I did not go anywhere today, and it may have been the best decision I made all week.
After the islands, a person needs a day like this. You cannot keep arriving at wonders. The lake seems to understand that, because Maggiore is not really a lake that asks to be conquered. It asks to be sat beside. So this morning I let the ferries leave without me. I heard the first one go, that low churn of water and the bell, and for once I did not reach for my shoes. I stayed on the terrace instead, in a hotel that has been doing this particular kind of morning since before my grandmother was born, and I let the day be exactly as long as it wanted to be.
The terrace runs along the front of the old building above a garden that falls away in clipped green steps to the water, and from the stone balustrade you can see the whole shining gulf: the island resting out in the middle of it like a green ship at anchor, the far shore soft and blue, the mountains standing back the way they do here, keeping their polite distance. I stood at the railing with a coffee growing cold in my hand and did nothing but look, which is a skill I am only now, rather late, beginning to learn. Below me the gardeners were already at work in the box hedges, clipping the maze back into its lines, and the smell of cut green drifted up on the warm air. There was no hurry anywhere. The whole place seemed to be exhaling.
This is what the grand old hotels of Maggiore were built for, and it is worth saying plainly because it is slightly out of fashion to admit it. They were built for people who had nowhere in particular to be and intended to be nowhere in particular with great style. The belle époque understood leisure as an art form rather than a guilty pleasure, and something of that conviction still lingers in the corridors here alongside the smell of beeswax and old flowers. You feel slightly underqualified for it at first, as though everyone else grew up knowing how to waste a morning properly and you are only just catching up. Then, somewhere around the second coffee, you stop performing relaxation and simply relax, and the day opens quietly around you.
By the afternoon the heat had risen off the water and I went down to the pool, which sits on its own terrace at the very edge of the lake, so that the blue of the pool and the blue of the lake beyond seem to run into one another with only a thin pale line of stone between. There are striped chairs along the side, blue and white, the same stripes these hotels have used for a hundred years because someone decided long ago that this was correct, and they were right. I swam, and then I did the thing you are meant to do, which is nothing at all. I lay back, listened to the small sounds of a hot afternoon, the water, a page turning somewhere, a boat far out on the lake, and watched the light move across the mountains without feeling I had to move with it.
I found myself thinking how strange it is that stillness has to be relearned. As a girl I could do nothing for hours, lie in the long grass and watch clouds and call it a full day. Somewhere along the way most of us traded that for the feeling of getting somewhere, and it takes a place like this, with its patient old rooms and its water that has been here for thousands of years and is in no hurry whatsoever, to hand it quietly back to you. My father used to say that you could tell the quality of a place by whether it let you be bored in it. He meant it as high praise. He would have approved of this pool, and of the fact that I stayed there until the sun slipped behind the western ridge and the whole terrace settled into a soft blue shade.
I had a late lunch that became an early aperitivo without any decision being made in between. A plate of lake perch, cool and simple, a glass of something pale and local, the waiter unhurried and kind. There is an art to a waiter who lets you sit, who understands that you are not waiting for the bill but for the evening, and the good ones here have mastered it. I watched the ferries I had ignored all day come back one by one, full of people who had done the islands and the gardens and the monastery on the cliff, sunburnt and happy and a little tired by it all, and I felt no envy, which surprised me. I had seen those things. Today I watched the lake do almost nothing, and it turns out that is worth seeing too.
Towards evening the light did what it always seems to do on Maggiore, the thing no photograph has ever quite managed to keep, and I have stopped trying. The water went from silver to pewter to a deep, quiet blue, and the lights came on one by one along the far shore, and the island out in the gulf became a single dark shape with one warm window glowing in it. Someone lives out there, I thought. Someone puts on a light and makes supper on an island in the middle of the lake, and to them all of this, the terrace and the pool and the grand hotel full of people relearning how to rest, is simply the view from the kitchen. That is the thing about beauty when you live inside it. It becomes weather. It becomes ordinary. Perhaps that is the whole point of coming somewhere like this: to borrow, for a few days, the astonishment that the people who live here had to surrender simply to get on with their lives.
I lit a candle before dinner, out of the old habit, and said the small quiet thank you I always say, directed and specific: for the water, for the long empty afternoon, for the particular mercy of a day with almost nothing in it. Then I went in to dinner in the grand, dim dining room where the silver is heavy and the ceilings are high, and I was, I think, as content as I have been anywhere.
Tomorrow, perhaps, the far shore. Or perhaps not. The lake will decide, the way it has decided everything since I arrived, and by now I have learned to let it.
V.
Part of my complete guide to Lake Maggiore.
