LOCARNO.
From Bellinzona a local train conveys the traveller to Locarno, which is
a small town at the extreme head of Lake Maggiore. I had heard a
wonderful account of Locarno, and had been assured that in its perfect
peace and pure air the malady from which I was suffering would rapidly
disappear. I arrived at Locarno full of hope. I also arrived in a heavy
storm of rain. I looked around me, and I saw nothing but water and mist
and mud. The mountains were wrapped in black cloaks of cloud. The walls
of the houses were covered with moss and mushrooms and toadstools, and
in the roadways the bulrushes grew several feet high.
On the way to the hotel we passed a few shops. Every shop seems to deal
in the same article--umbrellas, green umbrellas and red umbrellas. They
hung in rows along the walls of the town; they were piled high in the
shop-windows; every man, woman, and child carried one, and still the
rain came down upon the desolate scene.
There is no mistake about the dampness of Locarno when it is damp. It is
owing to the enormous amount of moisture which Locarno gets in
combination with the full glare of an Italian sun that it boasts unique
phenomena in the way of vegetation. You find the southern and the
Alpine plant in absolute juxtaposition. At one moment your eye is
dazzled by the full glory of a tropical garden; at the next you are
gazing at peat bogs and into moist green hollows crowded with the sedges
of the moors. Let me be fair to Locarno, for it has been fair to me. A
fairer place (when it doesn’t rain) it would be almost impossible to
find. From the sunny shores of the glorious lake the mighty mountains
rise, with soft green skirts of vine and caps of snow. In a hundred
gardens the red and white azalea, the camellia, and the wisteria make
great clusters of colour. Gaily painted villas, fair white spires, and
picturesque villages dot the heights, and over all there floats a balmy
southern breeze that bears upon its gentle wings the perfume of a
hundred flowers.
Before we left Locarno we explored the beauties of the neighbourhood,
and we started with climbing a mountain. One glorious mountain walk we
had which will linger in my memory until the last guard blows his
whistle, and I start for a country to which as yet neither Murray nor
Bradshaw nor Baedeker has published a guide. We started from Locarno for
Mergoscia, ascending the mountains by the path that leads to the Madonna
del Sasso (Our Lady of the Rock). One starlit night in 1480 a monk
kneeling in prayer looked up the mountain. Suddenly a glorious sea of
light bathed the rocky peak that rises above the town, and the Virgin
was seen surrounded by adoring angels. The monk interpreted his vision
as a wish of Heaven that on this rocky mount a chapel should be built.
The money was raised, and to-day Our Lady of the Rock, far above the
town of Locarno, is one of the famous sights of Switzerland.
It is a toilsome journey up the mountain-side and past the countless
shrines to the church, but the traveller is rewarded with many a quaint
sight by the way for his pains. The old-world peasant population was
probably gratified by the realism of some of the groups which are placed
here and there up the hill like small waxwork exhibitions. You come to a
kind of stone grotto; you peer in through the iron bars, and you start
back astonished. You are looking into a stable, with real straw and real
stalls, and in a manger you see the infant Saviour lying, and the Holy
Family grouped around him. A couple of donkeys are peering into the
manger, and nothing is spared that contributes to the almost sensational
realism of the scene. A little farther up you peep into another cave,
and you see a number of figures sitting at a long table laid with plates
and glasses. In front of each figure is a small roll, and a waiter is
just coming into the room with a big fish on a plate. You gradually
recognise the fact that you are assisting at the Lord’s Supper, and you
turn almost with a sigh to think that a beautiful faith ever needed such
coarse theatrical adjuncts to impress it on the minds of the populace.
Our Lady of the Rock is much resorted to by people in pain and
affliction, and the naves of the church are lined with curious _ex
votos_. No chamber of horrors ever contained a more terrible series of
accidents than these pictures represent. Here is a little boy under a
carriage wheel, rescued just as the wheel is on his chest. Here is a man
falling from a bridge into a river, and just caught by the leg as he is
going head first into the water. Here is a woman hurled over a
precipice, and caught by the branch of a tree. In one terrible picture a
man’s nose is being blown off by his own gun; in another, a gentleman is
accidentally mowing his own legs off with a scythe. It is a great
relief, after gazing at these pictorial horrors, in which the blood is
always laid on thick by the artist, to get out into the open air again,
and climb higher up the hill to the narrow path that leads to the Alpine
village of Orselina.
Through Orselina we pass over the spur of the mountain to Contra,
another village which is perched up higher still. These Alpine villages
look beautifully picturesque from the valley below, but they are sad and
grim enough when you are in them. All the poetry is gone when you wind
in and out through the little tortuous street and see the squalor and
the poverty in which the people live. The rough stone walls look so
forbidding; the rooms seen through the battered doors look so black and
cheerless as the smoke of the wood fire curls slowly out of them. All
the poetry is going as you peer into them, and there is no poetry at all
left when you have seen the inhabitants. Old men toil painfully along
with trembling hands; women, bent almost double beneath the burthen they
bear on their backs, pass you with sad faces and dull eyes. The women in
these Alpine villages do the work of animals. They are really beasts of
burden. They are loaded as in our country we load carts and barrows. I
have seen an old woman toiling up a hill with a great wicker basket on
her back in which were two calves and a pig. The basket the women have
perpetually strapped to their back is called a _gerlo_, and is made to
contain anything, from an elephant to a packet of pins.
Half the houses in these Alpine villages are deserted, as are many of
the houses lower down in the valleys. Only the old men and the women and
children seem to be left in the others. The reason of this is not far to
seek. The Ticinese have been the great emigrating race of Switzerland.
The men of the hills and valleys are scattered over the world, and most
of them have climbed the hill of fortune. Some of them have reached the
summit. From a village near Locarno, which is now full of houses barred
and bolted and falling into decay, have gone forth some of the richest
men in California. In that far-off land the owners of these houses made
a fortune by their industry, and then their fellow-villagers, hearing of
it, set out to try and do the same.
Everywhere as one wanders over this part of Switzerland one finds that
the manhood is gone. The Ticinese are far away in Italy, in France, in
England, in America, and everywhere their industry, their business
talents, and their thrift have carried them triumphantly to affluence.
But though he is far away the man of Ticino does not forget his old
home, or his poorer brethren left there. From over the seas every year
comes the emigrant’s gold for the village poor, and for the Church, and
for every good object that can be thought of.
The finest peal of bells in Ticino is the gift of a man of the valley of
Maggia, who is far away in California. On one of the bells is this
inscription:
‘Anche attraverso sterminati mari,
Degli Svizzeri il cor vola a’suoi cari,’
which, being translated, reads:
‘Though doomed beyond the boundless seas to roam,
The Switzer ne’er forgets his childhood’s home.’
The fortune of the Ticinese emigrants now settled in California alone is
estimated at nearly two millions, and from one valley in Ticino, the
Vallemaggia, there are forty men who went out from a little cottage such
as I have described, and who could now any one of them buy up almost the
entire district. Splendid emigrants are these brave, determined
fellows--emigrants who benefit not only themselves, but the lands to
which they go, and who never, as they climb the rungs of Fortune’s
ladder, and build up new homes and new associations in the land of
their adoption, forget the dear old home, or those less fortunate
companions who still remain there.
I have interrupted my walk to say something about Swiss emigration, but
it is a subject that must force itself upon you in whichever way you
turn in this portion of Switzerland. Emigration is writ large in every
valley. It accounts for much that you see which otherwise would be
inexplicable. The subject was forced upon me when I came to Contra and
saw the empty village homes of the rich men far away.
I don’t mind confessing to you that after leaving Contra I grew a little
nervous. Blondin used to get £100 a time for walking on the tight-rope.
I got nothing for walking from Contra to Mergoscia, but there were times
when I should have preferred Mr. Blondin’s job, even if in addition to
performing gratis I had had to pay for the rope and the pole out of my
own pocket. Just after leaving Contra the road crosses a most fearful
abyss. Down thousands of feet below you dashes a mad, roaring torrent.
You clutch the side of the frail mountain bridge, and you peer over into
the yawning jaws of death below. I have seen some grand sights, but
never before have I seen anything so sublime in its grandeur as that
wild rocky scene, the far-stretching vale, the roaring torrent in the
gorge below.
We crept over that bridge on tiptoe. We neither of us spoke a word. The
scene was too grand for words. We were both awestruck, and both just a
little nervous, for after crossing the bridge the road became more awful
still.
It certainly was a terrible feat we were about to attempt, but I had set
out to go to Mergoscia, and I didn’t want to be beaten. We had been told
that, owing to a portion of the path having been carried down into the
abyss by a landslip, the road was not very good, but we had never
imagined it was so awful as it now appeared to us. The road absolutely
led across the face of a perpendicular rock! To look down below was to
turn sick, and there wasn’t even the pretence of a wall on the outside
edge of the path! It was barely wide enough to creep over, walking one
foot in front of the other, and the rock above jutted out at places so
that you were forced nearer the edge.
It was at this point that the road had recently broken away. While we
were standing and hesitating before we stepped upon the ledge, a lad
came up behind whistling, and with his hands in his pockets stepped
boldly upon the broken path, skipped over some bits of rock which had
fallen upon it, and was presently safe round the terrible jut and on the
broader and sounder pathway that led direct to Mergoscia.
That was enough for us. Steadying ourselves and clenching our teeth, we
stepped forward. It was a very bad minute as we nervously crossed the
jut. We dared not look down the face of the rock, or think what lay
below us. But we arrived safely on the other side, and then we paused to
take breath, and we confessed to each other that we wouldn’t do it again
for a thousand pounds.
The village of Mergoscia stands at a dizzy height on the side of a sheer
precipice. Looking back at the road by which we had reached it, it
seemed impossible that anyone but an acrobat could traverse it. It was
afterwards explained to us that the road was about to be repaired, that
half of it had recently fallen away, and that while it was in its
present condition the general way of approaching Mergoscia was from the
opposite side of the gorge. That night, after I fell asleep, that awful
path to Mergoscia came back to me in my dreams, and I woke up just as I
was falling into the abyss below. The walk is described in a guide-book
as ‘one of the most sublimely grand and romantic on the Alps.’ Romantic
it certainly was, but besides the romance there was just a little too
much reality about it to make it an unmixed pleasure.
There is a town on Lake Maggiore where all the cooks come from. It is
called Brisago. The first person Columbus met when he discovered America
was a cook from Brisago, which brings me to another of Albert Edward’s
jokes. He was talking to Lord Mayor Monico and the Right Hon. S. Gatti
at Dongio, and he said: ‘Ah, if William Tell had been a Ticinese, do you
know what he would have done with the apple after he had shot it?’ ‘No,’
said Lord Mayor Monico, ‘I don’t.’ ‘He would have made it into an apple
dumpling, and opened a restaurant with it,’ replied A. E. And everybody
laughed so heartily that several avalanches fell in the neighbourhood.
There is one thing which cannot fail to strike the close observer of
Swiss contemporary history, and that is the extraordinary contempt which
the rival political parties have for each other. The Radical and the
Conservative members of the Council never associate in private or in
public life. They won’t even sit at the same café, they won’t put up at
the same hotel, they won’t walk on the same side of the street.
And oh, the dreadful things they say of each other! The Conservatives
assure me that the Radicals would not hesitate to set fire to
Switzerland, or to blow it up with dynamite upon the slightest
provocation. The Radicals tell me that the Conservatives are ruining the
country; that they want to make the people slaves, and divide
Switzerland among themselves. It is a sight to see a Radical and a
Conservative meet accidentally. The scowl is a thing to remember for a
lifetime. You can almost see them arch their backs at each other like
rival tomcats, and you are quite astonished when they don’t spit. There
is no place in the world where political antagonism becomes such real
and personal antagonism as in the land of the gentleman who immortalized
the apple trick.
One fine day we went over on a specially-conducted expedition to the Val
Gatti--the beautiful and romantic valley, some four or five miles from
Biasca, from which the celebrated brothers came forth many years ago to
conquer London. Our expedition was almost a royal progress. In
Bellinzona we were entertained by Mr. Stephen, M.P. for Switzerland, at
a sumptuous breakfast, at the fifteenth course of which Albert Edward
broke down, and shed tears because he couldn’t eat any more; then we all
adjourned to the Presidential Palace, where we had cigars with the
Government; and then it came on to thunder and to lighten and to hail,
and presently--note this, for it is a remarkable fact--it became so
pitch dark that we had to light lamps in order to see each other--and
this was between twelve and one o’clock in the day. When in glorious
Switzerland in the middle of May I saw the gas and the lamps and the
candles alight in all the shops and houses at noon, I felt that I owed
some slight apology to London for the unkind things I have sometimes
said about it.
By one o’clock, however, the storm was over and gone, and the sun shone
out, and then we took train for Biasca. At Biasca we alighted, and found
a carriage and four horses, and postilions in magnificent uniforms,
waiting to take us over the marvellous four miles of mountain road that
lead to Dongio, the beautiful spot in the Val de Blenio in which the
Palazzo Gatti is situated.
It is impossible for me to describe that drive. My adjectives would not
hold out, and my neck is still aching with the twisting I gave it while
endeavouring to gaze up at the kaiser crags and monarch mountains that
stand like solemn sentinels guarding the glorious Gatti valley. The
drive was spirit-stirring and sublime, and the face of Stephen, M.P.,
positively beamed as he saw how much we were impressed with the glory of
his mountain home. We only had one or two trifling accidents by the way.
Once the postilions took a road that the M.P. didn’t wish them to go
‘for fear of our nerves,’ and, in endeavouring to turn round on a wooden
bridge across a torrent, they came so near landing us all upside down
that the author of a hundred melodramas jumped out for his life.
Unfortunately, he hopped out of the frying pan into the fire. Our
carriage righted itself; but he jumped badly, and fell on his nose, and
his hat went over into the roaring torrent, and the big waves banged it
merrily against the rocks, and the last he saw of it it was going down
the valley at the rate of fifty miles an hour.
Avalanches fall occasionally in the Val Gatti, and sides of mountains
come down without being invited to do so by the inhabitants. I must
confess that every now and then, as we dashed along a narrow road, with
a yawning abyss below us and about a couple of billion tons of
overhanging rock above us, and it began to look like thunderstorms on
the weather quarter, I began to think that an Alpine life has its bad
quarters of an hour. But we arrived safely at last at Dongio, and, when
we reined our reeking steeds up in front of the Palazzo Gatti, and a
deputation of Dongio maidens came and presented us with bouquets of
mountain flowers, we felt that we had not risked our precious lives in
vain.
In front of the Palazzo Gatti the Tree of Liberty is planted in honour
of Mr. Stephen, M.P. for the Valley. From the tree float flags and
emblems and ribbons. It is by this tree that you know you are on the
domain of a patrician, a citizen of renown. There are plenty of
beautiful houses scattered about the valley, and any amount near Dongio.
‘English,’ says the Dongio M.P., and you gather at once what he means.
The owners are of the London-Swiss division. The names of most of the
grandees of the valley sound familiar to a Londoner’s ear. The mayor of
Dongio, who gives us a right hearty welcome, is Signor Monico. I fancy
I’ve heard that name in Piccadilly. Our host at Aqua Rossa, a health
station higher up the valley, is Signor Gianella. I think that name is
to be found in London day by day. Whenever I say to the M.P., ‘Whose
palazzo is that?’ he mentions a name that is familiar to my cockney
ears. One pretty villa, standing a little way out of the village,
specially attracts my attention. ‘Whose house is that?’ I say. ‘That,’
replies the M.P., ‘is the house of our manager at the Gallery.’ I
uncover my head and bow to the residence. Without knowing it, I have
been leaning over the garden wall of the Palazzo Gallizia!
From Dongio we drove to Aqua Rossa. As we pass every hat in the village
flies off, and all the old ladies drop curtsies. Mr. Stephen is a great
man in these parts, and our progress is a triumphal one. While our host
has gone into a house to pay a call we converse with our driver. We ask
him, through Albert Edward, who speaks Italian as his mother tongue,
many little questions, and he is filled with admiration and reverence
for the great men of the valley who live far away in London. He assures
us that the whole valley belongs to the Gattis, and that he thinks all
the mountains do too. He isn’t quite sure if they have any more valleys
anywhere else, but they could have if they liked. We asked him if he
has heard that the Gattis are going to buy up Switzerland, and turn it
into a public company. He thinks a minute, and says, No; he has not
heard that, but he thinks they have something to do with the big hotel
at Aqua Rossa, where, right in the heart of the mountains, there are to
be the electric light and the telephone, and your hair is to be brushed
by machinery.
We go up the valley to the hotel at Aqua Rossa, which is being enlarged.
The ‘Red Water,’ from which the Grande Stabilmento Balneario takes its
name, is a marvellous cure for dyspepsia, skin diseases, bronchitis,
etc. The situation of the hotel is magnificent. Five miles up the
valley, far from the busy hum of men, you can look from your window over
a glorious panorama of mountain and vale. The air is exhilarating as
champagne, and there is no next-morning headache in it. At the hotel you
can have the baths and the treatment, the electric light, and perfect
peace, and the pension is only 8fr. a day. I have taken a room for the
season there myself, and the entire staff have guaranteed that after a
fortnight’s treatment I shall never know a pang of dyspepsia again. Ye
gods, what an angel I shall return to my native shores if it comes off!
The shades of night were falling fast ere we left the hospitable homes
of the Val Gatti. Our drive back to Biasca in the darkness made us sit
tight and clutch each other, and think now and then that we might have
been better men had we tried; but we skirted the torrents and dodged the
avalanches all right, and we were no sooner in the train than we all
fell fast asleep, overcome with fatigue and the mountain air, and we
should probably have slept and been taken on to Calais or Milan or
Timbuctoo if Albert Edward had not snored so violently as to alarm the
engine-driver and to cause him to pull up and hold a hurried
conversation with the guard. They both listened, and felt certain that
some terrible convulsion of nature was taking place in the mountains.
They came to the carriages and begged the passengers to alight. ‘We fear
an earthquake or a landslip,’ they said. ‘This thunderous roaring
betokens mischief.’ But when they came to our carriage and found the
great convulsion of nature was only Albert Edward snoring, they woke us
up and apologized to the other passengers, and we resumed our journey.
And so ended one of the most remarkable journeys it has ever been my lot
to perform.