CHAPTER XIX.
LOCARNO.
From Bellinzona a local train conveys the traveller to Locarno, which is a small town at the extreme head of Lake Maggiore. I had heard a wonderful account of Locarno, and had been assured that in its perfect peace and pure air the malady from which I was suffering would rapidly disappear. I arrived at Locarno full of hope. I also arrived in a heavy storm of rain. I looked around me, and I saw nothing but water and mist and mud. The mountains were wrapped in black cloaks of cloud. The walls of the houses were covered with moss and mushrooms and toadstools, and in the roadways the bulrushes grew several feet high.
On the way to the hotel we passed a few shops. Every shop seems to deal in the same article—umbrellas, green umbrellas and red umbrellas. They hung in rows along the walls of the town; they were piled high in the shop-windows; every man, woman, and child carried one, and still the rain came down upon the desolate scene.
There is no mistake about the dampness of Locarno when it is damp. It is owing to the enormous amount of moisture which Locarno gets in combination with the full glare of an Italian sun that it boasts unique phenomena in the way of vegetation. You find the southern and the Alpine plant in absolute juxtaposition. At one moment your eye is dazzled by the full glory of a tropical garden; at the next you are gazing at peat bogs and into moist green hollows crowded with the sedges of the moors. Let me be fair to Locarno, for it has been fair to me. A fairer place (when it doesn’t rain) it would be almost impossible to find. From the sunny shores of the glorious lake the mighty mountains rise, with soft green skirts of vine and caps of snow. In a hundred gardens the red and white azalea, the camellia, and the wisteria make great clusters of colour. Gaily painted villas, fair white spires, and picturesque villages dot the heights, and over all there floats a balmy southern breeze that bears upon its gentle wings the perfume of a hundred flowers.
Before we left Locarno we explored the beauties of the neighbourhood, and we started with climbing a mountain. One glorious mountain walk we had which will linger in my memory until the last guard blows his whistle, and I start for a country to which as yet neither Murray nor Bradshaw nor Baedeker has published a guide. We started from Locarno for Mergoscia, ascending the mountains by the path that leads to the Madonna del Sasso (Our Lady of the Rock). One starlit night in 1480 a monk kneeling in prayer looked up the mountain. Suddenly a glorious sea of light bathed the rocky peak that rises above the town, and the Virgin was seen surrounded by adoring angels. The monk interpreted his vision as a wish of Heaven that on this rocky mount a chapel should be built. The money was raised, and to-day Our Lady of the Rock, far above the town of Locarno, is one of the famous sights of Switzerland.
It is a toilsome journey up the mountain-side and past the countless shrines to the church, but the traveller is rewarded with many a quaint sight by the way for his pains. The old-world peasant population was probably gratified by the realism of some of the groups which are placed here and there up the hill like small waxwork exhibitions. You come to a kind of stone grotto; you peer in through the iron bars, and you start back astonished. You are looking into a stable, with real straw and real stalls, and in a manger you see the infant Saviour lying, and the Holy Family grouped around him. A couple of donkeys are peering into the manger, and nothing is spared that contributes to the almost sensational realism of the scene. A little farther up you peep into another cave, and you see a number of figures sitting at a long table laid with plates and glasses. In front of each figure is a small roll, and a waiter is just coming into the room with a big fish on a plate. You gradually recognise the fact that you are assisting at the Lord’s Supper, and you turn almost with a sigh to think that a beautiful faith ever needed such coarse theatrical adjuncts to impress it on the minds of the populace.
Our Lady of the Rock is much resorted to by people in pain and affliction, and the naves of the church are lined with curious ex votos. No chamber of horrors ever contained a more terrible series of accidents than these pictures represent. Here is a little boy under a carriage wheel, rescued just as the wheel is on his chest. Here is a man falling from a bridge into a river, and just caught by the leg as he is going head first into the water. Here is a woman hurled over a precipice, and caught by the branch of a tree. In one terrible picture a man’s nose is being blown off by his own gun; in another, a gentleman is accidentally mowing his own legs off with a scythe. It is a great relief, after gazing at these pictorial horrors, in which the blood is always laid on thick by the artist, to get out into the open air again, and climb higher up the hill to the narrow path that leads to the Alpine village of Orselina.
Through Orselina we pass over the spur of the mountain to Contra, another village which is perched up higher still. These Alpine villages look beautifully picturesque from the valley below, but they are sad and grim enough when you are in them. All the poetry is gone when you wind in and out through the little tortuous street and see the squalor and the poverty in which the people live. The rough stone walls look so forbidding; the rooms seen through the battered doors look so black and cheerless as the smoke of the wood fire curls slowly out of them. All the poetry is going as you peer into them, and there is no poetry at all left when you have seen the inhabitants. Old men toil painfully along with trembling hands; women, bent almost double beneath the burthen they bear on their backs, pass you with sad faces and dull eyes. The women in these Alpine villages do the work of animals. They are really beasts of burden. They are loaded as in our country we load carts and barrows. I have seen an old woman toiling up a hill with a great wicker basket on her back in which were two calves and a pig. The basket the women have perpetually strapped to their back is called a gerlo, and is made to contain anything, from an elephant to a packet of pins.
Half the houses in these Alpine villages are deserted, as are many of the houses lower down in the valleys. Only the old men and the women and children seem to be left in the others. The reason of this is not far to seek. The Ticinese have been the great emigrating race of Switzerland. The men of the hills and valleys are scattered over the world, and most of them have climbed the hill of fortune. Some of them have reached the summit. From a village near Locarno, which is now full of houses barred and bolted and falling into decay, have gone forth some of the richest men in California. In that far-off land the owners of these houses made a fortune by their industry, and then their fellow-villagers, hearing of it, set out to try and do the same.
Everywhere as one wanders over this part of Switzerland one finds that the manhood is gone. The Ticinese are far away in Italy, in France, in England, in America, and everywhere their industry, their business talents, and their thrift have carried them triumphantly to affluence.