Winterlust. Bernd Brunner

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      LONG AGO, DEALING with winter meant escaping from it as much as possible. People either huddled around warm hearths or took to bed to stay warm, or they distanced themselves from winter by moving to places where its influence was not as intensely felt. Mountain farmers descended into valleys; other people became winter nomads, seeking places where they could be warm. During the cold, dark season, well-to-do citizens and pensioners, often with some excuse of lung disease, rheumatism, weak nerves, flu, or simply boredom, escaped to the coast in southern France or to the lakes in northern Italy. The Greek islands also beckoned. Doctors prescribed a winter in the south for rich patients suffering from winter depression.

      In the late nineteenth century, in the southern foothills of the Alps just before you reach Milan, Ticino, the southernmost canton in Switzerland, solidified its reputation as a “sun room.” Carefully compiled climate data broadcast in the newspapers helped advertise the region as an alternative to the European winter. Expensive hotels were built. Here, the history of winter intersected with that of a mythic South. Palm trees, mimosas, and eucalyptus—not native to the area, but deliberately planted—created the impression of a landscape located much farther away. Railway connections followed: from 1864, Nice, on the French Riviera, was accessible by train, and Menton, somewhat farther east, on the Italian border, was connected in 1868. Afforded protection by the Maritime Alps, the region enjoys especially mild weather—with thermometers rarely registering temperatures below freezing—and an almost complete absence of snow.

      Considering winter as a season to be avoided goes back many centuries. In ancient times, mountainous regions, higher latitudes, and the cold were associated with invading barbarian hordes, and these associations carried over to the cold time of year. It took the introduction of modern heating systems for people to begin to look upon the season more favorably. If you have the opportunity to come inside to warm up, going outside into the cold seems a much more attractive proposition. In the absence of reliable heat, people accepted that winter was something they had to deal with as best they could. Ivan Turgenev wrote to Gustave Flaubert on February 20, 1870, from the Hôtel de Russie in Weimar: “I have been here for about ten days and my sole preoccupation is keeping warm. The houses are badly built here, and the iron stoves are useless.”

      But at some point things took an important turn—at least for those who had either the resources to be cozy or the constitutions to enjoy the cold. In the nineteenth century, people began to sing winter’s praises, among them English essayist Thomas De Quincey, who observed: “Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o’clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.” And Ralph Waldo Emerson later wrote: “I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of summer.”

      The American Romantic author James Russell Lowell went even further, attempting a radical reinterpretation in his essay “A Good Word for Winter”: “Suppose we grant that Winter is the sleep of the year, what then? I take it upon me to say that his dreams are finer than the best reality of his waking rivals.” Spring, according to Lowell, is but a “fickle mistress who either does not know her own mind, or is so long in making it up, whether you shall have her or not have her, that one gets tired at last of her pretty miffs and reconciliations.” Summer, he feels, has lost “that delicious aroma of maidenhood,” and fall “gets you up a splendor that you would say was made out of real sunset; but it is nothing more than a few hectic leaves, when all is done.” He extols snow as a healing power that covers every wound in the landscape and softens every angle. He praises its sometimes pale-blue, sometimes soft-pink surfaces and composes a hymn for wet snow falling in large flakes out of a calm sky. “For exhilaration,” he added, “there is nothing like a stiff snow-crust that creaks like a cricket at every step, and communicates its own sparkle to the senses. The air you drink is frappé, all its grosser particles precipitated, and the dregs of your blood with them. A purer current mounts to the brain, courses sparkling through it, and rinses it thoroughly of all dejected stuff.”

      It doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that Henry David Thoreau recognized the redemptive value of exposing oneself to harsh winter: “Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”