The line, crossing the lowland with its red-tiled farm-houses and mulberry orchards, rises gradually to a region of rustling verdure. Mountain streams flow down between alder-fringed banks, white oxen doze under the acacia-hedges, and in the almond and cherry orchards the vine hangs its Virgilian garlands from blossoming tree to tree. This pastoral land rolls westward to the Graiian Alps in an undulating sea of green, but to the north it breaks abruptly into the height against which rises the terraced outline of Biella.
The cliffs of the Biellese are the haunt of ancient legend, and on almost every ledge a church or monastery perpetuates the story of some wonder-working relic. Biella, the chief town of this devout district, covers a small conical hill and spreads its suburbs over the surrounding level. Its hot sociable streets are full of the shrill activity of an Italian watering-place; but the transalpine traveller will probably be inclined to push on at once to the village of Andorno, an hour’s drive deeper in the hills.
Biella overhangs the plain; but Andorno lies in a valley which soon contracts to a defile between the mountains. The drive thither from Biella skirts the Cervo, a fresh mountain stream, and passes through villages set on park-like slopes in the ample shade of chestnut-groves. The houses of these villages have little of the picturesqueness mistakenly associated with Italian rural architecture; but every window displays its pot of lavender or of carnations, and the arched doorways reveal gardens flecked with the blue shadows of the vine-pergola.
Andorno itself is folded in hills, rounded, umbrageous, cooled with the song of birds. A sylvan hush envelops the place, and the air one breathes seems to have travelled over miles of forest freshened by unseen streams. It is all as still and drowsy as the dream of a tired brain. There is nothing to see but the country itself—acacia-fringed banks sloping to the stream below the village; the arch of a ruined bridge; an old hexagonal chapel with red-tiled roof and an arcade of stunted columns; and, beyond the bridge and the chapel, rich upland meadows where all day long the peasant women stoop to the swing of the scythe.
In June in this high country (where patches of snow still lie in the shaded hollows), the wild flowers of spring and summer seem to meet: narcissus and forget-me-not lingering in the grass, while yellow broom—Leopardi’s lover of sad solitudes—sheets the dry banks with gold, and higher up, in the folds of the hills, patches of crimson azalea mix their shy scent with the heavy fragrance of the acacia. In the meadows the trees stand in well-spaced majestic groups, walnut, chestnut and beech, tenting the grass with shade. The ivy hangs its drapery over garden walls and terraces, and the streams rush down under a quivering canopy of laburnum. The scenery of these high Pennine valleys is everywhere marked by the same nobleness of colour and outline, the same atmosphere of spaciousness and poetry. It is the rich studied landscape of Bonifazio’s idyls: a scene of peace and plenitude, not the high-coloured southern opulence but the sober wealth poured from a glacial horn of plenty. There is none of the Swiss abruptness, of the Swiss accumulation of effects. The southern aspect softens and expands. There is no crowding of impressions, but a stealing sense of harmony and completeness.
From Andorno the obvious excursion is to the famous shrine of San Giovanni; a “sight” taking up eight pages in the excellent “Guida del Biellese,” but remaining in the traveller’s memory chiefly as the objective point of a charming walk or drive. The road thither winds up the Val d’Andorno, between heights set with villages hung aloft among the beech-groves, or thrusting their garden-parapets above the spray and tumult of the Cervo. The densely-wooded cliffs are scarred with quarries of sienite, and the stream, as the valley narrows, forces its way over masses of rock and between shelving stony banks; but the little gardens dashed by its foam overflow with irises, roses and peonies, surrounded with box-hedges and shaded by the long mauve panicles of the wistaria.
Presently the road leaves the valley, and ascends the beech-clothed flank of the mountain on which the church of San Giovanni is perched. The coolness and hush of this wooded hill-side are delicious after the noise and sunshine of the open road, and one is struck by the civic amenity which, in this remote solitude, has placed benches at intervals beneath the trees. At length the brow of the hill is reached. The beeches recede, leaving a grassy plateau flanked by a long façade of the monastery; and from the brink of this open space the eye drops unhindered down the long leafy reaches of the Val d’Andorno.
The scene is characterized by the tenderest gradations of colour and line: beeches blending with walnuts, these with the tremulous laburnum-thickets along the stream, and the curves of the hills flowing into one another till they lose themselves in the aërial distances of the plain. The building which commands this outlook is hardly worthy of its station, unless, indeed, the traveller feels its sober lines to be an admission of art’s inferiority to nature in such aspects. To the confirmed apologist of Italy there is indeed a certain charm in finding so insignificant a piece of architecture in so rare a spot: as though in a land thus amply dowered no architectural emphasis were needed to call attention to any special point of view. Yet a tenderness for the view, one cannot but infer, must have guided the steps of those early cenobites who peopled the romantic landscape with wonder-working images. When did a miracle take place on a barren plain or in a circumscribed hollow? The manifestations of divine favour invariably sought the heights, and those who dedicated themselves to the commemoration of such holy incidents did so in surroundings poetic enough to justify their faith in the supernatural.
The Inner Quadrangle at Oropa
E. C. Peixotto
LOVEIRE. 1901.