Familiar Waters

The first time you see someone after a long while, it’s always difficult when you try to catch each other up on everything that’s happened. The trips, the romances, last winter. Often, your soul still lingers where the story took place. On the other hand, it’s different when you know people in those places who also remember, because then your soul finds a home in them. On the way from St. Moritz to Milan, you wonder whether it’s worth making a stop somewhere between Cernobbio and Ravenna – just for a few Negronis. It’s where Angelo works in the summer after spending the winter in St. Moritz at the Kulm. Here he brings you your drinks, and when he has brought you your drinks – on an evening under the trees, with a view of the lake, the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel and the sound of ice cubes in your glass – you no longer question whether it’s worth stopping here. You reminisce about the winter and think about the coming summer, chat with Angelo about the highlights among the usual places and some new ones. You’ll definitely head to the sea, but here, in spring by the lake, between north and south, Angelo says, at the end of one season and the beginning of the next, you don’t have to know where you’re going yet.

People have been fascinated by this region ever since the dawn of travel. In 196 BC, the Romans conquered Como and southern Ticino. Half a millennium later, the Alemanni came down from the north but were stopped by the Romans. Thank goodness. Then the Lombards established themselves, the oath of allegiance was sworn in 1496, and Locarno and the Maggia Valley became part of the Swiss Confederation in 1530. Nowhere else does the Mediterranean collide so forcefully with the Alps. Nowhere else is a coastal town so deeply nestled in the mountains. Glaciers and ice, both bathed in the sinfully beautiful sunshine of the same southern sky. You drive through a tunnel and find yourself in the same country but two different nations. Gone are the green meadows of Switzerland, the postcard scenery, the buttermilk peace. Every village has its fountain, its post office, and its inn. The church towers stand high and hollow in the valley, like antennas for God. It’s delightful to drive from the warm interior of the Engadin into the warm outdoors of Lombardy. On the streets, you see sophisticated village types testing their mopeds at a bus stop and catcalling a Monica Bellucci-type. The innkeeper makes his rounds in the bar, singing the first line of Verdi’s La Traviata. By that point, the fairy-tale alpine forests are easily forgotten. The distant villages cling to the side of mountains, looking out over frozen lakes. The deep snow in dark coniferous forests, the naturally purified ozone, and the day that creeps over the mountains in the morning and casts its first long shadows. Now, cypress trees rule the landscape and the sky is held aloft by pillars. Everything is now green, blue, and white, after having been only white and blue all winter long.

There are some places in the world that, despite their outward differences, are incredibly alike on the inside; and none more so than the most cosmopolitan mountain village in the world and Lake Como, the coast at the end of the Alps. Sometimes memories settle in, leaving marks that create an image of a place – something that can bring joy when handled carefully, seen from a distance. Never bigger or smaller, but always exactly as the places themselves are. In both places, something of oneself is left behind, rediscovered only when you return year after year. The memory becomes a feeling, the perfume of its time. It is said that there is no salvation for the inhabitants of this place, no paradise, because they are already lucky enough to live in paradise. Everything is very symmetrical and beautifully proportioned with clean lines and glowing in deep, transparent colours. The weather is never too hot or too cold, always pleasant. In the morning, when the sun rises over the mountains from another, weary land and drives the night out of the woods, you can see the lake from the shore or from the balcony of a hotel, just as Churchill painted it.

They say these lakes are as deep as the mountains are high. No one has ever actually seen this, but you can definitely feel it. They lie soft and flat, like seas beside to sheer rock faces. Veteran Roman legionnaires spent their twilight years here. Flaubert considered this region the most sensual place in the world, and back then the Orient Express even stopped in Stresa. Here, surrounded by palm trees and pasta, artists finally succeeded in doing nothing at all. Remarque had a house where all the windows looked out onto the lake. The villages are beautiful, the peaks are white, and human longing is reflected in the waves, which are sometimes blue but mostly green. The world could end and you wouldn’t notice it here (or in St. Moritz) until a few days later, when a concierge might casually mention it. They say that the dead live on here in the clouds, and Stendhal wrote that anyone who happens to have a heart and a shirt should sell them to live on Lake Maggiore or Lake Como.

The Kulm and the hotel on the lake are very close to my heart. They shine like proud embassies of civilization on the coast or billow like large ships in the mountains, travelling through time on a journey from other centuries. They transport the present into the past, the legacy of great beauty, so that the world of yesterday can still exist tomorrow. The socialites, the charlatans, the bon vivants, and women who love anything exciting, any change of scenery. They come from Monte Carlo, Nice, Antibes, Cannes and all the other pretty places where the games of seduction are played out in subtle, opaque, and skilful ways. These two hotels provide the stage on which the greats of their time loved to show themselves off. In the audience are the nouveau riche, braggarts, dandies, travelling salesmen, impostors like Felix Krull, like Ripley, me – all of us who pose as someone else until, through sheer persistence, we become them.

During your days here, you sip aperitifs at the hotel bar or go boating with Erio Matteri Riva. In the evening, when the lanterns are lit on the lake, you ride with old friends in old Ferraris through the narrow streets of Lenno and Laglio, stepping on the gas just where Mussolini was shot – before being hanged upside down in Milan. Behind you, the lake sparkles. Before you is the most orange awning in the world. You can feel the height of the mountains and the depth of the lake, you can even hear it lapping. It’s so beautiful that you don’t even need to smoke. You look out at the lake and see the other shore, finish your Negroni, and gaze into the distance a little longer. We never look at things long enough anyway, with our own limited frame rate, which seemingly fast-forwards time by slowing down our perception. Timelessness emerges, something endless, a prolonged stay. Angelo arrives and brings a new drink without asking. He just says, ‘The usual,’ and how nice it is here, and asks if there’s anything else we’d like.