Omegna, Italy, in February 2009

Dwight Peck's personal website

Omegna, 2009

Short pilgrimages to small Northern Italian cities

You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.

After a few months pretty much indoors, staring enviously out windows, we've got to get south of the Alps for some sun.

We've come over the way by bus, from Verbania to Verbania rail station -- which is nowhere near Verbania -- and thence via Gravellona Toce over into the next valley to see Lake Orta again. 20 February 2009.

The context is that we've come down from Switzerland for five days of convalescence in the sun, based in Verbania on Lago Maggiore with day trips around the region. That's all here.

Now we've got off the bus in Omegna at the northern end of Lago d'Orta.

The church of Sant'Ambrogio

A very charming place it is. Like Venice. A little.

This is the Nigoglia, which exceptionally in northern Italy runs northward from Lago di Orta towards the Alps . . .

. . . just for 2km, though, where it joins the Strona, which later joins the Toce coming down from Switzerland, which shortly thereafter joins Lago Maggiore.

The end of the lake, across from the city hall on the left

I stayed in an hotel on the waterfront here some 30-odd years ago, but either it's gone now or my memory is.

This is the Vialle Giuseppe Garibaldi, facing the city hall and the end of the lake

Vialle Garibaldi

Looking southward from Omegna down Lake Orta. This whole region around the lake was heavily fortified from the 6th century onward, and it seems to have been historically tossed all about for the next millennium and a half between feudal lords and bishops of Novara and imperial heavyweights like Friedrich Barbarossa.

Despite bronze and iron age archaeology hereabouts, however, the town is first mentioned in the records from AD 1221.