Swiss allmends, and a walk to see them

by F. Barham Zincke

August 8.—‘Now, Ammer, for a glimpse of Italy;’ as, at 6 A.M., starting from the almost undistinguishable watershed that divides the head-stream of the Reuss from that of the Ticino—an affluent of the Rhine from an affluent of the Po—we began to cut off the many zigzags of the Vale of Trembling, at a good pace, as became the frosty morning—frosty at that altitude—and our inspiriting destination. In just half an hour the zigzags of this once alarming descent, whence its name, were all behind, or rather above us, and we turned to the straight road along the gorge. Here we passed the still very considerable remains of two avalanches, which in the spring had fallen from the heights, one from the right, and one from the left, and were, but now some way below the road, blocking the valley. One was of clean snow; the other was largely compounded of stones, and sods, and earth, which it had swept off the mountain side in its long glissade. This latter one was of such mass, that if it had encountered York Minster on its way, York Minster would either have been buried beneath it, or would have had to accompany it to the bottom of the valley.

A little beyond the remains of this great avalanche we left the carriage-road, and took pretty nearly a straight line all the way to Airolo; at first through alpes, that is mountain pastures, then through prairies, that is grass land for mowing: sometimes at very steep inclines. When we entered Airolo we had been out one hour and fifty minutes from St. Gothard. Here, as at Göschenen, the commencement of the great tunnel had caused a great deal of building. Beyond Airolo the valley often has a flat bottom; and the near scenery, at times, is tamer than you might have expected to find it in the immediate neighbourhood of a great and famous Pass. But whatever there may be of this kind, for some little distance below Airolo, is completely compensated for by the gorge of Dazio Grande.

Here the Ticino descends rapidly, broken and blustering, through a deep defile it has cut out for itself. In the cliffs above the present channel man, too, has cut out for himself his path. The best part of the gorge begins, and ends, with a bridge; and is about three quarters of a mile in length. The channel, worn by the stream through the tough rock, is narrow, perpendicular, rugged, and tortuous. The water, from variations in its depth, and in the speed at which it is moving, and from the varying effects of the light in which it is seen, is, when looked at from the upper bridge, of a brownish bottle green: while in the gorge itself it is of a clear whitish green. In several places the foam is so touched by the light as to present a pale tint of pink, which still more softens it. This softness of its colour you contrast with the force it is exerting to cut away the rock, and with the aspect of the hard dark rock itself, but which you see, notwithstanding its hardness, is being ground down, and excavated, often on the sides into little rounded holes, by what appears to be only soft, feathery, almost downy, white foam, touched with this faint tint of pink.

As I was loitering through the gorge, noting what nature had done, and was doing—the din of the water, and the engineering boldness of the zigzags, gouged out of the perpendicular cliffs, awakened and enforced attention—a party of travellers in a four-horse carriage passed down: two ladies, and two gentlemen. Of the latter one was asleep, and the other seemed completely absorbed in watching the familiar sight of the smoke of his cigar. The party were not conversing, and no notice was being taken, certainly by the gentlemen, of the scene they were passing through. Let us hope that they did not hail from England. One could not but speculate a little on the cause of such strange insouciance to striking and interesting natural objects as the occupants of this carriage exhibited. Was it a result, if they had come from beyond the Channel, of that estimate of all knowledge (of course, with the exception of what we call practical knowledge, that is to say knowledge that will enable one to make money) which a man’s having been kept, grinding, through all his blessed youth, at that instrument of torture, our ‘Public School Latin Grammar,’ must, in most minds, give rise to? Here we have a not unlikely source. An affluent to this may, perhaps, be found in the ideas of what is desirable in life, which must to some extent be engendered by our English form of society: the most conspicuous exponents of which are our English dinner-parties. I do not mean to imply that our dinner-party-engendered ideas are like those of an old Squire I used to hear of—his day was a little before mine—who was in the habit of affirming that ‘conversation spoilt society:’ by society he meant the animal enjoyment of venison, and the port wine of his day. Still I think it may be held, and not without some show of reason, that there is a sense in which half of his idea is not far from the mark, for that society, as perhaps it would be better to have it, has in this country been spoilt to some extent; and, too, at the dinner-table; but that, as respects conversation, it is rather that society has spoilt it, than that it has spoilt society.

Beyond Airolo, the road is straight, and there can be no short cuts. We reached Faido, seventeen miles by road, at 11.30. We now encountered a great deal of dust, for the heavy storm of Friday, a week back, had been confined to the north of the St. Gothard mountains; I, therefore—and also because I had but little time for this little piece of by-work—gave up walking for the present, and engaged a four-horse return carriage for Bodio, which Ammer had heard of while I was taking an early dinner at the Prince of Wales. After an hour’s halt we were again en route. The road was straight; and the wind, from behind, was moving at about the same rate as the carriage. This kept us for the ten miles to Bodio in the centre of the cloud of dust our four horses and wheels were raising. On descending from the carriage, Ammer’s first thought was to get a clothes-brush. The landlord brought it himself, presenting it with the remark, that ‘a dusty road with the wind behind was the devil.’ ‘Yes:’ I replied, ‘it is often so on the road. But within the Hotels he not unfrequently assumes the form of flies, accompanied with a bad smell.’ I had been tormented with flies at Faido, while at dinner, and had unpleasant recollections of the stenches I had met with in many Swiss Hotels. This little sally at once placed us on an easy conversational footing. He told me that he was the physician of the place; that land in his Canton was too much divided to be of much use to anybody; that this kept everybody poor; that all their best young men were emigrating to the United States, chiefly to California; and that emigration was winnowing the population, sending away all the good grain, and leaving at home only the dross. This was during the half-hour while the carriage for Bellinzona, which he had ordered for me, was being got ready. At parting he expressed a hope that I might return the same way, in order that we might continue our conversation on the condition of the people, &c.

The merits of this valley are underrated: there is much in it worthy of notice. Its character is manifestly Italian, as is that of the people, who in all probability would feel irresistibly attracted towards the Kingdom of Italy, if only (but this is an if of the kind that interposes, in the case of such lovers of money, an impassable gulf) the taxation of the Kingdom were as light as that of the Republic. The regular increase in the variety and richness of the vegetation must strike even a somewhat unobservant traveller, as he rapidly makes the descent. The contour, too, and colouring of the mountains are somewhat distinctive. Those just below Faido had, this year, their barren tops in August flecked with snow. This attracts your eye as you are passing through fields of luxuriant maize, and trellised vineyards at their feet. You see how vegetation has struggled to ascend them. It begins by having it all its own way. Down below it covers all the ground. After a time it finds the struggle harder, and fails in places. Then comes a zone in which bare rock predominates. One step more, and to the eye vegetation dies out altogether; and cold and nakedness are supreme. All this you here take in at a glance.

Further on you pass along the foot of a long mountain range, in which the rock, wherever it is exposed, as high up as you can make it out, has evidently been smoothed, and rounded off by glacier action, or that of running water, for either could have set that kind of face upon it. I am, however, disposed to think that some, at all events, of the effects you may here observe, are due to the action of the stream of the Ticino in some remote past; for I saw little polished excavations in the otherwise smooth and even face of the rock, of precisely the same kind as those I had seen in the gorge of Dazio Grande, where there could never have been moving ice. These excavations exactly resembled the half of a reversed basin, and could have been formed by running water only. Of course they were produced by pebbles and grit being thrown by the stream against, and gradually working into, accidentally soft spots.

Was jolting over the pavement of Bellinzona a little after 4 P.M. Ordered supper at 8. Engaged the carriage and pair of my talkative acquaintance, the landlord of the Hotel de la Poste at Bodio, that had brought me to Bellinzona, to take me on to Lugano early the next morning; and there to wait for my return from Como. By the way, I observed here as in the other towns of this valley—it is the same at Andermatt—that the main streets have granite tramways, which wear the appearance of being old institutions. I suppose their object is to lessen not so much friction, which is our object, as noise; and to keep carriages in the middle of the roadway: both desirable objects where the streets are very narrow.

I had some hours to walk about the place, and note the aspect of things. Judging from the size of the old houses with their colonnades, and the number of churches, Bellinzona must have been formerly a place of more importance than it is at present; or perhaps, which may be the true explanation, wealth, may have been more unequally distributed then than it is now. For it is impossible to suppose but that the produce of the district is worth, at the present day, a great deal more than it was in the church-building age here; and that it can support now a great many more mouths than it could when those old mansions were built. More land has been reclaimed; the culture of the vine—which pays the best of all the plants cultivated here—has been much extended; potatoes and maize have been introduced, which, by reason of their greater productiveness, have almost superseded the old cereals; silk-culture has been superadded without displacing anything else; and then the great modern stream of travellers brings, every year, into the valley, and leaves in it, a great many nuggets of refined gold. There can, therefore, be no question about there being in these days, a great deal more wealth. The only questions are what becomes of it? By whom, and how, is it held? And how is it used?

I will suggest two answers. Suppose there are a score, or so, of proprietors, who have, each of them, five or six hundred acres of land. They will be able to live in such houses as surround the old Place of Bellinzona. But divide these estates among five score proprietors, and not one will be able to live in such houses. And this process you may carry on, till they have all become peasant proprietors. And, then, one step more, and these landed proprietors will all be landed in semi-starvation. This I take to be an answer that accounts for a great part of the change. The other answer is, that formerly people lived in towns, because it was not safe to live in the country; but that, in these quiet and peaceable days, people live just where they find it pleasantest to live. What well-to-do people, therefore, there may still be in the neighbourhood of Bellinzona now probably live on their properties. So far Bellinzona has gone out of town.