Feeding the soul: An appetite for Northern Italy

Art and music exist because some things are too beautiful to exist as words alone. Take Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. You don’t need a musical ear to hear the birdsong of spring, or summer arriving heavy before erupting into a thunderstorm. Autumn celebrates the harvest. Winter’s rapid notes evoke the frigid cold. Across four violin concertos, Vivaldi takes the natural world and turns it into music. He reminds us not only that something was beautiful, but why. I thought about that often on my recent travels throughout Northern Italy, a place where beauty follows like a shadow. The landscape doesn’t make this a challenge – especially in Italy’s lake region, where the scenery feels like a living painting. Lake Como shimmers beneath the sun while hydrangeas, cypress trees, and meticulously sculpted gardens compete for attention along its shores. Villas once belonging to Milanese nobility rise grandly from the water, romantic and imposing in their own right. But look up at the Alpine foothills, and you realize nature still wins. It would be easy to spend a journey through Northern Italy looking up – at the soaring spires of Milan’s Duomo, the iron-and-glass vaulted roof of the Galleria V...