Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino by Samuel Butler CHAPTER XVII--Soazza and the Valley of Mesocco Speed: 600 words per minute I regret that I have not space for any of the sketches I took at Bellinzona, than which few towns are more full of admirable subjects. The Hotel de la Ville is an excellent house, and the town is well adapted for an artist's headquarters. Turner's two water-colour drawings of Bellinzona in the National Gallery are doubtless very fine as works of art, but they are not like Bellinzona, the spirit of which place (though not the letter) is better represented by the background to Basaiti's Madonna and child, also in our gallery, supposing the castle on the hill to have gone to ruin. At Bellinzona a man told me that one of the two towers was built by the Visconti and the other by Julius Caesar, a hundred years earlier. So, poor old Mrs. Barratt at Langar could conceive no longer time than a hundred years. The Trojan war did not last ten years, but ten years was as big a lie as Homer knew. 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. On such days the mountains are very dark till close up to the level of the clouds; here, if there is dewy or rain-besprinkled pasture, it tells of a luminous silvery colour by reason of the light which the clouds reflect upon it; the bottom edges of the clouds are also light through the reflection upward from the grass, but I do not know which begins this battledore and shuttlecock arrangement. These things are like quarrels between two old and intimate friends; one can never say who begins them. Sometimes on a dull gray day like this, I have seen the shadow parts of clouds take a greenish-ashen-coloured tinge from the grass below them. On one of these most enjoyable days we left Bellinzona for Mesocco on the S. Bernardino road. The air was warm, there was not so much as a breath of wind, but it was not sultry: there had been rain, and the grass, though no longer decked with the glory of its spring flowers, was of the most brilliant emerald, save where flecked with delicate purple by myriads of autumnal crocuses. The level ground at the bottom of the valley where the Moesa runs is cultivated with great care. Here the people have gathered the stones in heaps round any great rock which is too difficult to move, and the whole mass has in time taken a mulberry hue, varied with gray and russet lichens, or blobs of velvety green moss. These heaps of stone crop up from the smooth shaven grass, and are overhung with barberries, mountain ash, and mountain elder with their brilliant scarlet berries--sometimes, again, with dwarf oaks, or alder, or nut, whose leaves have just so far begun to be tinged as to increase the variety of the colouring. The first sparks of autumn's yearly conflagration have been kindled, but the fire is not yet raging as in October; soon after which, indeed, it will have burnt itself out, leaving the trees it were charred, with here and there a live coal of a red leaf or two still smouldering upon them. As yet lingering mulleins throw up their golden spikes amid a profusion of blue chicory, and the gourds run along upon the ground like the fire mingled with the hail in "Israel in Egypt." Overhead are the umbrageous chestnuts loaded with their prickly harvest. Now and again there is a manure heap upon the grass itself, and lusty wanton gourds grow out from it along the ground like vegetable octopi. If there is a stream it will run with water limpid as air, and as full of dimples as "While Kedron's brook" in "Joshua":- [At this point in the book a music score is given] How quiet and full of rest does everything appear to be. There is no dust nor glare, and hardly a sound save that of the unfailing waterfalls, or the falling cry with which the peasants call to one another from afar. {29} So much depends upon the aspect in which one sees a place for the first time. What scenery can stand, for example, a noontide glare? Take the valley from Lanzo to Viu. 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. The least interesting part is that between Bellinzona and Roveredo, but soon afte

• published: 01 Apr 2015
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