The outline of Lake Maggiore looks like a dog: a spaniel with no front legs that’s standing on its hind ones. The head of the dog is in Switzerland. The rest – long neck, lean body, happy tail and legs – is in Italy and divided lengthways: half of the lake is in the region of Piedmont, the other in Lombardia. A friend, Francesca, lives in Colazza, a village behind the ankle in Piedmont. On the other side of Colazza, cradling it almost, is much smaller Lake Orta, which looks like a tadpole.
All this is written at my desk with a map. Dogs and tadpoles didn’t come to mind when Francesca took me to Lake Maggiore on a clear morning last December. Spread before us, it looked like a vast mirror: sublime and as if it might swallow us up. Colazza is on a hill (colle) , a possible reason for its name. Another hypothesis is the word colare, meaning to filter or drip, for the movement of countless natural springs. All this to say, there is water everywhere, and the reason thatthe “rice triangle” begins a few miles south, in an area between the provinces of Novara and Vercelli that accounts for 50% of Italian rice production.
