We saw Italy!
We took the advice of one of the girls we had met in our hostel and went to Morecote the next day. We got lost on the way while we were looking for our bus stop and ended up in a small neighborhood in Paradiso for an hour. We walked through narrow alleys between pastel colored houses. It seemed like a nice place to live.
I liked the little detailing on the houses.
Once again, we saw a church. There are a lot of churches in Switzerland, although I suppose there are a lot in the US as well.
When we finally did reach Morecote, we saw that the area we had been told to see was at the top of a tall hill above the lake. We hiked up steep cobblestoned staircases to a really amazing church with a large graveyard attached. It even had mausoleums.
The whole area was very beautiful.
On the way up, we passed alcoves with little statues inside.
We also found a lot of paintings inset in the walls.
Some looked really old and worn.
Others looked like they had been touched up more recently.
The church was relatively simple on the outside, but it was very ostentatious on the inside. It was definitely a Catholic church. Below are just a few pictures of the inside, to give you an idea of what it was like.
Here are some of the pews.
Here is the alter.
The ceiling above the organ.
A place to light candles.
There isn’t a lot of space on the hillside, so it seems like building a flat spot for the grave would be costly.
As we wandered around, we found another small church that was a bit simple but still very pretty.
It had a mural on the ceiling.
There was this flower pattern on the floor, which I realized was mirrored by the manhole covers outside.
Voila! The flower on the manhole cover.
Catherine and I have never been to Italy, but it looked very Italian to us. The major colors were the coral and grey of the stones and paintings, the blue-teal of the lake, and the green of the hills.
There were lots of green trees.
We could even look across the lake and see Italy.
We passed a clock tower on our way down.
Then we wandered through some more narrow cobblestoned streets to reach the bus stop.
We took a bus to Paradiso and then walked along the waterfront back to Lugano and bought gelato.
Along the water front, we passed a few interesting things.
A rhino statue.
We were very surprised to see a bust of “Georgio Washington.”
Here is a close up. We looked it up later and found out that apparently, “a nineteenth-century Swiss entrepeneuer who made a fortune in the US donated the statue as a ‘mark of honor towards the land of opportunity across the ocean.’”
A miniature Jet d’Eau, like the larger and more famous one in Geneva.
After passing through a corridor of trees, we wandered through a museum exhibit with a theme of window. It was really interesting. My favorite piece was a pair of glasses where the lenses had been made into tiny windows.
We also played around on a playground in a park near the lake.
It had a lot of beautiful flowers. It was also in this park that we used possibly the coolest public toilet I’ve ever seen. It had a huge bowl, maybe 2-3 times the size of a normal toilet bowl. There was a toilet seat folded up against the wall, and you pulled it down, sat on it to do your business, and then when you stood up, the seat automatically folded up again and caused the toilet to flush.
Tell you more next time!
