August: a heatwave in Lugano

In summer 1946 James Lees-Milne went on holiday to Lugano in Switzerland, travelling across Europe by train via Berne and Interlaken.

 View of Lake Lugano   Robert Kiener  1846-1945

Thursday, 1st August

"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)

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

Horizons...

"I would not like to say that Polchester had a more snobbish spirit than other Cathedral towns, but there is no doubt that, thirty years ago, the lines were drawn very clearly between the 'Cathedral' and the 'Others'....

When Joan arrived, then, in the Deanery dining-room,  there was a fine gathering.  Very unsophisticated they would all have been considered by the present generation.  Lady Rose and Lady Mary, who were both of them nearer forty than thirty, had of course had some experience of London, and had been even to Paris and Rome.  Of the 'Others' at this time, only Betty Callender, who had been born in India, and the Foresters had been farther, in all their lives, than Dryhorizon.   Their lives were bound, and happily bound by the Polchester horizon.   They lived in and for the local excitements, talks, croquet, bicycling (under proper guardianship), Rafiel or Buquay or Clinton in the summer, and the occasional (very, very occasional) performance of amateur theatricals in the Assembly Rooms.

Moreover, they were happy and contented and healthy.  For many of them Jane Eyre was still a forbidden book and a railway train a remarkable adventure."

The Cathedral  Sir Hugh Walpole