To Como for this and that. In atmosphere it is the quintessence of a provincial town, though I always have the impression its still waters might sometimes run deep. The cathedral, il duomo, is clearly and quite rightly the first port of call for culture lovers, but visitors would be wrong to miss the civic museum and, in particular, the art gallery (pinocoteca) in the Palazzo Volpi. There is an excellent section on stonework in the early Middle Ages, the Romanesque and the Gothic periods, and a wonderful collection of renaissance works, including paintings from Paolo Giovi’s sixteenth-century collection of portraits of the rich, famous and powerful. (Those who feature include Dante and Christopher Colombus.) For my illustration I have chosen a fragment of fresco from the old church of San Giorgio in Borgo Vico that I found beautiful and moving.

We watched the very dark C’est arrivé près de ches vous (literally, ‘It happened in your neighbourhood’), marketed in English as Man Bites Dog, this evening. Strangely, we watched it with people in whose neighbourhood some of this 1992 film was shot. It pre-dated by two years Pulp Fiction and must surely, with its garrulous, philosophizing serial killer, Ben, have had some influence on Quentin Tarantino, if only indirectly. C’est arrivé was shot on a shoe string by four filmmaking students and benefits greatly from those twin liberties, as their black-and-white cinema verité ‘mockumentary’ sends up the media and its fascination/complicity with violence. There is another message, I think, though it is delivered via reductio ad absurdum. We are all capable of the sort of detachment which enables us to do to ‘others’ what we would never do to our own.

Following my deal with N° 2 sprog, I today read Marcus Sedgwick’s White Crow, which N° 2 had read with great enthusiasm. It is indeed an excellent gothic but contemporary horror story that rattles forward and I greatly admire Sedgwick’s skill in concocting it. He even explains how he did it in the acknowledgements at the end, bringing together three stories based on true elements, and then weaving the lives of two youngsters around this combination. The three elements are, respectively, the Suffolk coastal village of Dunwich (once a thriving medieval town and the capital of East Anglia, but steadily reduced by the encroaching sea to become today’s village); a French scientist, Dr Gabriel Beaurieux, who in 1905 observed that the head of a freshly guillotined prisoner lived on for a good half-minute; and the fascination of Henry James’s brother, William James (a psychologist and philosopher), with the possibility of the afterlife. Magicians are always told not to reveal how they do their tricks. Sedgwick reveals how he does his it but his magic would still be beyond most of us.

We went up Monte Legnoncino (1,361 metres) today for a picnic. Behind me in the photograph, to the left of my head, is yesterday’s conquest, Sasso Canale (2,411 metres – to the right is a previous, lesser conquest, Monte Berlinghera – 1,930 metres). Sadly, it seems we won’t have time for Monte Legnoncino’s big brother, Monte Legnone (2,600 metres) this visit, but we’ll be back. Monte Legnoncino is a pleasant walk because it is all on a track built by Italian engineers during the 1915-1919 war, part of the fortifications collectively known as the Cadorna line (after General Luigi Cadorna). The Italian engineers used only local materials and no cement and were so attentive to water courses and drainage that the track today is still in excellent condition. Though it surely wasn’t Cadorna’s intention, the network of pathways and mule tracks has done much to facilitate walking in these mountains.

This morning, at around eleven, we bagged another local summit; Sasso Canale, weighing in at 2,411 metres. The walk we did is described here. It was a beautiful day and we drank in the stupendous views out over the Swiss alps and beyond. At our feet, the Chiavenna valley seemed like a drawing. The other way, we could see down to a miniature Como lake. There were, of course, photos at the summit but the illustration I have chosen for this post is an extraordinary dry stone wall, marked on maps as il muro del terminone, which runs straight up the mountain side for at least a kilometre, as straight as a die. Why so straight and why so long? I can find no explanatory references on the internet. Once again, I had that sense of many anonymous men achieving great, monumental things and leaving an enduring mark on the landscape they once graced.

In June I wrote about the late Alan Haberman, aka ‘Mr Bar Code’. Haberman did not invent the bar code but it was largely down to his conviction and persistence that its use became, ultimately, ubiquitous, in the process considerably facilitating commerce and changing the way our societies do things. In July another anonymous revolutionary passed away; George Charlesworth, aka ‘Dr Zebra’. Like Haberman, Charlesworth did not invent anything but he rendered something ubiquitous and, without a doubt, by doing so saved very many lives. The ‘thing’ in question was the pedestrian crossing. Charlesworth didn’t invent it, but it was he who headed the team who hit on the black-and-white markings and who pushed through the pilot schemes that led to the markings being adopted universally throughout the world. I have only come across one obituary, in The Times, but you’d need a subscription to read it. Largely anonymous Charlesworth may have been, but he surely died with the reassuring and satisfying knowledge that he had done far more good than many a man.

Today I finished Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze, a novel I gave the time that it richly deserved. To name drop unashamedly, Foulds was my tutor at a recent Guardian Masterclass and I remember him explaining how he always knew he would have to do something with the knowledge he had gleaned in his youth about how the ‘Northamptonshire peasant poet’, John Clare, and the future poet and peer, Alfred Tennyson, had in the 1840s probably not met at a fashionable, if not progressive, lunatic asylum, High Beach, backing on to Epping Forest (which is where Foulds grew up). Then mentally ill, Clare would in time go thoroughly mad. Tennyson’s brother, Septimus, was also a patient at High Beach, an establishment run by a Victorian scoundrel, the Reverend Matthew Allen, MD, who managed to squander the Tennysons’ inheritance in a get-rich-quick wood carving scheme. Foulds tells the tale of how Clare made a – temporarily successful – bid for freedom. To do so, he has to get inside the head not just of a poet (which I suppose should be a little less difficult for somebody who is himself a poet) but of a man losing his sanity. He achieves this brilliantly, avoiding the beartrap of writing a prose poem but nevertheless writing in poetic prose rich in metaphor and observation. At times a pugilistic boxer John, at times Lord Byron, Clare is at his most touching when Foulds paints him as a sort of noble savage, in communion with nature and the gypsies who live in the woods. It is Foulds’s great literary achievement to make us believe in this steadily disintegrating figure and sympathise with him.

This evening we watched the 1994 classic, Pulp Fiction. So much has been written, both positive and negative, about the path-breaking nature of this film, much imitated since, but I still found it fresh and entertaining – particularly the dialogue, with small-time crooks and gangsters fruitily philosophising, and the inter-twining non-chronological plot, which somehow retains its continuity despite all the convolutions. John Travolta is wonderfully ugly and the pastiche dance scene is an amusingly ironic reminder of his past glories. Is there a moral to this story? Does there have to be a moral? Or is it just ‘A soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter’? Anyway, for Hugo of New Amsterdam (previously of Old Amsterdam), here’s a quote: (Vincent) ‘It breaks down like this: it’s legal to buy it, it’s legal to own it, and, if you’re the proprietor of a hash bar, it’s legal to sell it. It’s still illegal to carry it around, but that doesn’t really matter ’cause… get a load of this: if you get stopped by the cops in Amsterdam, it’s illegal for them to search you. I mean, that’s a right the cops in Amsterdam don’t have.’

We followed a mountain torrent upstream today, a stiff climb under a hot sun, and though we didn’t get to a summit or a pass we nevertheless had a sense of achievement, picnicking by a deep mountain pool before trekking back down (a walk of about five hours, all told). Here, in the mountains of the Alto Lario, not everybody has abandoned the former farming practices and in the summer people still live up in the summer villages. Food and other essentials are winched up. Spring water is abundant. Behind the villages ancient paths lead back into the higher mountains and up to the refuges. We took a path that had been created from a terrace set into the mountainside, capped off with huge, undressed flagstones. The path has been there for so long that it has grown into the landscape. For heavy loads, there is only one viable form of transport; the donkey. And, as my picture shows, it wasn’t long before we bumped into some fine specimens. It is something of an irony that, having seen no donkeys at all in Gytheo (described in an old guidebook as the town of the donkey), I should see several here – and in good working order as well!