Swiss allmends, and a walk to see them

by F. Barham Zincke

Her little darlings crave their daily bread.[1]

Morality is the soul of poetry, because we are still conscious—though theology and the pulpit have done much to deaden our consciousness of this—that it is the life of life. It inspires the poet, and hallows his pictures. This was of old ‘the piety of the poets, who spoke words worthy of Phœbus.’ At all events there were in that old world good wives, the charm of whose goodness was felt; and so there must have been good husbands, too, whose goodness was honoured. I believe then, as the Mantuan would have believed, that my opposite neighbour of this morning was good in heart as well as in deed; and, for her sake, I hope her husband was good. If not, she was by so much the better in heart and in deed.

The road to Lugano begins on a rich and well-cultivated level. The broad, highly varnished leaf of the maize, and the more sober green of the vine, are side by side everywhere. Some country houses are passed. After five miles of this rich cultivation, grass becoming more common, and country houses less so, at Cadenazzo, you leave the valley, and begin the ascent of the Monte Cenere, by which you cross the range that separates the valley of the Ticino from the basin of Lugano. We had been for some little time slowly toiling up the zigzags; and I was at the moment noting the heath in flower, and the stunted russet brake (for there had been a long spell of dry weather) with rock everywhere protruding; and all beneath the old gnarled chesnuts; when, on coming to a masonry-supported angle of the road, projected on the mountain side, almost as if for a look out, there burst on my sight, beyond and below, at perhaps a distance of two miles, the head of Lago Maggiore, and the town, on its margin, of Locarno. I was not expecting anything of the kind; and was indeed, at the moment, intent on the heath and brake, when they abruptly vanished, and this glorious prospect took their place.

At my feet, for the foreground, was the broad, richly cultivated valley, partitioned into innumerable bright green prairies, and grain fields yellow for harvest; all full of fruit trees. Beyond were mountains of very varied outline and colour, scarred with rocky ravines of varying size, which the melting snow, and the storm torrents of ages, had cut from their naked summits down along their forest-clad sides. Snow still, here and there, spotted their summits, in consequence of the cold late spring of this year. Along the margin of the glass-smooth, green-blue lake were the white houses of the long straggling town. Above the town, scattered in woods, at wider intervals up the mountain, and for some distance from the town along the margin of the lake, were innumerable white villas. It being early morning the bright sun was full on the town, and mountains, bringing out clearly every white wall, every dark roof, every green field, every patch of wood, almost every individual tree, and every dark gray rock. It was a scene of surprising variety, interest, and beauty, that had come suddenly before me without any preparation. I was reminded that I had felt, when staying at Jerusalem, some years back, just the same kind of surprise. I had been riding up Mount Scopas, and had been occupied, as I ascended the crest, in looking at the broken pieces of red pottery which strewed the ground, and thinking that they might have been left there by the army of Titus, who, during the siege of Jerusalem, had held this summit, for it commanded a complete view of every house in the Holy City; when, on lifting my eyes from the ground, they were filled with the sight of the twenty miles of white sandy desert, in which had once been Jericho, and on the further side of this white desert was the black line of the Jordan, leading straight to the light blue of the Dead Sea; and beyond all this, the long, wall-like line, ablaze with purple, for it was verging towards evening, of the mountains of Moab, closing the scene, like a barrier of ruby and amethyst, to give promise of some brighter world beyond. The suddenness of the change, and the gloriousness of the new scene, in both cases affected the nerves of the mind with a sensation which can never be forgotten. But, however, in one case it was absolute desolation; not a tree, not a human dwelling-place in sight; all rock and sand; and the complete absence of man from a scene where of old he had often been busy: in the other case it was the complete present subjection and subserviency of the scene to man, and his busy presence everywhere, which were, respectively, the predominant elements of interest. In both scenes nature was grand; but in one grand in desolation, and in the other grand in combination with widely expanded and well-requited human effort.

As you pass on to Lugano, though you are still on high ground, there is something that tells you that you are on the south side of the mountains. It may be hard to say precisely what this something is, but it is in the vegetation, in the people, in the air. There is more of the chesnut, and less of the fir tribe. The oak is more spreading. The undergrowth in the copses, and the plants by the roadside, are more varied. The people are gayer, and more light-hearted. The air is more stimulative of life. At Lugano, as might be expected from its contiguity to the lake, the aspect of things is very different from what it is at Bellinzona. Many appear to be in easy circumstances, and at ease in their minds. This they show by the care they bestow on the exterior of their houses, and on the ground around them.

As to the lake. As far as I saw of it, its distinguishing feature appears to be the abruptness with which the environing mountains descend into the water. In many places they dip into it without any preparation at all, with no final talus. The deep water breaks on the clean upright rock. Still the mountains are pretty well clothed with wood. The trees, however, are much detached, and very scrubby, as if on these dry, sunburnt, rocky mountain sides, they needed a century, as probably they do, to grow into scrub. Still wherever on the margin of the lake, and a little higher up, soil could be collected for a few vines, or for a little garden, there you will see the few vines, or the little garden. One is astonished at the number of small towns on the margin. They are very conspicuous from the walls of all the houses being white. I suppose they are built of rough stone, which is then plastered, and lime-washed. An American on board the steamer, and who was acquainted only with the large way in which things are done in his own country, and with the large rewards of industry there, told me he had been fairly beaten by the puzzle, how the people in these towns could live. There was no land to cultivate. There were no factories to work in. No business. Nothing to trade with. Nothing to get a living out of.

Somewhere between Lugano and the eastern extremity of the lake, we were boarded by a custom house officer, and entered the kingdom of Italy. At the eastern extremity—the place is called Porlezza—we took the diligence for Menaggio, on the lake of Como. The road lies along a depression in the ridge that separates the two lakes. From its being much lower than the ground which separates the head of Lago Maggiore from Lugano, it presents a much more advanced stage of the idea of Italy, and of the sense of being in Italy. There is cultivation all the way. Maize, mulberries, vines everywhere. La petite culture only. In a little more than an hour we were going down the zigzags to Menaggio. The long expanse of Como was at our feet, backed by lofty mountains, on which snow still lingered. Everywhere on the terraced slopes, in which not a square foot of ground was anywhere lost, were not only maize, and mulberries, and vines, but also figs, almonds, and olives; and oleanders, myrtles, and magnolias. Another world with a richer life was around us; a brighter sun, and a bluer vault were above us—a glorious bit of quick-pulsed Italy! It is good for a man that his mind can be moved in response to such a scene.

At Menaggio I took a boat to cross the lake to Bellaggio—the fac-simile of the boat in which I had gone from Sacheln to Sarnen. It was propelled also in the same fashion by two men, who stood up to their work. Of course they demanded at first twice as much for their services as they were glad to accept eventually. As we got afloat the sun was shining brightly, as it had been since we left Bellinzona in the early morning; and there was just enough air to be pleasantly perceptible. At the head of the lake, however, far away to the north, we saw that a storm was raging. There all was black, and distant thunder was at times heard. When we had got about half-way across the lake, the surface being still unruffled where we were, we descried a line of broken water reaching across the lake, rapidly advancing upon us from the north. Our boatmen made all the haste they could, and succeeded not quite, but almost, in escaping the squall: for it struck us when we were but little more than 200 yards from the beach.

We had to wait at Bellaggio about an hour for as it was to go to Como I suppose I must say, the up steamer. If I had remained at Menaggio I should have gone on by the same boat, but I was glad that I had not done so, not merely because crossing in the boat was an additional small incident in the day’s work, but also because it enabled me to see the finest, I might say perhaps the grandest, display of flowers I have ever looked upon. In going down to the new pier, to the left of the road, or rather of the street, for it was still in the town, there is a long wall about 10 or 12 feet high; evidently the boundary of the grounds of a house situated somewhere behind it. I infer from the lay of the land that the grounds, immediately behind the wall, must be 6 or 7 feet higher than the roadway. Over the top of this wall, rising several feet above it, and bending down 4 or 5 feet from the top, was one thick, bushy, unbroken line of oleanders, every spray of which ended in a large truss of freshly expanded rose-red blossoms. I paced the wall, and, if I remember rightly, its length was 62 yards. The stems of the plants were invisible, being behind the wall. Crowning then this lofty gray stone wall, and hanging down over its side was a long, broad, even, unbroken line of bright blazing colour. The eye fed upon it, and was more than satisfied with the feast.

The streets of Bellaggio were sheltered from the squall. In crossing the lake to Cadenabbia it was on our starboard beam. The little wet it made on deck was sufficient to drive pretty nearly all the native below. A little further down, on rounding the point, which opens the long reach, at the bottom of which stands Como, there was no more wind: either the interposing mountain acted as a screen to keep it off; or, as is common in mountain lakes and valleys, it was a local affair along a single reach. As we neared Como, at about 6 P.M., we saw that a heavy storm was gathering at that end of the lake, and just as we were leaving the boat for the pier, the rain came down in earnest; and lasted for two hours, accompanied with much thunder and lightning.