[Footnote 1: This Essay was written in 1866, and published
in 1867. Reprinting it in 1879, after eighteen months spent
continuously in one high valley of the Grisons, I feel how
slight it is. For some amends, I take this opportunity of
printing at the end of it a description of Davos in winter.]
[Footnote 2: See, however, what is said about Leo Battista
Alberti in the sketch of Rimini in the second series.]
[Footnote 3: The Grisons surname Campèll may derive from the
Romansch Campo Bello. The founder of the house was one
Kaspar Campèll, who in the first half of the sixteenth
century preached the Reformed religion in the Engadine.]
[Footnote 4: I have translated and printed at the end of the
second volume some sonnets of Petrarch as a kind of palinode
for this impertinence.]
[Footnote 5: This begs the question whether [Greek:
leukoion] does not properly mean snowflake, or some such
flower. Violets in Greece, however, were often used for
crowns: [Greek: iostephanos] is the epithet of Homer for
Aphrodite, and of Aristophanes for Athens.]
[Footnote 6: Olive-trees must be studied at Mentone or San
Remo, in Corfu, at Tivoli, on the coast between Syracuse and
Catania, or on the lowlands of Apulia. The stunted but
productive trees of the Rhone valley, for example, are no
real measure of the beauty they can exhibit.]
[Footnote 7: Dante, Par. xi. 106.]
[Footnote 8: It is but just to Doctor Pasta to remark that
the above sentence was written more than ten years ago.
Since then he has enlarged and improved his house in many
ways, furnished it more luxuriously, made paths through the
beechwoods round it, and brought excellent water at a great
cost from a spring near the summit of the mountain. A more
charming residence from early spring to late autumn can
scarcely be discovered.]
[Footnote 9: 'The down upon their cheeks and chin was
yellower than helichrysus, and their breasts gleamed whiter
far than thou, O Moon.']
[Footnote 10: 'Thy tresses have I oftentimes compared to
Ceres' yellow autumn sheaves, wreathed in curled bands
around thy head.']
[Footnote 11: Both these and the large frescoes in the choir
have been chromolithographed by the Arundel Society.]
[Footnote 12: I cannot see clearly through these
transactions, the muddy waters of decadent Italian plot and
counterplot being inscrutable to senses assisted by nothing
more luminous than mere tradition.]
[Footnote 13: Those who are interested in such matters may
profitably compare this description of a planned murder in
the sixteenth century with the account written by Ambrogio
Tremazzi of the way in which he tracked and slew Troilo
Orsini in Paris in the year 1577. It is given by Gnoli in
his _Vittoria Accoramboni_, pp. 404-414.]
[Footnote 14: So far as I can discover, the only church of
San Spirito in Venice was a building on the island of San
Spirito, erected by Sansavino, which belonged to the
Sestiere di S. Croce, and which was suppressed in 1656. Its
plate and the fine pictures which Titian painted there were
transferred at that date to S.M. della Salute. I cannot help
inferring that either Bibboni's memory failed him, or that
his words were wrongly understood by printer or amanuensis.
If for S. Spirito we substitute S. Stefano, the account
would be intelligible.]
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