crossing and recrossing the land with so many and such strange devices
that from off the height of one of the mountains themselves there seems
scarce room for a space of level plain, wedged in between ridges or
sunk in clefts of hills, are the fair valleys of North Italy. Away from
the blue sea and its blinding beauty, and from the leaden heat of the
shores, they hold a fresh and free life of their own. Heavy night dews
there feed the wild flowers that sicken in the nerveless pallor of the
summer sea-air, and fresh water runs swiftly from mountain springs.
Sometimes they are narrow and hidden valleys, in whose depth even
villages could scarce find a home, did they not climb the hill-sides on
either hand, and camp out, as it were, upon the meadows or among the
vineyards. Or, again, they are wider, so that little towns have been
built within them—quaint towns with tall houses and taller _campanile_,
at whose side there flows, perhaps, a shallow river, brown upon its
shingly bed.
Where, north of Genoa and the sea some twenty miles, the low back of
the Giove mountain lies across the country, there is one of these more
open valleys that creeps upward toward the higher peak of Antola, and
along its way many a picturesque little village has grown for years,
wearing out the thatched roofs of its chimneyless houses beneath
hot suns and sharp mountain winds, cheerily holding its own against
storms and inundations from the river hard by, that is so cruel a foe
when the great rains have been at work. Little hamlets cling to the
mountain sides, with scarce a common thoroughfare beside them; while
other hamlets that stand upon the roadside can often boast a finer
house in their midst, for the _forestieri_ come in summer, and people
whose houses lie conveniently can let rooms. By these villages a stone
bridge is even built over the stream, so that the torrent may be safely
crossed when it is swollen by the rains.
It was early on a summer evening that I first saw this broader
and loveliest of North Apennine valleys which is between Giove’s
mountain and the more cloven peaks of Antola hills. In the towns it
had been so hot of late that not all the delights of sea-bathing in
soft, Mediterranean waters, from the marble steps of olive-planted
gardens, nor even the seductiveness of the _dolce far niente_ beside
spouting fountains, beneath colonnades and on balconies, could banish
the longing for the freedom of a fresher air, could atone for the
remorseless Scirocco, for the sapping heat of those white August
days and terrible nights. I sought release from them all and from the
mosquitoes, where green trees might perchance fan a breeze towards me,
where turf would at least be cool to lie on, and I sought it in the
valleys—so little known even by those who live within their reach—of
the Piedmontese Apennines.
I had seen a little station, just at the mouth of the Giove tunnel on
the way to Alessandria, around which the country seemed to me crisply
and luxuriantly beautiful. It was called Busalla. No one knew of it
as a recommendable _villeggiatura_; Pontedecimo, Serravalle, Voltaggio
were suggested to me instead, but I preferred my own choice. The little
town is dirty, noisy, dusty as little Italian towns mostly are; but
in the country round about I was not disappointed. Dense, bountiful
chestnut woods, whose tender-coloured, fan-like leaves sway soothingly
in the whispering breeze, would alone have been enough to freshen
me, wearied by grand buildings and splendid colonnades. And besides
the desired trees there was the gurgling of water all about—sometimes
I could scarcely find from whence. I would glance around to see the
stream that was babbling so audibly, and lay my head down again on the
turf, fancying I was mistaken, only to hear the mocking laughter of the
water again when I had ceased to look for it.
When I arrived at Busalla, I was rather at a loss at first about
a shelter for the night. The cleanest even of the two inns looked
scarcely such as I cared to enter. I questioned a comely female in
the piazza, who had figs and peaches in a basket on her head, and who
was freely gesticulating and shouting at a handsome _negoziante_ from
Genoa. Having secured her attention by means of a larger remuneration
than the nominal price she asked for the fruit, I learnt that there
was a _magnifico stabilimento_ at Savignone, a village some three miles
off: I could have a conveyance, or she herself would show me the way,
as she was going to the village. I accepted her offer—the _vettura_ I
had seen standing out, and I should have feared for my safety at its
mercy.
We came first through the little town, with its butcher, fruiterer,
and inevitable barber, past the old whitewashed _campanile_ with the
sun-dial on its façade, and struck out upon a roughish way to the left.
There was a torrent to cross on stepping-stones. I recollect that my
guide laughed loudly at my care to keep on the stones. She trudged
through the water on her bare feet. For a good half-hour the road runs
alongside of just such a drowsy river as I have remembered before,
creeping away furtively in the midst of an arid bed, too weary in the
drought even to lift its voice; yet this river can swell beneath the
sharp lash of an angry thunderstorm, to roll onward in muddy, turbulent
volumes, regardless of walls, bridges, or any other obstacle. Now to
the left is a weir: the road mounts some hundred feet above the level
of the water, and is none of the safest to drive over, being narrow,
ill-made, and unparapetted. I was glad I had not chosen the _vettura_.
Glad too, because a more lovely walk could scarcely be conceived. The
valley lay before me in all its sweet, mellow beauty: fresh, crisp,
luxuriant, and yet burnished all over and saturated with the dim,
gently sorrowful shadow of coming autumn. The vintage was near, and the
terraced hill-sides were hung with the rich festoons of unpruned vines,
that seemed fondly to try and cover the bare ground whence the golden
wheat had been shorn. Waving, sweeping chestnut woods drape those hills
around, leaving bare only the summits, whose frail outlines lie clear
against the pale sky. Unlike bolder types of mountains, these Apennines
are fretted all over with a delicate tracery of faint furrows that
wander waywardly, and of watercourses that rise slenderly above to grow
into large ravines and gashes below. Nature is warm and gracious here,
but not wanton with luxuriance, as in the more tropical beauty which
I had just left; the country is not a wild country because the hand
of man has rested on it all to put cultivation within its valleys, and
even upon its hill-sides; but cultivation has not wiped away the mark
of nature’s own wayward grace, that is fit to that other grace, free,
winning, and wayward, too, even to quaintness, which belongs to its
people.
[Illustration: IN THE FIELDS AT SAVIGNONE.]
We crossed the bridge—the only stone bridge on the river, that gives
its name to a village hard by—and followed the way that steeply climbs
the hill for a while until another Campanile is in sight. Ten minutes
more of climbing brought us out on to the piazza of Savignone.
I dismissed my friendly peasant guide, who promised me her warmest
prayers in exchange for my silver coin, and watching her as she reaped
neighbourly greetings from knots of country folk gathered on the
_piazza_ for their evening relaxation, I looked around upon the village
that was, for a while, to be my home. I stood in a large open square
paved with round pebbles; a church was on my right—on either side of
which, and forming a quadrangle round about, lay a long, low building,
yellow-painted and large-windowed, formerly a hospital, but now the
_magnifico stabilimento_ of which I had been told. Here were evidently
the remains of an old feudal borough, belonging probably in long-lost
times to one of those lords of the marshes so famous in the days of
the terrible _condottieri_. Even through the embellishments of modern
stucco one could trace the skeleton of a palace which had seen better
usage, in the days when architecture was something more than a name;
and besides the palace, hospital, or _stabilimento_, there were ruins
of a castle on a little hill close above, a hill that in the twilight
seemed to dwell beneath the shadow of another and rockier mountain.
All around me rose graceful and methodless mountains, with forms that
were broken into a wealth of harmonies, and sky-line lying clear-cut
and undulating upon the darkening blue. A soft dew fell from out
the hot day upon all drooping things, and, as I rested, the sound of
rippling water smote on my hearing—of water that, said I, would ripple
and murmur just the same to-morrow, when the sun should be burning
overhead. ‘Ah, yes, we have many streams here; that is why the doctors
have built a _Stabilimento Idroterapico_,’ was the old _contadino’s_
explanation, to whom I turned now for advice. ‘Your honour will be well
there in the Stabilimento; there is true luxury! We have a fair spot
at Savignone for anyone to pass the time in, and one does not feel the
heat too much—no! And over the gorge of the river is _la Valle Calda_.’
So I stayed at Savignone; and when the sun’s power had flagged the next
day, and dews crept down once more, I went back upon my steps of the
first evening—back almost as far as Busalla, that I might learn to know
that other gorge, which the old peasant had called _la Valle Calda_.
Leaving the town of Busalla, my road struck off from the main highway
across the Giove, from that highway which was in olden times the
traveller’s only route from Turin to Genoa. It is still studded along
with many a little wayside inn, now forlorn and impoverished, where
carriage-loads of foreigners used to stop in days gone by, while their
horses were baiting. These little inns have sunk nowadays to the lower
rank of ‘_bettole_’ or taverns; since the making of the railway they
lack the custom which raised them into ‘_alberghi_,’ and no longer
profess to find beds, but only to supply the wayfarer or the waggoner
with food and drink. Nevertheless the ‘_bettole_’ are still distinctive
features, and picturesque with a purely Italian picturesqueness.
The branch road up the valley of the Scrivia is not at first sight
inviting. Poor and dirty buildings of the town’s outskirts flank its
ill-paven and narrow streets, but squalid houses are soon left behind,
and the country opens out before and around you. As I have said before,
it is a free landscape, even though the hills stand about on every side
closing in the valley, and though, looking up toward the farther end
of it, you can see that the land grows more mountainous, and that the
cones and shoulders of hills seem to lie up more cumbrously against the
horizon. But they are not mountains whose peaks tower into the sky,
neither are their sides made up of cliffs and dark ravines. They are
scarcely perhaps high enough and important enough even to deserve the
name of mountains—these slimly moulded and graceful hills, daintily
muffled in luxuriant vegetation—excepting that they are so amply
cultivated where the chestnut woods are not, that something of their
height is lost, perhaps, because their nature is so like the nature
of the plains; the plains, that are no more than narrow little strips
of level land from which cultivation creeps up the steep slopes; for
patches of corn-field, of maize and potato crops, intersected with
vineyards and trellises, find room on many a tiny ledge or terrace of
earth till the whole land wears a look of careful plenty.
Even the timber vegetation of the country has a sort of prodigality
in its beauty, which seems to tell how the broad-leaved chestnut trees
are not only fair to behold but also bountiful in service. They wear a
promise of warmer tones now over their brilliant summer colouring, for
the autumn has just begun to shed a new influence abroad, and faintly
golden tints speak of the fruit-time of the year, after the sunnier
time of flowers and scents is over. The whole land has a flush of
this new promise. Harvest is over, and the corn-fields are laid bare,
yet there is a golden burnished hue upon the ground where the yellow
stubble is left upon the yellow clay soil. The vintage is not yet
gathered in, so that the vines have lost none of their beauty, but that
rather the cool purple-red of their luscious fruit-clusters, near to
that other warmer red which is faint as yet upon the gracefully-turning
tendrils and broad leaves of their foliage, serves to help the warm
painting of the whole. As far as the eye can see, gold and green mingle
in subtle harmony. A faintest fancy of coming gold in the chestnut
woods, the steadier gold and yet pale of the cropped fields, the gold
that almost deepens into brown where patches of ploughed land lie here
and there upon the hillsides and in the valley, and through the whole
the golden-winding thread of the river.
This is the valley of the Scrivia, from whose main course that side
gorge creeps up, among the mountains, to the village of Savignone
and the feudal castle. At its foot a mountain stands sentinel to
all the little quiet and cosy villages within the precinct below—a
tall mountain, uprising many hundreds of feet in one solid mass, but
indented with many clefts and water-courses, and cut at its summit
into many sharp peaks, each different in shape and in size, and all
lying clear and fine against the sky. Here the river winds in closer
coils, and its rough bed spreads across the valley; for soon the water
gathers itself together, since it is somewhere in the fissures of Monte
Baneo or her range that the Scrivia has its birth. At the foot of the
sentinel mountain you may see a little white town lodged—and this is
the town, more properly called the village, of Casella.
All this you will have seen on before you and beside you as you walked
up along the stony road from Busalla. The stream has been flowing at
your left, and on your right were chestnut woods growing up into the
hills, and turf and moss that spread beneath them, and little hamlets
dotting the wayside, and blackberry hedges by the road. Many little
torrents bubble across the footpath—streams that must be crossed on
the roughest of stepping-stones, for only the village called ‘_Ponte
di Savignone_’ boasts a stone bridge across the river for those who are
bound for the Baths, and here are houses gathered on either side of the
bridge, finer looking than the smoke-coloured and thatched cottages.
From this point the main road of the Scrivia valley runs on the farther
side of the water.
But I, in my evening ramble, was not bound for the high road nor
for the town of Casella, that lies at the valley’s foot. The old
_contadino_ had spoken of the mountain’s eastern side, when he had
pointed across the gorge to the slopes lying opposite, and he had
spoken of it as _la Valle Calda_. I did not therefore cross the stone
bridge again, but holding to the right, went in search of this new
valley. No carriage—not even the brave one offered to my notice the
evening before at Busalla—could have held its way upon this road, for
the stones lay looser and larger than ever upon it, and, as it went
farther into the hills, it narrowed, and grew more and more uneven.
Monte Baneo still stood up before me with the valley and the river at
its feet, and to westward the slopes of Antola. Little cottages began
to appear in clusters upon meadows and peeping from among woods; blue
smoke curled into the air from dells and copses, showing where other
human habitations lay hid; then the _Campanile_ came to sight. It stood
close against the hill, and as I came nearer the bells began gently to
chime with gladsome rhythm for the morrow’s feast of Saint or Virgin.
This was _La Valle Calda_; and as I stood gazing on the soft and
quiet scene there came an old woman along the road who went across
the mountains weekly with new-laid eggs to sell, and she, greeting me
friendly, as all these peasants do, told me many things of the country
and of the neighbours, and commending me heartily for my genuine
admiration of this valley of her home, she bade me turn my walk once
more to the right till I should reach a village called, she said, _La
Madonna della Vittoria_, for there should I behold a view worth the
seeing indeed!
So towards the east I turned again, and climbed my way into the
chestnut woods. I left the river behind that had been flowing on
my left through green meadows as I walked from Ponte towards the
chief village of _La Valle Calda_. I left even this semblance of a
high road, running parallel with the real high road on the stream’s
opposite shore which had seemed so close in the summer air that I
had heard the laughter of the _vetturino_ as he drove his infirm
vehicle, and chattered with his passengers, or urged his horse by loud
vociferations.
My new way was nothing but a mountain path, and a steep one—for _La
Madonna della Vittoria_ stands on a hill. The foot-track winds up
between chestnut groves, rising higher and higher above the banks of
a mountain torrent that in autumn and winter time is turbulent in its
downward rush to the river. Now and again little hamlets appear, whose
houses are ranged and huddled on both sides of the path; the road
grows steeper, and the sides of the ravine, in whose deep the torrent
gurgles, are rough and jagged as you look down upon them. In this side
valley the country is wilder and more bleak, for there is less room for
cultivation. The path creeps round an angle of the hill, and the long
ridge is in sight, where _La Madonna della Vittoria_ stands between two
heads of the mountain. The place takes its name from a little oratory,
sacred to the Virgin of that title. People come hither in pilgrimage
from the parish church; and in times of blight or of pestilence, of
rains or of long drought, processions are frequent. The chapel is
beyond the village, a little farther up on the hill. If you mount the
street and the flight of stone steps that is at the end of the village,
you will come upon the little mound on which stands the oratory. The
piazza is a paved enclosure with a low stone wall and a stone bench
that runs round hemming it in. There are acacia trees and cypresses
against the church, and upon its front a worn and faded image of the
Madonna, with sceptre and crown and glory, stands where it has stood
for many a year within shallow niche to receive the winds and the rain
and the people’s obeisance.
A sharp air blows of an evening around this little piazza upon the
hill, a breeze that is keen to refresh and yet soft enough to soothe.
Sitting upon the little low wall, it blows around, while your looks
stray over the goodly country spread out beneath and about you. Ranges
upon ranges of hills set a girdle on every side. But they are not
hills that tell of a mountainous land far ahead, as do the hills of
Savignone. There is a vague sense of space and freedom here, for we
have turned our faces back again towards the sea. The distance that
your eye can scan seems measureless: hills as far as you can see—tier
rising behind tier, the higher peaks standing forward and the lower
ones peering forth, as it were, from betwixt their shoulders; hills on
every side, but hills whose outlines sink and grow dim in the filmier
light as they near the sea far away. At first the mountains seem so
thickly wedged upon the soil that no room can remain for places of
human habitation; but as you gaze, you see how the rivers flow down
from them, growing wider in their course, and with space for towns
upon the banks. Far out ahead, where the blue air grows paler, the
dim sky sinks down into a silvery line, that is the Mediterranean.
And, perhaps, if the sunset has been clear, and if the vapours have
not arisen to muffle it, you may see in the vague distance other
things that are dim, yet more solid in their dimness, and these are
the islands of the sea; and further up, beyond the sky-line, forms of
dazzling whiteness, and these are peaks of the Maritime Alps; while
below, in the nearest valley, the town of Ponte Decimo gleams out in
the last of the sunlight, and _La Madonna della Vittoria_ looks down
upon it all.
The old _pedona_ had been right when she told me it was worth while to
climb the hill for the sake of the view at its top. I sat a while on
the wall of the little _piazza_ watching the evening vapours creep down
from the mountains, and feeling their breath on my cheek. Women with
children clinging to their skirts, and small, swaddled babies in their
arms, came to make their evening prayer in the sanctuary—to have their
evening gossip in its porch. They greeted me with courteous grace, and
one of them talked long with me, telling me of the neighbourhood and
of its people—rambling on with stories of her own and of many other
villages. They have the true grace of perfect unconsciousness, the
dwellers in these little Apennine homes, and have no conventionalities,
since each acts upon the moment’s impulse that he may enjoy life to
the full. I call them all to mind, those simple friends of a time long
past, and, as I think of them, I think of summer days when breezes
moved silently amid leaves, and the air was white with heat as it lay
clear above the tender green of chestnut trees.
I think of little rough and quaint villages that are the homes of
these my friends, and, best of all, I remember one village that stands
beneath the crest of a hill, with shady woods and orchards to girdle it
about. Another hill lies over against it, whose graceful form I seem to
see as I write—soft shapes, yet varied that rest upon the sky, subtle
waves and indentations of earth, with which play the lights and shades
of the daylight. It is that village of _La Valle Calda_, towards which
I turned my steps again after I had looked on the fair scene from _La
Vittoria’s_ hill. A church stands for centre to the parish—that church
with tall _campanile_ and blue-painted belfry—and, beside the church,
an oratory, where the memory of some special saint is sacred; but the
parish itself is scattered far and wide through copse and over meadow,
in hamlets that stand beside streams or on hill-tops.
The steeple is nevertheless, here as elsewhere, the beacon that can
gather all neighbours together, and beneath it is a piazza with stone
benches around, where at Ave Maria my memory confidently returns to
recall each one of those faces seen long ago. I know I shall find
them there, for I know they must have a goodly portion of gossip and
loitering, and am fain indeed to confess that if foreign sayings about
Italian impetuosity, and easily moved Italian feelings, have been
often exaggerated, these Apennine country people are, on the other
hand, no taciturn race. They are cunning to mould to their use the
lithe tongue of their land, to adorn it with expletives, and to point
it with gesticulation; and it is even this habit of noisy vociferation
which has perhaps won them abroad the character—so little deserved—for
curbless passions and vindictively cruel propensities. For they are
a kindly people in their mutual relations, and formed by their very
nature for warm, social life, since they need a free neighbourly
intercourse, such as quiet and colder temperaments can scarcely
understand.
Hence it is that the life of an Italian community, unlike the
comparatively secretive life of northern lands, is to be learned in its
open thoroughfares rather than its individual homes, and that we must
seek on cottage door-steps, in market-places and piazzas, where men and
women mix freely together, the true colour of the Italian people.
At the Chestnut Harvest.
As October days draw nigh to their end there is festival in the
cottages of North Italy. Walking at evening among her mountains and
passing through her homely villages, a red light of wood fire comes
streaming upon you from open cabin doors and from between the chinks
of clumsy window-shutters, and noisy sounds of revelry fall around.
For this is the season when the chestnuts are ripe, and the peasants
are making merry by dark, for the work they have had during the hours
of day, and they are glad for that harvest which is to them the most
bounteous of the year.