Up Monte San Salvatore

Another slow afternoon on the lecture front, but yet again the latter talks were interesting. Thereforenwe had a gap of a couple of hours to spare. And what did we do? We ventured up a hill.

Enough about taking boats, we took the train this time. And it was a funicular train up Monte San Salvatore.

The terminal was a bus ride away - although if you get your bearings sorted, walking would have been mote fun - at a place called Paradiso. A regular schedule - with a dicoubt given when I showed my congress badge - it took 15 minutes to get from the bottom to the tip of San Salvatore, with a quick change of train midway up.

The funicular station at the bottom of the hillThis will first take you to a middle station when you'd have to change coach. The second one was more steep.Time for a changeIt became more interesting from then onOnce you teach the top, there was a small museum and restaurant. You could stop there and then catch the ride back to the bottom, but that would be no fun.

A further ten minute walk along an asphalt path would take you further up the hill onto a small chapel. You then take three flights of stairs onto the roof of the chapel for the main show. And what a show it was.

You can stop here for a meal or coffeeOr you could go further upOn the way to the chapel, you could see these cute little posters from the 40sShame that it was cloudy that afternoonYou would be presented with the vista of the whole Lugano, lake and all. On a good day, you could even see as far as Milan - bit unfortunately not on the day that we went to visit. It started to drizzle as soon as we arrived and we rushed across to get our photographs taken. Luckily we were soaked.

Back to the bottom of the hill, we decided to take the lakeside walk towards the Congress Center. Around 30 minutes to get back, but the weather started to clear up and it was not too warm. Well worth the trip as well.

Photos from the outing can be seen here.