View of Lake Lugano Robert Kiener 1846-1945"Although I have passed my time this week as I have intended and hoped, yet I shall be glad to leave on Sunday. Ten, or rather eleven days of complete solitude are enough. Besides, I am anxious about that accumulating pile of work at home.
Today there is some sort of festa and the shops are all shut. I went to church next door (Saint' Angioli) at 9.45. Mass was in progress. I stayed till the end then studied very closely the Bernardo Luini 'Passion', a splendid thing, in excellent preservation.
Santa Maria degli Angeli, Passion and Crucifixion fresco, Bernardo Luini 1529
(from: web gallery of art)
(from: web gallery of art)
Visited the Museum in the Villa Cacci, a good late classical building of c. 1840, but the internal decoration poor: stucco and painted ceilings of feeble quality. Museum itself awful, neglected and absolutely lifeless, as I should hate any of mine to be. After luncheon took the steamer to Morcote. Extremely hot and muggy, there being high clouds behind which the sun is sheltering. Climbed the steep eighteenth century stairs to the S. Sassa church, with splendid square Romanesque campanile, which I photographed."
Santa Maria del Sasso, Morcote (wikimedia commons)
During this trip, filled with sightseeing, Lees-Milne encountered all the common mishaps of foreign travel: an upset tummy, fears of sunstroke, delays with money not arriving when expected, dirty trains and expensive hotel bills. "It is terribly hot in Berne and we wander about disconsolately. Cannot even afford to buy postcards." And arriving in Lugano, "The Grand Palace Hotel stiflingly hot".
He was comforted by his holiday reading: Shakespeare's Sonnets -- "Poetry and architecture are my two great loves" -- and The Last Chronicle of Barset. On the homeward journey he stopped for lunch and sightseeing in Lucerne, where he admired the famous bridge and the "Marvellous .. exhibition of paintings and tapestries from the Ambrosiana, Milan. Bought a catalogue to give to Ben Nicolson", but then he had to rush for the Basle train without time to buy food.
He had one book left to sustain him on the long journey home between Basle and the Dunkirk-Calais crossing: "two days and one night without a sleeper and without food on the [filthiest, indescribable] French train, in this torrid heat.…I have never been dirtier….I arrived home tired out at 10 p.m. Read Jane Eyre on the journey. "
Caves of Ice James Lees-Milne 1946
One English visitor to Lugano the previous summer took a more relaxed view:
At Lake Lugano Winston Churchill, 1945
© The Churchill Heritage Ltd
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