Brian's Place

Some Places To Enjoy Life... In Italy

My sister (on the right, second from the camera) and friends, at a location somewhere in Italy (she reveals all here).

The following list starts with a description of our stay at Cannero-Riviera on Lake Maggiore, because of the great time we had with the people of that community.

• Lake Maggiore - Cannero-Riviera
• A few words from our resident Italy expert...

• If you follow the links in the right hand panel, you will hopefully find a lot of useful or interesting information. The first (reddish-brown) link will take you to a map of Italy marked up with our favourite sites, restaurants, hotels etc.
• Links in that panel will generally open in a new window.

Lake Maggiore - Cannero-Riviera

This is an account of a magical week we spent around Lake Maggiore in July 1997, staying at the wonderful Hotel Cannero. (We didn't have a digital camera in those days, but I'm hoping to scan some of our old photos at some time in the future.)

The account starts after a truly awful flight that was delayed 6 hours (but that's another story). Frazzled and exhausted, we were picked up in Milan at about 3am by the driver from the hotel. Unbelievably, he was full of smiles and welcome, in spite of the long wait he'd had and the long drive still to come. It was then that we knew that life was about to improve greatly.

This picture by Markus Bernet is from Wikimedia Commons, reproduced here under the terms given at that site. Click the picture for more details.

We first saw the lake somewhere between 4 and 5 a.m., with the sky just starting to turn light behind the hills. Contrary to the gloomy weather forecasts the sky was clear, and it promised to be a fine day. Our wonderful courier dropped us off in front of our hotel, waiting to make sure that someone would let us in. It took a while, then we were greeted by a sleepy but smiling person who we later discovered to be a kind of factotum of the hotel, and possibly its owner as well! He showed us to our room, and after peering out of our window (the balcony overlooked the lake as promised), we crashed out.

In the morning we really discovered what a nice place we were in. We came downstairs some time after 10 am to find an empty restaurant, but the head waiter greeted us the moment we set foot in the place, announced with a beaming smile that he had saved us breakfast, and saw us to our table on the edge of the front terrace, a kind of verandah set a few feet above the promenade which separates the front of the hotel from the lakeside and the ferry-boat pier.

It was a beautiful day, balmy weather, people were strolling past, the occasional boat appeared, offloaded/loaded passengers and disappeared, and we relaxed and enjoyed our first decent meal for some time. I had a jug of mild but very tasty black coffee which, if served at that time of day in an English restaurant, would have been stewed and bitter, but was absolutely perfect.

The manageress, also beaming, appeared at our table and welcomed us, and said she was sorry we hadn't been able to have supper there but would we like to have a free lunch in the restaurant instead? We felt like we had suddenly been beamed up from Purgatory to Heaven - just wonderful.

Cannero-Riviera is a lake-side community built on quite a steep wooded hill-side. The road passes through the top of it, leaving the main lower part mostly undisturbed by traffic. The houses are all on different levels, with pedestrian walk-ways going through them in all directions. Our hotel had a nice swimming pool on a courtyard terrace one level up, and a sunning terrace on its roof (which got too hot!).

We did all our travel by boat. We visited two of the islands (Isola Bella, Isola Madre) eating lunch at the restaurants there. The palace at Isola Bella was not really to our taste inside, but we enjoyed the gardens, and the boat trips themselves.

The highlight of our week, visit-wise, was the botanical gardens at Villa Taranto. The day started out rainy but cleared up quickly, and we had the gardens almost to ourselves. We also took a fast boat across the lake to the market day at Luino (Sue bought a nice cool pair of trousers for about six pounds), and on our last evening we hired a small low-powered motor-boat and cruised for an hour or so around the vicinity of Cannero, including the tiny islands with ruined mediaeval forts.

What made the holiday so enjoyable, apart from the sun and the quiet relaxing atmosphere, was the people. Cannero-Riviera has its own local community which assimilates the tourists quite happily. There seems to be an endless supply of what we called the "Botticelli Kids", tiny infants with immense character and poise. The owner/factotum of the hotel had a little daughter of this variety (Bernadetta, aged 22 months), and seemed to have her with him whenever possible. In the evening when we were at supper he would often come cycling slowly up the promenade, a basket of groceries/fruit/flowers on the handlebars, and his infant perched on a kind of extra saddle made of a bundle of something draped over the bar which joins the front and back frames of the bike, held upright with his other arm! He would stop in front of the hotel and have unhurried conversations with people on the restaurant terrace, while his kid perched there quite happily.

An older version of a Botticelli Kid, a girl of maybe 5 or 6 years old, creased me up by waiting for her errant parents outside the pier, her arms folded, frowning and tapping her foot, but obviously making allowances for the frail behaviour of Parents.

Even the hotel dog was a character, a low-slung fat-sausage- shaped dog called Vicki with a long nose, silly tail, eyes close together and an endearingly goopy expression, like a dog from a Ronald Searle cartoon (you remember St Trinians?).

The fun with people culminated in the event on our last night, a community concert (oddly enough, mostly of music with English or American titles) held right outside the hotel restaurant, on the section of promenade (not very wide) between us and the boat pier building, which was basically two kiosks separated by a space on which to get onto the pontoon, all covered by a single roof (home of nesting swallows).

The night before people erected a simple stage platform, and stacked a few hundred white plastic chairs against a kiosk wall.

On Saturday, about 9pm when we had just finished supper, people started to congregate in front of us, including families with 3 or more generations represented, and the chairs magically unstacked themselves and distributed themselves in a series of shallow semi-circles, maybe 5 or 6 rows, filling all the available space except a narrow walkway just under our table, apparently (if you blinked) without human agency involved.

People gathered up and down the promenade as well as on the seats, and the hotel balconies and neighbouring cafe tables were also full of people watching. The small orchestra (or band, most of whom were teen- agers or just above, with a sprinkling of older hands) assembled for the 9:15 performance, in a fairly unhurried fashion between about 8:45 and 9:30. The Botticelli Kids were well in evidence in the audience, including a little boy with an amazing shock of hair which was much larger than his small face (it more than doubled the size of his whole head), who entertained everyone by dancing along to the music in the space between the front row and the orchestra, along with another small girl who kept escaping from her family to do the same thing. The boy was really good, Michael Jackson eat your heart out! Standing on seats in the back row were another couple of the BK's, who held hands and bobbed up and down to the music, right in front of us. A couple of policeman came along, one of them a squat plug-ugly cop with grizzled grey hair, the exact model for a Roman Centurion in a French Asterix cartoon, obviously well known to the family in front of us; the tiny girl bobbing up and down turned round and treated this cop as a favourite uncle (he might have been!), having a very perky conversation with him, pulling his cheeks etc.

The mayor (I think) introduced the event (and each musical number, whose English titles gave him some trouble) with long-winded speeches, and many applause-gathering references to the Maestro who was patiently waiting to do something, welcomed all the visitors, presented merit badges to the newest recruits to the orchestra (more applause for each one), the music was really very enjoyable (mostly light pops, varying from Beatles arrangements to arrangements of Russian melodies, and well performed), the entire town seemed to be out, and in short a great time was had by all. We felt that we were very much part of the local community for this one evening.

All this time it was a beautiful clear evening, as most of the evenings were, just perfect temperature for sitting in shirt-sleeves. About 20 minutes after the performance (and its many encores) finished (we were still watching, as the community was still there and the magic act with the chairs was reversing itself), a few drops of rain started to fall. Not long after that, a grand-daddy thunderstorm arrived and the rain came down like stair-rods, with people dismantling the stage at high speed and the band sheltering under the pier roof.

We retired to our hotel room and watched the further proceedings from our balcony. The thunder was quite impressive; one lightning strike hit the lake so close that the "bang" was extremely loud and completely simultaneous with the flash, making us all jump. The lingering members of the band sheltering under the pier roof cheered themselves and us up by playing impromptu versions of "Oh When The Saints Come Marching In", "Roll Out The Barrel", and many others of similar ilk, with an ear- splitting accompaniment of metal scaffolding-poles being thrown hurriedly into the back of a truck. A wonderful night.

Next morning (alas, our last day, but we had until 5pm to be lazy around the hotel) the weather was beautiful again!