To the Alps! Milan, Lake Iseo and Chur

 Guten tag! Chester here, writing about a couple of transitory days that connect our "Italy chapter" to our "Alps Chapter" consisting of Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia. We are sadly leaving Italy behind, but also feeling reinvigorated as we explore a new region with new sights, food, and language. 

Milan

On our Florence to Lake Como journey, we gave ourselves just two nights and a full day to explore Milan. We knew we would probably fail in getting to really know the beating, buzzing metropolis that is the heart of northern Italy in just 24 hours, and that premonition turned out to be correct. Milan really is not a city you can get to know in a short period, both because of its huge size and its culture, which is much more lived in day-to-day experience than held in any museum or served in a restaurant.

Still, our failure to really know Milan did not prevent us from having a good time. I had a few things I wanted to do, and we planned around those: a visit to the magnificent duomo, modern art and architecture, and great nightlife. 

 

We started our full day at the duomo, starting out by climbing the terraces in the blazing heat. This is a unique walk on the rooftop of the cathedral, getting you up close and personal with the stone spires and flying buttresses in all their gothic glory. We enjoyed the unique perspective on the church and also the views of the city that came with being all the way up there. It was also interesting to see inside as well, and how different (grey, gothic, tall) this cathedral was from others we had seen further south in Italy, deliberately designed as such to highlight the northern European influence on Milan.

 

 

A personal draw for me in Milan was all the design and modern art the city offered. If Rome shows you the best of the Roman era, and Florence the best of the Renaissance, then Milan is the best of Italy's twentieth century. We could see it in the fabric of the city, with its wide streets and modern apartment buildings, and gleaming skyscrapers hosting headquarters of multinational firms. We were really struck by this on our first exploration of Milan when we walked around BAM, a contemporary park edged by eco-friendly apartment complexes and sleek shopping malls.

 

Bosque Vertical, "vertical forest" is a neat residence tower in Milan featuring lots of trees.

A 19th century arcade.

 

Later, we deliberately sought out that modernity with a visit to Museo de Nuevocentro after the duomo, conveniently located on the same plaza. I have a recent fascination with futurist art, so I wanted to check out the collections here. It was a good, affordable visit and I thought the collections were well-laid out, and I was happy to see more works by Giacoma Bella as well as later Italian artists. 

 

 

Some examples of the Italian Futurist style that flourished in Milan in the early years of the 20th century.

Finally - the nightlife. After a budget-saving dinner of gyros, we headed out into the Brera district to explore (side note: the Milan metro system was great). With an early morning the next day, we didn't stay out too late, but enjoyed a few glasses of wine at a chic wine bar and then some cocktails and people watching at some outdoor tables. One neat connection Milan has to San Francisco is that Fernet-Branca, the Italian apertif that is popular in San Francisco, is distilled in Milan. Naturally, my last drink of the night was a fernet on ice.

 

Overall, I think we could see the appeal of Milan but it was not a highlight of Italy for us. If we had room in our bags to shop and cash to spend on fine dining and clubbing, we probably would have had more to enjoy and share here, but alas.

Lago d'Iseo

Our first change to the itinerary made while on the trip, Lake Iseo was swapped in for Lake Como after Milan a few weeks back. We made this change for a few reasons: first, the regional Italian train that was going to connect us from Milan to our Swiss train we learned was under renovations for the upcoming Olympics, with many reports of chaos and disorganization. Second, we had seen in Amalfi how a lot of tourists can break a public transit system in a rural area. Third, we were just a bit burned on the heavy tourist crowds prevalent in Italy, and Lake Como was somewhere we expected those same crowds. So, after much brainstorming and Google Map browsing, we decided on an alternative with Lake Iseo and the results were fantastic. 

 

Lake Iseo is the little sister between her two more chic siblings, Lake Como to the west and Lake Garda to the east. We stayed in the very charming town of Rivo di Salto on the west shore in an AirBnB we were lucky to get. The town was perfectly sized for the weekend with just a few restaurants, minimarts, and a gelato shop. We had two full days to explore both Rivo di Salto and its surrounding towns.

 

 

Some scenes in and around Rivo di Soltro

Our first day, we headed to the town of Lovere on the northern shore. The road there was half the attraction, blasted out of the sheer cliffs. In true Italian style, it was simultaneously a walking path, cycling route, car road, and trucking route, with the width of the road not staying consistent for any more than a few dozen yards. Fun stuff to navigate before your first cappuccino. 

 

Lovere itself was pretty lovely. It was clearly a weekend destination for city-dwellers and we saw many visiting families as well as Vespa and motorcycle clubs. After our visit, we went to a little beach club that our AirBnB left coupons for and vegged out on some sun loungers for a few hours, jumping in the lake to cool off. Eventually, the skies darkened with an afternoon thunderstorm and we headed back, but it was a nice few hours while it lasted. 

 

Ahoy.

  

Lovere

Nikita taking a dip in the lake!

Our second day was a Sunday with near perfect weather; the heavy thunderstorm the prior evening had cleared all the haze out of the sky and cooled things down. We went to one of the main attractions of the lake, Monte Isola, a large island in the lake (the largest lake island in southern Europe, in fact). We took off in the ferry, soaking in the beauty of the lake as we bounced from port to port for about an hour before arriving. We grabbed cappuccinos then picked up some rental bikes.  

 

Approaching Mount Isola

The island is perfectly sized for a ride around it, so that's what we took the next few hours to do, circling the island clockwise and stopping for a lovely lunch. We still had the bikes for another hour or so after finishing the loop, so we took them to a swimming area with a sunny lawn and went for a dip. The whole island was teeming with families enjoying the sun, taking swims and walking around. 

 

 

Scenes from the bike ride

It was an astoundingly nice time that really could not have been a better way to spend our last full day in Italy, especially as we ended it with a nice dinner with local fish Lombardian fish dishes and wine, all with a view of the lake. We never got to see Lake Como, but we really felt like we found something special with Lake Iseo and highly recommend it if you happen to be in the area.

 

Out of Italy - Bernina Express 

Our last day in Italy was a Monday, and it felt like one with an early wake-up to get our rental car to Sondrio, two hours away. White-knuckling it through many tunnels and mountain roads, we made it in time to return our car. From there, it was a very packed bus to catch the main affair of the day, the Bernina Express. This is a famous, all-electric train that starts at the very northern edge of Italy and brings you up and into Switzerland, passing glaciers and lakes and mountain passes - you get the idea. 

 

It was a beautiful ride! We enjoyed it, and there were several nice touches for the tourists - free Swiss chocolate among them. The route is an incredible feat of engineering and the viaducts and tunnels were cool to see. We tried to take some pictures to capture the experience, but found that unless we were 100% focused on it the pictures were pretty mediocre with the window glare, so we just let ourselves enjoy the ride.

It took about 4.5 hours to get from Tirano to Chur. By the end of the journey we were pretty saturated with majestic alpine scenery and tired from the long day, but happy to be in Switzerland, our third country on the trip.

A rainbow greeted us in Switzerland.

Swiss Bliss

Chur, pronounced more like "core" than "sure".

 

 

 

We had one full day in Switzerland. We did not have it on our list initially, but when I found out about the Bernina Express, we decided to make it work on our way to Austria. Our base was Chur, the oldest city in Switzerland and the northern terminus for the Bernina Express. 

 

The mountains at the edge of Chur

 

I found a giant sequoia in the town square and was pleased.

Our hostel was a converted Swiss prison, with rooms made out of the former cells. Unique!

 

We decided to make the most of it and bought tickets for a combo adventure on the mountain south of Chur. This ticket took up the mountain on two cable cars, on our own two feet feet for a hike across the mountain, then onto a mountain toboggan track for the descent. With temps in the mid-70s and just a few clouds in the sky, we had perfect weather for all of it. We loved the views we got on the hike and the clangorous herds of cows that were free grazing on the mountainside.

 

 

 

Then, the "mountain toboggan descent". These are a mostly European thing, basically an unpowered roller coaster that sends you flying down a track affixed to a mountainside in your own private rail...sled, which you can control the speed of with a brake lever. Here is a video if you need a visual. It was an exhilarating five minutes, though Nikita slightly misunderstood things and came barrelling down the track after me (I was taking things at a moderate speed) as she thought she was not supposed to use the brake (you are not supposed to use the brake to stop completely), resulting in a chase as I had to go full speed to escape a collision with my daredevil wife, until she eventually started using the brakes after my yelling. Great fun!

 

Toboggan loading zone.

Overall, we enjoyed our time in Chur and Switzerland. Everything is absurdly neat, timely and organized, and it is clear that all levels of government invest a ton in public resources and spaces to give the Swiss a very high standard of living. The landscapes are absolutely beautiful, and it really does seem like a mountain paradise on a summer day.

 

Clear, clean and correct Swiss hiking signage.

However, there is always trouble in paradise, and that trouble in Switzerland is the brutally high prices. Breakfast is the right hook, lunch the left hook, and dinner the upper cut knockout blow. We are used to a high cost of living coming from the Bay Area and consider ourselves mid-budget travelers, but whew! Unless you are specifically seeking out budget restaurants, dinner mains will run you 22-35 CHF, roughly $27 to $40 USD, making it easy to end up spending $100+ for dinner for two. Not too much of a surprise given Switzerland has the highest cost of living in the world, but difficult to stomach over many days for a budget conscious traveler. With the length of our trip, I think a short stay in Switzerland was the right choice.

 

My reaction to paying $20 for two affogatos. 

Etc.

So that's a wrap on Italy! Italy was huge for us, both as somewhere we were looking forward to and as a significant portion of our trip. I think with travel the actual experience of a place is only a small part of the total experience you have of it. Like many things, travel experiences get better with age as you reflect on your time in a place, understand connections and contrasts to home and other places, and apply new knowledge and skills gained while abroad. Italy is still in that "freshly bottled" stage right now - we are not yet missing the endless pizza and pasta - but we can say for sure that our Italian experiences were great on the first go. 

 

In planning the four and a half weeks, I think we did a pretty good job, especially with the Lake Iseo adjustment. Rome would probably have been a bit long at seven days if we were not seeing friends, and I wish we had been able to spend a bit of time a bit closer to the Tuscan coast. Maybe in a few years we will be able to explore more, especially Sicily and Calabria.

 

Thinking about another trip is a little silly when we still have so much ahead of us though. As I wrote at the top, we are now in our "mountain chapter" through Austria, and many more chapters after that.  It feels odd to remember where we were a week ago as it felt a month ago, but we both can't believe how fast the trip is going at the same time. One of those funny things. 

 

Until next time!