Then, later, there comes an account of a battle, which I cannot very well understand, but it seems to have been fought on the 26th of July 1655. The Savoyards were on their way to assist at a siege of Pavia, and were determined to punish the Valsesians en route; they had come up from Romagnano to Borgosesia, when the Valsesians attacked them as they were at dinner, and shot off the finger of a general officer who was eating an egg; on this the battle became general, and the Savoyards were caught every way; for the waters of the Sesia had come down in flood during the night. The Germans of Alagna, Rima, and Rimella were in it, somehow, and those of Pregemella in the Val Dobbia. I cannot make out whether the Pregemella people were Germans or merely people; either way, the German-speaking villages in the Val Sesia appear to have been the same two hundred years ago as now. I mean, it does not seem that the German-speaking race extended lower down the valley then than now. But at any rate, the queen, or whoever “Madama Reale” may be, was very angry about the battle.
“It is the custom,” concludes our author, “in token of holy cheerfulness (allegria spirituale) to wear a sprig of pine in the hat on leaving the holy place, to show that the visitor has been there; for it has some fine pine trees. This custom was introduced in royal merriment by Carlo Emmanuele I. He put a sprig in his hat, and was imitated by all his court, and the ladies wore the same in their bosom or in their hair. Assuredly it is one of the wonders of the world to see here, amid the amenities and allurements of the country, especially during the summer season, what a continuous festa or holy fair is maintained. For there come and go torrents of men and women of every nation under heaven. Here you shall see pilgrims and persons in religion of every description, processions, prelates, and often princes and princesses, carriages, litters, calêches, equipages, cavalcades accompanied by trumpeters, gay troops of cavaliers, and ladies with plumes in their hats and rich apparel wherewithal to make themselves attractive; and at intervals you shall hear all manner of songs, concerts, and musical instruments, both civil and military, all done with a modest and devout cheerfulness of demeanour, by which I am reminded of nothing so strongly as of the words of the Psalmist in the which he saith ‘Come and see the works of the Lord, for He hath done wonders upon earth.’”
It must have been something like our own Tunbridge Wells or Bath in the last century. Indeed, one is tempted to think that if the sea had come up to Varallo, it must have been almost more like Margate than Jerusalem. Nor can we forget the gentle rebuke administered on an earlier page to those who came neither on business nor for devotion’s sake, but out of mere idle curiosity, and bringing with them company which the good Canon designates as scandalous. Mais nous avons changé tout cela.
I have allowed myself to quote so freely from Torrotti, as thinking that the reader will glean more incidentally from these fragments about the genius of Varallo and its antecedents than he would get from pages of disquisition on my own part. Returning to the Varallo of modern times, I would say that even now that the railway has been opened, the pleasantest way of getting there is still over the Colma from Pella opposite Orta. I always call this road “the root,” for I once saw it thus described, obviously in good faith, in the visitors’ book at one of the inns in Varallo. The gentleman said he had found “the root” without any difficulty at Pella, had taken it all the way to Varallo, and it was delicious. He said it was one of the finest “roots” he had ever seen, and it was only nine or ten miles long.
There were one or two other things in that book, of which, while I am about it, I should like to deliver my mind. A certain man who wrote a bold round hand signed his name “Tom Taylor”—doubtless not the late well-known art critic and dramatic writer, but some other person of the same name—in the visitors’ book of the Hotel Leone d’Oro at Orta, and added the word “disgusted.” I saw this entry, then comparatively recent, in 1871, and on going on to the Hotel d’Italia at Varallo, found it repeated—“Tom Taylor disgusted.” The entries in each case were probably aimed at the Sacro Monte, and not at the inn; but they grated on me, as they must have done on many other English visitors; and I saw with pleasure that some one had written against the second of them the following epigram, which is too neat not to be preserved. It ran:—
“Oh wretched Tom Taylor, disgusted at Orta,
At Varallo we find him disgusted again;
The feeling’s contagious, I really have caught a
Disgust for Tom Taylor—he travels in vain.”
Who, I wonder, was it who could fling off such an apt impromptu, and how many more mute inglorious writers have we not who might do anything they chose if they would only choose to do anything at all? Some one else had written on an earlier page;—
1.
“While you’ve that which makes the mare go
You should stay at this albergo,Bona in esse and in posse
Are dispensed by Joseph Rossi.2.
“Ask him and he’ll set before ye
Vino birra e liquori,Asti, Grignolino, Sherry
Prezzi moderati—very.”
There was more, but I have forgotten it. Joseph Rossi was a famous old waiter long since retired, something like Pietro at the Hotel Rosa Rossa at Casale, whom all that country side knew perfectly well. This last entry reminds me of a somewhat similar one which I saw some five and thirty years ago at the inn at Harlech;—
1.
Τῇδε πᾶν ἄριστον ἔστι
Δεῖπνον οἶνοω και γάλ’ ἤδν.
By this ’ere I mean to testi-
fy how very well they feed you.2.
“Quam superba sit ruina,
Ipsa sua semper laus,
And the castle—nothing finer,
With its ivy and jackdaws.”