Isola Bella

Lago Maggiore means "Greater Lake."  It's long and skinny and runs roughly northeast-southwest, with the Alps to the north; along its borders are the northern Italian regions of Piedmont and Lombardy and the southern Swiss canton of Ticino.  The town of Baveno (the Total Package's base of operations in early August), is on the lake shore, about an hour from the Milan airport.

From Baveno you can see three little islands: Isola Bella, Isola Pescatori, and Isola Madre.  On Isola Bella is a palace (or palazzo, if you're Italian).  Isola Bella ("Beautiful Island") is on the right.  You can see the palazzo to the left and the gardens beyond. The small buildings were once a fishing village, and now they hold shops and restaurants.

In 1632, a Milanese aristocrat named Borromeo began building the palazzo.  Construction, interrupted at one point when the plague hit Milan, took fifty years. 343 years after that, we hopped on a boat in Baveno and visited the place.  We were in august company: Napoleon and Josephine stayed there once, and Caroline of Brunswick, the Princess of Wales, loved the island so much she tried to buy it. The Borromeos would not sell.

Photography isn't allowed inside the palace, so I recommend looking at Google Images ("Isola Bella Palace").  My favorite rooms were the grottos.  They're on the bottom floor, with arches open to the outside and groin vaults overhead.  The walls and ceilings are completely covered with pebble mosaic. I imagine people went there to cool off.

As soon as we stepped into the gardens, though, I pulled out my camera.

On the pots behind me, you can see a design that resembles a Venn diagram. I saw this motif all over the island, so finally asked my phone, (O, wise one) what it was. The interlocking circles represent the Borromeo, Visconti and Sforza families, who enjoyed great influence in Milan back then. The design symbolizes the families' agreement that they would support one another, intermarry, and thus retain power in the region.

(The name Sforza sounded familiar, and nagged me the rest of the trip. Back home, I rooted among my old National Geographics and found a piece - February 2012 - about "La Bella Principessa," a painting of a lovely, red-headed Milanese girl, Bianca Sforza. She lived a hundred years before work began on the Isola Bella palace, and was child-bride to the commander of the Milanese troops. She died in her early teens, probably from an ectopic pregnancy, but not before Leonardo Da Vinci made her portrait.)

No chasing the peacocks!

Sheez.

The backpack (or, Being Scared and Going Anyway)

Repeatedly, during our years together (17, counting the dating phase), the Total Package has dealt patiently with me being scared.

If I looked like a pie chart, you would see two even halves, one side representing fascination, curiosity and enthusiasm and the other half would be fear.  The Total Package doesn't deal in fear, necessarily.  Instead, he arms himself with data, or learns the necessary skill, so that fear dissolves into respect or due caution. Then he goes out and enjoys a new experience.

Most of my life, curiosity overcame most of my fraidy-cat tendencies, but having babies turned me into a complete ninny.  My husband has been nice about it, and my parents have been a big help.  For example this spring when The Total Package learned he would spend August's first week in Baveno, Italy, on Lago Maggiore, attending meetings...

...my mother said, "You're going, right?  We'll watch the boys."

So August came, my husband flew to Italy, and I prepared to join him in a week.  We decided to leave Baveno on a boat and land in Locarno, Switzerland, then take trains north for a week, eventually flying home from Zurich.  He kept emailing from Baveno ("I can't wait for you to get here!") and sending photos like this:

On my last day home I stopped the mail, cleaned the house top to bottom, emptied the fridge, set timers on a few lamps, and packed the backpack.  The Total Package does not love checking bags, and neither do I.

"I bought this backpack for your dad when we were dating," I told Sharpshooter.

"Did you know you would marry him when you bought it?"

I had to think about that one for a while.  "Not exactly, but I was pretty sure, and I thought he might want to marry me even more if I bought  him this cool backpack."

The backpack has seen many sights. The Total Package takes it snow camping (North Cascades, Crater Lake) and climbing (there are two St. Helens permits dangling from the straps), and I used it for two weeks in China.  So, I packed it tight and strapped it on.

All ready to go.  The boys and I drove to my parents, who fed us a nice dinner.  I ate a lot of dinner, which was delicious, and then became too nauseated to function. This is normal for me when I'm nervous. I went to bed with a bowl, just in case, and woke up to my alarm (3am) feeling fine.

Umpteen zillion hours later I landed in Milan.  A nice lady drove me to Baveno, where the Total Package waited in the hotel parking lot, next to a fountain with beautiful stone women holding pitchers, spewing water.  He took me inside and got me the Best Coffee In the World.

Then we took a boat to Isola Bella (one of those islands in the photograph above) and visited the palace and the beautiful gardens all around it.

Then we hopped to the next island, Isola Pescatori.

Ha!  We did not take the fancy boat in the foreground, but something like the one sailing into the background.  Anyway, on Isola Pescatori we did more important stuff:

We had to keep moving, or eating, because if we sat still I fell asleep, and to avoid jet lag one should stay awake until bedtime in the time zone one finds oneself.  Back at the hotel I fell asleep in a beach chair by the lake, and then again in our room, during a phone call to the boys, because I was lying down at the time. So we walked into town for dinner, ate wonderful handmade tagliatelle with ragu and some sort of chocolate cake, and by then it was really, truly bedtime.

In the next post, I'll share photos of Isola Bella.  (My cousin Natalie urged us to go, since she visited years ago as a landscape architecture student, and I'm so glad we took her advice.)  More to come.

Don't doubt the meatloaf

That is a weird title.

I did cook a meatloaf, day-before-yesterday, on a 90-degree afternoon in a house without AC.  (That sentence contained three prepositional phrases, which is a little much.)  It started with a trip to the library.

The Total Package was on a business trip and the boys didn't want to come to the library with me.  They told me to get them all the Tintin and Garfield comic books I could find.  So, I went to the library and got them several Beverly Cleary books and a few junior historical novels.

For myself, I found Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit, about Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the golden age of journalism.  Also, I found a cookbook:

I started reading this during lunch. The book features several iconic American restaurants, but focuses on the staff meal - the supper chefs provide their cooks and servers before dinner service starts.  Immediately, I found my holy grail meatloaf recipe.

My litmus test for meatloaf is that it contain all beef. I won't mess around shopping for ground pork or veal. All beef.  This one has all beef.  So, I cooked it for supper, despite the heat.

Supper was just a hurdle, though, because the real reason for making meatloaf is meatloaf sandwiches.  My ideal meatloaf sandwich recipe has four ingredients: whole wheat bread, mayo, ketchup and leaf lettuce.

Lunch today:

Click here for the meatloaf recipe.

PS - The boys were disgusted with the Cleary books and historical novels, but Sharpshooter sat down and read them all.