mostly harmless.

On Wednesday, I went downtown with a group of other Frankliners on the fabulous “Sweets Galore Tour,” so named because it was a tour of Lugano’s best sweet shops. I only managed to get a photo of our first sweet treat, chocolata densa (Italian hot chocolate), but rest assured the other delicacies were just as fantastic.

First we stopped at a little coffee house off of Piazza Dante for hot chocolate. The sheer number of flavors available was astounding (I settled on mint, but other people got chili, pear, and even lemon flavored chocolates), and they all came with an assortment of cookies and fruit for dipping. Next, we stopped at a cute little pastry shop in front of Manor for some delectable baked goods. I had a napoleon. Finally, we went into a gelateria called -9° for some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had. Man, it was so, so good.

Outside of -9°, some guy got into a fight with a couple of other guys over something (nobody from our group is really quite sure of the details), and ran up and down the street in his dark pink corduroy suit, yelling and screaming and causing a ruckus while we 15 Americans (and plenty of other onlookers, too) just stood in awe while eating our ice cream cones. It was a really intense fight, and the people who tried to step in to calm it down were inevitably drawn into it, too. At one point, someone whipped out a bottle of vodka and almost smashed it over pink suit’s head, but he wrestled his way out of the hold and managed to avoid it. Once the cops showed up, the scene died down and we all headed home. 

On Saturday I headed downtown to pick up some groceries and stumbled upon a huge Autumn Festival, where people were selling everything from fresh salami to… dreamcatchers? It was an eclectic assortment of booths, to be sure. For the most part I just wandered around, but I did pick up a lovely crêpe formaggio as I walked through the booths.

The streets were jam-packed with people all wandering around the festival. There were some areas that were so congested with enthusiastic festival-goers that it was easier just to take pretty wild detours.

I passed one tent that had 7 or 8 of these massive soup cauldrons. There was a guy on almost every cauldron, stirring the soup with huge, oar-like paddles. The soup chef in the red hat was a total ham, and he pulled some dramatic soup stirring poses when I came by with my camera.

(As always, more photos can be found here at flickr.)