On the road again

I have been travelling again for work over the past few weeks, and as always it comes with its pleasures and its privations. It is wonderful to return to much-loved cities, and to discover new places to which you’d like to return, but being away from home, from family, can be trying. I don’t like to complain, however, as free travel to desirable foreign destinations, no matter how much work it involves, is a privilege that must never be taken for granted.

The first port of call on my journeys was Vienna, a city that I have written about before, and never fails to delight. Perhaps it is because I spent so long living in London, and so have a leaning towards grand imperial cities; perhaps it is my love of classical music and opera that naturally draws me to the place where so many composers, not least Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and so many Strausses, had successes (not to mention the abundance of art in so many galleries dotted around the centre); perhaps it is my natural inclination towards the jolly German temperament that one finds in Austria (and Bavaria); or perhaps it is my appreciation for a particular well turned out cake, of which the Austrians are masters. Whatever it is, I have a sense of connection to the capital that means I consider it a kind of second home, and a place to which I always look forward to returning.

The weather was particularly good on this visit, so I focused on walking the city, as much as my schedule would allow, and on discovering new places to eat. Due to an unlooked-for change of hotel, I found myself by the Hauptbahnhof (main station), an area I didn’t know at all. It was useful, in that I could get to the congress centre easily via the metro, but its eccentric position relative to the main attractions meant I had a good half hour walk before reaching to anything that would be on the typical tourist trail.

I decided that was an advantage, as I would get to know new neighbourhoods, and my curiosity was immediately rewarded when I discovered, first, an excellent Austrian restaurant close by my hotel, Der Ringsmuth, and then, across the road from the entrance to the Belvedere Palace, Art Corner, which serves some of the best Greek food I have eaten outside of the Aegean. I also spotted dozens of bars and tucked away eateries that I would love to have visited, but I didn’t have as much free time as I would have liked.

Nevertheless, I managed to get to see a singspiel (ie, a form of operetta) at Volksoper Wien, the opera house that appeared in the James Bond film The Living Daylights as a double for a fictional conservatoire in Bratislava. I saw a production of Im weißen Rössl, or The White Horse Inn, by Ralph Benatzky. It was amusingly brought up-to-date (although I didn’t get all the Austrian and German in-jokes) and brilliantly performed. Moreover, it is a charming venue, and spending the intermission lounging on the stairs and around the entrance on a balmy summer evening and indulging in a spot of operagoer watching was very much part of the experience.

It didn’t end there. I decided that, no, I wasn’t tired after nearly a week of intense work, and I could rouse myself after the show to change out of my suit and head over to Spittelau and visit the cultural centre Das Werk. That night, it was a techno club par excellence, with fantastic DJs playing over one of the best sound systems I have heard, all in a very friendly and open atmosphere. I literally had to tear myself away to get at least some decent sleep before my travels home the next day.

So, it was a great trip, and a reminder that, no matter how much we have going on in life and no matter where we are, we should always take time to appreciate what we have around us. But, perhaps fortunately in some ways, we can’t all like the same places. Last week, I was bemused to find that the normally brilliant writer Marie Le Conte had taken a dislike to Vienna for what seemed to me like the bizarrest of reasons.

On her Young Vulgarian substack, in an article entitled ‘European Dips: a despatch from Budapest’, she wrote: “For the avoidance of doubt: I loathe Vienna. I didn't like it the first time I went, but felt I should be fair so I went again, to be sure, and the second time I liked it even less.”

“I found it beautiful but cold; like someone who's wonderful to look at but entirely uninteresting in bed. I also got tutted at by strangers there, as I crossed a completely empty road without waiting for the little man to turn green. It basically ruined my day. It happened several times."

Now, I am aware of the massive privilege that I have in travelling around Europe as a white male, and a tall one at that. But, seriously? How can someone’s day be ruined by being tutted at for jaywalking? What puzzles me specifically about that is that writing for public consumption, by definition, involves putting yourself out there, as the saying goes, and that requires a certain degree of imperviousness to criticism that usually rises above a tut.

No matter, we can all feel a little vulnerable sometimes, I guess. But it did put me in mind of strange review of Paris that was forced to think of a response to when I asked the partner of a close friend what she thought of the French capital. “I didn’t like it,” she said. Oh, why not, I enquired. “Because it rained,” she shot back. It does rain quite a bit there, I ventured, but it is a marvellous city. Sadly, she could not see past the droplets and confessed that the weather had ruined any chance she had of appreciating it.

I thought of this exchange again last week when I was on a train from Zurich to Lugano, my next port of call on my work-based odyssey. I overheard a young man, who was, like my friend’s partner, from the USA, tell his interlocutor that he did not like Berlin because it rained while he was there, but had liked Prague because it was sunny. It was clear that the woman who had engaged him in conversation and was quizzing him on his travels was lost for words.

I don’t have to tell regular readers of this column how much I love the German capital and how central a part it has played in my life, but regardless of the place in question, to not like somewhere because of something as uncontrollable as the weather is frankly ridiculous.

But what of Lugano? I was lucky enough to have my hotel at the opposite end of the city from the conference centre, so I was ‘forced’ to take an extremely enjoyable stroll alongside the lake every morning and evening. The change of pace that one experiences up in the mountains and by a large expanse of water is nothing less than a balm to the soul, especially when there is a lot of stressful work to be done in between.

And it helps that the city itself is charming; a lovely mix of Italian gastronomy (and friendly welcome) and Swiss order and efficiency (and money). The result is a well-heeled Italianate playground that has just the requisite amount of history and culture to make it a great place to visit for a few days. I ate out four times and each time the food was of the of the highest quality, and would recommend anyone in the area to eat at Grande Caffè Bistrot, La Taverna del Pittore, Ristorante Commercianti or, above all, Addis, which is perhaps the best Ethiopian restaurant I have come across. (I am sure that there are plenty of other great places, but time is, sadly, not as elastic as we would sometimes like.)

I did get some time to walk the city, and I found an abundance of churches that spoke of the deep and long-lasting significance of the area, with the cheisa di Santa Maria degli Angeli standing out. It was built between 1499 and 1515 and is essentially a large hall divided by a partition wall bearing frescoes of Bernardino Luini's Crucifixion (1529), a masterpiece of Swiss-Italian Renaissance painting. That, naturally enough, whetted my appetite for more art.

I was drawn to two photography exhibitions: one on Eugenio Schmidhauser, who captured the countryside and people of the Lugano region in the early 20th century; the other on Roberto Donetta, a rather forgotten chronicler of Swiss villages in the Ticino region, both of whom had an eye for capturing the everyday, with the wistfulness that this way of life would soon disappear forever. There were also a few delights in the permanent collection to discover, but the two main galleries in Lugano were, overall, a little disappointing. They reminded me that there is a finite number of great works, and they are not evenly distributed between the numerous publicly financed and private galleries and art spaces large and small that have sprung up all around the world.