Colony

Having met up with Chris, the rest of the Netski family, and Beth in Florence, I traveled by rail Monday morning to Como, a lakeside town in the Italian foothills of the Alps.

Arriving with naïve expectations of a naturalistic getaway like the lakes of Minnesota or New York, I was caught off-guard upon arriving at the thoroughly developed Lago di Como in northwester Italy. We stayed in the city of Como, located at the end of the southwestern arm of the wishbone-shaped lake. As a vacationer, I could certainly see the potential of the town as a poor man's Monte Carlo ('poor' in this case meaning 'middle class'). The shopping was so prevalent that it was hard to walk from the lake up to the remnants of the old city wall without brushing into a dozen shopping bags, and any place that wasn't a store was a hotel or a restaurant.

As an architect or even simply as a person with an appreciation for the tasteful, I cringed. Como is not the ugliest place I've been,* but it is the most acute example of squandered beauty. The city is disfigured by masses of bad modernist buildings, which detract from the overall landscape and spoil the scene for the occasional rather nice piece of modernist architecture. While "good" and "bad" modernist design is a debate in which I'm only beginning to grasp and can't discuss intelligently, the degradation of the landscape is much more readily described. The region's traditional building have flat fronts, which form large surfaces for reflection of the sun. This, combined with the creams, golds, terracottas, and other warm colors that dominate palette, turn the fields of buildings into friendly, glowing mosaics in the green slopes. The modernist buildings have a great tendency for clunky, shadowy balconies, which turn the façades dark and the cityscapes foreboding. Combine this effect with the cancerous sprawl of building on the banks surrounding and opposite to Como, and you've got one sadly blighted landscape.

Fortunately, no other part of the lake that I saw had succumbed to the same fate. We took a ferry up to the rather lovely Bellagio. Towns along the way exhibited few(er) examples of mid-twentieth-century eyeblights, and development generally clustered around nodes on the main road twenty meters above the lake shore. The effect was quite pleasing, and I greatly enjoyed my day ferrying around with the Netskis.

* I consider the campus of UMass Amherst to the be the ugliest place I've visited.