Lugano

Lugano is on the wrong side of the Alps, and that is the entire point. Cross the Gotthard and the language becomes Italian, the architecture becomes Lombard, the roofs go flat, palms and camellias appear, and the temperature rises several degrees.

It is the largest town in Ticino, the Italian-speaking canton, and the third financial centre of Switzerland after Zurich and Geneva — which is why a town of 65,000 has the shops it does.

Milan is under an hour away. Switzerland is behind the mountains. It does not feel like the same country as Zurich, because in most respects it is not.

The town

The centre is small and made for walking: arcaded streets, a couple of piazzas where the town sits outside in the evening, and Piazza della Riforma with the neoclassical town hall on one side.

Santa Maria degli Angioli, by the lake, is a plain little sixteenth-century church containing a very large fresco of the Crucifixion by Bernardino Luini, a pupil of Leonardo. It fills the whole wall and it is the best thing in Lugano.

LAC — Lugano Arte e Cultura — is the modern cultural centre on the waterfront, with the art museum and a concert hall.

The lakefront promenade runs several kilometres under plane trees and magnolias, past the Parco Ciani and out along the water. This is what people come for.

The two mountains

Monte Brè, 933 m, east of the town, is reached by funicular and claims to be the sunniest mountain in Switzerland. There is a small village at the top with an artists’ trail through it.

San Salvatore, 912 m, on the other side, is the pointed one you see from everywhere, also by funicular, with a chapel on the summit and the better view — the whole lake, the bay, and the Alps closing the north.

Both are half a morning. San Salvatore if you only do one.

Around the lake

Gandria is the village worth the boat: a cluster of houses stacked on the cliff at the water’s edge, no road through it, reached in twenty minutes from Lugano. The path back along the shore takes about an hour.

Morcote, at the southern tip of the peninsula, is arcaded and steep, with a long stair up to a church above the roofs. It regularly wins the prize for the prettiest village in Switzerland.

Monte San Giorgio, across the water, is a UNESCO World Heritage site — not for scenery but for fossils: the mountain is the best record anywhere of marine life in the Middle Triassic, and the museum at Meride shows what came out of it.

Boats run to all of these from the Lugano pier and are covered by rail passes.

Getting there

• By train — Zurich to Lugano is about two hours through the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the longest railway tunnel in the world at 57 km. You go in near Altdorf and come out in a different climate, which is a strange experience the first time.
• The scenic alternative — the old Gotthard line over the mountain, with its spiral tunnels, is slower and far better looking; the Gotthard Panorama Express runs it from Lucerne.
• By air — Milan Malpensa is about an hour and a half by coach, and often cheaper to fly into than Zurich.

What to eat

Ticinese food is northern Italian with a Swiss accent: risotto, polenta, luganighe sausage, and the lake fish. Eat in a grotto — a rustic country restaurant, originally a cool cellar cut into the rock, with granite tables under the trees and wine served in a boccalino, a small ceramic jug.

The local wine is Merlot, which Ticino planted after phylloxera and now does properly, including a white Merlot that exists almost nowhere else.

When to go

April to October. Spring is the best of it — camellias in March, everything green, and the summer crowds from over the Alps not yet arrived. July and August are hot and humid, and the Swiss come south in numbers.

Winter is mild but quiet, and a good share of the boats and funiculars run reduced timetables.