Crossing the Alps into Spring

Flying from London to Rome means crossing the Alps. The Alps of Byron's Manfred, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Here's D.H. Lawrence describing them in Women In Love: "It was a silence and a sheer whiteness exhilarating to madness. But the perfect silence was most terrifying, isolating the soul, surrounding the heart with frozen air."

He wrote that from sea level! Then there's George Eliot's The Lifted Veil: "When I was sixteen I was sent to Geneva to complete my course of education; and the change was a very happy one to me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them, as we descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance into heaven; and the three years of my life there were spent in a perpetual sense of exaltation, as if from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence of Nature in all her awful loveliness."

From 40,000 feet, we descend gently toward the blue-green Meditarranean. It's shocking to see how close the icy Alps are to Rapallo far below us, already enjoying its spring. Next stop, Via Tor de' Conti, 25-30, Roma, Italy.