Switzerland, in Italian

The bay is a crescent, closed off by a mountain at each end. On the south side Monte San Salvatore rises as a near-perfect pyramid, 912 metres; Monte Brè answers it across the water at 925. Between them the lakefront gardens curve along the shore, and at dusk the flowerbeds hold the last light while the peaks go dark first. This is Lugano — the largest city in Ticino and the largest Italian-speaking city outside Italy.

The water is Lake Lugano, marked Ceresio on the old maps, from the Latin Ceresius. It sits at 271 metres and drops to 288 at its deepest, and it is not Switzerland’s alone: 63 percent lies in Ticino, the other 37 across the border in Italy. A stone causeway thrown across the lake in the 1840s near Melide pinches it into two basins. That causeway still carries the A2 motorway and the Gotthard railway — the only land route linking the far south of Ticino to the rest of the country.

Ticino does not feel Swiss so much as northern-Italian, and the planting proves it. The climate here is humid subtropical; palms, cypress and olive grow on the slopes above the lake, and Ticino has pressed olives on this ground since at least the eighth century. The signs are in Italian. The light off the water is soft and southern.

I made these frames at dusk in August, from the promenade the city laid out along this shore in the 1870s. The pyramid across the water is San Salvatore — a funicular runs to the top of it — and behind me a cable car climbs Brè, reckoned the sunniest mountain in the country. From either summit the lake bends away and keeps going, out of Switzerland and into Italy.