Dave’s off to his conference today, so after a slow start, I decide to wander around the little towns around Lake Maggiore–well, inland of the lake. I head for another lake: Lago di Monte, a short drive from Ranco, where our hotel is. First stop is the grocery store.

I had a conversation with Michelle, who is part of the family that runs out little hotel (12 rooms only–they began with the restaurant 100+ years ago and only added the hotel in 2004) about gnocchi (pronounced nyah-ki, not nyo-ki). Their restaurant only does them on Fridays and sometimes on Sunday, but the Sunday we arrived they “hadn’t had time in the kitchen to prepare.” After talking for a moment about this particular little potato dumpling she said “Gnocchi are your passion, yes?”

Yes. But only good gnocchi. And here’s a picture of all kinds of pasta, especially gnocchi, all lined up for some Italian to take home and cook up. We head to Trader Joe’s for ours.

I feel like a spy, or a voyeur, taking pictures but it’s all so different. Milks and butter, above.

Yogurts. Yogurt is a big, serious business here, if the facings (a grocery store term, meaning how many linear “faces” or spaces a product has on a shelf) are any indication. Dave’s been a yogurt fan for many years and any trip to the grocers invariably means a carton or two of yogurt in our shopping basket. It’s fun to try the different kinds.

I buy a bottle of water, a bag of chips, a loaf of bread and a container of Bel Paese cheese.

I drive to Cadrezzate, and try to find my way to their lake. It’s like a treasure hunt, always, in finding cities and towns and directions. Sometimes you win the prize, sometimes you lose. This church, at the center of town shows the interesting blend of renovation–needed to keep the church operational for the local parish–and the attempt to preserve some history. I wouldn’t necessarily call this successful.

I drove around the back, parked the car and gazed at the lake through a chain link fence while eating my lunch.

A little tiny monster man. He’s about a half-inch tall. Another kind of chip, Wacko’s, has as their prize a charm for the cellphone. I like this game. I can only imagine the pestering that Italian parents get from their children to buy bags of chips. Collect all 15 tiny monster men!

Still trying to find that elusive access to their lakefront, I wander into a cemetery–their gate was next to the gate for the park and I took a wrong turn. I like cemeteries, though, and it is interesting how different this one was from what I’m used to in the United States.

The mother’s name on the right-hand picture is close to the children’s grandmother’s name: Benedetto. Perhaps their families are linked somehow? A gravesite seems to be a marble slab, sometimes engraved with the family name, that has a bit of statuary (sometimes a grand bit), an eternal light, an urn, and a vase for flowers. All these can vary.

A bronze rendition of Da Vinci’s Last Supper on this one.

I thought it was interesting that Enrico was noted as having died in the U.S.A. So far away and unable to be brought home to the family plot in this tiny town?

A double-wide gravesite, with a variation of the Christus statue.

Angel beside the broken column. Way over to the side, away from me, a man was pouring water all over the grave he was visiting–rinsing it off–and was removing dead flowers from the vase and replacing them with fresh ones. Some flowers are fresh, some are artificial. I was surprised at how many flowers were freshly laid.

I wound my way to another town: Besozzo. It rolls off your tongue nicely, in a sit-on-the-porch-swing kind of way. Besozzo.

Slightly lost, as usual, I look for the Center signs. Some guy was behind me on a motorbike, too close. I turn right to let him go left. He follows me. I go up a little hill and turn right again. He’s still with me. I turn right again and then again and not until I turn into a school parking lot does he turn left–into some institute building. Now to retrace my steps back down.

From below I notice this lighthouse-looking thing and work to find my way up to where it is, driving through several pedestrian only sections (no one was there–pedestrian only means for the visitors–lots of locals drive in the pedestrian only sections, I’ve noticed) by mistake until I see the signs for parking.

It’s in the school parking lot I had originally turned into while trying to evade the motorscooter.

I park, walk around several neighborhoods but can only look at this memorial (for World War I?), not go in. It’s behind a large yellow building, and I wonder what that building is.

Yes, it’s the school. I drive around to the back of the school and there’s the lighthouse memorial.

I’m done driving in cutesy little Italian towns from the moment and head to Gavirate–where Carrefours is located. This is sort of their version of Target crossed with Wal-Mart.

I’m enamoured with their pasta.

The Meduse–in the shape of a small pumpkin, or as Dave points out–a jellyfish, went home with me as a souvenir. It may be crumbles by the time we get it there. I also bought the extruded rectangular shape in the previous photo.

And the good news is that I made it back to our little hotel without getting lost at all. This stand of trees is about 5 minutes from the lakeside. Near the lake are towns, away from the lake, farmland. Lake Maggiore has lots of flatland with medium-tall mountains surrounding it.

June 23, 2008
Santa Caterina
On the day we nearly croaked for heat exhaustion (Orta and its island) we got back in the car and recovered sufficiently to think about another place to go visit: Hermitage Santa Caterina.

A hermit built the original chapel on the side of the cliff—88 steps above lake level, but 288 below the top of the hill (yes, about as many steps as are in the Leaning Tower of Pisa). The buildings hug the cliff: a small chapel, and two other small dormitory-type places, which have now been turned in Visitor Reception and the Gift Shop.

As soon as we opened the car door in the parking lot letting all the air conditioning leak out, we almost lost our nerve, but we filled up our water bottles at the small bathrooms at the top of the cliff, noting that they are building an elevator for future guests—obviously a bunch of wimps like me.

I wondered aloud to Dave, as we descended the 288 steps, whether building an elevator would change the Hermitage Santa Caterina as the shuttle buses changed Zion National Parks. More crowds, less filtering.

The roof of the first small building appeared more quickly than we’d thought and it overlooked Lake Maggiore. The first building was a small patio shaded by an old wisteria vine.

So how did a hermit, even aided by the church’s money, build something so elegant and perfectly tucked in? Obviously there’s been restoration, but the bones of the place are exquisite.

The buildings seem a part of the lakeside, even though they were slightly above the water level.

The chapel is small and I was amazed at how blue the light was—obviously the reflection off the lake water colors the light. Dave took this shot.

At the very back of the chapel is a saint in a glass box with brown socks on his feet. Notice the broken ceiling. Apparently several large boulders tumbled down onto the roof of the chapel and there they stayed for many years, until finally falling through with the miracle that no one was injured. Maybe this is left open to show the damage, and the miracle? I’ve noticed that miracles are really big here in Italy. Virgin sightings are especially popular. The last one I read about was when the man was digging a well and his daughter noticed The Virgin’s face in the watery muck.

This is Dave’s shot of the columns outside the chapel. Mine is the next picture, as I went for the red flowers in the small window above.

If I were to equivocate taste to this wall, it would be a creamy milk gelato with a hint of melon.

June 2008

This is not a chant from the Sacro Monte (Sacred Mountain) chapels, but rather an admonishment from a sign on Orta’s island. More on that later.

We parked our car in the modern car park garage and strolled down to the town of Orta, as it is pedestrian only in the center.

Orange seems to be a popular color for churches around here, but it works well.

Dave shooting another photo. He took the one of the church, above.

Weathered doorways appeal to this middle-aged traveler.

This town had several cool-looking chimneys. Here’s one of them.

Luckily for this skater, there are two smooth paved sections down the center of each cobble-stone road.

Just another typical charming town square. . .

. . . except not too many have pictures of Christ above the souvenir shops.

We could hear the clapping from a wedding (my assumption, not Dave’s) when we walked by the City Hall. A few minutes later, the bridal couple (posing for a picture here on the steps of the ancient Administration Place) came down to the square, leading a posse of guests behind them.

The sculptor of the machine-ball appears to be the same one as Matthew’s favorite sculpture from the Vatican museum. His work is also at the Hirschorn. His pieces were all over Orta, everywhere and we passed what we think could have been his house on the way home. Each one reminded of us Matthew.

The reason why we look as if we had taken a dunk in the water is because it’s about 85 degrees and about 9000% humidity. I’m not exaggerating in the least.

About the snapshot-via-arm shot: we’re trying Alice, really we’re trying.

So we made it over to the island and the first tourist item is the church. As Dave noted, there are first-tier tourist attractions, like Venice, Rome, Florence, New York City. And then there are second-tier attractions like this church. Actually, it might even be a third-tier, but the depiction of the Lady of the Eyes on the pillar boosted it up a level.

A view towards the little island across from Orta, with the Catholic Seminary.  We think we are headed over there to see the grounds of the seminary.  We find out later the truth.

After we land, Dave takes a shot of a view out toward Lake Orta.

Okay, the walk/island are firmly in third-tier attraction. It was basically a circular walk around the Seminary. They didn’t want to hear all the tourists yackety-yak so they named it the Walk of Silence and had these signs posted every few yards to remind the visitors to Keep It Down. Only they had very weirdly Hallmark-ish phrases that just about made sense.

• Open your being.
• If you can be yourself, you are everything.
• Silence is music and harmony.
• Leave yourself and what is yours.

Except they didn’t really. Something was lost in the translation, I think.

Another sculpture on the island.

We only had to wait 35 minutes for the boat that, according to the captain that dropped us off, comes promptly every 15 minutes.

More sculptures–flat, this time.

We did a 180 turn from the flat sculptures and went up about a 50-degree slope walk. Dave always thinks of fun things like this to do on our vacation. I reminded him that one sure sign of heat exhaustion is denial that you’re having heat exhaustion. He said we weren’t having heat exhaustion.

The road on the right came in from our mountain-goat climb to this church. We sat on the benches, drank our water bottles, and tried to recover.

I thought this was an interesting Mary, with candles askew.

We came down the hill to see the sculptor has branched out to cones. We clambered back up to the car park, and located a quick-stop on the road on the way home and drank cold drinks. Well, first I held the can to my head, trying in vain to get the red to fade and to cool down. I felt better after having the A/C blast on my face.

We passed this park on the way home. At first I thought the tractors were go carts and had a great time imaging children bashing into one another around the circular track. But Dave pointed out that they’re just stationary so kids can climb on them. Nobody was climbing today–too hot.