The day dawns gray and foggy, and soon a heavy rain begins to fall. My long train ride to the Italian-speaking Ticino region of southern Switzerland, weaving through mountains and valleys, would normally afford spectacular views of the Alps. But today the visibility is so poor that I can hardly see 50 meters. After a long, slow trek, and change of trains in the Italian town of Domodossola, I find myself in Ascona, a picture-postcard village on the shores of Lake Maggiore.
Ascona used to be an obscure fishing village until the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and a bunch of free-thinking artists and intellectuals founded a utopian community on a nearby hillside called Monte Verità. Attracting a motley crew of vegetarians, rhythmic dancers, theosophists, positivists and tree-hugging nudists, the community survived from 1869 to 1930s, giving Ascona a certain cachet as a center of avant-garde culture. The basic idea was to find a middle ground between capitalism and communism based on free-love — all of which sounds pretty much like the average American college campus of the 1960s.
Today, nothing is left of the community but a clutch of old wooden buildings and a museum displaying photos of bearded visionaries, nude dancers and people dressed in quaint costumes. The local fishermen have long since folded their nets and sold their lakeside properties to wealthy folks from the north — mostly Swiss Germans — drawn here by the mild climate, beautiful vistas and Italian-style food. Modern Ascona is a thriving resort town, whose pastel-colored Italianate buildings now house restaurants, hotels, souvenir shops and chic boutiques that cater to the estimated 1 million visitors who come here each year. But the old cultural aspirations inherited from Monte Verità live on in the form of philosophical conferences, classical music events and, most intriguingly, Europe's best-known festival of New Orleans-style jazz.
What's an Italian-speaking Swiss town doing celebrating New Orleans music? "Because everybody loves this kind of music," says festival producer Karl-Heinz Ern, who once ran a jazz club in his native Germany and worked in the plastics industry in Italy before moving here in the mid-1990s to become producer of the the New Orleans Jazz Ascona festival (www.jazzascona.ch). "I'm in love with the happiness and joy of traditional New Orleans jazz. It's not intellectual. People don't understand modern jazz, but everybody understands this and loves it."
There must be something in the alchemy of Ascona's balmy climate and the New Orleans beat, for the 10-day festival draws 100,000 people here each summer, generating an estimated $10 million in revenue for local businesses. Not surprisingly, the town fathers are quite bullish on the New Orleans event, which has turned the traditionally slack late June-early July tourist season into a boom period. "The jazz festival has become a major cultural manifestation," says Gianfrancesco Beltrami, deputy mayor of Ascona. "A lot of people have come to know Ascona mainly because of the jazz." But Beltrami is quick to point out Ascona's other attributes. "Today," he says, sipping champagne in the bar of a chic lakeside hotel, "Ascona is known as a tourist center, but you can't ignore the importance of our historical and cultural development. If it hadn't been for Monte Verità, the name of Ascona would not have been known around the world."
More important, perhaps, to Ascona's current appeal is an impressive tourist infrastructure that boasts four five-star hotels and nine four-star hotels in a tiny enclave covering only 4.5 sq. km. And while Ascona wants to avoid the "massive constructions" that have marred many other seaside resorts, the town fathers are pinning their future development hopes on the building of a glitzy new casino/convention center just a few hundred yards inland from the lake.
NEXT: TIME gets a lesson on allegiances among Switzerland's Ticinesi
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