Where to stay

Travel Information

Ticino has a milder climate than other Swiss cantons. July is the warmest month, with temperatures averaging 21˚C, reaching highs of 26˚C. The coolest months are December through to February, where temperatures usually remain below 5˚C. Currency is the Swiss franc (£1 = 1.46 CHF). Switzerland is one hour ahead of GMT.

GETTING THERE
Swiss (swiss.com) flies to Lugano (in Ticino, on the Italian border) via Zurich from London Heathrow or London City airports.
Easyjet (easyjet.com) flies to Zurich from London Gatwick and London Luton. Lugano is a two-hour, 40-minute train ride from Zurich.

RESOURCES
Ticino Turismo (ticino.ch) is the official website for travel and tourism in Ticino, and is a good starting point for useful information.
Swiss National Tourist Office (myswitzerland.com) offers details on Swiss regions, including advice on accommodation and travel.

FURTHER READING
Under the Olive Tree: Italian Summer Food by Manuela Darling-Gansser (Hardie Grant Books, £14.99). Manuela, accompanied by photographer Simon Griffiths, celebrates the family life and food of her home town Lugano, Ticino, where her great-grandfather owned a restaurant 120 years ago. She revisits the small grotto restaurants of the southern Swiss valleys, enjoying the salami, mountain cheeses and red wine.

Walking in Ticino by Kev Reynolds (Cicerone Press £9.99). An informative regional walking guide, with a selection of 75 alpine paths to choose from.

Where to eat

Prices are for three courses, excluding wine, unless otherwise stated.

Grotto Redorta Polenta, cold cuts and gooey cheeses are the staples; a vine-draped terrace occupies a lovely spot overlooking the grassy valley floor. From £40. Sonogno, 00 41 91 746 13 34, http://grottoredorta.ch

La Brezza Chef Rolf Krapf cooks classically based cuisine with a sunny Mediterranean influence at Hotel Eden Roc’s most exclusive restaurant. From £60. Ascona, 00 41 91 785 71 71, http://en.edenroc.ch

Osteria Malakoff Worth the 15-minute climb from Bellinzona; pasta and seasonal flavours are a highlight of this family run restaurant. In autumn, try the torta di pane (bread cake), using chestnuts and apples. From £25 (lunch) and £48 (dinner). Ravecchia, 00 41 91 825 49 40

Ristorante Albergo Antica Posta A pretty inner courtyard is the setting for a German-influenced menu, and produce from Terreni alla Maggia farm. Enjoy rich wild boar cutlets served with spaetzle, chestnuts and pickled cabbage. From £45. Ascona, 00 41 91 791 04 26, http://anticaposta.ch

Ristorante La Froda There’s a smell of woodsmoke around this more ambitious grotto. Open since 1928, it serves rich, salty braised venison shoulder cooked over the fire with polenta. Dessert includes pannacotta with tiny wild bilberries – a real treat. Don’t leave town without a close-up of the 20-metre-high waterfall along the path. From £30. Foroglio, 00 41 91 754 11 81, http://lafroda.ch

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

The curvaceous stone bridge over the Verzasca river at Lavertezzo is elegant but deadly. The local tradition is to show your courage by jumping off it into the turquoise waters below. Our guide, Marina, whose son has his leaper’s stripes, tells us that 50 people have died in this deceptively beautiful river.

The valley through which the Verzasca flows towards Lake Maggiore also combines gorgeous looks with tough truths. Beautiful, wooded and steep, it is a place with a history of abandoned villages, hunger and emigration. It’s said you’d be foolish to be one of the 17 people who still live in the small mountainside hamlet of Corippo, for example, where the only way
to stop eggs rolling off downhill is to tie handkerchiefs to the hens’ backsides. Despite this, the Verzasca Valley, with its wholesome activities and lung-gladdening air, is one of the bliss
points of Ticino, Switzerland’s southernmost canton. Like an upturned chunk of Toblerone dangling from the Alps, Ticino is flanked on two sides by Italy; it was once a part of neighbouring Lombardy, and in truffle season Piedmont’s proximity is particularly valued. Italian is the official language and, when we see the long queue for hot polenta at Bellinzona market, we realise that it is the language of gastronomy, too.

As we stand by the bridge in Lavertezzo, walkers pass on their way to start the nearby trails, and chestnuts fall at our feet. It’s autumn, and the crop that for centuries provided the area’s most significant source of starch is plentiful. Chestnuts spread here partly through their inclusion in Roman soldiers’ tuckboxes – and the old patrician custom of planting a new chestnut tree to mark every birth means there is no shortage of ‘trees of bread’ in the valleys. Collecting the nuts is still a leisure activity, and finding uses for them is more like a competitive sport. Chestnuts are celebrated in festivals throughout Ticino in autumn (and appear on every menu) and we can’t wait to try them at one of the best, in the lakeside town of Ascona.

Traditional chestnut pudding was replaced by polenta as the bulk food of choice when the first Ticinese emigrants returned from Italy in the mid-19th century. Nevertheless, the nuts remain hugely popular in multitudinous preparations. In the Maggia Valley, the quiet village of Moghegno still has its grà, a small building where chestnuts are smoked, dried and skinned. Once an essential part of community life, working the grà is today a valued traditional skill learnt by volunteers, who help to keep the fire burning for three weeks at a time.

Finding ways to store and preserve food was always a necessity in the valleys, which long ago gave rise to Ticino’s traditional restaurants, the grottos. Marina points out a friend’s house. Where the granite meets the ground there’s an opening – it’s the way into the grotto, a dry, cool natural cave where, traditionally, perishable foods could be kept all year round. Eventually, rough stone benches were erected in front of the grottos to serve as outdoor dining tables and travellers would stop and ask if they could share the meal.

Having evolved into basic restaurants, grottos are a proud part of Ticinese food culture, and to retain grotto status they must serve dishes that reflect their origins: sausages, cured meats and cheese; simple soups and stews; polenta and the much-loved and thrifty breadcake (leftover bread soaked in eggs, milk and cream and baked with pine nuts, chocolate and whatever fruit is to hand).

From the terrace of the Grotto Redorta in unspoiled Sonogno, the last village before the Verzasca Valley divides, the valley floor stretches in front of us and there are vines overhead and mountains as far as we can see. If you were driven here, blindfolded, you’d still guess you were in Switzerland; the stone cottages of the village, with their steep roofs and balconies, give it away. Yet we’re eating mortadella, coppa and chewy lardo, and polenta – thick, bland and sliceable – with gorgonzola and stracchino. With Italy on our plates and Switzerland all around us, it’s a good time to ask Marina, who is sticking to a bowl of minestrone, what characterises the Ticinese.

Ticino is peaceful, even if there can be mutual apprehension between the Italian-speaking Ticinese and their Swiss-German-speaking compatriots. The sale of chunks of this beautiful area to people from the north still rubs, as do the persistent gags about the contrast in efficiency here compared to other cantons. Whether you settle into a Teutonic or Mediterranean pace, there is no bad moment to walk along Lake Maggiore. It’s here that the contrast between the twin lake towns of Ascona and Locarno becomes clear. The latter, home every August to the famed film festival, bustles with visitors to the all-in market on Piazza Grande; it’s a short walk down to the lakefront, with its palm trees, water taxis and sense of energy and history combined. We’re supposed to get a bus (public transport is both user-friendly and plentiful) to Ascona and the luxury of the wonderfully over-the-top Hotel Eden Roc, but to see how the two towns join, we decide to make our way on foot. The Maggia river rather spoils our plans – there’s one very busy bridge and it’s out of our way – but we can see how well the river delta has been adapted for leisure, with campsites, lidos and golf all around the headland.

Ascona, smaller and more chic, developed its reputation as a stardust-scattered resort in the 1950s. It’s now re-establishing a more contemporary feel, while retaining the well-heeled cosiness of the little streets leading down to the shore and the pedigree dogs being walked by designer owners. It feels like a place where nothing could possibly go wrong.

Ancient skills are valued here, and in no arena more so than food. Up in Sonogno we meet Fabrizio and Claudia Patà, who keep a herd of goats. Cheese is made in the small dairy below their home. ‘We make 20 different products and there are not enough cheeses to cope with demand,’ explains Fabrizio, who makes the one-and-a-half-hour climb to the alpine fields when the herd moves. As we taste and talk, their little daughters snatch bits of herbed, slightly salted goat’s cheese and soft, wobbly, pure robiola from the table; even the older cheeses have a clean flavour. The cheese is served with what Claudia tells us are American grapes, a sweet table variety that is also used to make grappa.

On a Moghegno street we meet Lea and her son sorting such grapes from their vineyards. We smell the grapes almost before we see them; a dense, perfumed cloud seems to hang over the crates. Most are destined for the alambicco (still) but Lea will make juice, syrup, jelly and jam, and a version of torta della nonna with them, too. For drinking, home-grown merlot dominates smarter wine lists, while the local bondola grape is used to make serviceable table wine.

Back in the river delta near Ascona, Brigitte Willi from Terreni alla Maggia farm walks us through fruit orchards (the apple juice, light and amber-coloured, is wonderful) and tells us about their corn grown for polenta, hard wheat for pasta, barley for beer, plus potatoes, asparagus and honey. These and the trademark locals stained with grape juice do not come as a surprise, but rice paddies are a bit of a shock. Here, though is one of the world’s northernmost rice plantations – 140 hectares, yielding 450 tonnes of raw rice a year. The loto variety, used for risotto, prefers a temperate based on the design of a coin from the middle ages. Inside, there is a soft chestnut cream that sets the tone for the afternoon.

Ascona’s Chestnut Festival is as much an excuse for a spot of lakeside drinking and gossip as it is a celebration of the harvest. Marina’s favoured uses for chestnuts are to serve them with game or smash them with sugar, vanilla and cream. She has been gathering them all her life but compared with the stallholders she is a rank amateur. Chestnuts are prepared as jam, vermicelli, in a cream liqueur and as flour baked into a bread cake with rosemary and olive oil. A German cook offers a chestnut and lentil soup cooked slowly with wine and bacon, and there’s a sweet cake with ricotta and chestnut paste. It’s hard to beat the vermicelli though – squeezed to order, out of a kind of giant potato ricer – so sweet that the mealy texture of the nuts seems to disappear.

I also like the bags of red-hot roasted chestnuts that, moments before we get our hands on them, are being swung in enormous black roasting pans at the water’s edge. If you stand too close, the chestnuts can burst and burn but nature has provided a suitable method of healing. If you really stretch, you can cool a chestnut burn in Lake Maggiore. Far safer than river jumping.