Sottoceneri

In the first segment of The Amazing Race’s new season contestants flew from Los Angeles to Zürich where they transferred to a train for an overnight in Locarno. The introductory task left to the team member with “nerves of steel” was to leap off the dam at Lago di Logorno in the Valle Verzasca, the second highest bungee jump in the world. I am not worried about my nerves. I am convinced that I would suffer a heart attack very early in the 220-meter plunge that goes by the name 007 jump thanks to an appearance in the Goldeneye opening sequence. Simply watching it on television gives me clammy palms.

No James Bond exploit for me. The show’s theme music possesses an infectious tribal beat that could accompany on my own Ticino adventure.

Fifteen minutes after I landed in Zürich I rode toward the city. A record! Immigration inspection in the Swiss/E.U. lane took no time. My bag was the second dropped onto the carousel. I breezed through customs. It took me just a little while longer to locate the correct platform in the train station located below the airport.

While I readied my RailEurope pass for the conductor I noticed it bore the wrong dates. Fortunately no one ever came to examine it and I did not have to explain why I did not pay the fare for the train ride. At the Hauptbahnhof I raced to a service counter to get its validity dates adjusted even as I knew the SBB could not alter a rail pass issued by another agency.

The agent issued me a one-way ticket to Lugano for 59 CHF, not a bargain but I expected worse in a notoriously expensive country and with currency fluctuations that do not favor the U.S. dollar. During my first visit to Switzerland in 1997, a dollar bought 1.50 francs. It now fetches about 1.09 francs, a steep decline but an amelioration over last March when it was at parity. In 2001 it flirted with 1.80 francs. One may conclude that the eight years of Mr. Bush’s presidency coincided with a 40 percent decline in the value of the dollar and one may be correct. If one didn’t know any better, one would hypothesize that we are talking about a Third World currency…

Another way to look at this sorry state of affairs is to think of my 59 CHF ticket as costing about 54 USD today, up from about 33 USD eight years ago. That is without adjusting for inflation, which we are told does not exist.

I wrote an article on rail passes where I attempted to compare them with point-to-point tickets. The multitude of options makes it impossible to address specific scenarios. In very general terms, rail passes privilege convenience over savings. The Swiss train network now offers reduced rates advance reservations on selected routes. Zürich-Lugano prices at 23.60 CHF. If you travel the way the Swiss do, you can score it for 17.80 CHF with a Half-Fare Card that cost 125 CHF for the year and extends a 50 percent discount on all trains. With the high cost of train travel in Switzerland just about everyone carries this card.

Do the math: it won’t take long to recoup the fee. The Half-Fare Card might come out ahead of the Swiss Pass for savings, too, where the least expensive options cost 216 USD for three days of travel within one month or 226 USD for four consecutive days.

The train looped over itself three times and dove through tunnels to ease the ascent of the Schöllenen Gorge. Night had settled when it paused in Göschenen at 1106 meters and it became darker still inside the 15 km tunnel beneath the St. Gotthard Pass. The train emerged near Airolo at 1142 meters and embarked on a careful descent through more tunnels and full circles into the Valle Levantina. The St. Gotthard Pass rail tunnel opened in 1881 and a road tunnel followed 99 years later. Both avoid the tortuous highway (impassable in winter) that winds its way up and down a full vertical kilometer. Nevertheless, the steep climb on either side of the pass slows traffic considerably. The construction of the Gotthard Base Tunnel will speed rail transit because the portals at Erstfeld and Bodio sit at much lower elevations. The monumental project will create the world’s longest tunnel – 57 km -when it opens in 2018. Webcams track the progress of the construction.

To alleviate traffic on one of the most important north-south axis in Europe and in the tunnel, trucks will be required to piggyback on rail cars. In the U.S. fanciful dreams of high-speed rail links have flourished regularly in the last quarter century. Our transportation network would not be so nightmarish had we favored public transit instead of SUVs.

These mountains do not just harbor unusually long tunnels. The divide is geographic, with rain and snow melt flowing north towards the Rhine and the North Sea and south into the Po and the Mediterranean Sea. The climate also undergoes a change. Less snow falls south of the Alps and the Ticino (Tessin in English) canton receives more sunshine than the rest of the country.

It is also cultural. An immediate sign of change comes in the form of onboard announcements now broadcast in Italian before the Swiss German dialect. Sankt Gotthardpass becomes Passo del San Gottardo. The train company gets renamed as well: SBB (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen ) is now FFS (Ferrovie Federali Svizzere).
While I was airborne over the Atlantic Eric had already made his way from Lausanne and settled at the lakefront Walter au Lac Hotel. He was expecting hotel maintenance to adjust a misaligned window and was not surprised when I knocked on the door pretending to be a room service attendant. At this late evening hour, the dining options had shrunk. We opted for the cafeteria of the supermarket chain Coop, which you should not mistake for a drab restaurant with mediocre choices.
The service stations present the food in elegant settings reminiscent of market stalls. The selection and variety would be considered upscale in the U.S. (I chose veal prepared to order) but the beauty of eating in Europe is that minimum standards are much higher. Most of it is fresh and organic. Coop stores account for more than half of all organic food sales in Switzerland. It is tempting to think of the chain as a local version of Whole Foods but it is in fact very mainstream, the second largest in the country behind Migros. Both are cooperative-type organizations.

Eric and I fell asleep in the same bed exhausted by talks of unexpected pregnancy and fairytales of life in Zug.
Guide Marco showed us around the city center of Lugano, a complex of cobblestoned pedestrian alleys and piazzas near the lake. Luxury specialty shops crowd on Via Nassa, also the location of the Coop cafeteria. We climbed up to the railway station, close-by but on a rise above town that affords panoramic views.

The requisite banks colonize the center, a development that dates to the 1970s when political instability in Italy motivated the well-heeled to seek the safety and anonymity north of the border.
The recent prosperity contrasts with the poverty of 19th-century Ticino that pushed many rural residents to seek a better life in London, Australia, Argentina and the U.S.

Dairy farming in the western part of California’s Marin County owes its beginnings to these immigrants. Today, descendants still tend to the cows that pasture in the rolling hills of the county I deem my ancestral home because it was my landing point on my first trip to California in 1977.
The subconscious link might explain why I feel particularly comfortable in Ticino, this appendage to the Helvetic identity that hangs over Italy. The landscape combines dreamy lakes encased by steep slopes that rise to alpine peaks in no time. In Locarno, winter mountain snows in the background frame a panorama of palm trees along Lago Maggiore.

The Ticino is an inverted pyramid that pokes across haphazard borders into Lombardia and Piemonte. The return hug embraces traditions, culture, architecture, cuisine and emotions that capture the sweet essence of unhurried life. Swiss efficiency meets Italian charm. Precision enhanced by flair.

“In Italia niente funziona ma alla fine tutto funziona,” said Marco, our guide. At first glance the freeform emotions that engulf Italy impart a sense that nothing works. Moral absolutes turn delectably ambiguous. Italians respect the irrational and dwell in the aesthetics of disorientation. Life will go on even if everything is not done right and right away. No need to rush: there is always tomorrow. Italy welcomes the unexpected, the unproductive. The sum has been demonstrated to be greater than its parts. In the end, it all works out. Often for the better.

The Ticino embodies this virtue in a paradisiacal environment without sliding into a paralytic chaos. I have mentally already relocated here.

An Asian captain piloted the small ferry to Paradiso before we alighted in Gandria, a compact village flush on the shores of Lago di Lugano. I feasted on polenta nostrana con coniglio if only because I love rabbit. People where I live don’t eat bunnies. Here, it is a house (and cantonal) specialty. The Locanda Gandriese exudes a conviviality that invites indolent lunches. It boats a tiny patio that hangs over the lake but our table was inside the lively dining room.

We chose not to follow the olive path back to Castagnola and Lugano. A hike straight up Monte Brè provided a chance to stretch our legs and fill our lungs with the scent of a chestnut forest barely awakening to spring. We followed the white-red-white signs up the abrupt slope, certain that it would not take us 1hr30 minutes to reach the village of Brè near the 916-meter summit. An application on Eric’s iPhone with a topographical map that indicated our exact location amazed me. I was surprised to see roads for I did not know the village was accessible by car.

A band of white snow capped the ridge tops of a massive mountain range to the east in Italy. The border cuts across the landscape not 2 kilometers away, an almost futile distinction now that Switzerland has abolished land border controls.
Not much stirred in Villaggio Brè. We were tempted to dive in a private swimming pool after locating it beyond a hedge thanks to the iPhone. We settled instead at the terrace of a café overlooking the known world. Lugano stretched below us, constrained by Monte San Salvatore, Monte Brè’s twin, which I climbed on an earlier visit. The two mountains are almost of equal height: Salvatore is 4 meters shorter.
Fingers of the lake peeked in the hazy distance near Castlano and Ponte Tresa. Minutes across the lake from Lugano by ferry, tiny Campione represents a territorial oddity. Fully surrounded by Switzerland, the community is in fact an Italian exclave attached to the province of Como in Lombardia. Yet, Swiss phone exchanges serve its residents who register their cars in Ticino. The Casinò Municipale is said to be the largest casino in Europe, a building that has earned few admirers in town. Drop the accent off the “o” and you’re left with a municipal mess. Che casino!

The coolish weather did not invite a prolonged visit. I interrupted the drinking of my gazosa to snap a picture of Eric, a famed and handsome movie star lost in reverie or in a deep freeze.

The third option to reach the top of Monte Brè is to ride the two funiculars from town. We did it in reverse and if I recall neither of us paid for the privilege…

After an irksome dispute with the front desk about the merit of the additional 140 CHF charge for a second person in the same bed we rode the funicular to the train station. In preparation for the trip I realized that Swiss hotels charge a substantial fee for the second person in a room. This practice differs markedly from the U.S. and other countries where hotels assess a minimal surcharge if there is one at all. An agent for the hotel had agreed to an 80 CHF premium per night that had now almost doubled. Some wrangling later the surcharge was reduced to its original level. Still, 160 CHF (145 USD!!) for an additional person in the same bed is exorbitant.

I grabbed a copy of Il Corriere del Ticino, Il Caffè and l’Espresso but never would read them until much, much later. Eric was returning to his Lausanne home and I was headed to Leukerbad, two destinations that shared the same routing for two thirds of the distance. My trip involved four connections, four trains and a postbus.

The first train, a cross border regional link, took us under Monte Ceneri – sotto il Ceneri - to Giubasco on the outskirts of Bellinzona, the cantonal capital. Between Locarno and Domodossola the train winds its way through the Centovalli named for the (seeming) hundreds of steep valleys that cascade from a massive range. Bridges ford glacial torrents and snow lined the tracks as we crossed into Italy. I drove this road once and do not remember it being high in the mountains!
We arrived late in Domodossola and had no time to grab a sandwich (and pay in euros) before we needed to board the Milan-Geneva. Soon, we snuck under the Passo del Sempione, better known under its English name, the Simplon Pass, back into Switzerland. Napoleon built the road over the pass in 1805 and the first 19.8 km tunnel opened in 1921. It allowed the Orient Express to inaugurate a southerly route on the Paris-Istanbul run.