The Swiss are notoriously obsessive, not to mention rule-abiding, and so the car we’re taking to Italy has to be fully prepared: new, big ‘CH’ sticker, fluorescent jackets as required by Italian law, in case passengers have to stand around after a breakdown (every European country has different requirements), overlapping maps of Switzerland and Italy, water, soft drinks, rival piles of CDs, tents, sleeping bags.

The internet tells me the drive from Basel to Milan — our first destination in Italy — takes just three hours and 40 minutes, but my Swiss friends are not planning to take the direct route. By three in the afternoon we’ve taken our place in the orderly, moving jigsaw that is a major Swiss highway: slow lane on the right, normal lane in the middle, overtaking lane on the left. The rule is you stick to the middle lane, moving into the fast lane only to overtake, after which you return to the middle lane and keep driving at a sedate 120 kilometres per hour. The people who don’t follow this are the barbaric Germans in their fat-tyre SUVs and sports-cars; apparently the Dootschlis become irritated as soon as they cross over from their unlimited-speed autobahn network, and they show this by hogging the fast lane in a constant overtake mode at 150-160 kmph until they smell a police camera. The friend who’s driving deals with all this as I gawp at the famous scenery. Soon we have sped our way into central Switzerland, lakes on one side, peaks with shrunken snow-caps towering above, greens hills of different hue rising and falling alongside.

We are taking the A2 highway and heading for the Gotthard Road Tunnel which bores nearly 17 kilometres through the massif. Though the road tunnel was only completed in 1980, the railway tunnel, finished back in 1882, was an amazing feat of engineering, finished at the cost of many deaths, a strike crushed by the Swiss army and the death of the engineer Louis Favre who surveyed the mammoth project. The story goes that when the two sides digging into the mountain from north and south finally got to each other, Favre’s pre-GPRS, pre-computer calculations were only a few centimetres off. Today, as we approach Gotthard, the electronic signs above the road are repeatedly flashing the word ‘Stau’ and the figure of ‘7km’. A stau is a traffic-jam, or, in this case, a seven km-long build up of slowed traffic at the mouth of the tunnel. “Ach, everyone in Europe has the same idea, to go to Italy today!” the driver mutters. “We take some more scenery and go over the pass.”

As we leave the highway and snake our way up to the Gotthard pass that peaks at 2000 metres, the temperature drops. Soon we are passing packed slabs of dirty ice, stuff that has survived from the winter that now seems so long ago. In about an hour we are twisting down into the canton of Ticino. The road signage is now all in Italian, as is the traffic-patter on the radio stations. As the first signs for Locarno and Lugano appear, I realize we have almost traversed Switzerland from north to south, 260 odd kilometres, some of it pretty mountainous, in just over two hours of stress-free driving; had we taken the tunnel on a less busy day we’d have made it in about 90 minutes.

We decide to spend the night at Locarno and head for Milan the next day, after taking a look at the famous lakes between Switzerland and Italy. Locarno is ferociously expensive, especially in this high season, but someone knows a camping area and that’s where we head. Not having camped since my schooldays I’m imagining a grassy slope, meat sizzling on a camp-fire, strategic bushes beyond which there might be an open-air toilet-spot with an amazing view, and so on. Foolish. The camping site turns out to be a parking lot for camper-vans. And it costs — this is Switzerland, after all. We park and pitch tent before heading to the town.

Locarno is splendidly laid out, its curve of lights competing with a fat, rising moon. The forest of sailboats bobs whitely on the deep dusk blue of Lake Maggiore. Everywhere we see preparations for the film festival that will start in two weeks’ time. Walking past the huge projection booth being set up in the main square, I do a silent salaam to all the lucky so-and-sos of Indian art cinema who’ve come here over the last few decades, the great ones, the good ones and the strutting peacocks of mediocrity as well (‘ebaar Locarno tey khub bhaalo reaction pelaam…’, very good reaction at Locarno this time…), on this balmy evening, in this postcard-pretty extortionate tourist-trap, I feel warmly towards all of them without discrimination.

The next morning, I crawl out of my tent into a strange reality. All around me is a town perched on wheels. Rows and rows of trailers and cottage-sized tents complete with tiny patios and cloth awnings. Through this colony, early rising older people, already in their swim-wear, make their slow way to the toilets and showers. Little kids loll around, chewing absently on their bicycle handlebars. A few of the dwellings show signs of life, a table being unfolded, coffee brewing here, eggs frying there, someone hanging up the washing, the buzz of a hair-dryer. It’s strange to be here, seeing, hearing and smelling people’s early morning intimate actions and I realize I’m actually in a sort of middle-class, European, automotive-tourist slum.

For those of us without an en suite kitchen the only option is to join the queue of slight grumpy people waiting for the camp café and supermarket to open. Business commences at 8 am and I pick up coffee and croissants to take back to our plot. By now the campsite is teeming with loud activity. The early leavers fire up their engines and lumber out from under the plane trees, the swimmers make a beeline for the vast mirror of the lake, the camp staff chug about on little tractor-vehicles. It’s a completely new world for me, this over-equipped American camping culture transplanted to the centre of Western Europe.

In a couple of hours, however, we are in a totally different universe, driving along the lake shore at Lugano looking for a place to stop and have a coffee. After a few minutes we realize it’s going to be impossible to park anywhere in this tiny fortress of world poshness; every parking spot is either occupied or forbidden. We inch along behind the expensive cars, past the discreetly scaled designer stores and shamelessly opulent cafes. On one side, the expanse of Lago Lugano glitters in the noon sun while the facades of august hotels glare down at us from the other. Despite the pretence at ease and openness, it’s clear we’ve stumbled into an extremely exclusive club: people who need to park their itinerant cars are not welcome here.

After half an hour of this, we head for Lake Como, winding our way up the hills past some of the most expensive properties in the world, the discreet gates almost disappearing into the hill foliage, a villa fleetingly visible through a protective screen of high trees, and, below us, the sheen of the lake shifting as we climb. At some point we go through one of the most porous borders on the planet, the Swiss uniforms completely unconcerned about people ejecting themselves from paradise, the Italian guards too busy discussing Berlusconi or Balotelli to pay us much mind.

The northern Italy which I’m aching to finally see is the Italy of the old suspects Michelangelo, Leonardo, Caravaggio and Botticelli, the Italy of the cinema, of Antonioni, Fellini and Pasolini. But as the sun starts flickering through the pillars supporting an overhang along the lake, I realize I’m being welcomed by a different country. I send a text to i offspringi: “On one of the highways where I think they filmed the car chase in James Bond film.” Reply: “Mad! Which film?” “Quantum of Solace, I think.” “Cool! You near lake Como?” “Yup.” “Oceans 12”. Yes indeed, Lake Como where they filmed the end of Ocean’s Twelve in George Clooney’s mansion. Maybe it’s the Italian sun, maybe it’s the weight of long-hoarded, unwieldy expectations, but I suddenly feel all the different irrealities accordioning in my head, the swirl of the road up to the Gotthard pass, the basti of the Lugano campsite, the anally controlled luxury that is Lugano, and now that we’ve made the skip between Porlezza and Menaggio, the ludicrous, azure beauty of Lake Como.