Author: bissin0451

Today we stayed at our villa all day…we slept late, cooked and ate our breakfast, sat on the terrace and read, sat in our living room and read, napped, cooked and ate our lunch, walked around the grounds, took photos of clouds, thought about life and the world where we normally live.  Being near the water is one of the most relaxing experiences I can recall and this vacation is no exception.  Watching, hearing and feeling the water calms the soul.

Clay commented that he was glad to have a day off from being retired…

After our day resting, we opened a bottle of wine and relaxed some more.  Dinner was at Fiorini’s–a restaurant in Urio.  Giuseppe is the proprietor and he played the piano while we ate.  It was another good dinner, right on the water.  We watched mallards, mergansers and coots swimming and swallows flying.  Four scuba divers slipped into the water at the plaza next to the restaurant.

Clay was stuck by the century plant next to the car and considered cutting off the thorns on the end of the leaves.  We have enjoyed our time of peace and quiet here on Lake Como, but more adventure awaits…

 

Today was our early day…we left the villa at 7:20 to assure we would meet our guide at the Maria de la Grazie church for our 9:15 tour.  Thankfully we have our digital navigator and Allan to interpret. Clay had already scoped out parking via Google so we went straight to a garage that was a block from the church.  A stop across the street for a cappuccino began our tour…

Da Vinci’s Last Supper was the highlight of the morning and generated a lot of discussion among us.  Unlike the crucifixion painting on the opposite wall which was an actual fresco (painted on wet plaster), Da Vinci’s painting was dry painted because he wanted to think about each part of it before it was committed to the wall.  Our discussion focused on two topics:  1) Was the Last Supper a Passover Seder?  The bread in this painting is not unleavened as it would be during Passover.  2) The decision to use the local landscape rather than using descriptions from the Bible to paint a more realistic landscape.  See through the windows.  

The painting is focused on the moment just after Jesus declared that one of his disciples would betray him.  Each of them has a different reaction to the statement.

We continued our walking tour of Milan with Alice and a relatively small group of mostly Americans and saw shopping malls, shopping streets, a sculpture of a needle and thread dedicated to the textile industry, streetcars or maybe they were trolley cars, and the Sforza castle (built in the 15th century by Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, on the remains of a 14th-century fortification and today housing mostly museums).

The Duomo (Italian cathedral) in Milan is beautiful.  We thought of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona when we saw it.Alice, our guide, told us that as lovely as it is outside, the real beauty lies within. But, we didn’t tour the inside.  We walked by La Scala, but the outside is nondescript.  Unfortunately, we didn’t recognize the opera that was playing and the tickets were above our price limits.  After the tour, we walked to Bagutta for lunch, as recommended by Charlie’s Italian teacher in New Orleans.  The walls in the ristorante were covered with drawings and paintings.

After lunch we walked to the Pinocotecha Ambrosiana to see paintings by da Vinci and his compatriots as well as excerpts from da Vinci’s notebooks.  When we exited the museum, it was pouring  so we walked to our car in fits and starts, arriving sort of damp, but happy with our day in Milan.

Dinner was pizza at a little restaurant in Urio, Il filo d’ olio…Allan had a hot dog and anchovy pizza and was in heaven.  It was a long, but fun day!

Traveling up the river on a boat is too slow for us…so Charlie drove us past Tremezzo to the ferry stop at Villa Carlotta and we took the ferry to Bellagio.  This method only took us about an hour.  Our goal was to get to the monthly market before it was too crowded, but we walked all over the town, up alleyways, down alleyways, along narrow streets with cars, and never found the market.  After all of our walking, we decided to eat lunch…it was Noon…thanks to Joan and Morris Hyman, we ate at La Punta.  We had a fabulous lunch with fun waiters and a lovely view of the lake.  I had my favorite dish of the trip so far–spinach and ricotta stuffed ravioli and fresh tomatoes with butter and sage.

After lunch we had to catch the ferry back to Tremezzo since our parking space had a 3-hour limit.  We missed that ferry so we at artisan gelato while we waited for the next one, hoping our car had not been ticketed or towed.

 

After stopping at a local supermarket, we headed back toward Laglio.  We were stopped at about the town center by a funeral procession down the main road, most of the small village was included in the procession–a soccer team, people following a priest with a microphone chanting, an elaborate hearse and a very distraught family, with the rest of the  village following.   It was not a joyful celebration of life like our Second Lines in New Orleans, but a very sad, somber event.

When we got back to the villa, Allan, Charlie and Clay cooked us an excellent meal.  We shared a couple of bottles of the Amarone from Urio and ate salad, pork chops, asparagus and spaghetti.  The evening sky from our terrace was beautiful and the clouds sat like soft blankets around the mountains. I hope the beauty  is captured in this photo.

We took a long, slow ferry ride from Urio, just south of Laglio (our villa), to Varenna, across the lake from Bellagio and spent the middle of the day in Varenna.  We stopped at every small village on either side of our fork of the lake to drop off, pick up passengers.  The coastline was beautiful and the small villages looked tranquil.

We had a nice lunch on the lake at Varenna Caffe Bistrot and watched a family of swans and a family of coots on the edge of the lake.  Shopping was simple and we went up and down small alleyways. Charlie and I roamed through the gardens at a villa turned hotel.

The last boat for Urio left at 4:40 and we began our return trip–5 hours traveling and 2 hours visiting.  Since we arrived at Urio at 6:30 we decided to eat there.  First we had a bottle of Amarone red wine at an Enoteca–it was so good, we bought 6 more bottles to take home–then we ate dinner at AcquaDolce.  Dinner was excellent…the servers were attentive and pleasant…we had an “amuse bouche” to start our meal…all of the restaurant walls were made of glass so our view of the lake was amazing…and the food was excellent.

 

It was a good day!

 

I chose to stay in for the day…it is hard adjusting through jet lag, new food and too much wine…After a late start, the rest of the crew climbed into the van and headed through Brienne, Argegno, Pigra, Colonno and Lenno along that same narrow road to Tremezzo and the beautiful Villa Carlotta. They wandered outside through the botanical garden and inside through the villa.  Art abounds in this villa built in 1690 for the Milanese marquis Georgio Clericio.  The citrus covered arch was enticing, the views of Lake Como are a beautiful here as elsewhere, the rain forest was enhanced through an automatic misting system, the rhododendrons were not in full bloom, but roses were bright and colorful and the art was beautiful inside and outside.

The narrow road traveled convinced everyone that our next venture would be by water.

We returned to La Locanda del cantiere for dinner because it was good, it was close by, and we didn’t feel like searching for a new spot…the lightning over the mountains in one direction and Mars in another gave us a beautiful ending to Monday on Lake Como.

 

Charlie drove us down the very narrow road from Lagio through Urio, Moltrasio, Cernobbio and on to Como, following our electronic navigator’s instructions as interpreted by Allan.  It took us 15 minutes to get to Como and at least 15 minutes to find a legal parking space and the funicular.  The funicular took us from a park on the lake up to the small village of Brunate.  Brunate is the home of the Voltiano Lighthouse built to honor Count Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), a self-taught physicist who invented the battery and after whom the volt was named.  He was born and  died in Como.

About a 30 minute uphill hike from the end of the funicular Charlie and I found the lighthouse.  I couldn’t understand why a lighthouse would be needed on top of a mountain off the shore of a freshwater lake…it was actually built to honor Volta and “is the tower lighting humanity’s path”, not exactly a lighthouse…a tower of light.  From the lighthouse we could see some of the Swiss Alps and maybe our villa–we can see the lighthouse from the villa.

Dinner was at La Laconda del cantiere just down the road from the villa.  We sat outside with a beautiful view of the lake and had an excellent dinner–vegetable flan with fondue and whitefish appetizers, steak, lamb and local fish entrees and tiramisu and chocolate mousse for dessert.

The view of Lake Como from our villa is spectacular. The only thing between us and the water are trees full of singing birds. We are staying in the small village of Lagio.  The nearest bigger village is Como and we can walk 15 minutes to a good restaurant.  George Clooney’s place is 500 meters away but we haven’t seen it (or him).

Lake Como is shaped like a wishbone. Our part of the lake is the bottom of the left wishbone. Bellagio, Mellagio and Varenna are the bigger cities near the center of the lake.

Our travels were easy…we flew out of New Orleans at 1:05, arrived in Philadelphia at 4:30, flew out of Philadelphia at 6:40 and  arrived in Venice the next morning at about 8:35. Clay drove our Hertz rental Mercedes Vio to Lagio easily, but with some interesting twists ( we did visit Switzerland before arriving in Lagio!). We had an early dinner in the villa and we’re all in bed by 9.