In Göschenen, the steady climb up the Reuss Valley comes to an end; the train accelerates- and disappears almost immediately into a tunnel which, since 1882, has provided the fastest and most reliable link between German-speaking Switzerland and the Tieino, the Italian-speaking part. After exactly 10 minutes of darkness the train emerges into dazzling light and the Ticino, the sunniest part of Switzerland, the long-awaited South.

It is not as warm as all that, though. In fact, it can get pretty cold and foggy up here in Airolo, 1,142 metres (3,747 ft) above sea-level; the winters are harsh, and even in summer the weather in the valleys in the northern part of the Ticino never gets as hot as it does in the south. This was actually an advantage in the days when people went to mountain health resorts for the summer rather than to the Adriatic: the first hotels in Faido and in the Blenio Valley were built around the turn of the century for wealthy visitors from Milan and Lugano, who came here looking for an opportunity to cool down and see the thundering waterfalls, a common natural feature in the Ticino: from time to time, one or two major thunderstorms travel across this landscape, generally considered so pastoral, and fill the Ticino River with floodwater, boulders, debris and fallen wood, tearing away parts of roads and bridges and, more often than not, flooding the Magadino Plain.

No wonder, therefore, that the old traditional settlements and villages, the Romanesque churches and the many small baroque chapels are located so high up the mountain slopes. They seem to cling to the sides of the valley in fear. The former tobacco-growing areas in the Mendrisiotto, and the Magadino Plain, which used to be swampland before it was drained, are the main areas of fiat land that are fertile and agriculturally cultivable in the canton.

The Ticino is, first and foremost, a mountainous canton. It is fortunate to have been blessed with a number of attractive features as far as its geology and natural history are concerned. Among these are the two lakes at the foot of the Alps where the Ticino borders on Italy: Lake Maggiore, broad and majestic, nestling among the last of the Alpine foothills, and the contorted and somewhat confusing Lake Lugano, which lies between the majestic peaks of Monte Bra, San Salvatore, San Giorgio and Monte Generoso. Incidentally, in the Ticino it is still possible to find seemingly endless and wonderfully quiet valleys filled with sunshine and sub-Alpine vegetation, crossed by extensive, if semi-overgrown, footpaths, and these can be just a few kilometres from noisy motorways, railways and all the other intrusive accoutrements of Western civilisation. Here, the gentle hills of the Mend-risiotto already mark the transition to the fertile plain of the Po, as you cross into northern Italy. Then, of course, there' s the local climate, too: the annual average temperature here is some 3°C higher than in the north of the country, and spring often begins as early as March; the autumn lasts longer, too, with the warm days often extending into November - all of which is very good for Mefiot, the most commonly found wine in the Ticino.

A land of emigrants: Of course, man has never lived by balmy air and lush-green slopes alone, and that includes the people of the Ticino. The aspects of the local way of life that foreigners and German-Swiss have consistently idealised - the contented simplicity, the busecca (entrail-and-vegetable soup) and the goat's cheese which goes so well with bread for supper- have often been nothing more than characteristics of a life of great poverty and hardship lived out with dignity and decency. In fact, for centuries the history of the Ticino has been predominantly one of continuous emigration.

An initial phase of industrialization from the mid-19th century onwards, which made German and French-speaking Switzerland relatively prosperous, by passed the valleys of the Ticino, and when a comparatively modest tobacco and silk industry was established towards the end of the 19th century it was mainly because the area had such a large pool of cheap labour. Even the construction of the St Gotthard railway tunnel in 1882 did little to change things in the early years (though it did gradually turn Lugano and Locarno into tourist resorts).

For the large majority of the population, nothing really changed for the better: between 1881 and 1930 alone, a total of 25,300 inhabitants emigrated abroad. Right up until the 1950s, a trip to the Ticino was still considered to be a trip back into a different era and a much simpler way of life.

Now all that has radically changed. The villages in the valleys are all still there - romantic and sleepy - but many of their former inhabitants have emigrated - not to Australia this time, but to the overcrowded industrial areas around Lugano, Locarno, Bellinzona and Mendrisio-Chiasso. Four-fifths of the population of 290,000 and 90 per cent of the available jobs are crammed into approximately 14 per cent of the canton, within easy reach of the main traffic arteries.

Meanwhile Swiss-Germans, Germans and other strangers to the area are venturing into the mountain villages and rustici in the valleys, and are having the deserted houses and former stables convened into smart new holiday homes -which, of course, are only ever used for a few weeks in the year. If one includes the new buildings constructed since the 1970s, then every fourth house in the Ticino turns out to be a holiday home. As a result, locals are having increasing difficulty finding inexpensive places in which to live because of the massive rise in the cost of land.

Other changes have also affected the area, and not all of them depressive. Many factors have transformed the Ticino into a centre of finance and services: radically improved transport facilities, such as the international airport at Lugano and the direct motorway connection with the rest of Switzerland and Milan; the fact that manpower in the canton is still relatively cheap; the fact that Italians willingly commute across the border to work here; Swiss reliability; the Ticino's long tradition of producing the bulk of the country's lawyers; the social unrest of the 1960s, and the flood of capital into Switzerland associated with it.

Thus, in only 15 years, the city of Lugano has seen its very own banking quarter spring up, and flanking the motor-way through Mendrisiotto and beyond Lugano are a string of warehouses. Meanwhile, storehouses, lawyers' offices, banks, insurance companies and an ever growing number of filling stations (the Ticino comes second only to Geneva in the number of cars it contains) employ some 56 per cent of the canton's workforce, half of which is made up of frontier commuters and foreigners who reside here.