Some Holiday Snaps

I'm back from ten days of touring the Italian Lakes and spending time with my parents (where there isn't very good internet access). Last week I was enjoying the area around Lago Maggiore and staying at the Rosminian houses at Stresa and Domodossola. It was perfect holiday - plenty of this:


Good solid 'autentico' Italian fare, to help us recover from all the church-crawling:

This is the friary of Madonna del Sasso above Lucarno, Switzerland. Lake Maggiore has shores in both Italy and Switzerland, so it was possible to cross the border and briefly leave the E.U. (without any customs or passport checks). Stresa, our main base, has a charming Victorian air about it (there's even a statue of Queen Victoria in the grounds of a hotel that she used). It is the resting place of the once-controversial and now newly-beatified Antonio Rosmini, the friend of several popes, prolific philosopher and founder of the Institute of Charity and Sisters of Providence. Here is his monument at Collegio Rosmini:


His tomb is in the crypt below - looks rather like the proposed monument to Newman at the Birmingham Oratory. One Rosminian I met speculated that both Rosmini and Newman will be Doctors of the Church within 20 years - and both, of course, had their orthodoxy questioned in the nineteenth century:


This is the house where the beatus died in 1855. It is now a centre for Rosminian studies:

His bust can also be found by the lakeside:

The final ingredient of the holiday - lots of outstanding natural beauty to refresh the city-wearied soul:

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