We have one final stop to make before the border, the famous ‘Last Chance Cafe’, our romantic sobriquet for a decidedly unromantic service station which provides us with the last opportunity to have a real cup of caffè before heading into the culinary wastelands of Northern Europe. It also gives us an opportunity to buy the incredibly overpriced Swiss vignette, an obligatory one year road tax disc which must be displayed on the wind-shield when in Switzerland … and is a bugger to scrape off when it has expired!

Continuing our journey northwards the highway begins to climb into the foothills of the Alps. Emerging from the first of many tunnels, we are dazzled by the glittering cobalt waters as we skim the southern tip of Lago di Como. The flotsam and jetsam of colourful buildings litter the shoreline, packed between the rippling mirror and the almost sheer walls of rock which rise majestically above whilst seeming to penetrate their scattered reflections deep into the lake.

At Chiasso we reach the border crossing, and surprisingly, there’s no queue. I stop to ask the Italian frontier guards if they know whether the San Gottardo pass, which we’d hoped to explore this year, is open, but they shrug their shoulders. “You’ll have to ask them” they tell me indifferently, and vaguely indicate their Swiss counterparts twenty metres further on.
“No, still too much snow” the Swiss tell me, “it’ll be another two weeks at least before it opens”. Oh well, we’ll just have to do the San Bernardino.

Although the San Bernardino Pass is extraordinarily beautiful, it adds about another hour to our journey, and besides, we’ve never driven the San Gottardo, which from all accounts is quite spectacular. We leave the highway at Bellinzona, capital town of the Italian speaking Swiss ‘Canton Ticino’ and enter the precipitously walled Mesolcina valley which funnels us towards Mesocco and its fairy tale ruined castle.

I take a couple of parting photos from the rest area high above Mesocco. I point my lens southwards towards Italy. Although, technically speaking, we’re well within Swiss territory, this is the point at which I always look back and say farewell to Italy before crossing the pass into Northern Europe.

And now dear readers, if you ask very nicely I might just persuade Serena to tell you in her beautiful Italian all about the surreal night that we mistakenly spent at a German nudist colony in the Black Forest! What do you think?