When you first step onto the Floating Piersfinally step onto the Floating Piers, on what is inevitably a blazingly hot day—it mostly feels like stepping onto an inflatable raft, one that's resting in the shallow surf that's just kicked up the beach on Long Island or the Jersey Shore: They're bouncy, with some give underfoot, and they bob up and down as waves and wakes bump past.

Only this raft is wrapped in bright-orange fabric that we've all agreed to call saffron, and it's laid upon Lake Iseo, about 40 miles east of its celebrity cousin, Lake Como, and, if the trains are running properly, which they're not, just over two hours from Milan's immense, Fascistically neoclassical central station. They're also, unlike at the busiest day at Main Beach, crowded by thousands and thousands of other people.

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"The Floating Piers"—three kilometers of these saffron-colored waterbound walkways, in Northern Italy's gorgeous Lake District—is Christo's latest installation, 11 years after he draped Central Park in similarly colored fabric for his monumental "The Gates" and also seven years after the death of his wife and collaborator, Jean-Claude. He's 81 years old, and his pieces, with their engineering feats and bureaucratic permissions, take decades to mount, so it may well be his finalwork. When I saw the Piers on the front page of the Times two Thursdays ago, I knew I wanted to visit them. They'd only be up for 16 days, closing this Sunday.

I wanted to walk on water.

And walking on water, as it turned out, was easy. Getting to the water was the challenge.

I arrived at Milan's Malpensa Airport last Friday and discovered on touchdown two news items: One, announced by the pilot, that Brexit had passed, and the other, forwarded from the Times by my parents, that the Piers were receiving twice the anticipated volume of visitors, close to 100,000 per day. I soon enough also learned that Trenord, which operates regional trains in Lombardy, was closed by a planned, one-day strike. I'd decided that training would be a better bet than driving—where would all those cars park in those tiny towns?—but no trains meant no trek to Sulzano, the village at which the Piers begin, that day. I checked into my hotel, visited the Duomo, and then took a nap. I'd try the next day.

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Saturday morning I caught a 10:15 train from Milano Centrale. You ride from Milan to Brescia, where you transfer to a tiny train to take you up the spur into the mountains. The trains are, I discovered, un-air-conditioned. It was rising to 90-plus degrees. I arrived in Brescia to a jam-packed station, announcements in Italian, and a notice, also in Italian, on the digital displays. I neither speak nor read the language, but I got the vibe: The Floating Piers were too crowded, so they weren't letting any trains up. It was not an unreasonable position, but also one that would have been nice to know before I'd left Milan. Rumor was that they might start sending trains in the afternoon, and so, turning lemons into limoncello, I went into Brescia, pastel-colored and lovely, with a duomo that boasts the third largest dome in Italy, to wander a bit and have lunch. When I returned to the station around 3, there were smaller crowds, and unhappy Trenord staffers. No Sulzano trains for the rest of the day, some gestures and grunts confirmed. (As did the English version of the Trenord webpage, which blamed both crowds and weather.) I caught the next train back to Milan. The weather remained fine.

Sunday I played Milan tourist—the stalls of La Scala are truly beautiful!—and Monday I was on an 8:50 from Milano Centrale. Made Brescia, with some delays, around 10:30. And then proceeded to get on line. And wait. The trains north to Sulzano left every half-hour or so, and each featured three cars, for a total of maybe 250 passengers. At 12:32, finally, I was aboard and in motion. The half-hour ride somehow took an hour—until this trip, I'd never truly understood the power of trains running on time as an Italian political platform—and finally, around 1:30, we arrived in Sulzano. I got off the train and followed the saffron-bricked road.

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Christo's conception of the Floating Piers is as, his materials say, simply an extension of the streets. The saffron cloth runs through Sulzano, the saffron cloth runs onto the water, the saffron cloth continues across Monte Isola, the mountain island town in the middle of Lake Iseo, the saffron cloth goes further into the lake, where it surrounds—but does not touch—the tiny, private Isola di San Paolo, on which sits an isolated mansion, something out of Patricia Highsmith. That's true, to a point, but they're also a tourist trap. (Raise your hand if you've flown in from New York on a whim!) You less meander down the block from the Sulzano train station onto the floating walkway than you shuffle from holding pen to holding pen, herded into place. There is an idea that you'll take in the experience, that you'll float across the lake, in splendid isolation; in fact, traversing Sulzano is not entirely unreminiscent of traversing Times Square.

But then, finally, you are on the piers, and there are people all around you, but also, especially on the parts between Monte Isola and Isola di San Paolo, there sort of aren't. There are pockets of emptiness, moments of wonder. It is extraordinary. You take pictures, you walk down the middle of the pier, you get close to the damp edge. Occasionally, you trip. (Saffron fabric has a way of bunching up.) You bounce as you walk. You jump a little, and you hear water splashing beneath the raft as it hits the surface. You feel it float up and down, but never move an inch left or right, as though the piers are affixed to the lakebed by giant poles that extend and retract but permit no lateral movement. You notice a grid of disc-shaped indentions across the piers, and you realize the best analogy is that you are walking on Christo's Aerobed. (No doubt his guests sleep on saffron sheets.) You Instagram, of course.

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And you wander for a few hours, relaxed. All the visitors are relaxed. It's a beautiful day, in a beautiful place, and, there you are, walking on water. There's a lot of Italian being spoken, a good amount of French, some pockets of German, even a bit of Hebrew. I heard almost no one speaking English, which may or may not have been related to Brexit but was certainly a notable Brabsence. The entirely experience is remarkeably calm—even, as the kids say, chill. No one is running, no one is yelling, no one has complained—not here, and not, I realize, on the crowded piers, on the slow, hot train, during the interminable wait in Brescia.

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It had occurred to me, sometime during the train journey, that the Floating Piers could have been even more enjoyable in a country that understands efficiency, or crowd control. There are pretty lakes in the Adirondacks. But such a country, I also realized, would likely have tort laws and risk management. ("So these people are just going to float in the middle of a lake, with no guardrails?") The Floating Piers, with their crowds and their slow commutes, work best in a place okay with crowds, comfortable with slow trains. They're sweetest where the vita is already dolce.

I waited for three trains out of Sulzano to pass before I could get onto one. We got into Brescia just after a Milan train was scheduled to depart. But that was okay: The previous one was running 55 minutes late, and it pulled in just as I reached the platform. Water can turn to wine.