Ticino

The Gotthard Pass, at 2,106 metres, is Ticino's northern gateway, and the old road over it is closed through the winter. On the Ticino side the road drops to Airolo by the Tremola, a cobbled stretch of tight hairpins, and at the summit the Gotthard museum tells the story of the crossing. Below Airolo the river runs south through the Leventina, the long valley the motorway and the railway follow, past the Romanesque church of San Nicolao at Giornico. The Strada Alta, a marked path from village to village high on the valley's flank, walks the Leventina above the traffic, and regional trains still take the old mountain railway through Airolo, looping through spiral tunnels on the way down.

Bellinzona, the cantonal capital, guards the narrow valley through which every road from the Gotthard, the Lukmanier and the San Bernardino passes has to run, and the dukes of Milan fortified it with three castles that together are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Castelgrande, the largest, stands on the rock above the old town, and a lift cut into the rock rises to it from the Piazza del Sole; from it a long wall, the Murata, runs down across the valley floor. Montebello, joined to Castelgrande by the town walls on the hillside to the east, and Sasso Corbaro, the smallest and highest, standing alone in the woods above, are reached on foot or by road. On Saturday mornings a market fills the streets of the old town below them.

Locarno lies at the northern end of Lake Maggiore, and its life gathers in the Piazza Grande, a long square of arcaded houses at the foot of the old town. In August the Locarno Film Festival, one of the oldest international film festivals, turns the square into an open-air cinema for some 8,000 people each night; the Golden Leopard is its top prize, and rooms in Locarno and Ascona are booked far ahead for those days. Above the town, the sanctuary of the Madonna del Sasso stands on a crag at Orselina, reached by funicular or on foot by a path of chapels, and from Orselina a cable car rises to Cardada for the view down the lake.

Ascona, across the Maggia delta from Locarno, is a small old town of narrow lanes behind a lakefront promenade, the Piazza Giuseppe Motta. On the hill above it, Monte Verità drew vegetarians, dancers and writers to a reform colony in the early 20th century, the dance pioneers Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman and the novelist Hermann Hesse among them, and the Casa Anatta, a wooden house of the colony, holds an exhibition on its story. JazzAscona fills the lakefront with concerts in late June. Boats from Ascona and Locarno cross to the Brissago Islands, the larger of which is a botanical garden of subtropical plants, and sail on down the lake into Italy.

The Verzasca valley climbs north from the lake near Tenero, past the dam that holds back the Lago di Vogorno: its 220-metre wall is the one the bungee jumper leaps from at the opening of the James Bond film GoldenEye. Above the reservoir the river runs clear and green over smooth grey rock, and at Lavertezzo it passes under the Ponte dei Salti, a double-arched stone bridge whose pools are a summer swimming place. The water stays cold all summer, and the river rises fast after rain. Buses run up the valley to Sonogno, a village of stone houses at its head, and a path follows the river between the villages.

The Maggia valley runs north-west from Locarno, wider than the Verzasca, and at Ponte Brolla, near its mouth, the river has worn its rock into a narrow gorge of pools. Buses from Locarno run up the valley floor past villages of granite houses to Bignasco, where it divides. Val Bavona climbs north-west between walls of rock, past hamlets of stone houses without mains electricity, to the waterfall at Foroglio. Val Lavizzara climbs north to Mogno, whose small stone church by the architect Mario Botta replaced one swept away by an avalanche.

West of Locarno a narrow-gauge railway runs through the Centovalli, the valley of a hundred side valleys, crossing its gorges on high bridges and passing Intragna on the way to the Italian border at Camedo. It continues through the Valle Vigezzo to Domodossola, where trains run through the Simplon to Brig in Valais, so the line links Lake Maggiore with the Rhône valley.

Lugano, the canton's largest town, curves round a bay of Lake Lugano between two mountains, with the station up the hill behind the old town and a short funicular between them. The old town climbs from the Piazza della Riforma, the main square by the lake, through arcaded lanes such as the Via Nassa to the cathedral of San Lorenzo, whose Renaissance façade looks out over the roofs to the bay. In the church of Santa Maria degli Angioli on the waterfront, Bernardino Luini's great fresco of the Passion covers the wall that divides the nave. Beside it, the LAC arts centre houses MASI, the art museum of Italian-speaking Switzerland.

Funiculars climb the two mountains that frame Lugano's bay: Monte San Salvatore, 912 metres, from Paradiso on the south side, and Monte Brè from Cassarate on the east. A path runs from the summit of San Salvatore along the ridge through Carona and down to Morcote, at the tip of the peninsula; the village climbs from its lakefront arcades by a long stairway to the church of Santa Maria del Sasso. East of the city, Gandria rises in steps straight from the water, at the end of a lakeside path from Castagnola. Boats from the Lugano waterfront call at both villages.

South of Lugano, the Mendrisiotto is the canton's southern tip, a district of vineyards and hill villages around Mendrisio that reaches the Italian border at Chiasso, with Como just beyond. From Capolago on the lake a rack railway climbs Monte Generoso, where the summit building by Mario Botta, the Fiore di pietra, looks out over the lakes and the Lombard plain. Monte San Giorgio, rising over the lake to the west, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for the fossils of marine reptiles and fish from a Triassic sea, shown in the fossil museum at Meride. Merlot covers the slopes around Mendrisio, and on the evenings of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday the town's Holy Week processions pass through its old centre.