Italian Alps

We returned to the pass, whence a short zigzag leads down to the pasturage and brilliantly blue lakelet known as the Alpe and Lago di Caf. A broken hillside, on which scattered pines make foregrounds for a picturesque view of the Carè Alto, the prominent peak of all this country, slopes down upon the valley at the point where the torrent of Val di Fum first leaves the level and plunges into a narrow gorge.

Val di Fum is said to be a corruption of Val dei Fini, a name due to the ridge on its west being the limit between the territories of Trent and Brescia. It is a broad, level meadow some eight miles long, valuable as pasturage, and as such a subject of contention in former times. The highest alp is known as the Coel dei Vighi, from its former possessors, the commune of Vigo in Val Rendena, who drove their cows thither by a paved track leading over a pass from Val San Valentino. Over the door of the principal châlet of a lower alp is the inscription —

1656 A. d. 18 L.. o,

which is read '1656 addì 18 Luglio,' and records what a local writer with reason calls a 'fatto luttuosissimo.'

Then, as now, the commune of Daone were in possession of the pasturage. The Cedegolans, however, imagined themselves to have a better claim to it. With some brutality they proceeded to enforce their supposed rights by bursting in a body on the châlets, suffocating the seven shepherds in the large caldron, and cutting the legs of all the herd. After this story we no longer wondered at the greed and depravity of the modern villagers, the descendants of these ruffians. The claim so iniquitously enforced does not seem to have been practically known in recent times, but a strong tradition of it must have lingered to induce the Austrian Engineers to give the Val di Fum to Lombardy on their large map.

As usual in this part of the Alps we scarcely reach the valley before meeting a fine waterfall. At first the gorge descends in steps, separated by swampy platforms; lower down, its fall becomes more regular, gradually steepening as it approaches Boazze. The ground is broken and rugged, and the path until recent improvements must have been very bad. The Chiese is a noble torrent, green and clear despite its glacier birth, and a perpetual delight to the eyes, whether it leaps in white foam over some ash-hung crag or swirls in pure eddies in a bubbling caldron.

Boazze, a sawmill and a châlet, stands in a sharp angle under wooded cliffs. The houses are built, like villages in the Northern Caucasus, of huge, red, unsmoothed pine-trunks. The woodcutters have amused their leisure by painting imaginative titles over the various doors. Here we read 'Cafè e Billiardo,' there 'Sala di Recreazione,' or 'Buvetta.' But the thirsty traveller must not be deluded thereby into expecting anything but a glass of the very roughest of country wine.

It is a long but very beautiful three hours' walk down Val Daone to the high-road at Pieve di Buono. The mountains are not so high as those which surround Val di Genova, but they are rich in colour and picturesque in form. There are steep steps, down which the river thunders in sheets of foam, level meadow expanses, tall cliffs fringed with graceful foliage. Side-glens break through the walls on either hand, and give glimpses into an upper land of lawns and pines, from which we are being rapidly carried away towards hillsides clothed with walnuts and chestnuts and all green Italian things. Some two hours from Boazze the Chiese is left to fight its own way out through a deep ravine, and the road takes an upward inclination. On a warm afternoon one is disposed to feel strongly the egotism of the Daonians in requiring everybody to pass through their high-perched village. Although they may own the whole valley, a short cut through the vineyards would have been, one fancies, a harmless concession to public convenience.

The village overlooks a wide basin, clothed in vineyards and studded with castles and churches. A long road circling from hamlet to hamlet plunges at last upon Pieve di Buono, a double row of houses lying in the bottom along either side of the high-road. A country inn offers rest and refreshment to those who are unwilling or unable to get a carriage and push on for Tione or Condino.

Here we enter fairly on the valleys of the Giudicaria, so called in witness of certain rights early granted to the inhabitants by the Bishops of Trent. This mountain region has little in common with the Swiss Alps. The low elevation of the valleys, their sunny exposure, and the gentle slope of their hillsides, give the scenery an air of richness rarely found at the very base of great snow-mountains. The frequent and gay-looking villages, the woods of chestnuts, the knots of walnut-trees, the great fields of yellow-podded maize, the luxuriant vines and orchards, have the charm which the spontaneous bounty and colour of southern nature always exercise on the native of the more reserved and sober North. No contrast could be at once more sudden and more welcome than that offered by these softer landscapes to the eye fresh from the rugged granite of the Adamello chain.

Life here, it is evident, is not the hard struggle with a stubborn and grudging nature of the peasant of Uri or the Upper Engadine. Corn and wine grow at every man's door, and the mountains offer abundant timber and pasturage.

There remains, it is true, sufficient call for energy: torrents to be embanked, hillsides to be terraced, gorges to be pierced by high-roads. But all this lies well within the powers of a population which unites in some degree German industry with Italian grace. Massive dykes stem the stream and protect the water-meadows of Pinzolo; one of the finest roads in Europe, built entirely at the cost of the neighbouring 'communes,' traverses the two great gorges of the Sarca. Here we see no squalor, none of that sufferance of decay and ruin in whatever is old which amongst southern Europeans as well as Orientals is often found united with lavish expenditure on what is new.

The exceptional wellbeing and intelligence of the people is no doubt to some extent referable to the physical features of their country. The Northern Alps seem to have been more or less laid out according to rule; valley is severed from valley by lofty and abrupt ridges; thus isolation and seclusion are enforced on the mountain communities. Here one can imagine that nature first planned a rolling hill-country and put in the mountains as an afterthought, planting them here and there at haphazard in isolated masses. Intercourse is thus rendered easy, for the heads of the valleys are often rolling pasturages. It is in fact rather the lower gorges than the crests of the hills which sever the different districts. Val Rendena can always go to Val di Sole or Val Buona; the defile of the Sarca has been but lately pierced.

Moreover, whatever may be the value of Mr. Ruskin's remarks on the moral influence of granite, there can be no doubt of its material advantages, and some of the orderly appearance of Val Rendena is certainly due to its geology. The clean grey stone of the Adamello is ever at hand in the form of erratic boulders, and is found useful for every purpose, from a bell-tower or a dyke to a curbstone or a vine-prop.

The road which runs through Pieve di Buono leads northwards over a low pass, protected by several forts, to Tione, southwards past the shores of Lago d'Idro to Salo or Brescia. But a more tempting branch turns suddenly east and mounts through the fine gorge of Val Ampola, the scene of Garibaldi's solitary success in 1866, to marshy uplands, whence it descends on the still basin of Lago di Ledro, a Cumberland tarn as far as hill-shapes go, but girt round with all the warmth and colour of Italy. The landscape is imbued with cheerful sweetness, but without any pretence to mountain sublimity. The little 'pension' lately opened at Pieve di Ledro may, however, well detain for a few days those who can dispense for a time with snow and wild crags and find satisfaction in more homely beauties.

It is a country for strolls, not for expeditions, for idle rambles over the forested hillsides among the tall alders and untamed hedgerows which fringe the lake, or along the banks of the delicious stream which flows from it, dancing down between the boles of chestnuts and vine-trellises until under a spreading fig-tree it makes a last, bold, green leap into the broad waters of the Lago di Garda.

The air at Ledro is already, after the mountains, soft and warm, and the 2,000 feet of descent to Riva are a surprise. The road runs near the torrent through a narrow glen, between vineyards, mulberries, fig-orchards, and villages, in September a very Alcinous' garden of ripeness.

Suddenly the verdure ceases on the brink of the great mural precipice which overhangs the upper end of Lago di Garda. After several zigzags the road boldly turns on to the face of the rock. The descent to Riva is henceforth a mere groove blasted out of a smooth perpendicular cliff. Deep below lie the dark waters, flecked by white birdlike sails flying southwards before the morning breeze; opposite is the broad crest of Monte Baldo rising above an olive-fringed shore. The horses trot swiftly in and out of the tunnels and round the slow bullock-waggons creaking heavily up to the hills. Riva bursts suddenly into view, a line of bright-coloured houses and mediæval towers crowded in between the lake, red cactus-spotted cliffs, and a wealth of olive-gardens, orchards and cane-brakes – the most southern scene north of Naples.

But before the latter half of September Riva is too hot to linger in. Delicious as is an evening spent in the inn garden, where supper is served under a trellis overlooking the moonlit lake, it scarcely makes up the second time for a night spent in vain resistance to the assaults of mosquitoes. It is best to return to the mountains which are still so near at hand.

The river, which here enters the lake, will be our guide back to the snows. No stream in Europe can boast a more varied or splendid youth than the unknown Sarca, famous in its smooth-flowing old age, when it issues again from Lago di Garda, under the new name of Mincio. It is only necessary to look for a moment at the map to see what vicissitudes the Sarca encounters, and what struggles it has to go through. One is tempted to imagine that after Nature had once settled the Alpine streams of this region in their proper and comfortable beds she gave the whole country a rough squeeze, heaving up a hill here, making a huge split there, and turning everything topsy-turvy. The Adige has, I fancy, been cheated somehow out of the Lago di Garda. The Sarca clearly ought to have joined the Chiese, and flowed down into Lago d'Idro. There is something very unnatural about the eastward reach from Tione, even before one knows how prodigious a feat in hill-splitting it really is.37

Thanks, however, to its singular course, the scenery along the banks of the Sarca is extraordinarily varied. Roughly speaking, the river's progress may be divided into four great stages. The first, beginning from the lake, is the Val del Lago, the deep trench which forms the continuation of the Garda basin. Two or three miles through high-walled gardens and vineyards which recall the environs of an eastern city bring us to Arco, lying under a huge castled crag. After leaving behind the broad streets and cypress avenues of the hot-looking town, the drive grows monotonous. The road stretches on through the half-desolate, half-luxuriant valley, from time to time the wheels rattle over pavement, and we pass through the long, gloomy street of some roadside village. The trough is now a wilderness of fallen blocks, the road crosses a bridge, and winds along under great cliffs, which threaten further destruction. Alle Sarche, a wayside inn where the road from the Giudicaria joins that from Riva to Trent, is the end of the first stage in our journey.

The valley continues in a straight line, but our river suddenly bursts out of a deep narrow cleft in the wall of rock which has so long overhung us.

The road first climbs the cliff-face by two long zigzags, then a terrace cut in a bare bold wall of yellow rock pierces the jaws of the defile. High up on the opposite cliff runs the thin track from Molveno to Castel Toblino. The Sarca, victorious over all obstructions, glides along its narrow bed swiftly, yet smoothly, that Mr. Macgregor, or some one accustomed to those fearful feats in a 'cañon' pictorially recorded in books of North American travel, might find it possible to shoot the defile. When the walls break back a rich valley opens round us. The red crags of the Brenta chain glow for a moment in the north, then the Baths of Comano, a health-resort of local celebrity, is passed, and Stenico and its castle are seen on the right, high-perched on a green brow, holding the keys of the upper valley. The road and the river force their way side by side through an extraordinary cleft, split or cut through the heart of a chain rising on either side 6,000 feet above the gulf. The gorge is greener and less savage than the last, yet on a still more magnificent scale. Slender streams fall in glittering showers from the shelves above, and are carried under or over the road by ingeniously-contrived shafts or galleries.

The rocks at length withdraw, the hills open, and while we ascend gently amongst orchards and rich fields of Indian corn, the Carè Alto suddenly raises his icy horn over the green lower range. We are close to Tione, and at another of the great turning-points in the Sarca valley.

Tione itself is a thoroughly Italian country town, with dark narrow streets crossed by archways, large houses built round courtyards, low-roofed cafés, and miscellaneous shops. A happy sign of the times may be seen in the conversion of the large barrack outside the town into an elementary school.

Here we are but a short distance from Pieve di Buono, and a two hours' drive would complete the circle. The valleys of the Sarca and Chiese are at this point separated only by a low grassy ridge over which runs a fine high-road, defended, like every road in this country, by a chain of forts, the scene of some of the desultory skirmishes of 1866.

Above Tione the broad open basin which divides the granite and the dolomite is known as Val Rendena. Owing to its peculiar situation between two mountain-chains unconnected at their head, but little is seen of the higher summits, and the landscape is rich and smiling. The road, winding at first high on a wooded hillside, commands a charming view of the upper valley as far as Pinzolo.

Orchards and cornfields separate the rapidly succeeding hamlets, each of which resembles its neighbour. The method of construction in this country is peculiar. The lower stories only, containing the living-rooms, are built of stone; from the top of their walls rise large upright beams supporting an immensely broad roof. The spaces between the beams are not filled up, and the whole edifice has the air of having been begun on too large a scale, and temporarily completed and roofed in. The great upstairs barn is used for the storage of wood, hay, corn, and all sorts of inflammable dry goods. The roof being also of wood, the lightning finds it easy enough to set the whole mass in a blaze, and fires arising from this cause are of common occurrence. Caresolo, the next village above Pinzolo, was almost completely destroyed in a night-storm during the autumn of 1873.

The openings of two lateral glens, Val di San Valentino and Val di Borzago, are passed in quick succession. Near the latter stands the oldest church in the valley, a square box covered with ruined frescoes, and said to mark the spot of the martyrdom of St. Vigilius, a great local evangeliser and patron saint. Heathenism lingered in this remote region until the eighth century, and two hundred years earlier the first unfortunate missionary was done to death by the inhabitants of Mortaso, who, according to the tradition, finding no stones handy, used their loaves as missiles. For this unlucky piece of barbarity the perpetual hardness of their bread, even at the present day, is said to be a punishment. It is difficult, however, to believe that loaves which could kill a saint can have been very soft to begin with.

To judge from their habits and from the size and number of their churches, the people are still as remarkable for devotion to their religion as they were in pagan days. The wayfarer passing along the valley in the early morning sees a crowd both of men and women streaming out from early mass. In most cases the church seems to have been rebuilt and enlarged in modern times, and a curious effect is often produced by the juxtaposition of the huge whitewashed building and the campanile of the older structure, a little stone tower with circular-headed apertures, which scarcely reaches to the upper windows of its overgrown companion.

The river is presently crossed, and as we approach the end of our long drive and of the third stage in the Sarca's progress the mouth of Val di Genova comes into sight on the left, and the snows of the Presanella shine for a moment above the lower ridges. We are now within half a mile of Pinzolo, the Grindelwald, or Cortina of this country. But in this chapter I propose to confine myself to the southern approaches to the two groups of the Adamello and the Brenta. The excursions round Pinzolo must be reserved for future pages.

For the moment I shall ask the reader to stop short at the neighbouring village of Giustino, and return with me thence to Trent by a byway which enables us to avoid retracing our steps through Tione.

The walk from Val Rendena to Stenico, through Val d'Algone, is dismissed in the guide-books with a few words of faint praise which raise no expectation of its varied beauty. We left Pinzolo one perfectly cloudless morning, to descend to the shores of Lago di Garda, having for our companion a peasant familiar as the man who, seven years before, had led me up to the Bocca dei Camozzi under pretence of its being the pass to Molveno. To-day he was only engaged as an attendant on the donkey which carried our traps; and it was chiefly to the quadruped's sagacity that we trusted not to be misled.

We soon quitted the high-road down the valley, and climbed a steep pavé past the stations leading to a whitewashed church perched on a knoll amongst the mossy chestnut-groves. A large village, with a trim granite-edged fountain and a tall campanile, was soon left below. The ascent then became hot and tiresome for a time, where the path perversely left the woods and chose for its zigzags a loose, dusty, shadeless slope. The summit of the Presanella was now in view. The ungainly hump here representing the mountain is the greatest possible contrast to the noble mass which, with its long escarped sides and icy pinnacles, towers above the Tonale road. The Grivola is the only other peak I know of which undergoes so complete a transformation. Above the bare ascent lies a sloping shelf of meadow, dotted with hay-châlets. The path then enters the forest, the thick stems of which shut out all distant view. Suddenly they open and leave room for a smooth level glade: shut round by a green wall of pines, it is a place where an altar to Pan may have risen out of the mossy sward, and shepherds have held their sylvan revelries. This 'leafy pleasantness' is the top of the ridge known by the poetical name of the Pra Fiori. Behind us the icy comb of the Carè Alto gleamed through the branches; in front the massive form of a dolomite peak towered over the tree-tops. Bearing to the left, and descending very slightly from the pass, we came in a few minutes to a grassy brow adorned with beech-trees. A more beautiful site is hardly to be found; and here, with one consent, we built our ideal Alpine châlet.

Below us lay the smooth level of the Val d'Algone; on one side rose the bare, torn, and fretted face of a great dolomite, surrounded by lower ridges scarcely less precipitous, but clothed in green wherever trees or herbage could take root. Towards the south the distant hills beyond the Sarca waved in gradations of purple and blue through the shimmer of the Italian sunshine.

A short zigzag through thick copses took us down to the meadows. The large solitary building in their midst is a glass manufactory. At this point a good car-road begins, which, branching lower down, leads either to Tione or Stenico.

The loftier dolomites were soon lost to view behind a bend in the valley, and the road plunged down a deep and narrow glen between banks of nodding cyclamens, bold crags, and the greenest of green hillsides. About two hours' walk from the glass manufactory the gorge of the Sarca opened in front, and the road to Stenico, leaving the stream to fall into it, wound at a level round the face of perpendicular cliffs. Tione and its village-dotted valley were seen for a few moments before our backs were turned to them, and we fairly entered the gorge of the Sarca. The high-road and river thread side by side the intricacies of the great cleft; our way lay along a shelf blasted out of the cliffs a thousand feet above them. The rays of a midday sun streamed full upon us from an unclouded heaven, and every rock reflected back the glow of light and heat. Notwithstanding, we walked briskly on, for the castle of Stenico was full in view and scarcely a mile distant. Before reaching it we had to make the circuit of a gorge. From the hot golden rocks overhead a great fountain burst forth and poured down in a cool cascade, the waters of which were soon captured in channels and spread amongst terraced orchards and fig gardens, green – not as we know greenness – but with the vivid colour of Broussa or Damascus. Under the shade of the picturesque old covered bridge which crosses the stream, we halted for a few minutes to admire a view almost unique in my Alpine experience. Close beside us stood the castle of Stenico, perched high on a crag, commanding on one side the entrance to the gorge, overlooking on the other a wide sunny basin, girt by verdant ridges compared to which the shores of Como are bare and brown. The hollows and lower slopes sparkle with villages, and teem with Indian corn and trailing vines. The hills do not, as in the Northern Alps, rise in continuous ridges, but are broken up into masses of the most romantically beautiful forms. Such may have been the scenery of the fairest portions of Asia Minor before the Mahometan conquest brought desolation upon the land.

A steep car-road connects Stenico with the high-road to Trent and Riva. At Alle Sarche we left the Sarca and our old tracks, and turned sharply to the north. The little pool of Lago Toblino is rendered picturesque by its castle, an old fortified dwelling standing on a peninsula, and defended landwards by crenellated battlements. Beyond the lake a long ascent leads first through luxuriant orchards to Padernione, then through tame scenery to Vezzano, a large country town lying in an upland plain. Another climb brought us to a higher basin, still rich in vines and fig-trees. At its further end we plunged into a ravine. An Austrian fort crowned the hill above us, another was built in the bottom, right across road and stream, a scowling black and yellow-striped dragon of the defile. Rattling over its drawbridges, we followed the water for some distance through a narrow cleft, until suddenly the wide valley of the Adige broke on our eyes, backed by rich mountain-slopes. In the centre of the landscape rose the many towers of Trent, a dark ancient city surrounded by a ring of bright modern villas scattered on the neighbouring hills.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PRESANELLA AND VAL DI GENOVA

All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels;

Clouds overcome it. – R. Browning.

ENGLISH AND GERMAN MOUNTAINEERS – THE LOMBARD ALPS FROM MONTE ROSA – NOMENCLATURE – GAVIA PASS – PONTE DI LEGNO – TONALE PASS – VERMIGLIO – VAL PRESANELLA – THE PRESANELLA – PASSO DI CERCEN – VAL DI GENOVA

The races of English and German mountaineers, after making due allowance for the exceptions which there are to every rule, will be found respectively to embody many of the characteristics of the two nations. Our Alpine Clubman affords while in the Alps an example of almost perpetual motion. His motto is taken from Clough —

Each day has got its sight to see,Each day must put to profit be.

Provided with a congenial friend, and secure in the company of at least one first-rate guide possessed of the skill and knowledge necessary to encounter every obstacle of the snowy Alps, the English mountaineer runs a tilt at half the mountain-tops which lie in his erratic course, meeting on the whole with wonderfully few falls or failures on the way. He dashes from peak to peak, from group to group, even from one end of the Alps to the other, in the course of a short summer holiday. Exercise in the best of air, a dash of adventure, and a love of nature, not felt the less because it is not always on his tongue, are his chief motives. A little botany, geology, or chartography, may come into his plans, but only by the way and in a secondary place. He is out on a holiday and in a holiday humour. You must not be surprised, therefore, if the instruments with which one of the party has burdened himself give rise to more bad jokes than valuable observations. For the climbers are in capital training, and can afford to laugh uphill – a power which is freely used, even at moments when the peasant who carries the provision sack is appealing audibly to his saints.