The Flamingo Bar

There is a bar in Brissago, the last Swiss village before the Italian border at the right coast of Lake Maggiore, called Flamingo Bar. We usually arrive Friday evening late for a weekend in Brissago (a kind of Tyler Brûlé sentence, Brissago replaced with St. Moritz or Tokyo). It’s the only place in Switzerland where you have freie Sicht aufs Mittelmeer, not literally. We drive down the main road in Brissago and we gaze into the Flamingo Bar. We never enter. We see the people, usually only a few, drinking their beer. They look sad. We talk about going this weekend. We never go. We walk by in the late afternoon. We gaze in. We never enter. The Flamingo Bar in Brissago has become a kind of forbidden place over the length of time. You walk by, you slow down a little, but you don’t enter.

The Flamingo was closed this evening. It looks even sadder than usually.