Shortly after the sixth chapel has been passed the road turns a corner, and the town on the hill (see preceding page) comes into full view. This is a singularly beautiful spot. The chapels are worth coming a long way to see, but this view of the town is better still: we generally like any building that is on the top of a hill; it is an instinct in our nature to do so; it is a remnant of the same instinct which makes sheep like to camp at the top of a hill; it gives a remote sense of security and vantage-ground against an enemy. The Italians seem hardly able to look at a high place without longing to put something on the top of it, and they have seldom done so with better effect than in the case of the Sacro Monte at Varese. From the moment of its bursting upon one on turning the corner near the seventh, or Flagellation chapel, one cannot keep one’s eyes off it, and one fancies, as with S. Michele, that it comes better and better with every step one takes; near the top it composes, as on p. 254, but without colour nothing can give an adequate notion of its extreme beauty. Once at the top the interest centres in the higgledy-pigglediness of the houses, the gay colours of the booths where strings of beads and other religious knick-knacks are sold, the glorious panorama, and in the inn where one can dine very well, and I should imagine find good sleeping accommodation. The view from the balcony outside the dining-room is wonderful, and above is a sketch from the terrace just in front of the church.
There is here no single building comparable to the sanctuary of Sammichele, nor is there any trace of that beautiful Lombard work which makes so much impression upon one in the church on the Monte Pirchiriano; the architecture is late, and barocco, not to say rococo, reigns everywhere; nevertheless the effect of the church is good. The visitor should get the sacristan to show him a very fine pagliotto or altar cloth of raised embroidery, worked in the thirteenth century. He will also do well to walk some little distance behind the town on the way to S. Maria dei fiori (St. Mary of the flowers) and look down upon the town and Lombardy. I do not think he need go much higher than this, unless he has a fancy for climbing.
The Sacro Monte is a kind of ecclesiastical Rosherville Gardens, eminently the place to spend a happy day. We happened by good luck to be there during one of the great feste of the year, and saw I am afraid to say how many thousands of pilgrims go up and down. They were admirably behaved, and not one of them tipsy. There was an old English gentleman at the Hotel Riposo who told us that there had been another such festa not many weeks previously, and that he had seen one drunken man there—an Englishman—who kept abusing all he saw and crying out, “Manchester’s the place for me.”
The processions were best at the last part of the ascent; there were pilgrims, all decked out with coloured feathers, and priests and banners and music and crimson and gold and white and glittering brass against the cloudless blue sky. The old priest sat at his open window to receive the offerings of the devout as they passed; but he did not seem to get more than a few bambini modelled in wax. Perhaps he was used to it. And the band played the barocco music on the barocco little piazza and we were all barocco together. It was as though the clergyman at Ladywell had given out that, instead of having service usual, the congregation would go in procession to the Crystal Palace with all their traps, and that the band had been practising “Wait till the clouds roll by” for some time, and on Sunday as a great treat they should have it.
The Pope has issued an order saying he will not have masses written like operas. It is no use. The Pope can do much, but he will not be able to get contrapuntal music into Varese. He will not be able to get anything more solemn than “La Fille de Madame Angot” into Varese. As for fugues—! I would as soon take an English bishop to the Surrey pantomime as to the Sacro Monte on a festa.
Then the pilgrims went into the shadow of a great rock behind the sanctuary, spread themselves out over the grass and dined.