The Lakes of Upper Italy

III.

THE fate of things of beauty is to become hackneyed. The choicest poetry and music are repeated until everybody is tired of them; the masterpieces of art are vulgarized by constant reproduction, and even the beauties of Nature lose their freshness by being overrun and overpraised. The lake of Como has come to be a mere by-word for beauty; it can hardly be mentioned without an apology, yet it is impossible to pass by the Helen of Italian waters in silence. Many mountains, streams, and cascades have an individuality of their own ; the presence of the unseen genius loci is felt, often unconsciously, by mankind. One might suppose that this influence would be strongest where Nature’s haunts are still inviolate, among solitary peaks and pathless woods ; but for me, at least, the lake of Como possesses it in the highest degree, — a personality so distinct and feminine that a beautiful woman might be jealous of it. The charm does not lie exclusively in the scenery, but is a composite result of climate, atmosphere, cultivation, and also, in a subtle, unrecognized way, of the works of art which are scattered along its shores. The lake of Como is no mountain nymph, but is like Titian’s Venus lying naked on a magnificent couch with pearls braided in her hair.

The sheet of water is shaped like a long fish with a cloven tail, the three portions being of about equal size, the lower ones divided by a broad wedge of land, the base of which, to the southward, is known as the Brianza, the point being the promontory of Bellagio. Each has its characteristics ; the two lower bays or branches are called respectively the lakes of Lecco and Como, the latter giving its name and fame to the whole expanse. There are none of the grand and rugged features of Lago Maggiore here ; the prospect is soft, and alluring, embellished by two thousand years of cherishing care. The ancients were drawn hither from distant parts of Italy, and from the days of Augustus to our own, the most celebrated statesmen and men of letters have borne witness, in prose and verse, to that witchery which Ugo Foscolo declared distracted him from his work.

The town of Como, at the foot of the lake, is on the line of the St. Gothard railway, and it is to be feared that this facility of access will rob the proud little port of the aristocratic air with which she has borne herself through many centuries of change. The city is regularly laid out on the only flat bit of ground of any extent on the entire circumference of the lake, and gains distinction from this peculiarity above the straggling, clambering towns of the neighborhood. A fragment of wall, and a massive square gate-tower, pierced by three tiers of arched openings after the manner of the Coliseum, are relics of Frederic Barbarossa’s fortifications, which withstood many assaults and sieges. The churches are older than the defenses ; the original cathedral, now the collegiate church of San Abbondio, dates, as it stands, from the tenth century, being founded on the remains of one still more ancient. It is a remarkable specimen of late Lombard architecture; the first sight of it in a suburb near the railway raises the traveller’s hopes very high ; it has two towers of unusual solidity for that style, and five naves of different heights, and is externally an imposing structure, but the interior is a wreck of poverty-stricken restoration. San Fedele is reckoned as still older than San Abbondio, and its singularity is even more marked. The building takes one by surprise; a beautiful octagonal apse and cupola with roundarched galleries, and an extraordinary side-door with a triangular arch, thrust themselves upon the street between ordinary houses that shut off the rest of the church in a most provoking way. Within there are traces of the original structure, and of its old, semi-barbarous sculptures, discernible amid horrible modern alterations, but it is a piteous instance of pious desecration. Both these churches are more interesting than the cathedral, which is nevertheless a beautiful black and white marble edifice of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a happy combination of Italian Gothic and early Renaissance, the older and nobler style predominating. It gains by proximity to the Broletto or town-hall, a fine municipal palace of the thirteenth century ; this building looks rather long and low, overtopped as it is by a tall square tower; it stands upon two streets, and presents to them both a front with an upper row of Gothic windows and a rich central balcony, and a lower one of round arches through which are seen short, stout, octagonal columns, as the groundfloor is occupied by an open pillared hall, serving as a public thoroughfare and place of business. The Broletto forms an angle with one side of the cathedral, and the space inclosed between these noble samples of ecclesiastical and secular architecture is a good post of observation on a festa in summer, as the peasants come out of the hot sun of the market-place with their fruit-carta into this cool corner, and the church-door gives glimpses of rich tapestries, glimmering lamps, and groups of worshipers.

The striped effect of alternate courses of different colored marble (the Broletto has red introduced occasionally between the black and white) is apt to strike a spectator who is unused to it disagreeably. In the cathedral of Como, however, as in all old buildings of similar materials which have not been lately restored, the crudeness of the contrast has been softened by time, and results are obtained which are impossible where the stone is of but one tint. As in most Italian cathedrals of the same period, the surfaces are not broken up by decoration, the sculpture being confined to the pilasters, door-ways and windows, which are elaborately carved without impairing the integrity of the whole. The restorations of the interior have not essentially interfered with the original intention, so that there is no shock or revulsion on entering ; within and without, the church is in keeping with the town and see to which it belongs ; it is stately, without assuming airs of sublimity, and one has all the more satisfaction in it because of this measure and proportion. It contains startling examples of the way in which the Renaissance artists, even of the earliest and best days, treated sacred subjects. One of the beautiful side-doors is surmounted by an alto rilievo, if I remember right, of St. John and the Virgin supporting the dead Christ, a group touching in its devout simplicity and pathos ; immediately below it there is a fight between sea-deities riding marine monsters and slinging bundles of fish at each other, in the freest pagan enjoyment of irresponsibility. The doorposts of the opposite portal are pilasters covered with bassi rilievi of angels bearing the instruments of the Passion, while the lintel, towards which they are ascending, represents a procession of putti or wingless Cupids at play, and driving little chariots, the central figure beingintended for the Infant Jesus, with the globe in one hand and the fingers of the other upheld in benediction, although there is nothing but these symbols to distinguish him from the other children. On a pier of the nave there are tablets with allegorical figures of two of the Christian virtues, and beneath them, set in chaplets of fruits and flowers, leering satyrs’ heads which would throw Mr. Ruskin into agony.

The wealth and importance of the bishopric of Como in past times is attested by the opulence of its treasure, which I saw displayed on the feast of San Abbondio, the patron of the city and region, or at least so I was assured, although the day was the 31st of August, and the calendar assigns him the 2d of April. On the high altar there were four silver busts of bishops of Como, larger than life, inlaid with gold and jewels, and a forest of gold and silver caudelabra. Every side-chapel has its array of candlesticks, platters, vases, and lamps of the precious metals ; that of San Abbondio boasted a splendid tabernacle, a church in miniature of carved wood gilded and colored, a most elaborate performance, with innumerable compartments and figures, baroque in taste, but of cunning and patient workmanship, and mellowed to a fine tone by time and dust. The church was adorned also with very large and handsome bits of tapestry representing scenes from the Old Testament on one side and from the New on the reverse ; they are fine both in design and color, and were made expressly for the cathedral in the middle of the sixteenth century. Owing to these trappings it was not a good occasion to see the monuments and pictures, some of which are exceedingly beautiful ; they are of the Lombard school, and one altar-piece by Luini, a Nativity, in which the herald angels are depicted as little celestial waits standing in a line and piping, on a cloud under the stable-roof, is intimately sweet and tender.

There are so many enchanting sites on the lake that from Pliny down to the Marchesa Trotti there have been lucky mortals who could not be satisfied with one habitation here. Among these dilettanti of Nature was Tolomeo Gallio, born in the sixteenth century at Cernobbio, a small town, now the first steamboat-station from Como. His father was neither rich nor noble ; but the sons, by their own ability and by the aid of powerful protection, got on well in the world. In that age patronage was an active force in the social system, so vital indeed that without it no man, unless born in a position to be a patron himself, could make his way. Tolomeo’s first influential friend was the historian Paolo Giovio, also of a Comasque family ; and it is no disgrace to have had a lift in life from such a hand. The young man took holy orders, and was made bishop, archbishop, and cardinal, before he was forty years old. He bore his honors well, was charitable, munificent, a patron of art and letters, and a great benefactor to his native shores, where he built churches, colleges, and palaces. His brothers prospered in secular careers, and their descendants intermarried with the princely Milanese houses of Visconti, Borromeo, and Trivulzio. The family of Gallio is now extinct, I believe, but the name of the cardinal will live on Lake Como as long as his villas there last. One is at the head of the lake, the other at the opposite extremity close to Cernobbio, within half an hour’s drive or row from Como. This has been known for the last fifty years as the Villa d’ Este, the name given it by Caroline, wife of George IV. of England, to whom it once belonged, though it is actually a hotel named La Regina d’ Inghilterra. The house has changed owners several times and has been greatly altered and added to since Caroline of Brunswick’s occupancy. Cardinal Gallio’s villa is swallowed up in an immense palatial vulgarity of pillared vestibules, salons, and galleries, with a magnificent double staircase of white marble; there are a few paneled rooms with the emblems of Cupid and Bacchus encrusted in gold on white wood-work, charmingly designed and executed in the style of the last century, but none of the original apartments can be identified. There is nothing distinctively Italian in the trim grounds immediately about the hotel, which stands low, close to the lake, and is shaded by sycamore trees worthy of an old English seat. But beyond the inclosure, and connected with it by a stone bridge over a road, there is a hillside laid out in true rococo taste with grottoes, temples, artificial cascades and rock-work, and to crown all a mimic fortress erected by a Countess Calderara, who preceded Caroline as proprietress, to celebrate the return of her husband, General Pino, from the siege of some Spanish town, of which this was intended for a model.

Poor Caroline of Brunswick’s sojourn at the Villa d ’Este was unfortunate for her ; the scandals which led to her repudiation and prevented her being crowned queen of England were connected with her life there, but she is still remembered gratefully in the neighborhood, and as she fades from recollection as a living woman she is becoming “ a legend,” as the French say. She opened a carriage-road from Cernobbio to Moltrasio, the next village of importance, which is called La Strada della Regina, and makes a beautiful walk or drive ; at some places it skirts the lake, at others scales the cliff, passing for six miles or more continuously by private gardens, till it reaches the waterfall of Moltrasio foaming down over a black wall of slate rock crested with verdure. This road is the boulevard of the peasants and villagers ; on holiday afternoons it is closely dotted with groups of them in Sunday clothes, strolling along chatting in their abrupt, bitten-off syllables. The dialect of the lake region is very odd, and every town has its own lingo. A foreigner who speaks good Italian will have no difficulty in making himself understood, but may be unable to understand in return. I was bewildered by answers in which the town of Comazzo, (properly pronouueed Comatso) was called Comass, Moltrasio Moltras, dieciotto (eighteen) dess-dot, sei meno dieci (ten minutes to six) sez men dess, and the high-sounding name of Belgiojoso, Beljoose.

The lake of Como is well provided with waterfalls. The finest and most picturesque of them is at Nesso on the eastern shore, opposite Moltrasio ; it breaks through a cleft in the mountain overgrown with dense greenery, and plunges between the houses of the village, which cling to the moist, mossy sides of the gorge, rushing into the lake beneath a steep bridge with a peaked arch. On the western side, still further northward, the pretty cascade of Camoggia skips down the sunny face of the rocks under the scanty shade of olive trees, turning a small mill-wheel where it reaches the lake. Near this is Comacina, the only island of Lago di Como, divided from the western shores by a strait; a few acres of greensward, vineyards and olive orchards, among which lie the crumbling remains of fortifications that made this plot of earth a stronghold from the fifth to the twelfth century. The modern author, Cesare Cantù, entitles it, magniloquently, “ the bulwark of Italian liberty,” as the inhabitants of the mainland fled there for refuge from the barbarous hordes which swept over the country during the decline of the Roman empire, and held out against them when Rome itself fell. Comacina gradually acquired the right of sanctuary, and various important fugitives sought asylum there as in a church ; the town of Como at last grew impatient or jealous of the pretensions of the isle, and in the year 1169 destroyed its fortifications and banished its population. Some of them settled near by, in a hamlet still called Isola in memory of the home of its founders.

Beyond Comacina the western hills throw out a spur which, projecting half across the lake, interrupts the view, but makes a beautiful landmark in itself. It is the Dosso di Lávedo ; the steep sides are laid out in gardens, with monstrous aloe plants and oleander shrubberies which blush from afar, and on the ridge, or back (dosso), there is a classic portico of elegant proportions, conspicuous for miles. This commands an entrancing prospect down the Bay of Como on one hand, and on the other over the exquisite basin of Tremezzina, to the promontory of Bellagio and the widening upper lake. Landward, at the foot of the eminence, lies the Villa Balbiano, built by Paolo Giovio on the supposed site of Pliny’s villa, called Comedy, and, at one time the property of the insatiable Cardinal Gallio ; above the roofs of San Balbiano and Sala, almost contiguous villages, rise the ruins of an octagonal baptistery and a striking Gothic tower, an uncommon bit of architecture to find in the realm of Romanesque. Fragments of fine old churches and castles abound on these shores and hilltops, but they impress the traveler less than such remains do elsewhere ; they are merged in the present living beauty of the scenery.

The Tremezzina is pronounced, by common consent of Italians and guidebooks, the Eden of the Lombard lake district. Here the mountains of the western shore stand back a little, leaving room for a tract of leafy knolls and dells sloping to a small crescent-shaped harbor, of which the Dosso di Lávedo and a narrow point of land tufted with foliage and ending in a single cypress tree form the piers. The chief and only town of this territory, which is no larger than an average New England farm, is Tremezzo ; it consists of one short street under low, straddling arcades, with wide granite or marble water-stairs on one side and on the other steep, narrow, crooked flights of steps, possibly considered by the inhabitants as streets, leading to houses, gardens, and vineyards on higher grades. They are mere slits between walls feathered with fern and maiden-liair, broken at irregular intervals by a window ledge bright with carnations and geraniums ; but every one of them makes a picture: in one, I saw at the foot of the stairs a gray-headed beldame in a dull red gown, helping a toddling, flaxen-haired child to climb the steps; further up, a dark, handsome young woman wearing a flowered neckerchief sat spinning at her threshold ; and higher yet, a tall, slender, muscular man in blue cotton shirt and trousers and a broad straw hat was descending with a load of newly sawn boards on his shoulder. On the water-steps, the boatmen loll in suits of navy blue beside their light craft, furnished with white or striped awnings and cushions. The place is exquisitely pretty, and the view of the opposite heights is fine, the promontory of Bellagio standing out boldly towards the north, ending in an abrupt cliff with a dark, shaggy sylvan fleece. But Bellagio itself, at least if one lodges at the Villa Serbelloni, is to me by far the most beautiful and delightful situation on the lake.

The Villa Serbelloni has been rented as a dépendance by the Hôtel Grande Bretagne, and is reached from the town of Bellagio by long, breathless staircase streets, such as I have just described, or by the numerous sharp zig-zags of a carriage-drive from the hotel garden at the water’s edge. The view grows lovelier at every turn as the road ascends, bordered by trees and tropical plants, until it enters the magnificent umbrage of the villa. The mansion is long, rambling, and barrack-like, but full of large, airy apartments, so disposed that almost every window overlooks one of the bays, some of the rooms commanding them both. The Serbelloni, who I am told are now extinct in the male line, have been known on Lake Como for four hundred years ; they inherited this property from another old and noble family, the Sfondrati, who have set the stamp of antiquity upon it. The grounds cover the head of the promontory, and, well as I know them, I am unable to guess at their extent, they are so steep and thickly wooded and laid out with winding paths and roads ; you can walk in them steadily for two hours without treading in your own footsteps. But I speak unadvisedly, as not many people could walk there without pausing at every few yards. The woods open now and then upon lawns ; the walks pass from the shade of the trees to wide sunny ledges bordered by branching palms and tall yuccas with pagodas of milkwhite flowers, or by hedges of oleander heavily laden with rosy bloom, and pomegranates covered with fierce little scarlet cockades, then disappear suddenly into dark rocky tunnels wreathed in pendant garlands, through which, as in a camera oscura, are seen glimmering pictures of fairy land; emerging from these, you may find yourself on a broad road, or on the edge of a precipice two hundred feet above the water. The paths tend gradually to the highest point of the headland, on which are the ivied fragments of a mediæval castle built by the Sfondrati. Here an unexpected view of the upper lake breaks upon one through a ruined casemate, and not far hence, the three branches may be seen at once, a wonderful vision. You can descend by different paths from those which brought you up, with other grottoes and altogether novel outlooks, but not less beautiful ; or strike across the intervening woodland, to be brought to a stand-still by a jutting crag, or a miry glen, or a too rapid slope covered with a slippery, resinous-scented mast from the pines. It is difficult to estimate the distance of such peregrinations.

Although some of the views are more extensive, none is more satisfying than one which is within a few steps of the house, and on the same level with it. An immense oak divides into two trunks not many feet from the ground, and overhangs the terrace, spreading its boughs like curtains over the outer edge, which is railed in by roses and jasmine, and forming a screen both from the sun and from the dazzling reflection of the water below. In this impenetrable shade there are seats and a table, and a perpetual breeze rustles the oak-leaves. The view down the twin bays of Como and Lecco, more and more separated by an area of highlands and mountains rising and broadening as it recedes, is the most perfectly beautiful composition of nature I have ever beheld. It has no elements of the sublime, but above the nearer mountains on the eastern side of Lake Lecco, several silver-gray peaks of bare rock lift themselves against the azure sky, — the summits of Monte Grigna, severely harmonious in form and tint with the rest of the landscape, and asserting a force that preserves it from sinking into mere voluptuousness. The outlines of mountain and shore follow each other in what George Eliot calls “ rhythmical succession,” and the colors are more marvelous than on Lago Maggiore. At dawn the lake is like a mirror which has been evenly breathed upon and then touched by a careless finger here and there. An hour later, just before sunrise, it is a vast plate of silver, stretching from the dark green eastern mountains to the western ones bathed in amber radiance ; then the tiny fishing-boats appear by the score, with two little sails set, looking like white moths expanding their wings, or a scattered fleet of pea-blossoms. Later in the morning, the color of the water is sapphire, with parti-colored reflections, sometimes violet, sometimes roseate, for which I could never account; they are not cast by clouds, as I have seen them when there was not a flake in the sky, nor are they from the shore; I have watched them apparently rise to the surface, spread, deepen, and then fade like a blush. In the hot hours of the mid-afternoon the water and the land seem melting together like golden ore, and the mountains swim and float in glory. At sunset the lines grow firm again ; the western peaks and ranges are dark, the eastern ones repeat the hue of the heavens, but more faintly, like an echo, and the lake is a second sky ; after the landscape has dislimned itself into calm, sombre masses, the ashen heights of Monte Grigna glow with a delicious apricot-color, growing purer until they seem as if they were sprinkled with gold-dust. The sky, though no longer bright, is still limpid, and the brief twilight is so clear that the smallest bush on the mountain’s edge stands out distinctly, yet as soft as if cut in black velvet. As it grows dark, the moon begins to shed a pale golden track the whole length of Lake Lecco, which scintillates where the ripples break against the land. Gradually diaphanous vapors rise from the water and glide out of the gorges, spreading and uniting until the distant mountains vanish and the nearer ones are veiled in a transparent, silvery gauze, which subdues the sheen of the moon in the heavens and makes her path on the water look like the reflection of the Milky Way. The scene becomes more dreamlike each moment, as if one’s own eyes were closing; the perfume rises from the orange-blossoms, the olea fragrans, and countless other intoxicating flower-cups, and the only sound is the cascade of Varenna on the mainland, which does not call loud enough to be heard during the day.

As the Villa Serbelloni is cooler and quieter than any of the hotels in the town, I joined some friends there on my latest and longest visit to the lake of Como. The season had not fairly begun. We had the house nearly to ourselves for a few weeks, although in the great corridor which runs along the whole front there was a large placard, no doubt a duplicate of others in more frequented situations, enumerating the attractions of the resort, recommending it to Italians for its beauty and its accessibility from their principal cities, to Germans for its cookery and for its being patronized by their princely families, and to English people on account of the regularity with which the services of the Church of England are celebrated there. As long as I stayed, the last inducement was a deception. Americans like the boating and swimming in the tepid waters at first, but soon find it hard to desert the oak tree on the terrace; for, if the truth must be told, the effect of the scenery is enervating, and disinclines one even for active enjoyment. Collecting our joint stock of resolution, however, five of us set off one day to find the Villa Pliniana, not one of Pliny’s country-seats (though according to some authorities, in the neighborhood of the summer abode he called Tragedy), but a place where there is a sinking spring, which he has described minutely in a letter that has come down to posterity. The locality must have been known and visited ever since his times, but there was no house there until the latter part of the sixteenth century, when the existing one was built by a Count Anguisciola, or Auguissiola, of Piacenza. This nobleman took part in a conspiracy against the life of Pier Luigi Farnese, an execrable tyrant, and being the person who dealt the death blow, he was rewarded by the Emperor Charles V., then in possession of Lombardy, with the governorship of Como. Anguisciola, finding that he was in constant peril from the powerful enemies whom he had made by his crime, at the head of whom was Pier Luigi’s father, the Pope Paul III., created a retreat for himself in a secluded position not easy of approach, and keeping aloof from public life he escaped their vengeance. The chronicle of the place is not continuous ; I could learn nothing more about it prior to this century, except that Napoleon was there in 1797, after the treaty of Campo Formio, when meditating his first and unsuccessful return to Paris. The house looks as if it had a history ; it stands withdrawn in a deep bight of the lake, a plain, rectilinear façade upon a single square terrace rising directly from the water; it has nothing to distinguish it except a certain symmetry, the mark of the cinque cento, and an air of bygone times, of melancholy and isolation. It is more likely to be remembered by reason of its last owners than of any former ones. The shades of the Prince and Princess Emilio Belgiojoso still linger in tradition among the scenes of their romantic exploits. They were both rarely endowed by nature and in temporalities of every sort, — genius, beauty, accomplishments, old blood, high rank, great wealth; but they were several centuries behind their time in regard for appearances. The prince, after playing the lion in Paris for years, where his escapades had an exotic and melodramatic flavor, quitted it suddenly, under circumstances which Alfred de Musset briefly recounts in a letter written at the time. Belgiojoso was dressing to sing at a private charity concert, for his voice was one of the finest in Europe, when a great lady to whom he was attached burst in upon him with no baggage except her pocket-handkerchief, says Musset, and besought him to take her at once out of reach of her husband who was jealous ; the prince set off with her immediately for La Pliniana, and the audience that was waiting to hear him sing waited in vain. The two remained in charmed exile for ten years, and then one fine day the lady left the prince without warning; a few months afterwards he died of love and a broken heart. Such is the version which is given by some of his surviving friends of the final episode of this exaggerated existence. The princess, his wife, was a Trivulzio, and appears like a modern incarnation of her family’s crest, a winged mermaid or siren on a helmet. Musset and Heine, both unsuccessful aspirants for her capricious favor, have left portraits of her in verse as Paris knew her in her young time. There are persons living on the lake who remember her as she rode forth in 1848, in a general’s uniform, one of them assured me, at the head of the troops she had raised for the Italian insurgents to join their patriotic outbreak. Many years afterwards she returned to the Pliniana, an old woman, bent double from the effects of a stab in the back dealt her by a courier during her journey to the East, to spend her nights in writing historical and theological treatises, smoking a Turkish pipe, with a fire burning in her bedroom and windows wide open, summer and winter.

We found the haunts of these real though improbable personages perfectly fitted to their modes of life, but ill-adapted to any manner of being that is prosaic, commonplace, or even practical. Directly opposite Moltrasio on the eastern side of the lake is the small town of Torno, at which the steamboat does not touch, passengers being landed by a barge. Like the other towns that have not regular quays it is older, poorer, quainter-looking than those on the line of travel. There are no fine hotels at Torno, or shops and cafés under striped awnings. A narrow street ending in a still narrower path, the pitiless indigenous footpath of sharp stones, leads to the Villa Pliniana, now the property of the Marchesa Trotti, the Princess Belgiojoso’s daughter. On the outskirts of the town there is an old church, Italian Gothic, with some good sculpture and bassi rilievi round the principal door ; the interior is impressive, in spite of its gaunt bareness, from its fine, bold lines. Opening on the little churchyard there is a small cloister with only six arches, each framing a view of the lake ; the wall is covered with tablets to the dead, two of which are in memory of young English women. One was Margaret, wife of Lawrence Oliphant of Condie, Scotland, aged twenty-seven, with the arms, crest, and motto “ Altiora peto.” Both she and her countrywoman died in the early part of the present century ; it is affecting to find their memorials here, and one speculates as to where and how they had lived. With a sense of quiet, induced by the simple English inscriptions and the thought of lives that ended young and were possibly innocent and happy, we returned to the track of those other feverish, worn out human creatures. The path passes under a series of arches thrown out from the church wall like dying buttresses, and almost immediately enters a sylvan tract of trees and rocks, smelling of moss, fresh earth, and dead leaves. Overhead, the branches are endlessly interwoven ; looking through them, one sees only more leaves and branches, until the eye loses itself in cool green, for the hill rises higher and steeper, clad to the top in forest; while looking down, far down, through the boughs and foliage there are glimpses of motionless blue water like a floor of ribbed agate. The way is long, and practicable only for pedestrians or cloven-footed quadrupeds. After half an hour’s good walk from the town we reached a rift in the hillside, spanned by the single, high arch of a stone foot-bridge, through which the bright skeins of a mountain brook drop into a leafy gorge. The grated entrance of the villa is but a step further. Within the gate there is a deep, green shade of laurel trees, through which the path descends rapidly to the gardener’s house, a large rose-colored cottage, then down between laurel walls to the palazzetto by a long flight of steps fringed with ferns, blue and pink hydrangeas at intervals refreshing the sight with their cool clusters. The house is plain and unpretending from this side, but after passing through a hall and corridor we found ourselves in a central courtyard, the adytum of the temple. The wings of the house form two sides of a quadrangle, covered with ivy, trumpet-flowers, and climbing white roses ; the third is a wall arched over a rocky grotto half hidden in trailing verdure, through which gushes a clear torrent; the upper stories of the wings being connected by a balustraded gallery along the top of the wall, at each end of which a magnificent cypress stands sentry, the light, feathery foliage of the overhanging hillside waving between; on the fourth side is a paved and pillared loggia communicating between the lower rooms of the main house, and opening in three pointed arches on a view of the deeply recessed bay, a small, pale, variegated town with a tall tower and some red roofs lodged over against us between the cobalt-blue water and the green velvety lap of the mountain.

The loggia is furnished with a divan, tables, and easy-chairs ; I sat down and tried to sketch the courtyard, but here, as it always happened on the Lake of Como, the charm of the spot held my hand in thrall. The sunshine beat from the cloudless sky on the dark cypresses and the bright green vineyards, the fountain poured and plashed, stirring a strong, cool breeze, the Gothic openings on the lake showed a landscape in each compartment, like a great triptych. If it was not the most beautiful human dwelling-place I had ever seen, it was the one which appealed most irresistibly to the imagination ; nature, art, antiquity, history, and romance combined to lend it an ideal fascination.

The fountain is fed by Pliny’s sinking spring, filling and emptying three times in the twenty-four hours under the occult influence, as it is now supposed, of the wind, which blows from opposite directions at regular intervals. It has been observed that when the wind sets strongly from any quarter for an entire day the phenomenon is not produced. The terrace on which the house stands is laid out as a garden, but the place is like some forest sanctuary, for a second and larger waterfall tumbling from the hilltop into the lake, and bridgeless, completely cuts off approach on the side furthest from Torno.

We took a row-boat from the town and pulled up to Bellagio in three hours. The evening was mild and windless, the lake perfectly smooth, and as the sunset faded from the sky a low-hung moon shone dimly through gathering clouds. The stillness was broken only by the dip of our oars, and by the convent bells which now and then rang out from different heights, or the lesser tinkle of little bells which the fishermen fasten to the buoys of their nets, to guide them in the dark; their small, clear tones have a strange and witching sound in the twilight loneliness. By and by the stars came out in the sky, and lights twinkled at intervals along the shore, leaving the mountains in darkness.

Our energy being restored in some degree by this long excursion, the next thing was to see the country-seats near Bellagio on both sides the lake. It would be more easy to give a catalogue than a description of them, as, although each has its beauties, there is but one set of adjectives for them all, and one runs the risk of rhapsodizing. The most celebrated is the Villa Carlotta, close to Cadenabbia, opposite Bellagio, which belongs to the Duke of Saxe Meiningen. The grounds are in better order than those of the Villa Serbelloni, though not to compare with them in extent or variety; the collection of coniferous trees is very rare and fine, and the magnolias are the pride of the place. But on the whole it is not worth a formal visit for what is to be seen out of doors. There is some famous modern statuary in the main hall, which is large and lofty, and has a reddish-brown gambrel ceiling ornamented with rosettes of white stucco, the walls being pale blue, the wood-work dark brown ; the effect is agreeable, and sets off the sculpture extremely well. Most of the groups are mediocre, even Canova’s, except his Cupid and Psyche. In this the attitude of Eros, poised yet scarcely pausing, the life, purity, and lovely youthfulness of both figures, and the exquisite, light touch with which they embrace, as if each feared to brush the down from the other’s wings, are ineffably charming and graceful, but the general outline is too regular; the pinions of Eros and the elbows of the pair look like halfopen scissors, from a short distance. Thorwaldsen’s Triumph of Alexander, a frieze surrounding the room, is the finest thing in it, full of antique spirit and nobility, “ ganz grossartig,” as the inevitable æsthetic German lady explained to her party. It recalls the procession on the column of Trajan, even to the dignified old captive following an elephant, with bound hands and bent head, but it impressed me, nevertheless, as an inspiration.

There is a broad walk beside the lake, from the Villa Carlotta to Cadenabbia, under the dense shade of a double avenue of great sycamores, which frame a long gallery of pictures : soft green mountains, punctuated by dark cypresses and indented with little bays and coves, bright towns sunning themselves and throwing their doubles on the blue water. I am conscious of alluding to these frames and settings much too often ; but they occur continually, and always with new combinations. Turn wherever one will, the variety is endless, and removes the odiousness of comparison between the villas, each of which has its peculiar beauty and physiognomy. The Villa Giulia, once the property of the king of Belgium, is the most lordly of them ; it occupies a plateau between the bays of Como and Lecco, which is reached from the former by a wide flight of a hundred and fifty granite steps, bordered on each side by a line of towering cypresses in close rank, opening a grand perspective from the top of the stairs. On my first visit to this villa in 1871, among its chief ornaments were the camellia shrubberies ; twelve years afterwards I found that they had been almost entirely cleared away by the new owner, an Austrian nobleman, to make room for a regular English ribbon garden, in a style which has already fallen out of favor in Great Britain, with initials and ensigns armorial in geraniums and colored leaves. However, as the ground is level, it makes a fine, free platform for a glorious view of Lake Lecco, and the principal walk edged by orange and lemon trees in huge terra cotta pots of Etruscan shape is an admirable decorative arrangement. The head gardeners of these great places are often men of great taste in their own calling ; the dignified person who holds the post at the Villa Giulia looked with respectful contempt at the floral devices on the lawn, which are a fancy of his employer, Count B. Like many Italians of his class, his manner was at once stately and deferential, but on our asking if Count B. were at home, he volunteered the information that he was absent per quistione di matrimonio, adding that he had eight sons to marry. My companions and I laughed a little among ourselves at this hard bestead parent; the consequence of which was, though we spoke English together, that the next time we came the gardener told us, in gleeful confidence, that it was Count B. himself who was trying to marry again at eighty years of age. The way in which he kept his balance between what was due to his padrone, to us, and to himself, and preserved his propriety while making these gratuitous communications, was inimitable. I opine that the Italians are great gossips, from the frankness with which my neighbors at table d’hôte and fellow travelers in railway carriages imparted to me the affairs of their acquaintance, of whom naturally I had never heard ; I soon knew much more about them than of people at home, next door to whom I had lived for twenty years. Their want of reticence in regard to love affairs seems to be still as great as when a Roman servant told Madame de Staël that she could not see his mistress because she was in love ; two Italian guide-books allude to Prince Emilio Belgiojoso’s “ amore infelice e tempestoso ” as if it were an historical event.

The descent from the Villa Giulia to Lake Lecco is by a winding walk, guarded from the edge of the bluff by a barrier so overgrown with roses and flowering creepers, that nobody can say whether it be iron, wood, or stone ; on the other hand, there is a myrtle hedge starred with tiny white blossoms. The exit is by a short, broad flight of stone steps, overhung by the pink masses of the finest oleanders I saw in Italy, into a miniature haven full of boats, above which, on two sides, stand small houses with terraces and pergolas; a chain that barred our egress was lowered, and we pulled back to Bellagio round the head of the promontory, passing under the perpendicular cliff from which it is said that a wicked Countess di Borgomanero threw her lovers down in old times, one a day. I do not know why all the guidebooks, English, German, and Italian, concur in stating that the Villa Giulia is no longer open to strangers, unless it be closed when Count B. is not absent “ per quistione di matrimonio.” All the proprietors on the lake are exceedingly kind and generous, as far as my experience goes, in allowing their beautiful homes to be seen even when they are living at them. The sole exception that we found was the rich Duke Melzi’s villa, open twice a week on specified days ; here, after paying a franc’s entrance fee apiece, besides the invariable half-franc to the gardener, we were told that the house, which contains a picturegallery, and some statues by Canova and Marchesi, mentioned in the guide-books, is no longer shown. I promised my angry comrades that I would denounce this greed and fraud to Murray, Baedeker, and Meyer, — a promise which I did not keep, so I hereby endeavor to atone for my breach of faith.

All the places which we saw were well kept, and there is a great deal of skill in the disposition of the trees and shrubbery, the confines of the grounds being generally completely concealed ; it is difficult to detect how limited they are. The most beautiful instance of this is the Villa Trotti, the property of the fortunate lady who owns La Pliniana, a mere strip of land as flat as a billiard table along the lake, with hills rising abruptly behind it. There are two avenues, one of sycamores, the other of lindens, fine specimens of their kinds, meeting at right angles and bounding the place on two sides ; the ferneries and flower garden lie near the house ; beyond them spreads a wide, smooth lawn, planted with consummate art in groups of magnificent firs, pines, and hemlocks of the rarest species, and with every variety of palm and palmetto. There are no statues, terraces, or any of the usual accessories of an Italian villa; a fountain rises from a simple marble basin in one slender jet, a mountain brook falls through a rockery, and then by a torn and stony channel down to the lake; there is no other sort of tree on the spaces of even turf except the many-storied evergreens and the great tropical fans at their feet. An old, gray campanile looks over their pinnacles from a short distance ; on one hand there are craggy mountain - sides, on the other, across the celestial-colored lake, the ravishing graces of the Tremezzina. The mode of planting is unique, a perfect triumph of landscape gardening, and gives the place an indescribable charm of originality and poetry.