It has the typical layout of a lakefront town with a spacious promenade following the shore line, small port for private boats and yachts, piazza with many narrow cobbled streets and alleyways leading off it, statues and churches.
I took way too many pictures and could have taken even more, practically one every step of the way! These are all from the day of our arrival, Monday afternoon:
Now off to explore the streets leading away from the shore:
Then we found an enchanted palace where I am sure Sleeping Beauty lay behind one of those shutters, maybe in the room with the tiny balcony:
Back to the lake front and along a few more streets before it was time to find a place for dinner and eventually go back to the hotel:
Just beautiful :) glad you had such a lovely trip
ReplyDeleteThank you, Fi, so are we :-)
DeleteI would never have wanted to leave.
ReplyDeleteWe could have easily spent another week (or three) there, too!
DeleteEnchanting, that is the perfect word!
ReplyDeleteWere there any people there? :-)
It really was as quiet as my pictures make it look, Kay! We managed to catch a week "in between" - the high tourist season of summer has not yet begun, and the 1st-of-May crowd was already gone.
DeleteI was also struck by how quiet and empty it looked. I believe that depopulation is a problem in many rural areas of Italy. But what a beautiful place!
ReplyDeleteWhile I am fascinated by empty/abandoned places, it also saddens me to see a once prosperous area being all converted into holiday homes or let go to ruin because people can not afford to live "normal" lives there anymore.
DeleteFor us, that first walk around on Monday afternoon was just very relaxing after the roughly 5 hours of driving, most of it in bad weather.
Jenny's comment made a point that had been my foremost thought too. I can think of places, too, where the indigenous population has gone elsewhere to find work and a new life and a combination of holiday homes and retired incomers have repopulated the area and completely altered the demographic.
ReplyDeleteYes, it happens in many places. I know of an entire Greek village, completely abandoned by its original inhabitants, that was bought up by a wealthy Englishman and converted into his very own holiday village.
DeletePS One of the advantages that your post layout has over, for example, mine is that you can put a lot more photos on and one can open them separately to scroll through them. I do enjoy doing that.
ReplyDeleteYou can easily do that with your blog, Graham. It's all in the settings (as if you wouldn't have guessed).
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