Who's eating my favourite lizards on Lake Como?
PAUL JOHNSON The great thing about taking a holiday every year in the same place — provided it is the right place of course — is that you notice the huge, reassuring continuities, and the minute changes which prove that life, though stable, is at work. This is what I find in early autumn at Lake Como, which I have now been visiting for the best part of two decades. I look at it very intently, and necessarily so, for I paint it in watercolour every day I am there: at least one picture in the morning, and another in the afternoon, sometimes four per day. I have probably done over 200 watercolour drawings of the lake and its surrounding mountains, its skies, little ports, forests, groves and meadows, each dated. Although I have given many away, and sold some at my occasional shows, I retain scores, and thus can compare the evidence not only of the endlessly changing light following eternal rhythms of the time of day and the weather patterns, but the occasional physical events which leave their permanent marks. The great merit of topographical art is that it forces you to examine carefully and record accurately what is before your eyes.
Thus, although the great limestone cliffs which slope diagonally across the lake and plunge into its depths look strong enough, they are in fact subject to decay like everything else. As professional builders say of the structures of old houses, they grow 'tired'. Attacked by frost and occasional snow and ice, and ravaged and infiltrated by heavy, stream-forming rains, beaten too by the hammer blows of brazen summer suns, immense particles of the rock lose their grip on their parent mountain and suddenly, without warning, lurch into the abyss and come thundering down into the lake, carrying the soil and trees, and any buildings in their path, with irresistible force and catastrophic consequences. A few years ago I was present during a mighty storm, and even recorded it in paint The evening before I painted from the terrace the mountains on the other side of the lake, and the unusual, even sinister weather illuminating them and casting great shafts of gold and purple light down their sides. I remember saying to myself, as I painted, 'This is like a set for Gottercliimmentng.' The ominous twilight of the gods was followed by a frantic night of noisy, torrential rain and wild, howling wind. The rain formed instant cataracts which came thundering down the dry gullies, carrying with them slices of cliff and boulders weighing many tons. They smashed through the lakeside road in three places, hurtling a score of cars into the deep waters. By morning, though, all was still, totally silent, fresh, sunny and benign Up early, I was able to paint the lake in all its normal blueand-gold serenity, after the fever and purgation of its ordeal by storm. The two paintings hang side by side on the stairs of my London house.
More usually, however, the storms and clifffallings occur during the winter, and I notice their effects the following year: great gashes and scars on the hillside, and underneath them the chutes and tracks where the boulders came crashing down, stripping trees and soil and throwing them into the lake. These marks constitute the lines and wrinldes on the face of beautiful Como, that wild lady of the lake, formed by nature and embellished by human hands. The scars heal of course. They are overgrown by verdure, so that they fade, and one sees them today as palimpsests on the historical manuscript of Como, the fainter ones going back to Renaissance times, when Giovanni Bellini came here in search of backgrounds for his sacred conversations, or even to mediaeval and Roman days. The scars fade but they never entirely vanish, making up with the virgin hillside the complex countenance of the shore.
There are other changes to note, especially when I clamber up the hillside to my paintingtower, from which I can survey the vast enfilade of the lake in both directions, north and south. The natural, untouched meadow beneath the tower is a paradise for butterflies. But they vary in colour from year to year. Last year there was a mass of powder-blue creatures, rising from the salad leaves of the meadow like a faint sapphire mist. This year there was not one blue, their places taken by smaller flutterers of browny gold, almost indistinguishable from the tawny soil beneath. But I saw also a few giant brownies, with spots of vermilion on their wings, bigger than moths. There have been years when both blue and brown butterflies have been plentiful, competing with each other, perhaps even fighting. Next year, I suspect, will be a blue one again, but in any case it is sure to be different.
The meadow is food for a thousand salads. I have been over it often with my friend Carla, a native of these parts, who was shown as a child, by her peasant nurse, exactly what fruits of the bounteous earth can be eaten. The varieties of dandelions and their affiliates are many, some bitter, some sweet, and there is, especially in the spring, wild asparagus. Hiding shyly amid the greenery, in August, are wild raspberries, late but luscious wild strawberries, and an edible little berry, the colour of Baltic amber, whose name I do not know. There are also, varying with the seasons, many nuts to be found: walnuts, sweet chestnuts, and funny little groundnuts, good to chew, as well as straggling wild grapes from long-abandoned vineyards, and of course olives. As Carla says, no one need ever starve if they know where to look. But the menu changes from year to year, as nature is bounteous with one item, niggardly with another.
On the whole though, Como, while looking wild at a distance, is a genial and welcoming place. It was already a resort in Roman times, and the place where I stay has, in its retaining wall, brickwork which Cicero might have laid with his own hands, and stonework going back, perhaps, to the ancient kings The Romans patronised Como, and built villas there, because it was self-consciously cordial and courteous, famous for good manners and soft speech, and for the absence of the more annoying spirits of nature. No wolves, except in the more remote mountain heights. No bears. No wildcats. No scorpions and poisonous snakes. No biting insects, especially mosquitoes. By contrast, there were plentiful rabbits and hares, of the most delectable varieties. Indeed, rabbit — boiled, roasted, broiled, fried and stewed in endless different ways — is a local speciality, and there is today an admirable restaurant which demonstrates what feasts can be provided by this humble quadruped — as well as hares jugged fit for an emperor. Then, too, the lake provides many varieties of fish, especially an ingenious little flatfish, a kind of flounder, admirable fried, and a salmon-trout, about a foot long, which raises one's gastronomic spirits no end.
No wonder, then, that the Romans came, and self-indulgent visitors from near and far ever since. Such, for instance, was Dr Vesey Stanhope and his strangely entertaining brood from Barchester Towers. He had gone there to cure a sore throat and remained there for many years. The brother of a lord, he held a prebendal staff and 'one of the best residences in the close', together with `the two large rectories of Crabtree Canonicorum and Stogpingum', but had 'never done a day's duty', preferring the delights of Como. Such clerical hedonists are no longer to be seen. Instead, so one reads, Como is currently the favourite of `the international smart set', who rent villas and palaces, and it appeals 'strongly to celebrity watchers'. Does it indeed? I saw nothing of them. The creatures I like to watch are the lizards, two or three inches long, which bask and scurry, stage dramatic epiphanies and vanish wherever there is warm stonework. This year, I notice, there were fewer than normal. Is the smart set eating them?
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