The Best of Northern Italy
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03 542931 Ch01.qxd 2/10/04 9:20 AM Page 4 1 The Best of Northern Italy Northern Italy’s riches are vast, varied, and yours to discover, from art-packed museums and mosaicked cathedrals to Roman ruins and hill towns amid vine- yards that produce some of Europe’s best wines. You can dine at refined restau- rants that casually flaunt their Michelin star ratings, or chow down with the town priest and police chief at osterie (small local eateries) that have spent gen- erations perfecting traditional recipes. You can spend the night in a sumptuous Renaissance villa on Lake Como in the Alpine foothills where Napoléon once stayed (the Villa d’Este), or in a converted 17th-century Venetian palazzo where the room opens directly onto the Grand Canal but costs a mere $109 (the Hotel Galleria). Here’s a short list of the best of what northern Italy has to offer. 1 The Best Travel Experiences • Gondola Ride in Venice: Yes, it’s of Burano is a colorful fishing vil- hokey. Yes, it’s way overpriced. lage with an ancient lace-making But when it comes down to it, tradition and houses in a variety there’s nothing quite so romantic of super-saturated hues. Nearby, after a long Venetian dinner as a lonely Torcello may have been one ride on one of these long black of the first lagoon islands settled, skiffs, settling back into the plush but it’s long been almost aban- seats with that special someone doned, home to a straggly vine- and a bottle of wine and sliding yard, reed-banked canals, the fine through the waters of Venice’s Cipriani restaurant, and a stunning back canals guided by the expert Byzantine cathedral swathed in oar of a gondolier. See p. 78. mosaics (see “The Best Churches,” • A Day Among the Islands of the below). Time it right and you’ll be Venetian Lagoon: Venice’s ferry riding the last ferry back from Tor- system extends outside the city cello into Venice proper as the sun proper to a series of other inhabited sets and lights up the lagoon islands in the lagoon. First stop, waters. See p. 151. Murano, a village where the famed • Cruising the Brenta Canal: The local glassblowing industry began lazy Brenta Canal, lacing its way and where its largest factories and into the Veneto from Venice’s best artisans still reside. Not only lagoon, has long been the Hamp- can you tour a glass factory (com- tons of Venice, where the city’s plete with hard sell in the display nobility and merchant princes have room at the end), but you’ll dis- kept summer villas. From the mas- cover a pair of lovely churches, one sive, palatial Villa Pisani, with its hung with paintings by Giovanni elaborate gardens, to the Villa Fos- Bellini, Veronese, and Tintoretto, cari, designed by Palladio himself, the other a Byzantine-Romanesque most of these villas span the 16th masterpiece of decoration. The isle to 19th centuries and are open to 03 542931 Ch01.qxd 2/10/04 9:20 AM Page 5 THE BEST MUSEUMS 5 visitors. In the past few years, a few dangles from a trio of stout cables 1 have even been opened as elegant some 2.4km (1 ⁄2 miles) above the hotels. There are two ways to tour deep fissures of the Vallée Blanche the Brenta: on a leisurely full-day glacier. It takes half an hour to cross cruise between Padua and Venice, to Aiguille du Midi on French stopping to tour several villas along soil—the longest cable car ride in the way with an optional fish the world not supported by pylons. lunch; or by driving yourself along From here, you can take a jaunt the banks, which allows you to pop down into France’s charming Cha- into the villas you are most inter- monix if you’d like, or turn around ested in—plus you can pull over at to head back into Italian territory, any grassy embankment for a pic- perhaps stopping at the Alpine Gar- nic lunch on the canal. See p. 168. den two-thirds of the way back to • Driving the Great Dolomite Courmayeur to sun yourself and Road: From the Adige Valley out- admire the wildflowers. See p. 365. side Bozen (Bolzano) across to the • Hiking the Cinque Terre: At the ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo southern end of the Italian Riviera runs 110km (68 miles) of twisting, lies a string of former pirate coves winding, switchbacked highway called the Cinque Terre. These five called the Great Dolomite Road, fishing villages are linked by a local which wends its way around some train line; a meandering trail that of the most dramatic mountain clambers over headlands, plunges scenery in Italy. The Dolomiti are amid olive groves and vineyards, craggier and sheerer than the Alps, and skirts cliff edges above the glit- and as this road crawls around the tering Ligurian Sea and hidden peaks and climbs over the passes, scraps of beach; and an excellent one breathtaking panorama after communal white wine. Though another opens before you, undulat- tourism is discovering this magical ing to the distant Po plains to the corner of Italy, there are as yet no south and to the mighty Swiss Alps big resort hotels or overdevelop- to the north. See p. 232. ment; just trattorie on the tiny har- • Riding the Cable Cars over Mont bors and houses and apartments Blanc: There are not many more converted into small family hotels dramatic trips in Europe than this and short-term rental units. It takes one, where a series of cable cars and a full, long day to hike from one gondolas rise from Courmayeur in end to the other, or you can simply the Valle d’Aosta to the 3,300m walk the stretches you prefer (con- (11,000-foot) Punta Helbronner veniently, the trails get progressively from which the icy vistas spread easier from north to south) and use over Mont Blanc’s flank in one the cheap train to connect to the direction and across to Monte other towns. Pause as you like in Cervina (the Matterhorn) in the the osterie and bars of each town to other. It is here that the true thrill sample the dry Cinque Terre white ride begins as you clamber into a wine and refresh yourself for the four-seat enclosed gondola that next stretch. See p. 410. 2 The Best Museums • Galleria dell’Accademia (Venice): 1750 and gorgeously installed in The single most important gallery this trio of Renaissance buildings of Venetian painting and one of by Napoléon himself in 1807. Italy’s top museums was founded in (Napoléon swelled the collections 03 542931 Ch01.qxd 2/10/04 9:20 AM Page 6 6 CHAPTER 1 . THE BEST OF NORTHERN ITALY with altarpieces confiscated from • Pinacoteca di Brera (Milan): One churches and monasteries he sup- of Italy’s finest collections of art, pressed.) The works, spanning the from medieval to modern, is 14th through 18th centuries, housed in a 17th-century Milanese include masterpieces by all the palazzo. Venice’s Accademia may local, Northern Italian greats—the have a richer collection of Venetian Bellini clan, Paolo Veneziano, art, but the Brera has a broader col- Carpaccio, Giorgione, Mantegna, lection of masterpieces from across Piero della Francesca, Lorenzo northern and central Italy. As with Lotto, Palma il Vecchio, Paolo the Accademia, the Brera started as Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto, a warehouse for artworks Napoléon Tiepolo, and Canaletto. See p. 128. looted from churches, monasteries, • Collezione Peggy Guggenheim and private collections. There are (Venice): The Guggenheim family masterpieces from Mantegna, was one of the 20th century’s Raphael, Piero della Francesca, the greatest art patrons. Peggy not Bellinis, Signorelli, Titian, Tin- only amassed a stunning collec- toretto, Reni, Caravaggio, Tiepolo, tion of modern art, she even mar- and Canaletto, and great works ried Max Ernst. Her half-finished by 20th-century geniuses such as 18th-century palazzo on the Grand Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Canal is now installed with her col- Giorgio Morandi, and Giorgio de lections, works by Picasso, Pollock Chirico. They even throw in some (an artist Peggy “discovered”), works by Rembrandt, Goya, and Magritte, Dalí, Miró, Brancusi, Reynolds. See p. 265. Kandinsky, and Marini. See p. 128. • Museo Egizio & Galleria • Museo Archeologico dell’Alto Sabauda (Turin): The world’s first Adige (Bozen): Bozen’s major sight real museum of Egyptian artifacts is a high-tech, modern museum remains one of the most important crafted around one of the most outside Cairo and London’s British important archaeological finds of Museum. The history between Italy the past 50 years. When hikers first and Egypt dates back to Julius Cae- discovered the body of Ötzi high in sar and Cleopatra, though this col- the Alps at the Austrian border, lection of 30,000 pieces was largely everyone thought it was a moun- amassed by the Piedmont Savoy taineer who succumbed to the kings. The exhibits range from a elements. It turned out to be a papyrus Book of the Dead to a full 5,300-year-old hunter whose body, 15th-century B.C. temple to fasci- clothing, and tools had been pre- nating objects from everyday life. served intact by the ice in which he But Egypt isn’t all; upstairs the Gal- was frozen. The Ice Man has done leria Sabauda displays the Savoy’s more to give us glimpses into daily amazing collection of Flemish and life in the Stone Age than any other Dutch paintings by Van Dyck, Van find, and the museum does a great Eyck, Rembrandt, Hans Memling, job of relaying all that scientists are and Van der Weyden.