The Gotthard, the slow way south

The lovely strange thing about the Gotthard Panorama Express is that it doesn't begin on a train at all. It puts you on an old paddle steamer at Lucerne and sends you the length of the lake to Flüelen before you see a single carriage. We took the late-morning boat, down past the Rütli meadow and the little Tellskapelle on its shore, the whole Wilhelm Tell pantomime laid out along the water, and I stood at the rail with a coffee while Marc told me, with great confidence and no accuracy, which mountain was which.

At Flüelen you change onto the train, and here is the part a certain kind of person comes for. There is a tunnel under the Gotthard now, the long flat one from 2016 that gets you to Ticino in well under an hour without a single thing to look at, and the panorama train pointedly refuses to use it. It climbs the old mountain line instead, the one from 1882, up the Reuss valley on a gradient that needed every trick the engineers of the day could think of.

The line gains its height by looping back inside the mountain, in spiral tunnels that turn the whole train through a circle in the dark, and the proof is a little white church at Wassen. You see it below you, then level with you, then above you: the same church, three times, from three heights, while a carriage of grown adults cranes at the window each time like a school trip.

You come out of the summit tunnel at Airolo and it is, abruptly, the south. The signs have gone over to Italian, the light is harder and whiter, the roofs turn from timber to stone, and inside half an hour there are palm trees that have no business at that altitude and get planted anyway out of pure optimism. The train drops down the Leventina to Bellinzona, and we got off there rather than carrying on to Lugano, because Bellinzona is where the castles are and I had a plan to walk up at least one of them.

Three castles and a cold stone table

There are three, strung up the hillside from when this valley was the lock on the door between north and south and everyone in Europe wanted the key. We walked up to Castelgrande first, the broad low one on its rock in the middle of town, with lifts cut up through the stone if you want them, and we didn't, which I regretted around the second flight, then along the wall toward Montebello higher up. It is not really a climb, twenty minutes of switchback with the rooftops dropping away below, but it was thirty degrees and we had dressed for a lake breeze, so we arrived pink and grumbling and entirely happy. The third, Sasso Corbaro, sits higher again on its own. We looked at it and left it for a cooler day.

Dinner was in a grotto, the Ticinese thing I'd most wanted and most failed to explain to Marc in advance. It is not a cave but a rustic stone tavern, usually tucked up a lane in the trees, with granite tables in the shade and a cellar dug back into the cool of the hillside. We found one above the town and sat at a stone table that stayed cold to the touch even in that heat, and ate the whole canon of it. Polenta cooked slowly until it has nearly given up. Brasato, beef braised in Merlot until a spoon does the work of a knife. A plate of the little formaggini. And the Merlot itself, the local one, served in a glazed ceramic boccalino that hides entirely how much of it you've had. We stayed too long. I had booked the return for the next afternoon with no particular care, and did not regret a minute.

We came back north through the base tunnel a day later, the fast flat dark one, Bellinzona to Arth-Goldau before I'd finished a sandwich. A marvel of a different kind.

— Tobi