At the head of the Valle di Blenio, above the village of Campo, the road climbs in hairpins until the trees thin out and the lake appears. Lago di Luzzone lies at about sixteen hundred metres, closed at its lower end by a concrete dam and surrounded by steep mountains, green with pasture up to a certain height and then grey rock. On a summer day the water has a colour that is hard to describe, a dark turquoise that belongs neither to the sky nor to the mountains. A few white clouds drift over the ridges. The afternoon is long, and the light shifts slowly across the slopes opposite.
The first time you come up here, what you mostly see is the spectacle. The colour of the lake, the height of the peaks, the silence. It is a strong impression, but a vague one: you go home feeling you have seen something beautiful, without being able to say exactly what.
On later visits something else happens. The lake does not become less beautiful. It becomes more precise.
A lake that was not there
Lago di Luzzone is younger than it looks. It is a reservoir: the dam was completed in 1963, and in the late 1990s it was raised by seventeen metres, to a height of two hundred and twenty-five. Its downstream face now carries one of the tallest artificial climbing walls in the world, with hundreds of holds fixed to the concrete.
Most people only find this out after a few visits. The first time, the lake seems eternal, as old as the mountain. Then you start to notice the pale line the water leaves on the shore when the level drops, the way the lake changes shape between spring and autumn, the grey wall that holds it back. None of this takes away from the place. If anything it makes it more interesting: you begin to understand what you are looking at.
A single visit produces a photograph, a memory, an impression. Returning produces something harder to name: a relationship, perhaps, or more precisely the kind of knowledge that only builds up through repeated presence. You start to know what the lake looks like early in the morning, before the first cars arrive, and at the end of the season, when the water draws back and the pastures around it turn yellow. You learn which bend in the road shows the dam first and which keeps the lake hidden until the last moment.
That is the difference between seeing a place and beginning to read it.
Legibility
In 1960 the American urban planner Kevin Lynch published a book that would become a classic, The Image of the City. For five years he and his colleagues had asked people in Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles to describe their city, to sketch its map from memory, to talk through their daily routes.
From those interviews Lynch drew an idea he called legibility: the ease with which the parts of a place can be recognised and organised into a coherent pattern. A legible city is one you can find your way around, where streets, edges, districts, junctions and landmarks form a picture the mind can hold together.
Lynch was mainly writing about how cities are built. But his interviews show something else as well: legibility depends not only on the place but on the person looking at it, and on how many times they have looked. The same junction that is a tangle to a visitor is a precise landmark to someone who crosses it every day. Familiarity does not take the shape out of things. It gives them shape.
What an expert sees
In 1973 the psychologists William Chase and Herbert Simon, of Carnegie Mellon University, ran an experiment that became famous. They showed chess players of different strengths a board for a few seconds, set up with a position from a real game, and then asked them to reconstruct it from memory. The masters recalled far more pieces than the beginners.
The decisive detail came next. When the pieces were placed at random, with no sense of play, the masters’ advantage almost disappeared. Their memories were no better. They simply saw differently. Where a beginner saw twenty scattered pieces, a master recognised a handful of familiar patterns, each with a meaning. Back in the 1940s the Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot, himself a chess player, had noticed something similar: grandmasters did not calculate more moves than other players, but they saw almost at once the ones that mattered.
That is what happens to anyone who keeps returning to a place. The first time, Lago di Luzzone is a sheet of water surrounded by mountains. After a few years it becomes a set of distinct things. The gully that holds its snow until June, say, the path that runs from the dam towards the head of the valley, the hour when the shadow of the ridge reaches the water, the spot where the wind first ruffles the surface. None of these things is new. They were there the first time too. What was missing was the eye to see them.
The same façade thirty times
In 1892 and 1893 Claude Monet rented rooms opposite Rouen Cathedral and painted it more than thirty times. Always the same façade, almost always from the same angle. Only the hour and the weather changed: grey morning, full midday, the pink light of evening, fog. He went on working on the canvases in his studio at Giverny, and in 1895 he exhibited around twenty of them in Paris.
To anyone who walked past the cathedral once, that façade always looked the same. Monet, who looked at it every day, knew it never was. He was not searching for a new subject. He was learning to see the one in front of him.
There is a remark often attributed to Monet: nature never stands still. But to notice it, you have to stand still in front of the same thing for long enough.
When habit dulls
It would be too easy, though, to say that familiarity always makes things more visible. Often it does the opposite. In 1917 the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky, in an essay called Art as Device, described with almost brutal precision what habit does to perception. The things we see every day, he wrote, gradually stop being seen. We recognise them without looking at them, the way we recognise a word without reading it letter by letter. Habit devours objects, clothes, furniture, even the people closest to us.
For Shklovsky, this was exactly why art existed: to give us back the sensation of things, to make the stone stony again. He called it estrangement, the ability to look at what we know as if we were seeing it for the first time.
So there is a familiarity that blinds and a familiarity that illuminates. The difference lies not in the number of visits but in the way we return. Those who come back distracted see less and less: the lake becomes background, then nothing. Those who come back attentive see more and more: the lake becomes a text, with a grammar that can be learned a little at a time. Monet in front of the cathedral was not used to the façade. He was studying it.
Travelling a good deal in Concord
In 1854 Henry David Thoreau published Walden, his account of the two years he spent in a cabin beside a small lake in Massachusetts. In the first chapter he wrote a sentence that still sounds almost provocative today: “I have travelled a good deal in Concord.” Concord was his home town, a few square miles of fields, woods and ponds.
Thoreau was not against travel. He was making a different point: that you can travel in depth as well as in distance. That a place known inch by inch, season after season, can reveal more than ten places visited in a hurry. He sounded the depth of his pond, recorded the day it froze and the day the ice broke up, and knew its trees one by one.
Today the culture of travel nearly always pushes us the other way: new places, new experiences, lists of places to see at least once in a lifetime. There is nothing wrong with that. But we risk forgetting the other half of knowledge, the half that only comes from going back.
What returning makes possible
At this journal, Calm Performance is our name for a way of working that judges performance partly by what it manages to preserve: energy, attention, clarity. Constant novelty drains all three. Every new place, every new project, every new tool asks us to start again from scratch working out where we are. Familiarity, by contrast, frees attention: once we no longer have to decode the whole, we can finally see the details.
A few simple choices follow. The first: have a few places to return to, a lake, a path, a neighbourhood, and actually go back, in different seasons. The second: go back attentively, asking each time what is different, rather than confirming what you already know. The third: apply the same principle at work. The client you have known for years, the project you have followed for a long time, the craft you have practised all your life are no less interesting than new ones. Often they are the only ones where you see enough to make a difference. Someone who knows the ground well notices the small signals first: a change of tone, a risk drawing closer, an opportunity others miss.
And a fourth: be wary of the idea that knowing something well means having exhausted it. It is usually the reverse. Only once the whole becomes familiar do things really begin to stand apart.
What was always there
Back at Lago di Luzzone. It is late afternoon, and the shadow of the western ridge has begun to cross the water. The mountains are the same as last time, and the time before. The lake is the same. And yet today you notice something you had never noticed: a reflection, a line of snow, the different colour of the water close to the shore.
It is not the lake that has changed. It is our gaze, finally reaching it.
Perhaps this is the quietest gift of the places we return to. They promise no surprises, and that is precisely why they keep providing them. They do not ask to be discovered, only to be visited again. And each time they give back a measure of ourselves: how much we have learned to see, what we have become able to notice, which part of the landscape has at last opened up.
Lago di Luzzone was here before the first visit and will be here after the last. The dam, the mountains, the colour of the water do not depend on who arrives. The things that never left are not the things we overlooked. They are the things that were always here, at a depth that takes more than one visit to begin to reach.
