Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino by Samuel Butler
Chapter XXVI: Fusio Revisited
This last year Jones and I sent for Guglielmoni to take us over the Sassello Grande from Airolo to Fusio. Soon after starting we were joined by a peasant woman and her daughter who were returning to their home at Mugno in the Val Maggia some twenty minutes’ walk below Fusio. They had come the day before over the Sassello Pass through Fusio carrying two hundred eggs and several fowls to Airolo. They had had to climb a full four thousand feet; the path is rugged in the extreme; neither of them had any shoes or stockings; the weather was very wet; the clouds hung low; the wind on the Colma blew so hard that, though the rain was coming down in torrents, it was impossible to hold up an umbrella, and they did not know the little road there is. Happily, before they got above the Valle di Sambucco they had fallen in with Guglielmoni, on his way to meet us; otherwise one does not see how they could have got over. As it was, they did not break a single egg, but they were a good deal scared and asked us to let them go back in our company. We found them delightful people; the girl was very pretty and the mother still comely, with a singularly pleasing expression. We found out what they had done with their eggs and fowls. They sold the eggs for nine centimes apiece, whereas at Fusio they would have got but five. The fowls fetched three francs apiece as against two they would have got at Fusio. Altogether they had made the best part of twenty francs by their journey, over and above what they would have made if they had stayed at home, and thought they had done good business.
The weather was perfect for the return journey. After passing Nante we noticed by the side of the path several round burnt patches some four feet in diameter which struck us as rather strange, so we asked Guglielmoni about them. He said there had been ants’ nests there, and the people burnt them because the ants did so much damage. He showed us one that was in process of reconstruction, the ants building upon the remains of their ruined home, and pointed out the deep channel which the ants had worn in the ground through their habit of entering and quitting their old-established nest by one main road. We had thought the channel was a rill artificially cut for irrigation, and it was not till Guglielmoni showed us how impossible this was that we came to see he was right. He showed us a disused road that had led to a nest now destroyed, and on two or three other occasions showed us roads leading from one nest to another.
He told us several more things about marmots which I may mention as opinions held by the Fusians, but upon which I should be sorry to base a theory. He said their fat was so subtle that it would go through glass and could not therefore be kept in a bottle. He said it would go through a man’s hand. I said: “Let us try,” but it appeared that it might take three or four hours in getting through, so we delayed the experiment for a more convenient season. I asked how the marmots held their own fat if it would go through skin. I was answered that at the end of summer, when the marmots are very fat, they no longer hold it and their fur is greasy. I could not contradict this from personal knowledge and was obliged to let it pass. He said marmots’ fat was good for rheumatism and sprains, but that it must never be used for a broken bone, as the ends of the bone would not grow together again if the fat reached them. Badgers’ fat, he said, was very good, but it was not so sovereign a remedy as marmots’. There are badgers about Fusio, though not so many as lower down the valley in the chestnut country. We saw some badgers’ fat later on at Tesserete; it was kept in a tin which was certainly very greasy, but we did not think that the fat had gone through the tin.
Then we met an old gentleman with a Rembrandt-Rabbi far-away look in his eyes. He wore a coarse but clean linen shirt, and was otherwise neat in his attire. He looked as if he had suffered much and had been chastened rather than soured by it. We talked a little and the conversation turned upon deceit. I said that deceit was a necessary alloy for truth which, without this hardening addition, like gold without an alloy of copper, would be unworkable.
“Chi non sa ingannare,” I said in conclusion, “non sa parlare il vero.”
The old gentleman seemed to like this, and so we parted. Guglielmoni told us he was a painter and liable to temporary fits of insanity. During these fits he would go up by himself into the mountains, like some old prophet going out into the wilderness, and stay there till the fit was over, living no one knew where or how.
Cheese is the principal product of these valleys. I asked Guglielmoni whether there was any sign of the upper pastures becoming impoverished by the annual removal of so much cheese. He said the soil about Fusio did not yield as much by a third as it had yielded when he was a boy, but I hardly think it likely that there is much difference. He did not see why taking away so many hundredweight, or rather tons, of cheese yearly should impoverish the land, for, he said, the cows manured it. He did not see that the cheeses should be taken into account. At one time he said that two hundred years hence the Alpe di Campo la Turba would not be worth feeding; at another that the cows left what they ate behind them. Our own impression was that, what with insect and bird life and the fertilising power of snow and the frequent addition of new soil by avalanches, there was probably no harm done, and that the grass was there or thereabouts much what it always had been since people had first begun to feed it. I have myself known these alpi off and on ever since 1843, and can perceive no difference, except that the glaciers, especially at Grindelwald, have receded very considerably, and even this may be only fancy.
I asked Guglielmoni whether the Alpigiani—the people who spend the summer in the alpi—ever get pulmonary complaints. “Oh si,” was his answer, and he nodded as though it were common, which I can well believe; but it is more difficult to understand how the few robust Alpigiani escape. The majority seemed to us to be prematurely worn and to live in a state almost of squalor. What would a doctor say to the damp floor covered with mildew growing on spilt milk and fragments of half-made cheese? What about men sleeping night after night in a room built in the middle of a dung-heap, with never a ray of sunshine save a little near the door and an occasional beam through crannies in the walls? What nidus can be conceived more favourable for the development of organic germs? How can any one escape who spends a summer in one of these huts? I should say the worst and most insanitary cellar into which human beings are huddled in London is not more unwholesome than these alpi in the middle of the finest air in Europe.
Guglielmoni had some edelweiss in his hat, and we asked him the Italian name for it. He replied that it had no other name. The passion for this flower has evidently spread from the north. The Italians are great at suppressing unnecessary details. I was going up once in the posta from Varallo to Fobello and had an Americanised Italian cook for my only fellow-traveller. I asked him the name of a bird I happened to see, and he said:
“Oh, he not got no name. There is two birds got names. There is the gazza; he spik very nice. I have one; he spik beautiful. And there is the merlo; he sing very pretty. The other, they not got no names; they not want no names; every one call them what he choose.”
And so it is with the flowers. There is the rose and perhaps half-a-dozen more plants, but as for the others “they not got no names, they not want no names.”
My fellow-traveller, speaking of the villagers in the villages we passed through, said:
“They all right as long as they stop here, but when they go away and travel, then they not never happy no more.”
When we reached the floor of the Valle di Sambucco, the people were milking the few cattle that remained there, and the milk purred into the pails as with a deep hum of satisfaction. The sun was setting red upon the Piz Campo Tencia; the water was as clear as the air, and the air in the deep shadow of the bottom of the valley had something of the deep blue as well as of the transparency of the water. We passed the gorge in twilight and presently were again at Fusio. We ordered some wine for the women who had accompanied us, and as they sat waiting for it with their hands folded before them they looked so good and holy and quiet that one would have thought they were returning from a pilgrimage.
I have nothing to retract from what I have said in praise of Fusio. It is the most old-world subalpine village that I know. It was probably burnt down some time in the Middle Ages and perhaps the scare thus caused led to its being rebuilt not in wood but in stone. The houses are much built into one another as at S. Remo; the roofs are all of them made of large stones; there are a good many wooden balconies, but it is probably because it has been chiefly built of stone that we now see it much as it must have looked two or even three centuries ago. If any one wants to know what kind of village the people of three hundred years ago beheld, at Fusio he will find an almost untouched specimen of what he wants. For picturesqueness I know no subalpine village so good. Sit down wherever one will there is a subject ready made. The back of the village is perhaps more mediæval in appearance than the front. Its quaint picturesqueness, the beauty of its flowers, the brilliancy of its meadows, and the genial presence of Signor Dazio prevent me from allowing any great length of time to pass without a visit to Fusio.
I said to Jones once: “It is worth while going to Fusio if only to please Signor Dazio.”
“Yes,” said Jones, “and he is so very easily pleased.”
It is just this that makes it so pleasant to try to please him. I believe all the people in Fusio are good. I asked Guglielmoni once what happened when any one did something wrong. He seemed bewildered. The case had not arisen within his recollection. I pressed him and said that it might arise even at Fusio, and what would happen then? Had they a prison or a lock-up of any kind? He said they had hone, and he supposed the offender would have to be taken down the valley to Cevio, about fourteen or fifteen miles off—but the case had not arisen.
At Fusio, in spite of all its flowers, there are no bees; the summer is too short and they would have to be fed too long. Nevertheless, we got the best honey at Fusio that we got anywhere. Signor Dazio said it was from his own hives at Locarno and had not been “elongated” in any way. What was bought at the shops, he said, was almost invariably “elongated” with flour, sugar and a variety of other things.
The hotel has been much improved during these last two years; the kitchen has been taken downstairs and the old one thrown into the dining-room, which has been newly decorated after a happily-conceived and tastefully-executed scheme. The visitor is to suppose himself seated in a large open belvedere upon the roof of the house, over which a light iron trellis-work has been thrown and gracefully festooned with a profusion of brilliant flowers. In the sky, which is of unclouded blue, birds of lustrous plumage are engaged in carrying a wreath, presumably for the brow of one of the visitors. The lower part of the heavens is studded with commodious hat pegs, two or three doors, the windows, and a substantial fire-place. The gorgeous parrot of the establishment has chosen the point where the sky unites with the right-hand corner of the chimney-piece as the most convenient spot to perch on, and his presence there gives life and nature to the scene. We were struck with the wise reticence of the painter in not putting another parrot at the opposite corner; there is a verisimilitude about one bird which would have been lost with two, for few houses have more than one parrot. The effect of the whole is singularly gay and pleasing. For an English household I admit that there is nothing to compare with Mr. Morris’s wall-papers—except, of course, his poetry—but there is an over-the-garden-walliness, if the expression may be pardoned, about these Italian decorations, a frank meretriciousness, both of design and colour, which will be found infinitely refreshing and may be looked for in vain in the works of our English masters of decoration.
The day after our arrival was the feast of the Assumption of the Madonna, and the next day was the feast of S. Rocco, the patron saint of Fusio, so the bells were ringing continually. There are only three bells, but they are good ones; they were brought up from Peccia some forty years ago, long before Signor Dazio had the present road made; he was then a boy and assisted at the very arduous task of bringing them up. Like bells generally in North Italy they hang half-way out of the windows of the campanile, instead of being wholly within the belfry as our English bells are. This is why an Italian campanile is such a much more slender object than an English belfry; it has less to cover. When the bells are rung by being raised and swung in and out of the window, there is one ringer to each bell, and the following is all that is attempted:—
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This, however, is varied with another and very different effect to which I have alluded in Chapter XXIII, but of which I can now speak at greater length inasmuch as we went up among the bells and saw how it was done.
The ringer has a light cord for each bell; he fastens one end of the cord by an iron hook to a hole in the clapper and the other to a beam of the belfry. The cords are just long enough to hold the clapper an inch or so off the side of the bell, the weight of the clapper keeping the cord tight. The ringer has thus three tight cords before him, on which he plays by hitting the middle of whichever one he wants with his hand; this depresses it and brings the clapper suddenly against the bell. He sits so that he can easily reach all the strings, and sets to work playing on the cords as though on a clumsy three-stringed harp. He plays out of his head without any music, and it is wonderful what variety he makes this rude instrument produce and how responsive it is to moods requiring different shades of expression. Of course, when the player’s resources are enlarged by the addition of two more bells, as at Castelletto and Vogogna, he can produce an infinitely more varied effect.
The notes, according to the pitch of Signor Dazio’s piano, were G, A, and B, and when we watched the ringer we saw that he frequently played the B with the G; sometimes he struck the B with the A, no doubt intending it as an appoggiatura, and, at a distance, this was the effect produced. But when he struck the two notes together and made the B louder than the A it had the effect of varying the tune. He never played his tunes in precisely the same way twice running, and this makes it difficult to say with certainty what they were, but, omitting variations, the two favourite tunes went like this:
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This last he treated almost like a patter song, making it go as fast as ever he could. Give the Italian three bells, a belfry, and some bits of string and he will play with them and with you by the hour together with infinite variety. Give the German five bells and he will know a single figure, which he will probably have got an Italian to make for him, and will repeat it till you have to close the windows to keep the sound out, and the bottom bell will make a noise like the smell of a crushed cockroach. This is what happened to us in the valley of Gressoney at Issime, where German influences and the German language prevail.
It was at Issime, by the by, that we saw the most beautiful woman that either of us ever saw. She was gathering French beans in the little garden in front of the hotel and had her apron full of leeks and celery. No words can give an idea of the dignity and grace with which she moved, and as for her head, it was what Leonardo da Vinci, Gaudenzio Ferrari, and Bernardino Luini all tried to get without ever getting it. As long as she was in sight it was impossible to look at anything else, and at the same time there was a something about her which forbade staring.
S. Rocco is the saint who is always pointing to the dreadful wound in his poor leg; accordingly he is invoked by people who are out of health and thanked by those who have recovered. Near the first stalle in one of the neighbouring valleys there is a chapel where we saw three women praying. It had been prettily decorated with edelweiss, mountain-elder berries, thistle flowers, and everything gay that could be got. There was nothing of interest inside it, except a votive picture of a little man in a tailed coat who had got a bad leg like S. Rocco and was expostulating about it to the Virgin Mary. I have seldom seen any even tolerably serious frescoes in any of these small wayside oratories; they are usually done by some local man who has cultivated the Madonna touch, as it may be called, much as some English amateurs cultivate the tree touch, and with about as happy a result. The three women had crossed by the Sassello Grande from Nante, starting with earliest daybreak. It seems that one of them had for a time been deprived of her reason, but her sister had prayed at this chapel that it might be restored and her prayer had been granted; so the two sisters and another woman come over every year as near the feast of S. Rocco as they can, and repeat their thanks at this spot.
The feast of S. Rocco is kept at Fusio with considerable solemnity. Jones happened to be outside the church and kissed a relic of the saint which was handed round after service. I was sorry not to have been there at the moment, but I joined in the procession and helped to carry S. Rocco out of the church and down the valley to Peccia. There a table covered with a handsome cloth had been placed in the middle of the road, and on this the bearers rested the silvered statue. The officiating priest approached it, said some appropriate words before it, I believe in Latin, at any rate I could not catch them, and then we all turned home again. When the procession doubled round we could see the faces of the people as they met us in pairs. First came the women, one of them bearing a crucifix turned so that the people following might see the figure on the cross. Then came the men in white shirts, some carrying candles, among whom we saw Guglielmoni, and some bearing the image of the saint. Then came the men of the place in their ordinary dress, and we followed last of all. The older women wore the Fusio costume, which is now fast disappearing; many of them wore white linen drapery over their heads, but we did not understand why some did and some did not. Immediately before the statue of S. Rocco came two nuns from Italy who were seeking alms for some purpose in connection with the Church.
We thought the people did not as a general rule look in robust health; some few, both men and women, seemed to have little or nothing the matter with them, but most of them looked as though they were suffering from the unwholesome conditions under which they live, for the conditions in the villages are not much healthier than in the alpi. The houses in such a village as Fusio are few of them even tolerably wholesome. Signor Dazio’s houses are all that can be wished for in this respect, but in too many of the others the rooms are low, without sufficient sunlight, and too many of them are far from inodorous.
We see a place like Fusio in summer, but what must it be after, say, the middle of October? How chill and damp, with reeking clouds that search into every corner. What, again, must it be a little later, when snow has fallen that lies till the middle of May? The men go about all day in great boots, working in the snow at whatever they can find to do; they come in at night tired and with their legs and feet half frozen. The main room of the house may have a stufa in it, but how about the bedrooms? With single windows and the thermometer outside down to zero, if the room is warm enough to thaw and keep things damp it is as much as can be expected. Fancy an elderly man after a day’s work in snow climbing up, like David, step by step to a bed in such a room as this. How chill it must strike him as he goes into it, and how cold must be the bed itself till he has been in it an hour or two. We asked Guglielmoni how he warmed his house in winter and what he did about his bedroom. He said he put his wife and children into the warm room and slept himself in one that on inquiry proved to have only single windows and no stove. It then turned out that he had been at death’s door this last spring and the one before, and that the doctors at Locarno said he had serious chest mischief. The wonder is that he is alive at all. I advised him to get a half-crown petroleum burner and, if he felt he had caught cold, to keep it in his room burning all night. He asked how much it would cost and, when told from twenty to twenty-five centimes a night, said this was prohibitive, and I have no doubt to him with his wife and family it was.
One cause of the mischief doubtless lies in the fact that the high-altitude houses have descended with insufficient modification from ancestors adapted to a warmer climate. Their forefathers were built for the plains. These houses should have been begotten of Russian or Canadian dwellings, not of Piedmontese or Lombard. At any rate, if a reform is to be initiated it should begin by a study of the Canadian or Russian house.
But it is not only the hard, long cold winters, with rough living of every kind, that weigh the people down; the monotony of the snow, seven months upon the ground, is enough to bow even the strongest spirit. It is not as if one could get the “Times” every morning at breakfast and theatres, concerts, exhibitions of pictures, social gatherings of every kind. Day after day not a blade of grass can be seen, not a little bit of green anywhere, save the mockery of the pine-trees. I once spent a remarkably severe winter at Montreal and saw the thermometer for a month at 22° below zero in the main street of the city. True, it was warm enough indoors, and grass does not usually grow in houses, so that one ought not to have missed it; nevertheless one did miss it, as one misses a dead friend whom one may have been seeing but seldom. There is a depressing effect about long cold and snow which one feels whether one is cold or not. I suspect it is the monotony of the snow-surface that is so fatiguing. I used to trudge up to the far end of Montreal Mountain every day because there was a space of a few yards there on which the snow positively would not lie by reason of the wind. Here I could see a few roots of brown dried grass and moss with a tinge of yellow in it, having looked at which for a little while I would return comparatively contented. If the monotony of surface was found so depressing even in a city like Montreal, where so many interests and amusements were open, what must it be in a place like Fusio, where there are none?
The two great foes of life are the two extremes of change. Too much, that is to say too sudden change and too little change are alike fatal. That is why there is so little organic life a few feet below the surface of the earth. It gets too slow altogether and things won’t stand it. Cut away for months together the incessant changes involved in the changed vibrations consequent upon looking at a surface whose colour is varied, and a monotony is induced which should be relieved by the entry of as much other change as possible to supply the place of what is lost.
What a vineyard for the Church is there not in these subalpine valleys, if she would only work in it! The beauty and sweetness of the children show what the people are by nature and prove that the raw material is splendid. Their flowers are not gayer and lovelier than their children; but they do not get a fair chance. If the Church would only use her means and leisure to teach people how to make themselves as healthy and happy in this life as their case admits! If she would do this with a single eye to facts and to the happiness of the people, cutting caste, dogma, prescription, and self-aggrandisement direct or indirect, what a hold would she not soon have upon a grateful people. Nay, if the priests would only set the example of washing, of keeping their houses clean and their bedrooms warm and light and dry, and of being at some pains with their cookery, their example would be enough without their preaching. I grant honourable exceptions, but the upland clergy are as a rule little above their flocks in regard to cleanliness of house and person; instead of facing the many problems that surround them, they rather, I am afraid, have every desire to avoid them. They do not want their people to learn continually better and better in health and wealth how to live; they want things to go on indefinitely as hitherto, only they hold that the people should be even more docile and obedient than they are. I may be wrong, but this is certainly the impression that remains with me.
The priest himself must have a hard time of it in winter. We see the church steps basking in the morning sun of August. It is an easy matter then to dawdle into church and sit quiet for a while amid a droning old-world smell of cheese, ancestor, dry-rot, Alpigiano, and stale incense, and to read the plaintive epitaphing about the dear, good people “whose souls we pray thee visit with the everlasting peace that waits on saints and angels.”
As the clouds come and go the gray-green cobweb-chastened light ebbs and flows over the ceiling. If a hen has laid an egg outside and has begun to cackle, it is an event of magnitude. A peasant hammering his scythe, the clack of a wooden shoe upon the pavement, the dripping of the fountain, all these things, with such concert as they keep, invite the dewy-feathered sleep till the old woman comes and rings the bell for mezzo giorno.
This is the sunny side of subalpine church-going, but how is it when these steps are hidden under a metre of frozen snow? How about five o’clock on a Christmas morning, when the priest can hardly get down the steps leading from his house into the church from the fury of the wind and the driving of the fine midge-like snow? Even when the horrors of the middle passage have been overcome and the church has been reached, surely it is a nice, cosy place for an infirm old gentleman or lady with bronchitic tendencies! How is it conceivable that any one should keep even decently well who has to go to church in a high subalpine village at five, six, seven, eight, or in fact at any hour before about noon upon a winter morning? And yet they go, and some of them reach good old ages. Still one would think that, if a little pains were taken, the thing might be managed so that more of them could reach better old ages. As for the priest, he will carry the last sacraments of the Church any distance, in any weather, at any hour of the night, in summer or winter, but he must have an awful time of it every now and then. So, for the matter of that, has an English country parson or doctor. Still, the Alpine roads are rougher and the snow deeper, and the pay, poor as it often is in England, is here still poorer.
After a few days at Fusio, Guglielmoni took us over to Faido in the Val Leventina by the pass that we had not yet crossed—the one that goes by the Lago di Naret and Bedretto. From Faido we returned home. We looked at nothing between the top of the St. Gothard Pass and Boulogne, nor did we again begin to take any interest in life till we saw the science-ridden, art-ridden, culture-ridden, afternoon-tea-ridden cliffs of old England rise upon the horizon.