The Lake That Didn’t Try Too Hard

(Reflections on a trip to Italy)

“Citronella,” he said as he set a negroni down in front of me. His head was shaved. He wore gloves and lived on the island of Murano. He made the best negronis in the world and I swore I would never put another one past my lips ever again unless I was in semi-darkness in a wood-panelled lounge beside the Grand Canal and he made it for me. He was half my age and as only a mother would, I wondered how he got home when he finished his shift and put the Campari back on the shelf in the early hours of the morning.

I was in the hotel bar in my pyjamas. I was feeling like the contents of my case, wrinkled and dirty. I was in the “city of canals” but I was thinking fondly of all the things I liked about my own city. “This is our Grand Canal,” I would say a few days later as we drove home over a bridge crossing the Lagan on a dull July Sunday afternoon. “I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long,” said Tom Waits¹. He’d never seen the morning until he stayed up all night, never seen the east coast until he moved to the west, never heard the melody until he needed a song. It was all relative. I’d never known air conditioning until I stepped out of forty-degree heat, I’d never known beer until I was gasping with thirst. A supermarket was like an oasis in the desert, a gin and tonic in a can had tasted like nectar from the Gods. It was day twelve of our holiday trip and I had a severe bout of travel fatigue. I was tired of croissants and parma ham, of key cards and thirty different switches beside my bed, none of which turned off all the lights, of windows that didn’t open. I’d eaten tiramisu for breakfast to add a bit of variety to my diet. I craved porridge and a breeze. I was mainly tired of mosquitos. I still had the scars from Palma a month earlier when I’d spent a whole week draining and re-draining a collection of blisters. Despite slathering myself in three different types of repellent and pacing up and down for twenty minutes until I dried, then rubbing oil fastidiously on to my wrists and feet, they had found my shoulder blade, a toe, both ankles. His granny had burned a citronella candle to keep them away. Basically, my scent reminded him of old women and his childhood. “Do you think citronella works?” I asked. “No,” he replied. There was a cartoon in The New Yorker, ‘Meet My Mosquito Bites’. I had all of them – Hilda, tiny and powerful, itch you to death and beyond, Fred, sits there like a huge glowering hulk, Harry and Larry, seconds apart, Doris, the last bite of summer, won’t disappear until October 3^rd.

On day fourteen as I sipped my final negroni, I would eventually delete the empty folder. “Italy 23 is complete,” I said as I swiped the last restaurant booking into the trash. “Do you know mum makes a separate folder for all the holiday emails?” said my eldest daughter. For two weeks, I had watched its contents gradually reduce, seen future plans become the present and then the past. I wondered had it been worth it, all those plans. For large chunks of May into June, I’d prepared an itinerary for five other people. I’d booked their transport, their gastronomy, their sleeping arrangements. I’d organised airport transfers, sunset cruises, galleries, churches, monasteries, the best sandwiches in Milan, the must-do giandiuotto gelato in the oldest ice cream parlour in Venice. I only wanted them to be grateful, to appreciate my effort. But they were decidedly ambivalent. “I don’t want to do any aimless walking,” said daughter number two. “Do we have reserved seats?” daughter number three asked as she boarded each train, “I don’t want to sit beside strangers”. They’d give the Uffizi a miss. The Duomos were nice to photograph but they didn’t want to go inside. “What’s your highlight been?” I said to my husband. I wasn’t sure what I would do if he didn’t have one or if he didn’t say “spending time with you”. He’d been quite impressed with The Last Supper. I’d wondered why no-one was looking at The Crucifixion on the opposite wall and whether we only see what we are told to see which is never the full picture. He’d enjoyed the food tour in Florence. When we’d discovered that we weren’t part of the large group gathering in the square and that it was just us and one other couple, I’d looked at him in horror. What if they were American? In the end, alongside the statue of David and a courgette and aubergine burger on Burano, meeting Tim and Ana from San Francisco was a joy – as we’d shared prosecco and plates of wild boar and cheese and gnocchetti, we’d shared stories too, talked about the children who weren’t with us. We’d exchanged contact details, kept in touch on WhatsApp, met them again on the secret ghetto tour in Venice. “You need to view it from a distance,” said the strange man with the googly eyes who was passionate about art history. He’d focused on David’s anatomy, his muscles, the size of his feet but had failed to mention the bits that were staring us in the face. When I’d posted a photo on Instagram, I’d captured him discretely from behind. “Why David?” I asked. I was interested in the decision-making process of twenty-six-year-old Michelangelo. “He was commissioned,” said the strange man with the googly eyes. It was all relative.

At first, I’d been even more ambitious. We’d do the Grand Tour. We’d follow the 18^th century rite-of-passage of aristocratic young men. We would start in London, cross the Channel, sojourn in Paris, endure a difficult crossing over the Alps which would mainly involve lifting our suitcases on and off the Bernina Express, we’d explore the great Italian Renaissance cities, we’d rest beside a great Italian lake, do a side trip to Pisa. We’d finish in the locus of decadent Italianate allure and hope it didn’t smell like everyone said it would.  But life is a compromise and we’d compromised on Swissair to Zurich. On day two, as I’d gasped at snow-capped mountains in the distance through huge panoramic windows which didn’t open and they’d asked how long until they got off, I reminded them there had been limited accommodation options in a small town, half an hour from the Italian border. “Don’t be expecting too much,” I said. “It looks quite old-fashioned”. I’d never heard of Lago di Poschiavo. Having researched Garda and Como, I’d plumped for Maggiore. That I believed would be the lake I’d never forget. In the end, it will mainly be remembered not for its stunning scenery but as the hotel where we had to beg for toilet roll on a daily basis.

I called it the lake that didn’t try too hard, Lake Poschiavo. I wanted to be like it, not trying too hard either, content not to be Garda or Como or Maggiore. In a place not listed in any guidebook which I had only intended to be a functional stopover, before I got to the best bits, I found my highlight. In a magical setting somewhere between Agatha Christie and the Famous Five, where we explored gardens and I swung in a swing for the first time in a long time and was almost young again, where I ate traditional Swiss cuisine, where there was nothing to do other than read a book, where I discovered Franciacorta, where I had the best night’s sleep in a room with a window that opened wide and a switch that turned off all the lights and the mosquitos left me alone, I felt at peace.

It was a metaphor for life, a reminder that often when we expect little, we find much, often when we make too many grand plans, we leave no room for the unexpected. And maybe that our travel memories will never be about what we see and do, but only ever about how we feel.  

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