`On the left-hand side is Paris," said our Alitalia pilot during his mid-flight homily between Dublin and Milan. The businessman across the aisle went on reading his newspaper. I looked around. As far as I could see no else was interested either. Flying to Milan on a clear summer's afternoon has about it - for this writer at least - what in another context finance Minister Charlie McCreevy described as "a high degree of unusuality". And yet the coinage - which deserves to survive - is inadequate to the experience. Here in less than three hours is an astounding lesson in the geography, history and - at 35,000 feet not at all a rarified word - the beauty of Europe. (As for lessons, I've long wondered what the explanation is for the many precisely circular fields in central France.) The scale of all this is human, but then as the plane begins to fly over the Alps one realises how thin is the earth's envelope of habitability: a few hundred metres between sea-level and perpetual snow. And after that the plane tilts down into the evening mists at the foot of the mountains, the horizon blurs and for a moment it's hard to distinguish between the clouded orange disk of the setting sun and its ghost reflected in the many flooded rice-fields of the great northern plain of Italy.
The journey is worth making for itself alone. On this occasion, though, I was going further east, to the Veneto. Travelling by night along the autostrada, everything I saw, apart from the occasional hill-town standing out against the clear night sky, was lit by electric light. And the amount of light was phantasmagorical. Bowling along at a steady 70 mph for just short of three hours, we were rarely in the dark. On either side of the motorway neon signs illuminate, Edward Hopper-like, a multitude of mostly small factories and office-blocks, often strikingly designed. This is the spinal column of Italy's quite enormous wealth - and like it or not, it is what we in Ireland are trundling towards, but without much evidence of the Italian talent for design.
As it happened, during the week I was there a conference was held at the University of Padua on the theme of the identity of the Veneto. According to Cesare De Michelis (not to be confused with former EU Commissioner Gianni), the 1970s were a destructive decade for the region, when the last vestiges of Veneto peasant culture were blown away by the industrial boom, replacing tradition with "the egoistic ambition of independence and self-sufficiency", resulting in an "ambiguous and fleeting" sense of identity along with widespread solitude and marginalisation. Sounds familiar.
I set off early on the first morning for Lake Garda. Like much else that is beautiful in Italy, Garda is protected by its inaccessibility.
Although it is possible to drive around its shores on narrow roads, really the only way to travel here is by boat.
I took the ferry from Peschiera in the south to Malcesine some 30 miles to the north. Goethe, who first visited the lake in 1786, said: "I simply couldn't tear myself away from this spectacular exhibition of nature." The lake and its intensely blue waters are hemmed in on the western side by almost vertical cliffs and on the eastern side by steep, thickly-wooded slopes, but what is truly spectacular is the way nature has been domesticated. In every nook and cranny of the shore small towns and villages, red-roofed, painted ochre and white, bursting with flowers and vines, follow obediently and also subdue the contours of the landscape.
This is a wilderness but a bourgeois one, practical and yet operatic.
The medieval castle of the Scaligeri in Malcesine, where Goethe, suspected of being a spy, was briefly imprisoned, and which displays a small but fascinating collection of his drawings of the area, could indeed be an opera set, complete with towers, parapets, dungeons and deep windows framing the lake.
Contemporary practicality has also, thankfully, ensured that the waters of the lake - can my guide-book really be correct in saying that it's more than 1,000 feet deep? - are crystal clear. They are certainly filled with fish. The restaurant where we ate lunch was cantilevered over the lake and I could see shoals of enormous trout and carp swimming beneath its windows. Here and throughout the Veneto the food is wonderfully simple and seasonal. During the summer every restaurant features asparagus and stuffed, deep-fried courgette flowers as well as its own specialities - in Malcesine, for instance, I ate ravioli stuffed with pumpkin.
In the afternoon we took the funicular up to the top of the peculiarly-named Bocca Trades Pin mountain. At 1,780 metres this is well above the tree-line, skiing territory in the winter, Alpine meadow in the summer, complete with fat cattle wearing bells. There are also hikers, mountain cyclists, sky-gliders and the odd botanist orchid-hunting. Garda in fact strikes me as an ideal place for a walking holiday - and one can also swim in the lake.
After Garda I spent the rest of my time between Padua, Verona and Vicenza. As in all the great Italian art cities, one has to be careful how time is spent. In the university (60,000 students) city of Padua, for instance, I unwittingly missed the Mantegna frescoes in the Eremitani church and instead crossed the border into the Vatican territory around the cathedral (no bare arms, legs or heads, ladies). A wonderful, multi-domed building, it is unfortunately chock-a-block with bad pictures and rococo curlicues, especially evident around the shrine to the blackened tongue, jawbone and larynx of St Anthony of Padua - much venerated but seriously weird.
The paramount reason for going to Padua, however, is to see Giotto's frescoes in the Scrovegni chapel, one of the world's greatest art treasures. And it might be advisable to make the trip soon - human traffic in and out of this small building is now so great that the constant opening of the doors, altering light levels, not to mention body-heat and breath, is damaging the delicate paint. Having seen the Giottos of Assissi (now closed after the 1997 earthquake), which are on a larger scale, I have to say the Scrovegni is, if comparison isn't too absurd, the more concentrated experience. In particular the band of monochrome grisaille figures representing the vices and the virtues along the base of the main frescoes is, perhaps because of the contrast with the riches above, awesomely simple.
Unless you have plenty of time it's easy to miss the best of Verona. The worst of it is not, surprisingly enough, the house where Juliet did not stand on her balcony and was not wooed by Romeo. It's charming, in fact, though I wondered whether the graffiti that now covers the walls was pre-U2. The great Roman amphitheatre in the heart of the city certainly shouldn't be missed, especially when the opera is performed there in July and August. Of all these cities of the plain, Verona is probably the prettiest, the least afflicted by traffic, and it has a wonderfully surging turquoise river, torrential even in mid-summer, spanned by elegant bridges.
The prize of the Veneto, however, is Andrea Palladio's Vicenza. Perhaps the greatest architects of the High Renaissance, Palladio (1508-80) was active in Venice, in Vicenza, and throughout the Veneto. It is extraordinary to think that this humble stonecarver should have risen to dominate European architecture well into the 18th century. Normally I don't care for guides, but Vicenza is so crammed with examples of his genius that finding one who knows the subject and his way about is essential. That I knew nothing about Palladio's final project, the Teatro Olimpico, says a lot about my knowledge of architectural history, but on this occasion ignorance brought the blessing of surprise. To stand in the auditorium of this small, roofed amphitheatre and face the stage with its permanent set of wooden buildings and streets seen through arches is, I'd say, as near as one can get to understanding the Renaissance ideals of balance and of man being the measure of all things.
And the understanding shifts when one sees a man moving on the stage - the set is built perspectively so unless he stands at a vanishing point everything is out of proportion. Like the Giotto, an awesome experience.
The entire Veneto is full of Palladio-influenced villas and gardens and there are wonderful hill towns and villages, such as Bassano and Marostica, but to see them one really needs a car - thus becoming a part of the wrecking process. One should also be able to fly direct to the area, but except for high season access to Verona we Irish have to settle for Milan.
Still - to go back to the beginning - flying to Milan is almost as miraculous as the Veneto itself.