Claude Lorrain "The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet", 1643  oil on canvas, 105.1 x 152..1 cm.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Photo Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Every region in Italy exists as a distinct cultural entity...The various artistic styles do not operate on one another within a closed system but grow out of different soils, with each major region of the Italian peninsula having a predominant temperament, a set of proclivities; in short, an ethos, which is clearly different from that of every other."---Robert Engass, review of Ellis K. Waterhouse Italian Baroque Painting, Phaidon Press, 1962, in The Art Bulletin, September 1963.​

Et In Arcadia 

The Unknown Splendor of the Borromeo Collection

The reason why Northern Italy's treasures remain mostly unknown to the jet-set blogeuses of Conde-Nastified Italy is two-fold: one, because access to the most sparkly of these jewels usually involves scaling an inconvenient Sacra Monte, the 'sacra' part being as taxing to their intellectual sensibilities as the via dolorosa climb up the 'monte' is to their physical stamina.  The second aspect has to do with the difficulty in choosing between Curiously Strange Islands on alpine lakes as the object of one's treasure hunt.  Our focus is on the latter.  We are speaking of the contest between the Isola St. Julio on Lago d' Orta and the Isola Bella of the Borromeo islands on Lago Maggiore, two breathtaking proofs that exploring Italia settentrionalle is a far more stimulating adventure than those jaunts further south that begin with the overrated Portofino and end in the Italian Hamptons also known as Ischia and Capri.  The 'strange' quality of these phantomy northern islands has not only to do with the fortress-like embrace of the gloomy, haughty Alps [in contrast to the cheerful, roly-poly Apennines that form the long green spine of the Italian peninsula​] but with their magnificent compactness: monasteries, palaces, cathedrals, castles and gardens seemingly piled on top of each other on small lily pads of peace scouted out by monks ages ago. The first impression of Isola S. Giulio--especially when viewed from Orta's beautiful and melancholy Sacra Monte--or of the Isola Bella as seen from the rose-laden feminine curves of Stresa's broaden garden boardwalk--is that of an optical illusion.  These islands simply seem, at first glance, like movie sets, vividly unreal.
             Lago Maggiore, with its aristocratic villas, oceans of camellia bushes and its cascades of oleander that stream like the countless waterfalls in the forest paths of the lake, is adored with a collar of pearls whose luster may have faded since the Belle Époque yet still illuminate the entire coastline of the lake with well-bred charm and reserve: these are Stresa and Pallanv, Cannero, Cannobio, Luino and Laveno, among others, not to mention Ascona and Locarno on the northern, Swiss border.  Clean, cool Cannero is our vacation, our local Liguria, with its lemons and oranges in the height of winter, its short, discreet boardwalk along the lake of of elegant boutique hotels; the Borromeo castle, first restored by Count Vitaliano Borromeo, recently restored, perched on another lone island a ferry-boat ride away.   But Cannero, though favored by the Swiss and the French, avoids, like nearly all Italian towns, wealthy or rustic, anything overly 'sweet' or resort-like and catered-to, because its winding backroads with 16th century houses squeezed next to each other on absurdly narrow roads is, as ever, just the right mix of Italian chaos, even if of a more manageable northern variety, to keep things fresh, one might say.  The alps themselves, no background scenery are they, refuse to be ignored--just as Aristotle's definition of the human was the lonely biped who looked up, looked around and wondered, they alps demand your consideration, your contemplation as well besides all this consideration of flowery island beauty; for, here above is the five-thousand meter Monte Rosa whose pure pink sunrise, should you every catch it, is what Homer must have had in mind in the opening lines of his second opus; there, is the Simplon Pass with its legends of Napoleon, John Singer Sargent and the Orient Express.  "I really think that Maggiore is more beautiful than Como", wrote Anne Hollingsworth Wharton in The Lotus in May 1914. "For I have heretofore contended that Lake Como at Bellagio is the most beautiful place on the face of this earth". 
     I could solve many of the world's problems on a long walk around Isola Madre, my favorite of the Isole Borromeo, those 'fairy islets on a silver lake'.  You know that a place fulfills your sense of life when you find yourself in conversation with the dead--that is, an unfinished conversation with a long, lost parent you came to know only years after their passing; the distinguished person you never met, but whom you admired from afar because they struck you as a twin soul, yes--at last a twin soul. These are the conversations of inscrutable Isola Madre, whose pathways converge as a stone ring around a luxuriant garden and a fatigued old villa tucked behind the island's immense, dense froth of green.  In traveling I tend to seek out destiny more than I do escape--that is, I want to meet up with myself in a place as if I had always belonged to that place--and Isola Madre, where one arrives by grand entrance on a slow boat from Isola Bella, is the place of book ideas, their great first lines, and the moving images of a happy time that might have taken place had there been an Isola Madre in one's life at the time....[for rest of essay please see the print edition]  

Breathtaking Isola Bella, Lago Maggiore