up to let the kids back in--but they weren't at the door. Instead, he encountered the brother and sister-in-law of our new upstairs neighbors. The neighbors moved in yesterday, while we were still out of town.

The brother and sister-in-law live in Heidelberg, about an hour and forty minutes north of Freiburg by car. They rang our doorbell because they recognized our names on the mailboxes outside.

Thus it was that we happily reconnected with Mary Beth and Hans-Walter, our former housemates from Tucson, AZ--folks we lived with some twenty years ago, and whom we haven't seen since 1995. MB runs her own copywriting, copyediting, and proofreading business; Hans-Walter is a director at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie in Heidelberg. Contributing to the small-worldness of the evening, Anne's father knows Hans-Walter's brother.

In novels and films, such coincidences seem contrived ("of all the apartment buildings gin joints in all the towns in all the world..."). In real life, they're amazingly cool.

Lago Ritóm

I learned two fundamental things about the Swiss Alps on our trip to Ticino. The first is that geologic activity is violent and cataclysmic even when it occurs in slow motion. The Alps formed over several tens of millions of years, through a combination of tectonic collisions, glaciation, and erosion, and the steep upward thrust visible in the rock strata demonstrate that this was hardly a gentle process. The second thing is that the Alps provide abundant adrenaline-overdosing opportunities for acrophobes like me.

On Wednesday morning, we left the most comfortable beds we've slept on in years behind us in Airolo and drove up the mountainside to Lago Ritóm. We drove instead of taking the funicular tram: while the narrow, occasionally guardrail-free road cuts back and forth along switchbacks, the tram goes directly from bottom to top along an 87% grade. It's the steepest funicular in Europe. And let's face it, who wants to ruin a perfectly fine day by risking one's life on a cog train that's been described effusively by the ADAC Tessin (Ticino) tour book as "ein grossartiges Wunderwerk Schweizer Ingenieurkunst!" ("a splendid feat of Swiss engineering!")?

We parked near the Lago Ritóm dam and hiked partway around the lake, then over a ridge to another lake, Lago Tom, and then up another ridge to gaze over the peak to the mountains and lakes on the other side. I only made it about four fifths of the way up to the peak--something I attribute to my keenly evolved self-preservation instincts--but carefree Elias and Stefan went all the way to the top, where they played in the snow and enjoyed being on top of the world. Then it was back down to Lago Tom, over another ridge to Lago Cadagno, and around the other side of Lago Ritóm. Getting back to Lago Ritóm required hiking down a steep, narrow trail with the mountain on one side, a direct plummet down to the far-below lake on the other, and two roaring waterfalls providing accompaniment as I clutched at the sparse grasses and tried not to freak out. On the bright side, every bridge we crossed and every narrow trail we traversed after that was a cinch.

Luzern*

On Tuesday, after finally taking Elias to apply for a German passport (thanks, Nancy, for mailing us his birth certificate!), we packed our bags and headed south toward Ticino, the Italian-speaking Swiss canton just north of Italy. Our sunny Autobahn route began along the Rhine River flood plain, with the mountains of the Schwarzwald on our left and the distant French Vogesen on our right. We passed through Basel and over the Jura range, and then on to Luzern, where the Swiss Alps loomed bright and clear over the far side of the Vierwaldstaettersee. There we paused to be tourists for a few hours.

Luzern's Altstadt boasts ornately frescoed buildings and abundant filigree, often in unexpected places--on signs, rooftops, building corners, windows. An iconic bridge, the Kapellbruecke, spans the Reuss River near the Water Tower (historically used variously as a dungeon, archive, and vault). The wooden bridge was first erected in the 14th century but is now largely a restoration, as much of it--including 81 of the 111 triangular 17th-century paintings that line the roof beams inside--was damaged in a 1993 fire. We completed our walking tour with a visit up the hill to the Musegg ramparts and towers built in the 14th century to protect the city.

From Lucerne, we drove through the almost 17-km long St. Gotthard tunnel and into Airolo, the first town on our Ticino itinerary.

*Not in southern Germany, but still in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.