Europe by Train: Over the Alps to Zurich

We’d gone to Italy for the soul and were now heading to Zurich for friendship—to visit one of my very oldest friends, married to a Swiss. After leaving Bologna, we connected through Milano, the station just as you would expect for this fashionable city, grand and elegant.

I haven’t mentioned yet the Man in Seat Sixty-One, www.seat61.com. This website has proved invaluable over several train (and ferry) trips, and I can’t recommend it enough. Based on his advice, I buy the tickets online and have never had a problem…only great adventures.

Milan is near the border and soon we crossed into Switzerland…and began climbing, our glued to the window. This is picture-postcard land, little need for words.

We continued our scenery-watching in the dining car, complete with white tablecloths and even bigger windows. Perfect for sipping espresso and watching the mountain villages and lakes pass by.

My friend met us at the Zurich railway station, spacious and orderly, and drove us to her home overlooking the lake. Carol’s village was a steep walk uphill so later we piled back in the car to visit it and her office, from which she publishes the monthly Historic Motor Racing News. She is quite a woman, but that is another story (perhaps for one of my books)! 

The next day we visited the Old Town and had a fabulous lunch at LaZoupa, where her husband, the company’s founder, arranged a delicious tasting menu out of their international range of offerings. He met us there, arriving by electric bicycle.

Like Bologna, Old Town is pedestrian only, divided by the Limmat River, which flows into Lake Zurich. This side is hilly and vibrant, known for being “edgier” than the left bank with its designer boutiques. Crossing the bridge, we were enthralled with the crisscrossing ferries and boats, the peaky Swiss spires.

I wished we’d had time to visit the illustrious old Opera House. 

I wished we’d had time for more explorations of the city and the magnificent countryside, but I was focused on my friend, catching up and getting to know her husband better. They are a great couple and we parted sadly, cherishing a connection that has taken us through many lives—and that’s only in this one.

Carol put us on the local train that would take us to the central station, promising that it would arrive exactly on time. It did.

Downtown, we boarded the TGV, the Train à Grande Vitesse. By an anomaly of online booking, our first class tickets on the Zurich-Paris line, Lyria, cost little more than second class—lunch and wine included! We were off for Paris and the Van Gogh Trail.

A bientôt. http://dianarchambers.blogspot.com/2016_06_01_archive.html

Europe by Train: Bologna: Through the Arcades

Leaving Arezzo’s cozy train station, we passed through lush Tuscan hill country,       descending to Bologna, an artistic and culture center of North Italy, home of the world’s oldest university, founded 1088. 

Most of Old Town is a pedestrian zone and our taxi took a circuitous route to our Art Hotel Orologia, next to the sprawling main square—Piazza Maggiore, surrounded by the great Basilica of San Petronio, elegant municipal buildings, cafés and shops set amid arched colonnades.    

   

Intrigued for years by Bologna’s famed arcades, my Fellow Traveler was for once more eager than me to explore.

We passed through endless arcaded passages on our way to find the Piazza Santo Stefano and its Sette Chiese (Seven Churches) built over the centuries. 

On his own tour of the cafés of Europe, my husband sampled the local brew while I wandered through the church complex.

On the way back, we lost ourselves in narrow centuries-old cobbled lanes.

Returning to the Piazza Maggiore, I entered the basilica and discovered underfoot astrological mosaics dating back 1000 years.

Next I poked my head inside the old Bourse and discovered a large, airy space, three stories rising above a bustling book-filled atrium…

Kind of like a library…

No wait! It is a library—the Biblioteca Salaborsa—the library of our dreams, filled with books, of course. But also a very cool place to hang-out, with wifi, media rooms, café, areas for young children and teenagers, college kids studying in the second- and third-floor stacks. The glass floor looks down on Roman-era ruins, perhaps the Forum.

And it offers a Jane Austin book club!

Next door is the Palazzo d’Accursio, a palace that later became the city’s administrative center, now a museum where municipal meetings still occur. A broad staircase rises from the ground floor, its deep steps designed for ascent by horseman and carriages. 

As befitting a former palace, the ornate galleries are filled with friezes, sculptures, paintings. The mantel is engraved with the initials of the ancient Roman Republic, SPQR. When buried in my writing, I often feel like the scribe in the bottom image, facing away from the view. 

Sorely disappointed that we had to leave the next morning, we enjoyed a most elegant hotel buffet.

Bologna is a very rich city, worthy of an extended visit. Next time! Now we were off to a more personal visit, with one of my very oldest friends.

Next stop: Zurich. http://dianarchambers.blogspot.com/2016/06/europe-by-train-over-alps-to-zurich_18.html