We were attracted to Locarno by the approaching fêtes in honour of the fourth centenary of the apparition of the Virgin Mary to Fra Bartolomeo da Ivrea, who founded the sanctuary in consequence.

The programme announced that the festivities would begin on, Saturday, at 3.30 P.M., with the carrying of the sacred image (sacro simulacro) of the Virgin from the Madonna del Sasso to the collegiate church of S. Antonio.  There would then be a benediction and celebration of the holy communion.  At eight o’clock there were to be illuminations, fireworks, balloons, &c., at the sanctuary and the adjacent premises.

The church itself is not remarkable, but it contains the best collection of votive pictures that I know in any church, unless the one at Oropa be excepted; there is also a modern Italian “Return from the Cross” by Ciseri, which is very much admired, but with which I have myself no sympathy whatever.  It is an Academy picture.

On the afternoon of Friday the 13th of August the Patriarch Monsignor Ballerini was to arrive by the three o’clock boat, and there was a crowd to welcome him.  The music of Locarno was on the quay playing a selection, not from “Madame Angot” itself, but from something very like it—light, gay, sparkling opera bouffe—to welcome him.  I felt as I had done when I found the matchbox in the sanctuary bedroom at Graglia: not that I minded it myself, but as being a little unhappy lest the Bishop might not quite like it.

I do not see how we could welcome a bishop—we will say to a confirmation—with a band of music at all.  Fancy a brass band of some twenty or thirty ranged round the landing stage at Gravesend to welcome the Bishop of London, and fancy their playing we will say “The two Obadiahs,” or that horrid song about the swing going a little bit higher!  The Bishop would be very much offended.  He would not go a musical inch beyond the march in “Le Prophète,” nor, willingly, beyond the march in “Athalie.”  Monsignor Ballerini, however, never turned a hair; he bowed repeatedly to all round him, and drove off in a carriage and pair, apparently much pleased with his reception.  We Protestants do not understand, nor take any very great pains to understand, the Church of Rome.  If we did, we should find it to be in many respects as much in advance of us as it is behind us in others.

One thing made an impression upon me which haunted me all the time.  On every important space there were advertisements of the programme, the substance of which I have already given.  But hardly, if at all less noticeable, were two others which rose up irrepressible upon every prominent space, searching all places with a subtle penetrative power against which precautions were powerless.  These advertisements were not in Italian but in English, nevertheless they were neither of them English—but both, I believe, American.  The one was that of the Richmond Gem cigarette, with the large illustration representing a man in a hat smoking, so familiar to us here in London.  The other was that of Wheeler & Wilson’s sewing machines.

Later on, passing through the town alone, when the people had gone to rest, I saw many of them lying on the pavement under the arches fast asleep.  A brilliant moon illuminated the market-place; there was a pleasant sound of falling water from the fountain; the lake was bathed in splendour, save where it took the reflection of the mountains—so peaceful and quiet was the night that there was hardly a rustle in the leaves of the aspens.  But whether in moonlight or in shadow, the busy persistent vibrations that rise in Anglo-Saxon brains were radiating from every wall, and the man in the black felt hat and the bland lady with the sewing machine were there—lying in wait, as a cat over a mouse’s hole, to insinuate themselves into the hearts of the people so soon as they should wake.

Great numbers came to the festivities.  There were special trains from Biasca and all intermediate stations, and special boats.  And the ugly flat-nosed people came from the Val Verzasca, and the beautiful people came from the Val Onsernone and the Val Maggia, and I saw Anna, the curate’s housekeeper, from Mesocco, and the old fresco painter who told me he should like to pay me a visit, and suggested five o’clock in the morning as the most appropriate and convenient time.  The great procession contained seven or eight hundred people.  From the balcony of the Hotel della Corona I counted as well as I could and obtained the following result:—

In the evening, there, sure enough, the apparition of the Blessed Virgin was.  The church of the Madonna was unilluminated and all in darkness, when on a sudden it sprang out into a blaze, and a great transparency of the Virgin and child was lit up from behind.  Then the people said, “Oh bel!”

I was myself a little disappointed.  It was not a good apparition, and I think the effect would have been better if it had been carried up by a small balloon into the sky.  It might easily have been arranged so that the light behind the transparency should die out before the apparition must fall again, and also that the light inside the transparency should not be reflected upon the balloon that lifted it; the whole, therefore, would appear to rise from its own inherent buoyancy.  I am confident it would have been arranged in this way if the thing had been in the hands of the Crystal Palace people.

I suppose these were something like famine prices; at any rate, a workman wrote this upon the tower and the tower stopped.

We left Locarno by the conveyance which leaves every day at four o’clock for Bignasco, a ride of about four hours.  The Ponte Brolla, a couple of miles out of Locarno, is remarkable, and the road is throughout (as a matter of course) good.  I sat next an old priest, an excellent kindly man, who talked freely with me, and scolded me roundly for being a Protestant more than once.

Bignasco is at the confluence of the two main branches of the Maggia.  The greater part of the river comes down from the glacier of Basodino, which cannot be seen from Bignasco; I know nothing of this valley beyond having seen the glacier from the top of the pass between Fusio and Dalpe.  The smaller half of the river comes down from Fusio, the valley of Sambucco, and the lake of Naret.  The accommodation at Bignasco is quite enough for a bachelor; the people are good, but the inn is homely.  From Bignasco the road ascends rapidly to Peccia, a village which has suffered terribly from inundations, and from Peccia it ascends more rapidly still—Fusio being reached in about three hours from Bignasco.  There is an excellent inn at Fusio kept by Signor Dazio, to whose energy the admirable mountain road from Peccia is mainly due.  On the right just before he crosses the bridge, the traveller will note the fresco of the Crucifixion, which I have mentioned at page 140.

When near the top of the pass we heard the whistle of a marmot.  Guglielmoni told us he had a tame one once which was very fond of him.  It slept all the winter, but turned round once a fortnight to avoid lying too long upon one side.  When it woke up from its winter sleep it no longer recognised him, but bit him savagely right through the finger; by and by its recollection returned to it, and it apologised.

At this point pines begin, and soon the path enters them; after a while we catch sight of Prato, and eventually come down upon Dalpe.  In another hour and a quarter Faido is reached.  The descent to Faido from the summit of the pass is much greater than the ascent from Fusio, for Faido is not more than 2300 feet above the sea, whereas, as I have said, Fusio is over 4200 feet.  The descent from the top of the pass to Faido is about 5300 feet, while to Fusio it is only 3400.  The reader, therefore, will see that he had better go from Fusio to Faido, and not vice versa, unless he is a good walker.

The weather was perfect for the return journey.  After passing Nante we noticed by the side of the path several round burnt patches some four feet in diameter which struck us as rather strange, so we asked Guglielmoni about them.  He said there had been ants’ nests there, and the people burnt them because the ants did so much damage.  He showed us one that was in process of reconstruction, the ants building upon the remains of their ruined home, and pointed out the deep channel which the ants had worn in the ground through their habit of entering and quitting their old-established nest by one main road.  We had thought the channel was a rill artificially cut for irrigation, and it was not till Guglielmoni showed us how impossible this was that we came to see he was right.  He showed us a disused road that had led to a nest now destroyed, and on two or three other occasions showed us roads leading from one nest to another.

Then we met an old gentleman with a Rembrandt-Rabbi far-away look in his eyes.  He wore a coarse but clean linen shirt, and was otherwise neat in his attire.  He looked as if he had suffered much and had been chastened rather than soured by it.  We talked a little and the conversation turned upon deceit.  I said that deceit was a necessary alloy for truth which, without this hardening addition, like gold without an alloy of copper, would be unworkable.

“Chi non sa ingannare,” I said in conclusion, “non sa parlare il vero.”

The old gentleman seemed to like this, and so we parted.  Guglielmoni told us he was a painter and liable to temporary fits of insanity.  During these fits he would go up by himself into the mountains, like some old prophet going out into the wilderness, and stay there till the fit was over, living no one knew where or how.

Guglielmoni had some edelweiss in his hat, and we asked him the Italian name for it.  He replied that it had no other name.  The passion for this flower has evidently spread from the north.  The Italians are great at suppressing unnecessary details.  I was going up once in the posta from Varallo to Fobello and had an Americanised Italian cook for my only fellow-traveller.  I asked him the name of a bird I happened to see, and he said:

“Oh, he not got no name.  There is two birds got names.  There is the gazza; he spik very nice.  I have one; he spik beautiful.  And there is the merlo; he sing very pretty.  The other, they not got no names; they not want no names; every one call them what he choose.”

And so it is with the flowers.  There is the rose and perhaps half-a-dozen more plants, but as for the others “they not got no names, they not want no names.”

My fellow-traveller, speaking of the villagers in the villages we passed through, said:

“They all right as long as they stop here, but when they go away and travel, then they not never happy no more.”

I have nothing to retract from what I have said in praise of Fusio.  It is the most old-world subalpine village that I know.  It was probably burnt down some time in the Middle Ages and perhaps the scare thus caused led to its being rebuilt not in wood but in stone.  The houses are much built into one another as at S. Remo; the roofs are all of them made of large stones; there are a good many wooden balconies, but it is probably because it has been chiefly built of stone that we now see it much as it must have looked two or even three centuries ago.  If any one wants to know what kind of village the people of three hundred years ago beheld, at Fusio he will find an almost untouched specimen of what he wants.  For picturesqueness I know no subalpine village so good.  Sit down wherever one will there is a subject ready made.  The back of the village is perhaps more mediæval in appearance than the front.  Its quaint picturesqueness, the beauty of its flowers, the brilliancy of its meadows, and the genial presence of Signor Dazio prevent me from allowing any great length of time to pass without a visit to Fusio.

I said to Jones once: “It is worth while going to Fusio if only to please Signor Dazio.”

“Yes,” said Jones, “and he is so very easily pleased.”

At Fusio, in spite of all its flowers, there are no bees; the summer is too short and they would have to be fed too long.  Nevertheless, we got the best honey at Fusio that we got anywhere.  Signor Dazio said it was from his own hives at Locarno and had not been “elongated” in any way.  What was bought at the shops, he said, was almost invariably “elongated” with flour, sugar and a variety of other things.

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 are only three bells, but they are good ones; they were brought up from Peccia some forty years ago, long before Signor Dazio had the present road made; he was then a boy and assisted at the very arduous task of bringing them up.  Like bells generally in North Italy they hang half-way out of the windows of the campanile, instead of being wholly within the belfry as our English bells are.  This is why an Italian campanile is such a much more slender object than an English belfry; it has less to cover.  When the bells are rung by being raised and swung in and out of the window, there is one ringer to each bell, and the following is all that is attempted:—

The ringer has a light cord for each bell; he fastens one end of the cord by an iron hook to a hole in the clapper and the other to a beam of the belfry.  The cords are just long enough to hold the clapper an inch or so off the side of the bell, the weight of the clapper keeping the cord tight.  The ringer has thus three tight cords before him, on which he plays by hitting the middle of whichever one he wants with his hand; this depresses it and brings the clapper suddenly against the bell.  He sits so that he can easily reach all the strings, and sets to work playing on the cords as though on a clumsy three-stringed harp.  He plays out of his head without any music, and it is wonderful what variety he makes this rude instrument produce and how responsive it is to moods requiring different shades of expression.  Of course, when the player’s resources are enlarged by the addition of two more bells, as at Castelletto and Vogogna, he can produce an infinitely more varied effect.

The notes, according to the pitch of Signor Dazio’s piano, were G, A, and B, and when we watched the ringer we saw that he frequently played the B with the G; sometimes he struck the B with the A, no doubt intending it as an appoggiatura, and, at a distance, this was the effect produced.  But when he struck the two notes together and made the B louder than the A it had the effect of varying the tune.  He never played his tunes in precisely the same way twice running, and this makes it difficult to say with certainty what they were, but, omitting variations, the two favourite tunes went like this:

It was at Issime, by the by, that we saw the most beautiful woman that either of us ever saw.  She was gathering French beans in the little garden in front of the hotel and had her apron full of leeks and celery.  No words can give an idea of the dignity and grace with which she moved, and as for her head, it was what Leonardo da Vinci, Gaudenzio Ferrari, and Bernardino Luini all tried to get without ever getting it.  As long as she was in sight it was impossible to look at anything else, and at the same time there was a something about her which forbade staring.

We thought the people did not as a general rule look in robust health; some few, both men and women, seemed to have little or nothing the matter with them, but most of them looked as though they were suffering from the unwholesome conditions under which they live, for the conditions in the villages are not much healthier than in the alpi.  The houses in such a village as Fusio are few of them even tolerably wholesome.  Signor Dazio’s houses are all that can be wished for in this respect, but in too many of the others the rooms are low, without sufficient sunlight, and too many of them are far from inodorous.

One cause of the mischief doubtless lies in the fact that the high-altitude houses have descended with insufficient modification from ancestors adapted to a warmer climate.  Their forefathers were built for the plains.  These houses should have been begotten of Russian or Canadian dwellings, not of Piedmontese or Lombard.  At any rate, if a reform is to be initiated it should begin by a study of the Canadian or Russian house.

The two great foes of life are the two extremes of change.  Too much, that is to say too sudden change and too little change are alike fatal.  That is why there is so little organic life a few feet below the surface of the earth.  It gets too slow altogether and things won’t stand it.  Cut away for months together the incessant changes involved in the changed vibrations consequent upon looking at a surface whose colour is varied, and a monotony is induced which should be relieved by the entry of as much other change as possible to supply the place of what is lost.

As the clouds come and go the gray-green cobweb-chastened light ebbs and flows over the ceiling.  If a hen has laid an egg outside and has begun to cackle, it is an event of magnitude.  A peasant hammering his scythe, the clack of a wooden shoe upon the pavement, the dripping of the fountain, all these things, with such concert as they keep, invite the dewy-feathered sleep till the old woman comes and rings the bell for mezzo giorno.

This is the sunny side of subalpine church-going, but how is it when these steps are hidden under a metre of frozen snow?  How about five o’clock on a Christmas morning, when the priest can hardly get down the steps leading from his house into the church from the fury of the wind and the driving of the fine midge-like snow?  Even when the horrors of the middle passage have been overcome and the church has been reached, surely it is a nice, cosy place for an infirm old gentleman or lady with bronchitic tendencies!  How is it conceivable that any one should keep even decently well who has to go to church in a high subalpine village at five, six, seven, eight, or in fact at any hour before about noon upon a winter morning?  And yet they go, and some of them reach good old ages.  Still one would think that, if a little pains were taken, the thing might be managed so that more of them could reach better old ages.  As for the priest, he will carry the last sacraments of the Church any distance, in any weather, at any hour of the night, in summer or winter, but he must have an awful time of it every now and then.  So, for the matter of that, has an English country parson or doctor.  Still, the Alpine roads are rougher and the snow deeper, and the pay, poor as it often is in England, is here still poorer.

I know nothing of the date of this remarkable ballad, or the source from which it comes.  I have heard one who should know say, that when he was a boy at Shrewsbury school it was done into Greek hexameters, the lines (with a various reading in them):

“The colliers and nailers left work,
And all to old Scroggins’ went jogging;”

being translated:

Ἔργον χαλκότυποι καὶ τέκτονες ἄνδρες ἔλειπον
Σκρωγινιοῦ μεγάλου ζητοῦντες εὐτίμενον δῶ.

I have been at some pains to find out more about this translation, but have failed to do so.  The ballad itself is as follows:

After a preamble, stating the names of the commissioners, with the objects of the commission and the circumstances under which it had been called together, the following orders were unanimously agreed upon, to wit:—

“Firstly, That repairs urgently required to prevent the building from falling into a ruinous state (as shown by the ocular testimony of the commissioners, assisted by competent advisers whom they instructed to survey the fabric), be paid for by a true tithe, to be rendered by all priors, provosts, and agents directly subject to the monastery.  This tithe is to be placed in the hands of two merchants to be chosen by the bishop commendatory, and a sum is to be taken from it for the restoration of the fountain which played formerly in the monastery.  The proctors who collect the tithes are to be instructed by the abbot and commendatory not to press harshly upon the contributories by way of expense and labour; and the money when collected is, as already said, to be placed in the hands of two suitable merchants, clients of the said monastery, who shall hold it on trust to pay it for the above-named purposes, as the reverends the commendatory and chamberlain and treasurer of the said monastery shall direct.  In the absence of one of these three the order of the other two shall be sufficient.

“The monks are to be careful how they hold converse with suspected women, and are not to be found in the houses of such persons, or they will be punished.  Item, the epistle and gospel at high mass are to be said by the monks in church, and in Lent the epistle is to be said by one monk or sub-deacon.

“Item, two candelabra are to be kept above the altar when mass is being said, and the lord abbot is to provide the necessary candles.

“Any one absent from morning or evening mass is to be punished by the prior, if his absence arises from negligence.