This week’s dream: a surprisingly sensuous Swiss idyll

“Fine watches, punctual trains, ski resorts and overly discreet bankers” – fairly or not, we tend to think of Switzerland as agreeable but dull. But there’s at least one corner of the country that is not only “ravishing” in its beauty, but “sensuous” and glamorous too, says Sean Thomas in The Times. This is Italian-speaking Ticino, walled to the north by the high Alps but bordering too on Piedmont and Lombardy, pierced by the waters of Lake Maggiore and warmed by the Mediterranean sun. Its cuisine is “rural yet refined”, Teutonic and Italianate at once; its wines include some of the best Merlots in Europe, none of which it exports. It has “winsome” lakeside towns and wild green valleys – and an extraordinary countercultural history.

In “well-fed” Lugano, a “tormentingly opulent” new hotel, The View, “gazes in a kind of astonishment” at the “clustered” mountains and sparkling lake before it. From here, you can visit the valleys of Verzasca or Val Maggia, great for hiking and wild swimming, or march up the remote, glacier-ended Val Rovana, a place “fantastically devoid of electricity” and home to locals speaking an Ur-german dialect no one else quite understands. Near the village of Ascona lies Monte Verità, a wooden hamlet with a medieval reputation for “witchy Black Masses”, and the site of a scandalous vegan commune of nude sunbathers in the early 20th century that attracted the likes of Carl Jung and Paul Klee. It’s a “strange, seductive” place – but lovelier still are the Brissago Islands, “idyllic” outcrops in Lake Maggiore with a subtropical microclimate. Legend has it that “wildly promiscuous monks” once frolicked here; and in the 1930s, German industrialist Max Emden partied nude each summer with “giggling showgirls”. In the islands’ century-old gardens, blue dragonflies “shimmer” among the palms, and a sense of “Tahitian languor” lingers on. The View (00 41 91 210 0000, www.theviewlugano.com) has doubles from £615, b&b.