Summer and Annecy are synonymous. Not a body-to-body, broil-in-the-sun summer, but a season of gentle mountain breezes rippling deep blue lake water, of lazy lunches in the shade of plane trees along the shore. Swans set the pace as they glide on the canals that have earned this French city its reputation as the Venice of the Alps.
Annecy is a half hour from Geneva by highway and just an hour and a half from the ski resorts of Chamonix, St. Gervais and Megeve. But we took a narrower, twisting, tricky road down from Megeve that brought us in from the south to a flat stretch of road that runs so close to the Lac d`Annecy that we could almost reach our hands out the car window to test the temperature of the lake.
In summer, women sitting on wobbly wooden piers roll down the tops of their one-piece bathing suits to take the sun`s rays caught in the circle of the Alps that ring the lake. Boaters have to vie with swans who make their home on the water, which may be navy blue one day and turquoise the next, and boasts of being the cleanest in Europe. There are no clues to the fact that Annecy and the surrounding Haute Savoie are home to high-tech industries with one of the highest industrial outputs in France.
DICTATOR`S REFUGE
Boaters on the lake can point out L`Abbaye, the home of Benedictine monks in the 17th Century. Now a hotel, L`Abbaye was Baby Doc Duvalier`s elegant refuge after his flight from Haiti. Boaters also can drop anchor and stop for a three-star lunch at Le Pere Bise at Veyrier du Lac in Talloires. From there they can gaze off at some distance upon the city of Annecy`s red roofs, set like stepping stones up the side of the mountain across the water.
By car, before entering Annecy, the road that runs along the east side of the lake passes through Annecy-le-Vieux, where the Paccard Foundry has a museum of bells and chimes and exhibits the tools and techniques they`ve used to make them since 1796.
The final stretch of road into Annecy is lined on either side with plane trees reminiscent of southern France. At the park along the lake`s edge, children ride on the carved horses of a turn-of-the-century merry-go-round or take a ride around the park on a miniature train past old people playing
”boules.” On one summer day international gymnasts leaped and flipped into the air from trampolines, and hang gliders with bright-colored wings slid silently out of the sky onto the lawn.
In the old section of the town no cars are allowed on most of the cobblestone streets, where the air smells of warm bread and roasting chickens cooking in gourmet food shops. Under the arcades, a graceful architectural reminder that Annecy was Italian until 1860 (when this area called Savoie became French), there is an inordinate number of expensive jewelry shops, testimony to the wealth of Annecy. The per capita income here is among the highest in France.
POST NO BILLS
Here and there the ancient walls are brought up to date by a local jokester who, tongue-in-cheek, has stenciled angry faces on them and words decrying the local police who do nothing to stop graffiti artists.
At the corner of the rue Royale, where children sit on the edge of a fountain, a young woman in an antique lace dress plays a hurdy-gurdy while a man dressed like Charlie Chaplin imitates the jerking motions of the silent movies. Even Mouna, the doyen of anarchists among the Parisian street people, knows where the good times are and has left the French capital to spend some time in Annecy to harangue the crowds that vacation there in the summer.
Farther along, at what seems like a dead end in the street, people keep slipping through a narrow, dark, covered passageway. We followed and emerged into the sunshine on the other side, like Alice, into an even more wonderful land. Narrow cobblestone streets alternate with canals where fuchsia-colored flowers cascade from wrought-iron railings. The arcades here shade shops and the tables of the French equivalent of American fast food restaurants:
pizzerias and creperies.
The music from a restaurant`s player piano and the tinkling of knives and forks of alfresco diners reverberated off the walls of old buildings the color of ripe melons, apricots, peaches and fresh cream.
At one point a branch of the canal separates to flow along either side of the Palais de l`Isle, a solid stone building shaped like a ship`s bow, built in the middle of the water as if anchored there. It was built to house the lord who ruled Annecy in the 12th Century, when it was a village of fishermen and farmers. Today it has been restored to resemble the prison it became in the 18th Century. By then Annecy had turned to manufacturing.
Models and maps in the prison trace the history of the building. Heavy wooden doors with tiny peepholes give way to small cells, some with ominous iron rings hanging from the ceiling, where people accused of witchcraft or vagrancy, or caught smuggling salt or tobacco, slept on the stone floor.
SCRUB, SCRUB, SCRUB
Today, through the prison`s double-barred windows, a waiter can be seen across the way lowering a bucket on a rope into the canal for water to wash the restaurant`s sidewalk, trying, like everyone else, to keep Annecy clean. In winter the canal itself is drained and scrubbed.
No trace of the morning market was left in the streets as we headed to the top of the hill where Annecy`s chateau sits, assembled piecemeal over the centuries, at first a fortress in the 12th Century and eventually the castle of the Duke of Savoie in the 15th Century.
Today one ground-floor room is used for changing exhibits of contemporary art. Displays in other rooms lay out the natural and human history of the region. Archeological discoveries have unearthed the essentials of
civilization: tools, cooking utensils and ancient coins, some of which date to the time the ancient Romans occupied France, which they called Gaul.
There are everyday handmade objects from the more recent past carefully crafted and decorated to bring pleasure and solace to peasant life. The pottery is painted most often with birds, carved devils and saints. The cowbells, ornate cow collars and buckets with holes for draining cheese still are in use on the mountain slopes today. To add food for thought, a sign suggests reasons for our renewed interest in yesterday`s folk arts: ”Is it nostalgia or snobbery?” it asks.
A ROOM WITH A VIEW
Only the ballroom of the castle, sufficient in its own grandiose simplicity, remains empty. The guard for the room, a young woman wearing a green dress, sat draped on a windowsill as though her sole job was to draw attention to the view of the Visitation Basilica on the distant hillside behind her.
But there was no rush to go and see it now. We already were convinced that Annecy has all the natural, historical, cultural and gastronomical pleasures that are the prerequisites of a summer vacation.
For the moment it was time to find a table on the sidewalk at the Brasserie St. Maurice, to sip a drink and to see who`s wearing what and wonder how it is that a Frenchman, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, dressed for summer in baggy pants and turquoise boat shoes, can look so utterly chic. –
