The Lakes of Upper Italy

I.

THEY lie in the lap of the mountains like jewels dropped from the sky, and Nature has lavished her love and man his labor on the setting. By political geography they belong in part to Switzerland ; but if there be any force in the theory of natural boundaries, the Alps bar her claim with tremendous emphasis, and in climate, scenery, religion, custom, and speech they are Italian. No sooner does the traveler by the St. Gothard railway reach Locarno, the first station on Lago Maggiore, than he finds another heaven and another earth from those which vanished when he entered the great tunnel, a few hours earlier. The mountain peaks are sharper and more serrate, the curves and indentations of the shore more delicate, the outlines of the landscape more finished and perfect; the light is at once softer and more splendid, the sky has a deeper and more tender blue, the verdure is richer and darker; the very weeds give the wayside the grace of a garden run wild. Already there are terraced vineyards to be seen, and vines trained over a sort of trellised arbor called pergola, the supports of which are stone, — one of the most ancient modes of growing grapes in Italy, - and orange walks, hanging gardens, arcades of shrubbery, walls of evergreen, stone stairways and balustrades, pillars, vases and fountains among the flower beds, a different cultivation, a different style of gardening, which adorns the humblest plot. The gleaming towns upon the water’s edge have irregular tiers of red-tiled roofs, broken by arched porticoes in the attic story, by slender Lombard bell-towers, cupolas, long, blank palace-fronts, — a different architecture. All this can be seen from Locarno, which is yet but a poor place compared with the towns lower down the lake. It is worth while to stop there, though, to wash off the dust of the long journey in great white marble bath-tubs, of antique form, filled with cool, diamond-clear water, and to rest and attune the spirit to a softer key. There is a new hotel, a remarkably fine building, with a lofty hall of entrance, from each end of which a marble staircase leads to galleries with balusters, colonnades rising one above the other, and intersecting long perspectives, like the backgrounds of Paul Veronese’s banquet pictures; — a Palladian interior, every corridor ending in an arch draped with muslin embroidered in Oriental patterns, through which a mellow picture of lake and mountain is visible.

At Locarno, moreover, there is the first glimpse of the art of Lombardy, in which some of the towns on the smaller lakes are so rich, and which has adorned the entire region with countless churches and palaces. The front of the Chiesa Nuova is by Tommaso Rodari, the foremost of three brothers who have left their mark on the architecture and sculpture of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries throughout Northern Italy. In the pilgrimage church of the Madonna del Sasso (Our Lady of the Rock), half an hour’s walk above the town, the mild Luini’s influence is seen in an altar-piece by one of his followers. I trudged up to this sanctuary one afternoon, to be rewarded by the expedition itself beyond my expectations, which were not great. Two deep gorges bring down two noisy, demonstrative brooks by so precipitous a path that the water is ready to leap into cascades at every step, until they unite and seek the lake together. Up the strip of wooded rock between them, which rises higher and higher, broadening until it joins the mountain, winds the way to the church. It is very steep and laid in cordonate, a pavement of cobble-stones crossed by a curb at every few feet, much like a railway track, ballast and sleepers, without rails, raised to an angle of seventy degrees from the level; the curbs are about as far apart as cross-ties, and it is as hard to walk either upon or between them. The pilgrimage to the Madonna del Sasso should be made by all but penitents only after the sun has sunk behind the western mountains. It is a pretty walk, although disfigured by the stations of the cross at short intervals ; the wayfarer passes out of the village under a long, vine-wreathed pergola, then over a bridge, then up the narrow hillside, between the ravines, to the foot of the foundation-walls of the building, and by a few more sharp twists to the solitary little stone piazza from which he enters the church. It dates from a miraculous appearance of the Virgin four hundred years ago, but has few signs of its age : within it is as freshly gilded, painted, and frescoed as a hotel dining-room, and is in so far a surprise after the lonely scramble beside the bed of the torrent. I reached it at the hour of the Ave Maria. The church was empty save for a woman and two children, who were kneeling together telling their beads. There was a murmur of prayers and responses uttered by two invisible ministrants ; the voices seemed to come from behind the high altar, but priest or acolyte there was none to be seen. The effect was so mysterious at that sunset hour that the renovated church grew venerable to the quickened sense of awe. After the last amen, while looking for the Luini scholar’s painting, I came upon a picture of the Entombment, a work of considerable beauty and religious feeling, by a Signor Cerusi, of Florence, as my fellow-worshiper told me. A modern picture from our Saviour’s history, painted with talent and skill, yet reverently, and hidden in a side-chapel of this inaccessible and unvisited little church, was a strange thing and worth coming to find. The view of the lake from the steps is fine, and still better from a little pillared side-porch, which looks as if it were the oldest part of the building, and overhangs the landscape like the parapet of a castle. The scene was very lovely : the peaks were pale rose-color, and a bluish moisture, like the dew on dark grapes, rested upon the surface of the lake.

There is an older and more interesting church on the outskirts of the town, near the railway station, bearing an indelible stamp of long-past times, notwithstanding many restorations. Set into the side of its rough square tower is a fine equestrian statue of St. Victor in alto-rilievo of the quattro cento, a stiff but striking figure, distinguished by the unsophisticated genius of that age, which lost its simplicity so rapidly in the following century. On each side of the principal doorway there is an inscription of startling import. One is in memory of Margherita Paganetti, “sweet, loyal, tender, an angel of consolation to the poor, the delight of her husband, the dearest hope of her children, who in the forty-second year of her age fell a victim to the most detestable treachery; her last articulate accents being, ‘Pardon.’” The other is to Giovanni Battista Giacometti, “ a patrician of Æschina, disideratissimo per pieta e schietezza, a true master of arts and learning, who died a violent death. . . . The prayers of his widow and sons are offered for his undaunted soul ” (pro anima sua intemerata). As the church is in a sequestered situation, although the haunts of men are not far off, and from the spot where the traveler reads these ominous tablets he can see only high walls shutting in lonely roads, it gives him a shudder to learn from the last lines of the inscriptions that the victims met their fate little more than thirty years ago, which is not reassuring as to modern manners in the neighborhood ; if he is a man of imagination he goes away a little faster than he came.

Yet this is only Locarno, the threshold of the Italian lake region, and few people will be tempted to stop there more than a night. The little steamboats, which make the round of the lake three times a day, lose half the usual vulgarity of their species by the leisurely way in which they move from point to point; crossing and recrossing, touching at every small town, or pausing a little out from shore while a clumsy boat, with a white awning on hoops, like a Conestoga wagon, pulls off from the wharf to exchange passengers. The motley crowd on deck is not vulgar, either, until September brings the full tide of travel. At one place three peasant women, two of them handsome, clamber on board from the row-boat: one wears a bright flowered headkerchief, another a black lace veil ; the third is bare-headed, and her thick coil of plats is stuck about close with big, flat, round-headed silver skewers, forming an obscure halo to her Madonna-like face. The next passengers may be a party of tourists, not unpicturesque, with sun-hats wrapped in muslin pugarees, Chinese silk coats and umbrellas, alpenstocks, and bunches of wild flowers. Then a couple of black-robed, broad-brimmed priests come aboard.

At the little quays many Italian humors are to be studied : men and women meet and embrace fondly, or part kissing and weeping without constraint, although the journey one of them is to take is no further than to the opposite shore. At one landing I saw a lean, haggard old man, of shabby-genteel aspect, with a white handkerchief in his hand, lean over the rail, looking intently at the steamboat; the white handkerchief was an unusual refinement, colored cotton ones being universally used by the poorer middle class. He seemed to be counting the passengers, for as his eyes moved along the deck he nodded and his lips moved incessantly. Suddenly, as we cast off, he caught sight of somebody, for whom perhaps he had been looking, and in an instant his face and person expressed the maddest hatred. He hissed, spat, shook his fingers, stuck them into his mouth, made the sign against the evil eye, while his poor withered features and limbs writhed and quivered with rage. As we receded he turned from the pier and tottered towards the town, shaking his head and burying his face in the conspicuous handkerchief. The necessity of Italians for expressing the emotion of the moment and their unconcern about lookers-on give every-day life among them a dramatic interest for us of a colderblooded and more reticent race. One never knows what tragedy or comedy may be enacted before one’s eyes at any minute.

An hour after leaving Locarno the lake is in view in the utmost length and breadth that can be seen from any point. It is majestic among its grand, encompassing mountains, which crowd closer as we advance; the nearer ones dark green, the further ones purple. As we traverse the water from shore to shore snow-peaks rise into sight, hiding themselves behind intervening crests when the boat draws near land. I am writing of a day near the end of August, almost the only time I felt excessive heat in this part of Italy. The sky blazed like a burnished reflector, the lake glowed like molten silver and the shore like a furnace, but the cool breath of the invisible ice-mountains tempered the atmosphere. Amidst the incandescence we passed a grassy islet covered with small trees, called Isola dei Conigli (Coney Island !), showing some prosaic ruins above the verdure, but uninhabited now even by the feeble folk from whom it takes its name. On the neighboring heights there are ruined castles, always strong adjuncts to scenery; one of them, as well as the hill it stands upon, claims the archangel Michael for sponsor. Warlike Italians in the Middle Ages swore by the sword of St. Michael, and these waters and marges must often have reechoed the oath; for they have a long, bloody history, beginning with the Gauls and not ending with Garibaldi. One cares little for dates and facts in Italy; the enjoyment of the moment asks and gains nothing directly from association ; there, as everywhere else in Central Europe, natural beauty is enhanced by the mere consciousness of a great past. It is worth recalling, however, that Frederic Barbarossa abode in more than one of those crumbling piles, and that two hundred years before his day the small town of Maccagno was known as Corte Imperiale, in honor of the great emperor Otho, who sojourned there during a campaign against the Lombard King Berenger II. Maccagno is extremely picturesque, fit to be put upon the sketching block as it stands: a gray tower overtopping a yellow Renaissance church, built on a table rock rising from the lake, with a front broken by two irregular, ivied arches, its southern side bristling with aloes. Before this picture had grown dim on my mind another came into sight. Standing out against the dark green, thickly wooded slopes above Cannero, the ruins of two castles emerge from the water close together: one is formidable even in dilapidation ; the other and the stone on which it stands are so small that they look like a fragment of the original rock and fort, which have been cut off from it by a rise in the lake. They were always two, however, and were built in the very beginning of the fifteenth century by five brothers named Mazzarda, sons of a butcher. They called their stronghold Malpaga, Ill-Toll, and held the shores in terror, waging a piratical warfare against the inhabitants and everybody who ventured upon the waters. They kept their sway for ten years, every attempt to dislodge them failing, until the unhappy villagers appealed to Filippo Visconti, Duke of Milan, who came to the rescue with a flotilla and four hundred men-atarms. Even then the robbers’ kennel was not carried by assault, but was starved out after a two years’ siege. The place was impregnable, in fact, for one of the later Visconti was besieged there in 1523, and after some months the assailants were forced to withdraw.

The contrast between these violent scenes and the theatre on which they were enacted helps to throw them into remote distance. The physiognomy of the lake grows more smiling, the vegetation more luxuriant and southern, at every landing. The cypress, that most distinctively meridional tree and strongest feature of the Italian landscape, begins to appear among the masses of foliage, standing up as solid in form and color as a tree cut in stone, but soft as fur to the eye. Light-tinted towns, each with its tall, slender church-tower, are perched along the mountain sides, from the base to the top, and many a solitary convent and shrine. The finest point of the voyage is between Intra and Baveno, where the snow range of the Mischabel Alpine group is suddenly manifest as one looks skyward to the west, and the lake divides into the two great bays of Arona and Pallanza, the latter strewn with garden isles. Behind Pallanza the mountains stand back on each hand, and reveal Monte Rosa drawing a snow mantle over his black shoulders. Baveno and Stresa are also upon this bay, and great rivalry exists between the three towns, which are the favorite halting places on Lago Maggiore. Travelers who have stayed at only one of them become violent partisans of that one. Knowing them all well, I prefer Stresa, partly because the town is smaller than either of the others, and its best hotel, the Iles Borromées, stands beyond the last houses in its own pretty grounds ; still more because from this point of view the Borromean islands “ compose ” better, as painters say, on one hand with the curve in which Pallanza stands, with its long, bright lines of houses and multitudinous red roofs, and on the other with the frowning, many-peaked Sasso di Ferro, the highest mountain on the lake.

The islands are the regalia of Lago Maggiore. There are five in the Borromean group, none of which is more than a quarter of an hour’s row from the next in order. Isola San Giovanni is so near Pallanza that nothing could be easier than to join them by a bridge. IT is a mere bouquet on a rock; there is just space enough for a garden and a summer-house, but it is disfigured by an ugly villa, which Count Borromeo has built within a few years, — to spoil the prospect from the Grand Hôtel, it is said, in revenge for the proprietor’s adding a story to his house, and so shutting out the mountains from the count’s pretty casino on the island. Isola dei Pescatori (Fishermen’s Island) is about fifteen minutes by row-boat from Baveno, and is entirely covered by a fishing village. It is a delightful object: an irregular cluster of houses, of cheerful yet subdued tints, — dark red, pale yellow, gray-white, — festooned with vines and creepers, low upon the blue water, with a background of grave-toned mountains. At one end there is a quay, with a little beach, where the fishing-boats are drawn up in line as the sun goes down ; at the other, a little green with half a dozen trees, beneath which the population, from three to four hundred souls, dry their nets and take the evening air ; they must take it turn about, as there is not room for half of them. Despite the nearness of the village to the main-land, it has so truly isolated an aspect, — cooped within walls, moreover, as if the limits of the rock were not narrow enough, — that I was surprised to see two or three houses of rather elegant appearance, although not large, with embroidered muslin window-curtains and balconies full of flowers. My boatman told me that they belong to men of the island who, having made fortunes elsewhere (one of them in Manchester, England, as a picture dealer), have come back to spend the rest of their days upon their native pebble, and have built themselves “palaces,” as he termed their dwellings. The picture dealer has kept a precious Poussin for himself, the joy of his old age, and hoards it in his palace. Nothing, not even the stories of the Greenlanders’ mortal home-sickness, is a more singular and touching proof of the strength of that passion which we call love of country than the return of these wealthy people to imprison themselves in an unsavory hamlet which they might almost cover with a fishing-net.

A furlong from Isola dei Pescatori there is a heap of stones, whereon two or three slim willows wave their branches above a tuft of forget-me-nots; nobody has troubled himself to name it, but it is an excellent place to set up an easel. It lies midway between Isola dei Pescatori and the famous Isola Bella, the most overrated and berated island on the globe except Albion.

Isola Bella looks scarce ten acres in extent, but gains room by its height above the water, being terraced and every inch of its surface turned to account. On near approach by steamboat from Pallanza, the north end is seen first; and it is ugly, for nothing is visible except a palace front divided by a four-story bow, unfinished yet ruinous, and two big, square wings which might belong to a shabby hotel. Next appears a mean seventeenth-century church and a huddle of dirty little houses, most of them drinking-shops, directly at the entrance of the palace, and sticking like limpets to the base of the hanging-gardens. The Borromei have their private landing and a magnificent flight of granite steps, by which they avoid actually passing through the squalor ; but everybody else must do so as the public landing-place is in the midst of it. The fishermen who inhabit the purlieu have ancient rights of tenure, which they maintained against their noble landlord some years ago, when he tried to dislodge them. They had settled there before modern notions had taught the cleaner classes to consider such neighbors as a nuisance; they were there, in fact, before the palace, and they have the right to stay. The latter is a monstrous barrack, tasteless and comfortless, containing fine halls and galleries and some sparse magnificence, no doubt ; it is placarded inside and out with the coronet of the family and the motto Humilitas, a bequest from San Carlo, Cardinal Borromœus and Archbishop of Milan. There is quite a collection of pictures, few of them good ; a Luini, a Gaudenzio Ferrari, and two or three of the Venetian school, which one guesses to be fine, are too ill hung and lighted to be really seen. The unwilling attendant, who takes your money but shows you that he looks upon you as an intruder, and has neither time nor information to bestow upon you, cannot tell you the painters’ names, and the ink of the catalogues which lie on the tables is so faded that they are often illegible. The views from the windows are the best pictures in the place. On the ground-floor there is a suite of six or seven low rooms, exactly alike, in imitation of grottoes, with false rockwork, false shell-work, false stalactites, and false coral, a fantastic piece of bad taste. They open on a series of arcades, loftier but in the same style, which are redeemed by an unexpected, enchanting glimpse of gardens at the end of a long vista. The grounds are older than the palace, as the plan of the first Borromeo who owned the island was to make a pleasaunce with merely a pavilion. Although they are formal and artificial to the last degree, the statues, staircases, and terraces lend them a grand air, while the luxuriance and rareness of the bloom and foliage and the exquisite outlook on every side bewilder the senses. On the side towards Pallanza there is a noble group of pines. The deep seriousness of their shade heightens the joyous expression of the sunny lake the distant, smiling town, and the rich-colored mountains seen between the great columnar trunks. On the opposite side the same grade is occupied by a grove of fifty large magnolia-trees. Glimmering reflections from the water play among their dark, glossy, russetlined umbrage, filling the place with lambent lights, and flicker upon ivory, cupshaped blossoms, which linger here and there even at the end of summer. The huge, cavernous arches which support the lowermost terrace are divided from each other by gigantic intertwisted wisterias and Virginia creepers, and are curtained by masses of ivy hanging from the vaults; each recess forms a shelter for a clump of tall palms and other tropical plants. The boughs of orange and lemon trees lean over from the upper grades, golden with fruit. The shape of this big ten-terraced pyramid, rising in the centre of the gardens and filling two thirds of the area, is softened by the growth which mantles its lines and angles, and by lights and shadows which tremble over it in a constant caress. As one rows round the southern end of the island its beauty cannot be denied, but at a little distance its likeness to a wedding-cake — a comparison which has been applied to both the cathedral of Milan and Isola Bella — is also undeniable ; it looks still more like the altar of a modern Roman Catholic church, with tiers of flower-vases and images.

The queen of the group is Isola Madre, lying in the middle of the bay of Pallanza, half an hour’s pull from either shore ; larger, higher, and more irregular in outline than the others, yet keeping the dimensions of a fairy kingdom. The steep sides are thickly wooded, but the woods are opened in every direction by winding foot-paths or broad gravelwalks, leading through myrtle shrubbery, to sudden views of the lake and mountains ; by green glades starred with wild flowers; by stately balustraded stone stairways without steps, sloping from the villa and gardens down through dark, shining walls of laurel to a grand gateway on the water, surmounted by aloes and fern palms. This entrance is at the principal landing, and is not open to strangers, who come ashore at a flat rock and climb to a postern-gate, by which they gain access to the terraces. These are unusually broad, and bordered by orange and lemon trees on one hand, and on the other by wonderful oleanders, great bushy trees binding under a load of rose-colored, almond-scented blossoms. Several stages like this lead up to a little plateau brilliant with flower-beds, like a jeweler’s showcase, on which stands a small palace, turning towards the lake a long, flat, pale yellow façade, with rows of square windows. It opens on the garden by a beautiful two-story loggia, or portico, three arches supported on pillars of elegant proportions ; a high recess on each side the door being used as a fernery. The lovely sites on this little domain are inexhaustible ; in many long visits I always discovered new ones. The owners never occupy the casino, and the grounds are a nursery garden for exotic trees, some of them extremely rare and fine. One of the most charming restingplaces is a light iron balcony inclosing a square of gravel as large as an ordinary drawing-room, furnished with garden tables and chairs, roofed by the branches of a superb Australian fir, and overhanging thickets of rhododendrons, with an outlook across the water to Pallanza, which at a distance is the prettiest town on the lake. Another is a stone balcony projecting over the water, with stone table and seats of such classic models that they are worthy of an ancient temple ; two great magnolia-trees form a canopy, and frame a view of the dark Sasso di Ferro, hollowed out by primeval volcano-throes into the shape of a rude crown. More beautiful than either of these is an ivy arbor, centuries old, of gnarled, knotted stems and leafage impervious to rain or sunshine. It stands at the head of a steep, narrow flight of steps, walled in by glossy evergreens, and lightly tunneled over by trumpetcreeper, wisteria, and white roses, ending in a dazzle of water and a glimpse of distant steeps, partly wooded, partly covered by a rosy-lilac growth which overspreads them in August. The combination of orange - colored bignonias and the lavender bunches of the glycene with cascades of white roses is a favorite device of the gardeners in this region. Although the prime of the wisterias and magnolias is in the spring, they flower profusely in August and September. From the moment the season opens until winter sets its seal on the plants again they seem to feel the joy of existence, and bloom and bloom as if for the mere pleasure of it.

This luxuriance belongs to the lake shore as well as to the islands, and the former has beauties of its own. For more than twenty miles it is skirted on one hand by a fine cornice road, with villas, or wooded slopes, or cliffs tufted with herbage and wild flowers, whence trickle cool rills, and on the other by a low parapet and granite telegraph shafts, ashes of roses in color, from the quarries near Baveno, which cut the prospect into a series of pictures. The climate is delightful for a person who likes warm weather : the sun is very hot, but there is a perpetual cool, light breeze, pure and refreshing, which one tastes as if it were spring water, in walking and driving, even in the heat of the day. In a boat the refraction is oppressive from noon till an hour before sunset, but the lake road is shaded after midday by high banks and rocks to landward. I have been out on foot for hours between breakfast and five o’clock in the afternoon without wishing the temperature a degree lower, and becoming more convinced at every step that it is a mistake to come to Italy in autumn and winter rather than when it is in the flower and fervor of summer.

It does not often rain on the lakes in August and September, according to my experience: and this is fortunate, for sunlight is essential to bring out the marvelous colors of the landscape and water, which are seen at their best under a perfectly clear sky ; then the upper portion of Lago Maggiore is seagreen, and the lower and larger expanse sea-blue. But every change of weather gives it a new character. There are days when large white clouds are floating high in the air, and the lake rolls white and cerulean in alternate, undefined sheets. Under the lowering masses of cloud which sometimes gather towards sunset the expression of the scenery alters entirely : every soft feature disappears ; harsh cliffs, unnoticed before, Start into sight; the bays and headlands sternly wait for the burst of wrath from that realm of awful summits, abysses, and eternal snow beyond the nearer mountains ; the latter take a wild, changed, confused mien, as if uncertain of the part they are to play in the coming strife. When this begins after twilight it is tremendous indeed, with blinding flashes and darkness to which the intervening darkness of night is like dawn ; the thunder sounds as if it were rolling down from the mountains upon the villages, with crashes and reverberations, echoing and reëchoing, until the endless repetitions are lost in a new detonation, while torrents of rain threaten to make the lake overflow. After this uproar, the next day sometimes comes in splendid and fleckless ; but sometimes it is overcast, and the clouds, having lost their fierceness, hang low and lazy upon the hillsides, while the lake is a soft, even gray, on which the islands lie as clear as painting on porcelain. Then the fishing-boats come out in shoals, — clumsy, picturesque barks, with hoops for awnings, which are never up, but leave the frame bare, like the ribs of a wrecked craft inverted. Now and then a larger vessel passes, bearing a big tan-colored sail and an ungainly oarshaped rudder in a swivel, as long as a mast, bound on a merchant cruise to distant towns.

The bay of Arona is the least beautiful and striking limb of Lago Maggiore. As one approaches the foot of the lake the mountains recede, the hills are lower and rounder, the shore is tamer in outline. Near Meina, a lovely, slim white waterfall slips down through a gorge, but in very dry weather it disappears. Further down there is a bronze statue of San Carlo Borromeo, about a hundred and twenty feet high, including the pedestal, — a preposterous production of the latter part of the seventeenth century. It stands on a hillock on the mountain side, and is ridiculous from every point of view: there is one from which the saint looks as if he were peering down the chimney of the convent at his feet. The ruined castle of Arona, wrapped in ivy, and the mediæval fortifications of Angera, on the opposite headland, lend some character to the end of the Voyage, but its charm is gone.

Making my headquarters at Stresa, I lounged about the neighborhood on foot, or in a pony carriage, — a lucky find,— for a week or more in two successive years, making acquaintance with new scenes daily, and meeting with various little incidents on my walks and drives. The record of these wanderings made at the time probably has more of the first freshness of my impressions than a carefully prepared account of them would preserve.

“August 11, 1882. Walked in the afternoon to Belgirate, a town four or five miles from Stresa, towards the lower end of the lake. Turned off the dusty, white road into the beautiful Villa Pallavicini, full of great masses of shade and deep, grotto-like shrubbery walks; on one lawn there was an acre of hydrangeas, so closely covered with azure flowers that through intervening trees it looked like a glimpse of sky or water. Along the road the dark laurel hedges of the villas are overtopped by oleanders stooping under the weight of their Canton-crape blossoms, roseate, white, and pale pink, which are seen from below against the velvet-blue sky. The trumpet-creeper flames up the white walls with a violence of flowering and color inconceivable even in our country, where it blooms so abundantly. Things have a joy of life in this land. Rested at a wayside stone terrace above the lake, with stone seats under a thick awning of clipped locust-trees, — a halting-place for pedestrians. A peasant and his wife were passing, and I called them to sit by me. They did not complain of the sufferings of their class, although they said that work is scarce, that wages are scanty, the necessaries of lite too high, the taxes too heavy, and that bad years produce great misery. There have now been two such years running, and the harvest, which promised plenty, is being destroyed by the drought. But they told me that the government tax on the grist which went to the mill had been taken off, causing great relief. . . . Took a boat from Belgirate back to Stresa, an hour’s row. My boatman was an ex-soldier, and a person of many resources, I suspect. He had been over the Monte Motterone the day before as guide to a Milanese gentleman, an eighteen hours’ tramp there and back. He said that the work which pays best is on the railways, two lire (less than half a dollar) a day, from six A. M. to six P. M., with two hours’ rest ; for agricultural labor the wages are one lira a day, — about twenty-two cents ; a soldier’s pay is less than half a lira and no rations. People can’t live on that, he said: it is barely enough for a man alone ; if he be married, impossible. But he added that it was no worse than it had always been in his recollection; that everybody got meat on holidays (I do not know whether this included Sundays), and wine once a week, at least. He then unblushingly asked four lire for rowing me to Stresa — and got it. . . . The King of Italy was at Stresa to-day to see the Marchese Rapallo, second husband of his aunt, the Duchess of Genoa, whose villa gardens adjoin those of this hotel. He went and came very quietly in a special steamboat, which bad nothing to distinguish it except that it carried a handsome flag and a crew dressed in white. A small crowd assembled at the landing to see him come and go, but there was not a single cheer.”

“August 14th. Gray day, close but not oppressive, with random gleams of sunshine. Set out at half past nine in the morning for the lake of Orta, driving myself in a basket phaeton, with the courier in the rumble. The road follows the lake for some miles, past the base of Monte Motterone with its chestnut woods and the rose-colored granite quarries of Baveno. At the small town of Gravellona, where a milestone announces that the Simplon route begins, I turned westward and struck into a narrow green vale, shut in by craggy mountains. The way was lonely for about half an hour ; then I passed several villages drawn out on each side of the road, and picturesque in spite of themselves. There were several consequential-looking little houses, with gateposts surmounted by grotesque, dwarfish stone figures of men and women, unlike anything else I have seen in this or any other country. They are conceptions of a clumsy humor, like the offspring of Dutch or German genius, and I cannot help referring their origin to Teutonic invasion and occupation, of which many traces remain in this region. I recognize it, grudgingly, in the appearance of the peasantry. Most of the young women I met to-day had a peculiar softness in the oval of the face and outline of the features, with a fair complexion, clear, gentle eyes, and brown hair, like Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola. The children were ruddier than the mothers, of the same soft, fair type, and beautiful as little angels. After leaving the villages the road loiters up a very long but not steep hill, into a wide valley of hay-fields, studded with fine walnut and chestnut trees, through which rushes a brimming brook side by side with a glassy mill-race, and soon I came in sight of the lovely little lake of Orta.

“ The drive had taken an hour and a half. Left the phaeton at the principal inn of Omegna, the first (and I think only) town at the hither end of the lake, with explicit and emphatic orders that it should be at the door by four o’clock in the afternoon, and walked through the narrow, crooked streets and dull, sleepy market-place to the water’s edge. I never saw a municipality, or any human community, which gave me in five minutes so distinct an impression of indifference to the rest of the world. Hired a small boat, and a man to row ; the courier took an oar, and they pulled me to Orta, near the lower end of the lake, in a little over an hour. The great charm of this irregular bit of water is its seclusion and apparent remoteness from the noisy, dusty, beaten tracks. We met no boat, heard no sound except the thin voice of a chapel bell from a distant mountain ledge, and, as far as I recollect, saw no village or building, except isolated convents high up on the hillsides.

“ Orta is the prettiest, most picturesque waterside townlet, smothered in flowers; its amphibiousness gives it a gay, whimsical resemblance to Venice, such as a kitten has to a lion. Lunched at the inn, a rough but clean and friendly place; and while the meal was being got ready I climbed by the terraces of a delightful villa garden — a strange spot in a locality so out of the way — to the foot of a Monte Sacro, behind the town. It is a place of pilgrimage, and as I toiled up the steep, straight approach, an inclined plane paved with cobblestones and bordered with shock-headed locust-trees, which cast no shadow in the noon, the sight of the cool, blue lake below aggravating ray sufferings, it seemed a pity that I lacked the faith by which the sweat of my brow would wash away some of my sins. The hot ascent leads to a grassy, breezy summit, broken into knolls shaded by great branching trees and rustling laurel groves, and dotted with shrines containing terra cotta groups of incidents from the life of St. Francis Assisi. Some of them struck me as having spirit and merit, but I was too much absorbed by the beauty of the site to examine them. The hill projects into the lake, so that one sees water between the tree trunks in every direction. It was pervaded by a happy tranquillity; the solitude gave me no sense of loneliness ; its laurel-trees and little temples recalled the sacred places of classic heathendom. There was nobody to disturb its quiet except myself and a peasant, who was looking at the prospect with dreamy eyes. He said he had come from another paese (which I translate township), about twelve miles off, to see the Sacro Monte, which he had never visited before. He was not on a pilgrimage ; he had never even heard of St. Francis Assisi, although his schoolmaster had been a priest. He had heard of America, however; but to him, as to most of the rustics in Northern Italy, it means Mexico or Montevideo, whither many of them go to work on railroads. They send home money for a few months, and then die of fever.

“ Opposite Orta, in the middle of the lake, is Isola San Giulio, a cone covered with white, arcaded, red-roofed houses, terraces and garden bits rising in irregular stages to a square white convent amid tufts of dark foliage, with a waving palm on the tip-top, and reflected line for line in the water. The tiny place is very old, and has its own share of history, so I rowed over to get a nearer look at it. Found a Lombard church of great antiquity, well whitewashed, and muffled besides in shabby red damask for some festa or funzione. The capitals of the pillars are richly though rudely sculptured with Runic knots and archaic beasts ; the stone pulpit, black with age, is very curious, and in the style of that at San Ambrogio at Milan. There are a number of frescoes, nearly effaced, but very interesting. They seem to be of widely different epochs : some look almost Byzantine, but the saints have wider eyes; others recall the early Flemish masters ; and there is a chapel painted, I should think, by the oldest of the Lombard school, with faces of great purify, sweetness, and repose of expression. Wedged in among the stucco walls of more modern houses are fragments of military masonry; the remains, probably, of the stronghold of Queen Willa, the wife of Berenger, in which she was besieged for months by Otho the Great.

“ My visit to the island was cut short by a sudden change in the weather. The sky grew dark, and the lake rough. The boatman, who was surly and slippery, was prevented from starting for Omegna, and leaving me in the lurch, only by the courier’s sitting in the boat the whole time I was out of it. Rowing back we had flaws of wind and spurts of rain ; the thunder growled and roared in the gorges, and the men were white and scared. We reached Omegna safely, however, but instead of finding the horse harnessed nothing had been done, and the household of the inn, master and mistress, man and maid, and their entire acquaintance, who were arriving in groups and troops, were so engrossed in laughing at a basket of live shrimps that it was only by adjurations and extra fees that I could get anybody to attend to me. The rain began just as we set out, and increased steadily, the storm bursting as we reached Baveno. At the last bend before the Ponte Napoleone I came upon an old woman, with white hair and a brown, wrinkled face, grinding a wheeled hand-organ before a poor little inn to a score of ragged boys and girls between the ages of six and sixteen, who were waltzing barefoot on the stony road in the pelting rain, with the utmost glee. At the sight of a stranger pulling out a purse they paused and ran up, shouting, ‘ Money ! We’re to have some money ! ’ ’ No,’ I said, for mendicity is strictly forbidden by law ; ’ but I will pay for your ball, so that you can dance as long as you like.’ There was an explosion like small fireworks of pretty words and thanks,— ’ Grazie,’ ’ Favorisea,’ ’ Reverisca,’ — and clapping their hands they rushed to seize each other by the waist, that no time might be lost, and I left them twirling again under the falling torrents. N. B. Have seen but one beggar in the neighborhood, and he was an old cripple.”

“ September 3d. Divine day. Rowed to Isola Bella, but it was so cockney that I went on to Isola Madre, where I spent the morning in reading and sketching, unmolested by aught except a turkey-hen, who brought her brood into the shrubbery where I was sitting, and after circling round me a number of times, nearer and nearer at every round, gobbling to raise her own choler, at length assaulted me. I had sat so quiet during her circumlocutions that I believe she thought me inanimate, and when I beat her off with my sun-umbrella it was a rout. Mother and children fled, leaving me in peace to listen to the ring-doves calling to each other among the pines, until in the cooler hours of the afternoon parties of Germans overran the island, and I fled like the turkeys. Ten years ago, if one wished to see this great people one went to Germany ; if one wished to eschew them one kept out of it, for they stayed at home. At that time there were many well-to-do Berlin burghers, whose only notion of a journey was going to Potsdam for the day ; they did that once in a lifetime, and called it traveling. Now Central Europe swarms with them in summer, and Christendom does not produce a more obnoxious, offensive race. I am convinced that the prejudice against Jews, which has been gaining ground in America, arises from the fact that those who come to our country are for the most part of a low class of Germans. But the true Teuton, to be seen in full odiousness, must be met in Switzerland or Italy. The coarseness of his habits, the loudness of his voice, the aggressiveness of his demeanor, his rudeness and churlishness, make him the most undesirable of fellow-travelers. Americans may take some comfort under the infliction in reflecting that the English tourists who used to complain bitterly of our invasion of the Continent are now outnumbered by a race who speak louder, smoke and spit more, and wash less, than the commonest class of ‘ Yankee,’ and are neither liberal nor good-natured, which we were admitted to be. At times better specimens are seen, to whom the deportment of their country-folk must be a keen mortification, if they have a grain of our sensitiveness on that point. The superior sort are indefatigable sightseers, and very effusive. In every party there is an achzendes woman, who sentimentalizes over everything from a church to a weed, and an intelligent man, who explains the beauties of nature and art to his companions. This afternoon Isola Madre rang with their musical exclamations : ‘ Ach ! wie ist es hier so wunderschön ! ’ ‘ Sehen Sie den Lorbeerbaum an !’ ’ Sieht es nicht ganz bezaubernd aus ! ’ Ach! why don’t they stay at home and go to Potsdam twice in their lives instead of once ? ”

“ September 20, 1883. The lake season has begun. The hotel is full, the shores and waters are gay with tourists, one hears nothing but English. . . . Last night six or seven guitars and violins and several male voices made really good music under the windows. To-night there came a man and woman with a guitar : he sang remarkably well, with a trained voice, — some unsuccessful opera singer, no doubt, poor devil; she was not so good, but they gave popular melodies charmingly, both as solos and duets; there was a particularly pretty one with a refrain of ‘Niccolí Niccoló.’ It was trying to have some poorer devil come by afterwards and drone out the same airs very badly, to a zither.”

“ September 23d. Paid a visit to the wife of one of the Omarini brothers, the proprietors of the hotel, in her pretty little house behind the garden. It is a kindly, courteous family. One brother acts as steward, another as bookkeeper, a third as clerk; the wife of one of them superintends the laundry, another is housekeeper: and thus the establishment is efficiently managed by respectful, self-respecting people, not above their business, with whom one’s dealings are never unpleasant. Signora Omarini’s ’ best parlor ’ is decorated with glass cases full of gold and silver cups and medals, dozens of them, some extremely handsome and valuable, which her brother, who is a Swiss, has won at federal and international shootingmatches. He was presented to me, a stout, rubicund, quiet, middle-aged citizen, with nothing remarkable about him except a singularly steady, penetrating gaze, like our typical Western man’s. He used to be a famous chamois hunter, but says he has grown too old for that.

“ Took a long, steep walk up the mountain behind the village. The path was cruelly rough, but led through a wood of magnificent portly chestnuttrees, with here and there a slender white-stemmed birch waving her drooping tresses ; there was a bank of ferns on each side, and a tantalizing sound of water running and falling, now right now left, seldom visible, and still more seldom to be tasted. At every turn in the road there was a beautiful view of the lake and the islands, each with its picture in the water. Looked over a low vineyard wall, and gave a woman good-day and half a franc to her children. Presently one of the little girls came panting after me to beg me to come back and have some of their grapes. I declined, saying that I had not time. By and by she overtook me again, breathless, with her apron full of fine bunches. On the way down I turned into a pasture where some little girls were driving a cow, and asked for a cup of fresh milk. They ran to a hut and brought a clean bowl, which they washed in a spring ; then they milked the cow, and gave me a warm and foaming draught with the sweetest smiles and words of welcome. . . .

“A great hotel is building on the Monte Motterone, which will have a view of six or seven lakes and a magnificent Alpine horizon, and serve as a half-way house for travelers who cross the ridge to Orta instead of driving by the valleys.”