Boazze, a sawmill and a châlet, stands in a sharp angle under wooded cliffs. The houses are built, like villages in the Northern Caucasus, of huge, red, unsmoothed pine-trunks. The woodcutters have amused their leisure by painting imaginative titles over the various doors. Here we read 'Cafè e Billiardo,' there 'Sala di Recreazione,' or 'Buvetta.' But the thirsty traveller must not be deluded thereby into expecting anything but a glass of the very roughest of country wine.
It is a long but very beautiful three hours' walk down Val Daone to the high-road at Pieve di Buono. The mountains are not so high as those which surround Val di Genova, but they are rich in colour and picturesque in form. There are steep steps, down which the river thunders in sheets of foam, level meadow expanses, tall cliffs fringed with graceful foliage. Side-glens break through the walls on either hand, and give glimpses into an upper land of lawns and pines, from which we are being rapidly carried away towards hillsides clothed with walnuts and chestnuts and all green Italian things. Some two hours from Boazze the Chiese is left to fight its own way out through a deep ravine, and the road takes an upward inclination. On a warm afternoon one is disposed to feel strongly the egotism of the Daonians in requiring everybody to pass through their high-perched village. Although they may own the whole valley, a short cut through the vineyards would have been, one fancies, a harmless concession to public convenience.
The village overlooks a wide basin, clothed in vineyards and studded with castles and churches. A long road circling from hamlet to hamlet plunges at last upon Pieve di Buono, a double row of houses lying in the bottom along either side of the high-road. A country inn offers rest and refreshment to those who are unwilling or unable to get a carriage and push on for Tione or Condino.
Here we enter fairly on the valleys of the Giudicaria, so called in witness of certain rights early granted to the inhabitants by the Bishops of Trent. This mountain region has little in common with the Swiss Alps. The low elevation of the valleys, their sunny exposure, and the gentle slope of their hillsides, give the scenery an air of richness rarely found at the very base of great snow-mountains. The frequent and gay-looking villages, the woods of chestnuts, the knots of walnut-trees, the great fields of yellow-podded maize, the luxuriant vines and orchards, have the charm which the spontaneous bounty and colour of southern nature always exercise on the native of the more reserved and sober North. No contrast could be at once more sudden and more welcome than that offered by these softer landscapes to the eye fresh from the rugged granite of the Adamello chain.
Life here, it is evident, is not the hard struggle with a stubborn and grudging nature of the peasant of Uri or the Upper Engadine. Corn and wine grow at every man's door, and the mountains offer abundant timber and pasturage.
There remains, it is true, sufficient call for energy: torrents to be embanked, hillsides to be terraced, gorges to be pierced by high-roads. But all this lies well within the powers of a population which unites in some degree German industry with Italian grace. Massive dykes stem the stream and protect the water-meadows of Pinzolo; one of the finest roads in Europe, built entirely at the cost of the neighbouring 'communes,' traverses the two great gorges of the Sarca. Here we see no squalor, none of that sufferance of decay and ruin in whatever is old which amongst southern Europeans as well as Orientals is often found united with lavish expenditure on what is new.
The exceptional wellbeing and intelligence of the people is no doubt to some extent referable to the physical features of their country. The Northern Alps seem to have been more or less laid out according to rule; valley is severed from valley by lofty and abrupt ridges; thus isolation and seclusion are enforced on the mountain communities. Here one can imagine that nature first planned a rolling hill-country and put in the mountains as an afterthought, planting them here and there at haphazard in isolated masses. Intercourse is thus rendered easy, for the heads of the valleys are often rolling pasturages. It is in fact rather the lower gorges than the crests of the hills which sever the different districts. Val Rendena can always go to Val di Sole or Val Buona; the defile of the Sarca has been but lately pierced.
Moreover, whatever may be the value of Mr. Ruskin's remarks on the moral influence of granite, there can be no doubt of its material advantages, and some of the orderly appearance of Val Rendena is certainly due to its geology. The clean grey stone of the Adamello is ever at hand in the form of erratic boulders, and is found useful for every purpose, from a bell-tower or a dyke to a curbstone or a vine-prop.
The road which runs through Pieve di Buono leads northwards over a low pass, protected by several forts, to Tione, southwards past the shores of Lago d'Idro to Salo or Brescia. But a more tempting branch turns suddenly east and mounts through the fine gorge of Val Ampola, the scene of Garibaldi's solitary success in 1866, to marshy uplands, whence it descends on the still basin of Lago di Ledro, a Cumberland tarn as far as hill-shapes go, but girt round with all the warmth and colour of Italy. The landscape is imbued with cheerful sweetness, but without any pretence to mountain sublimity. The little 'pension' lately opened at Pieve di Ledro may, however, well detain for a few days those who can dispense for a time with snow and wild crags and find satisfaction in more homely beauties.
It is a country for strolls, not for expeditions, for idle rambles over the forested hillsides among the tall alders and untamed hedgerows which fringe the lake, or along the banks of the delicious stream which flows from it, dancing down between the boles of chestnuts and vine-trellises until under a spreading fig-tree it makes a last, bold, green leap into the broad waters of the Lago di Garda.