Samuel Butler

“ Here the first signs of the Italian spirit appear in the wood carving of some of the houses. It is with these houses that I always consider myself as in Italy again. Then come Ronco on the mountain side to the left, and Quinto; all the way the pastures are thickly covered with cowslips, even finer than those that grow on Salisbury Plain. A few kilometres farther on and sight is caught of a beautiful green hill with a few natural terraces upon it and a flat top—rising from amid pastures, and backed by higher hills as green as itself. ”

“ At the same time, there can be no doubt that modern Italian art is in many respects as bad as it was once good. I will confine myself to painting only. The modern Italian painters, with very few exceptions, paint as badly as we do, or even worse, and their motives are as poor as is their painting. At an exhibition of modern Italian pictures, I generally feel that there is hardly a picture on the walls but is a sham—that is to say, painted not from love of this particular subject and an irresistible desire to paint it, but from a wish to paint an academy picture, and win money or applause. ”

“ Take the valley from Lanzo to Viù. It is of incredible beauty in the mornings and afternoons of brilliant days, and all day long upon a gray day; but in the middle hours of a bright summer’s day it is hardly beautiful at all, except locally in the shade under chestnuts. Buildings and towns are the only things that show well in a glare. We perhaps, therefore, thought the valley of the Moesa to be of such singular beauty on account of the day on which we saw it, but doubt whether it must not be absolutely among the most beautiful of the subalpine valleys upon the Italian side. ”

“ Ronco would take a little sun even in midwinter, but at the bottom of the valley there is no sun for weeks and weeks together; all is in deep shadow below, though the upper hillsides may be seen to have the sun upon them. I walked once on a frosty winter’s morning from Airolo to Giornico, and can call to mind nothing in its way more beautiful: everything was locked in frost—there was not a waterwheel but was sheeted and coated with ice: the road was hard as granite—all was quiet and seen as through a dark but incredibly transparent medium. ”

“ For an English household I admit that there is nothing to compare with Mr. Morris’s wall-papers—except, of course, his poetry—but there is an over-the-garden-walliness, if the expression may be pardoned, about these Italian decorations, a frank meretriciousness, both of design and colour, which will be found infinitely refreshing and may be looked for in vain in the works of our English masters of decoration.
The day after our arrival was the feast of the Assumption of the Madonna, and the next day was the feast of S. Rocco, the patron saint of Fusio, so the bells were ringing continually. ”

“ There have been many who have known as much English as Shakespeare, and so, doubtless, there have been no fewer who have known as much music as Handel: perhaps Bach, probably Haydn, certainly Mozart; as likely as not, many a known and unknown musician now living; but the poet is not known by knowledge alone—not by gnosis only—but also, and in greater part, by the agape which makes him wish to steal men’s hearts, and prompts him so to apply his knowledge that he shall succeed. ”

“ Near at hand were the most exquisite pastures close shaven after their second mowing, gay with autumnal crocuses, and shaded with stately chestnuts; beyond were rugged mountains, in a combe on one of which we saw Oropa itself now gradually nearing; behind and below, many villages with vineyards and terraces cultivated to the highest perfection; further on, Biella already distant, and beyond this a “big stare,” as an American might say, over the plains of Lombardy from Turin to Milan, with the Apennines from Genoa to Bologna hemming the horizon. ”

“ We are then on the very ridge or crest of the mountain, and look down on the one hand upon the valley of the Dora going up to Susa, with the glaciers of the Mont Cenis in the background, and on the other upon the plains near Turin, with the colline bounding the horizon. Immediately beneath is seen the glaring white straight line of the old Mont Cenis road, looking much more important than the dingy narrow little strip of railroad that has superseded it. The trains that pass along the line look no bigger than caterpillars, but even at this distance they make a great roar. ”

“ The wall is the crying place, playing, lounging place, and a great deal more, of all the houses in its vicinity. It is the common drawing-room during the summer months; if the weather is too sultry, a boatman will leave his bed and finish the night on his back upon its broad coping; we who live in a colder climate can hardly understand how great a blank in the existence of these people the destruction of the wall would be.
We soon reached Arona, and in a few minutes were in that kind and hospitable house the Hotel d’Italia, than which no better hotel is to be found in Italy. ”

“ When, again, I think of Waterloo Bridge, and the huge wide-opened jaws of those two Behemoths, the Cannon Street and Charing Cross railway stations, I am not sure that the prospect here is not even finer than in Fleet Street. See how they belch forth puffing trains as the breath of their nostrils, gorging and disgorging incessantly those human atoms whose movement is the life of the city. How like it all is to some great bodily mechanism of which the people are the blood. ”

“ The people of Prato are just as fond of cherries as those of Primadengo, but I did not see any men in the trees. The children in these parts are the most beautiful and most fascinating that I know anywhere; they have black mouths all through the month of July from the quantities of cherries that they devour. I can bear witness that they are irresistible, for one kind old gentleman, seeing me painting near his house, used to bring me daily a branch of a cherry-tree with all the cherries on it. ”

“ It is in the hospice that the apartments are in which visitors are lodged. I was shown all over them, and found them not only comfortable but luxurious—decidedly more so than those of Oropa; there was the same cleanliness everywhere which I had noticed in the restaurant. As one stands at the windows or on the balconies and looks down on to the tops of the chestnuts, and over these to the plains, one feels almost as if one could fly out of the window like a bird; for the slope of the hills is so rapid that one has a sense of being already suspended in mid-air. ”

“ Let any one watch the Ticino flowing into the Lago Maggiore after a few days’ heavy rain, and consider how many tons of mud per day it must carry into and leave in the lake, and he will wonder that the gradual filling-up process is not more noticeable from age to age than it is.
Anzone, whence the sad torrent derives its name, is an exquisitely lovely little hamlet close to Mesocco. Another no less beautiful village is Doera, on the other side of the Moesa, and half a mile lower down than Mesocco. Doera overlooks the castle, the original hexagonal form of which can be made out from this point. ”

“ Almost all days in the subalpine valleys of North Italy have a beauty with them of some kind or another, but none are more lovely than a quiet gray day just at the beginning of autumn, when the clouds are drawing lazily and in the softest fleeces over the pine forests high up on the mountain sides. ”

“ The first night I was ever in Piora there was a brilliant moon, and the unruffled surface of the lake took the reflection of the mountains. I could see the cattle a mile off, and hear the tinkling of their bells which danced multitudinously before the ear as fireflies come and go before the eyes; for all through a fine summer’s night the cattle will feed as though it were day. A little above the lake I came upon a man in a cave before a furnace, burning lime, and he sat looking into the fire with his back to the moonlight. ”

“ In winter, when the lake is frozen over, the people bring their hay from the farther Lake of Cadagno in sledges across the Lake Ritom. Here, again, winter must be worth seeing, but on a rough snowy day Piora must be an awful place. There are a few stunted pines near the hotel, but the hillsides are for the most part bare and green. Piora in fact is a fine breezy open upland valley of singular beauty, and with a sweet atmosphere of cow about it; it is rich in rhododendrons, and all manner of Alpine flowers, just a trifle bleak, but as bracing as the Engadine itself. ”

“ The inner court of the castle is as beautiful as the outer one. Through the open door one catches glimpses of the terrace, and of the lake beyond it. I know Ightham, Hever, and Stokesay, both inside and out, and I know the outside of Leeds; these are all of them exquisitely beautiful, but neither they nor any other such place that I have ever seen please me as much as the castle of Angera. ”

“ Rooks are lovely; they do not pretend to tune. Seagulls again, and the plaintive creatures that pity themselves on moorlands, as the plover and the curlew, or the birds that lift up their voices and cry at eventide when there is an eager air blowing upon the mountains and the last yellow in the sky is fading—I have no words with which to praise the music of these people. ”

“ I mean what sort of a look-out the old woman must have in winter, when the wind roars and whistles, and the snow drives down the valley with a fury of which we in England can have little conception. What a place to see a snowstorm from! and what a place from which to survey the landscape next morning after the storm is over and the air is calm and brilliant. There are such mornings: I saw one once, but I was at the bottom of the valley and not high up, as at Ronco. ”

“ It would be very nice if we could ring our bells sometimes in the English and sometimes in the Italian way. When I say the Italian way—I should say that the custom of ringing, as above described, is not a common one—I have only heard it at Vogogna and Castelletto, though doubtless it prevails elsewhere.
We were told that the people take a good deal of pride in their bells, and that one village will be jealous of another, and consider itself more or less insulted if the bells of that other can be heard more plainly than its own can be heard back again. ”

“ Sometimes in a little country village, as at Doera near Mesocco, there is a modern fresco on a chapel in which the old spirit appears, with its absolute indifference as to whether it was ridiculous or no, but such examples are rare. ”

“ One man may steal a horse when another may not look over a hedge. The good man who tells no lies wittingly to himself and is never unkindly, may lie and lie and lie whenever he chooses to other people, and he will not be false to any man: his lies become truths as they pass into the hearers’ ear. If a man deceives himself and is unkind, the truth is not in him, it turns to falsehood while yet in his mouth, like the quails in the Wilderness of Sinai. ”

“ What rocks were to him, the common occurrences of everyday life were to those who are generally held to be the giants of painting. The result of this neglect to kiss the soil—of this attempt to be always soaring—is that these giants are for the most part now very uninteresting, while the smaller men who preceded them grow fresher and more delightful yearly. It was not so with Handel and Shakespeare. Handel’s
“Ploughman near at hand, whistling o’er the furrowed land,”
is intensely sympathetic, and his humour is admirable whenever he has occasion for it. ”

“ What would a doctor say to the damp floor covered with mildew growing on spilt milk and fragments of half-made cheese? What about men sleeping night after night in a room built in the middle of a dung-heap, with never a ray of sunshine save a little near the door and an occasional beam through crannies in the walls? ”

“ In England I have found by experience that there is nothing for it but to examine every village and town within easy railway distance; no books are of much use: one never knows that something good is not going to be sprung upon one, and few indeed are the places where there is no old public-house, or overhanging cottage, or farmhouse and barn, or bit of De Hooghe-like entry which, if one had two or three lives, one would not willingly leave unpainted. ”

“ I have Italian friends whom I greatly value, and who tell me they think I flirt just a trifle too much with il partito nero when I am in Italy, for they know that in the main I think as they do. “These people,” they say, “make themselves very agreeable to you, and show you their smooth side; we, who see more of them, know their rough one. Knuckle under to them, and they will perhaps condescend to patronise you; have any individuality of your own, and they know neither scruple nor remorse in their attempts to get you out of their way. ”