Christian and ecclesiastical politeness of the religious orders and the simplicity and hospitality of mountaineers; as priests they are edifying, intelligent, and free from narrow prejudices; their mountain being continually traversed by the poor, the peasantry, traders of different countries, wealthy travellers, authors, poets, men of science, artists, and ladies of distinction, they obtain sufficient information respecting worldly affairs. From the number of inhabitants, or beggars, who leave a country, they are enabled to judge of the wealth or poverty of that state; their charitable statistics on this point may be less uncertain than those of the government or certain celebrated authors. The convent receives the Bibliotheque universelle de Genève, a very instructive journal; the Gazette de Lausanne, and some scientific works. I regretted that I could not examine the library, which was all in confusion, not from negligence, but on account of works then in progress for raising the edifice a story higher. The most hardy adversary of monastic vows would be somewhat embarrassed here: what other men than monks could have lived here, for more than eight centuries, under such a climate? Charity with them supplies the place of that love of country which peoples the frozen regions of Iceland and Greenland. Tell men who have families to go and live on Saint Bernard, and you will soon see what a difference separates philanthropic institutions from the works of religion. One of our most illustrious captains, Desaix, is interred in the church of the Great Saint Bernard. If the column erected to his memory on the plain of Marengo has disappeared, his coffin is better protected by religion on the mountain of a free state. This French tomb is the most elevated in the world; it stands on this lofty point above the clouds, as an advanced monument of our glory; and the sepulture of the hero it encloses is well nigh an apotheosis. The tomb of Desaix has no inscription, not even his name: it is said that Napoleon promised to compose one. If the cares of government made him forget this promise, perhaps he remembered it in his exile, when, thinking of the many and glorious lives sacrificed in his cause, he must have envied the victorious mausoleum of Desaix on the summit of the Alps-he, whose remains were about to be hidden in the bosom of the wave-beaten rock on which he was a captive. The epitaph of Desaix by his brother in arms of Egypt and Marengo would have been a sacred and imperishable monument, doing more honour to Napoleon with posterity than all his creations and proclamations of princes and kings of which nothing remains. Notwithstanding the white marble of which it is made and the great owl in the centre, the tomb of Desaix is naked it is a pity that it has no Christian emblem; a cross would seem better placed there than the melancholy and classical bird of Minerva. All the part describing the Great I did not omit going to see the celeSaint Bernard is excellent in M. de Saus-brated dogs of the hospital. One of them sure, instead of copying it, one can only attempt after him to give some of one's own impressions. One of the most forcible that I felt was the effect of the morning prayers in the church of the convent. The Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes, accompanied by the organ, was still more solemn there, and the misericordia seemed verily confirmed on the venerable men who sung it. The charitable catholicism of these religious men certainly appeared to me a more beautiful example to the protestants adjacent, than that of one of our bishops buse little diocese I had crossed two days before. 'The present convent was founded as early as the year 202. had been hurt; it was in fact nothing more than a kick from a mule; but I loved to ennoble the wound of this poor animal, and to suppose that he had received it in one of his perilous excursions to succour humanity. In his article on the dog, Buffon has forgotten the blindman's dog; his omission of those of Saint Bernard is equally blameable and still more difficult to explain. The pompous author of the Epoques de la Nature might easily overlook the vulgar dog of the blind in towns, but he might have met with, and he ought not to have omitted this dog, so noble in stature-this watchful host of the mountains, companion of the fatigues, the dangers, and almost of the charity of his masters-this dog, in a word, the most respectable of his species. In a corner of the convent, I observed | able traces of the two most warlike lying on the ground a superb slab of people in history, the Romans and the black marble. From a Latin inscription French. thereon, I found that this stone had been devoted by the Valaisians to Napoleon, as the restorer of their republic, which, however, in contempt of treaties, this stubborn destroyer of republics ultimately made a prefecture. On a little plain in front of the convent are some ruins, among which many medals have been found, the ex voto offerings of devotees and pilgrims of the olden time. It is not known whether the building was a temple to Jupiter or an hospital; most likely it was a temple, for I can hardly imagine a pagan hospital in so horrible a place. The Swiss society of the Amis des Sciences naturelles is to hold a meeting at the hospital of the Great Saint Bernard in July next. Never has a learned society held its sittings so high. The convent will lodge these new and numerous Saussures, and while elsewhere a kind of jealous enmity subsists between the cloister and science, here it will be well received, treated as a welcome guest, and admitted to the hearth and banquet of the house." CHAPTER VII. Valley of Aosta.-Aosta.-Calvin's column.-Cathedral.-Tomb of Thomas H.-Saint Peter and Saint Orso.-Antiquities.-Arch of Augustus.-Cretias. The valley of Aosta, despite its beauty, variety, and its rich vineyards, does not present the smiling contrast observed on entering Italy by Domo d'Ossola. This valley retains for some distance the principal features of Alpine nature, such as torrents, forests, rocks, cascades, precipices, at the bottom of which is the rumbling Dora. The antiquity of this military road, previously perceptible in going up the Great Saint Bernard, is still more so in the descent; and this narrow valley presents at every step the redoubt This meeting took place on the 21st of July 1829; it was composed of eighty-six persous, among whom were several learned foreigners, such as the German Baron de Buch, known by his geological works, and MM. Bouvard and Michaux, French naturalists. There were two sittings, on the 21st and 22nd, under the presidentship of the Canon Biselx, rector of Vauvry, in which several scientific papers were read; and on the 23d, says a journal, the whole The valley of Aosta, the banks of the Dora, and the impressions they produce are eloquently painted in the different works of Count Xavier de Maistre, a sentimental military writer, who is, as it were, the bard of this little country. Aosta has 6,400 inhabitants. In the centre of the public square is a stone column, surmounted by a cross, erected, as the inscription shows, in commemoration of Calvin's second flight from the city of Aosta, on his return from Italy, in the year 1541. Might not one suppose, on seeing this singular column, that there was question of the repulse of some mighty conqueror, instead of the hasty retreat of an insulated wanderer, whose whole strength lay in his doctrines. The antique cathedral, restored in the fifteenth century, contains the tomb of one of those brave and skilful captains of the house of Savoy, duke Thomas II.; it is a noble mausoleum of white marble, and from the superiority of the workmanship must be regarded as of the close of the fourteenth century or the beginning of the fifteenth. There are some good frescos in the sumptuous chapel of Saint Grat, erected in the sixteenth century by the marquis Roncas d'Aosta, minister of state. An ancient consular diptych in ivory, of the year 406, is the oldest in existence that bears a date, and is placed in the first rank of those fragile and curious monuments of antiquity. The collegiate church of Saint Peter and Saint Orso is reckoned the oldest church in the valley. On the arched roof of the choir, some antique paintings in the Byzantine style, of the beginning of the thirteenth century, represent the apostles. In the sacristy is a fine missal, ornamented on almost every page with the arms of the Challant family, the most illustrious in the valley, as well as with some rich miniatures of good taste. The population of Cretins and Albinos company descended, equally pleased with the zeal and unanimity of the members of the society, and the manner in which the monks of Saint Bernard had done the honours of their convent. * The most esteemed wines of the valley are those of Donasso and Arnazzo, and among the finer wines, the toretta of Saint-Pierre and the maimsey of Aosta. who inhabit the valley of Aosta, forms a singular contrast with the beauty of the site and the grandeur of the Roman antiquities found there, such as the arch of Augustus, the bridge, the gate, the pretorian palace, the amphitheatre, and the theatre. I saw some of these wretched monsters under the arch of Augustus, and the human species seemed to me there much more degraded and decrepid than the monuments of eighteen centuries. CHAPTER VIII. The Forestiere. — Englishmen.—Inns.—Registers. Scarcely have you entered Italy, in vested with your character of forestiere (foreigner), before you find the conduct and manners of the various classes of its inhabitants totally different: the higher orders are very obliging, hospitable, and good-natured; to the populace, on the contrary, the foreigner, notwithstanding the ceremonious formalities with which he is overwhelmed, is nothing less than a prey, a kind of booty at which every one runs, and endeavours to bear off his share to the best of his means; the little half-naked urchin runs after the carriage crying out carità, until the period when, grown to manhood, he can take his carabine and beg more nobly; the perfidus caupo is no less cunning than in the days of Horace; in short, voiturins, valets de place, postilions, chamberlains, boat masters, all seem eager to bring about, in detail, a restitution to Italy of the tribute that invaders have but too often levied there; and in this respect none fail in the duties of a citizen. Some of the authorities do not disdain to join the league; the everlasting and expensive visa of passports are but an indirect tax on the curiosity of travellers; and in some secondary towns, such as Ferrara, Reggio, Placentia, the price of tickets at the theatres has been doubled to foreigners for some years past, with the consent of the municipality. Independently of the paid services, the servants of the houses here you are received, the custode, the officer of customs, the gendarme, in fact every body holds out a hand; it is not what one buys that costs dear, but what one is perpetually obliged to give; and even the poet of the locanda (inn), the author of a sonnet on your happy arrival, | in which he has made the Tiber and Arno rejoice for the thousandth time, also asks for a donation. The forestiere must, therefore, be resigned, and come to the determination of not being too minute in his accounts, or he will find the pleasures of travelling diminished: the struggle would not be equal, so great is the instinct and craft of these people for getting money. The English, by reiterated complaints and boisterousness, have contributed to the improvement of the Italian inns, and may even claim the glory of having reformed them; they are in general very tolerable now, and I think them even better than in France. The register, which the severity of the police obliges every hotel to keep accurately, is a book which I have often perused, nor is it destitute of its peculiar matter for meditation. The different names of all the travellers who pass, show the agitation, often very vain, of this world's things; sometimes they recall the caprices of fortune, and reveal the forgotten existence of adventurous persons, once celebrated and powerful, and whose old palaces were to them but a kind of hostelry. The column condizioni of the inevitable register is to numbers of persons very diflicult to fill up; they do not know exactly what they are, so uncertain are the fortunes of many in our days; so incomplete and temporary is the social order on some points, notwithstanding its improvements. The Italians generally take the title of nobile; that of gentilhomme, or man of quality, is not taken by any Frenchman, although the Charter acknowledges a nobility, and even that there are two kinds; the names of rentier and proprietor are certainly pleasant enough, but they are somewhat common. The età (age) is another positive question which, for the ladies, is embarrassing at a certain epoch; the number of ladies of thirty-eight who travel can hardly be imagined; one would think it the best age for that enjoyment; the difficulty is sometimes complicated by the proximity of some charming girl, who already begins to be interesting, and proves that it is a considerable time since her mother was in the same circumstances. But the best chapters are the names of your friends, who, like you, are travellers; it seems that in finding and following their traces, you diminish the sadness of separation, and that this sort of apparition restores them to you, as in the rencontre sung in the same place by the poet : Plotfus et Varius Sinuessæ, Virgiliusque Nil ego contulerim jucundo sanus amico. CHAPTER IX. On the season for visiting Italy. Though winter is the usual season for travelling to Italy, I will advise no one to follow this custom, unless going under the advice of a physician. The winter does not suit that fine country; its aspect is ther but little different from that of our provinces: there is nearly the same humidity and the same cold; the rivers are overflowed, heavy and continued rains obscure the sky and inundate the fields; the trees are dwarfish and look still worse when stript of their verdure, and the vine, which twined around them gracefully, is nothing but a species of reptile clinging to them, black and tortuous. The orange-trees seem charged to do the honours of the country alone, and to recall some of its charms; but, despite the beauty of their fruit, there are not so many of them as is supposed, nor are they indeed higher than those of Versailles and the Tuileries. When I left Italy, generally towards the end of the year, and most frequently in very foul weather, while crowds of foreigners were going thither in elegant equipages, in my tenderness for that country, I thought with pain of the first impression these strangers would receive; I was tempted to cry out to them on the road that it was not Italy, the real Italy, that they saw. The poor English ladies' maids, cruelly exposed on seats before and behind, especially inspired me with true pity; probably they had read the Mysteries of Udolpho, in which, amid a thousand horrors, is such a smiling description of Italy in spring; how great must have been their disappointment on beholding it thus! But if nature loses her glory, the monuments of art are scarcely more to be recognised; they are made for the light and the sun of summer, and not for the fogs of winter. What numbers of pictures, basso - relievos, chefs d'œuvre of the best masters, disappear then in the obscurity of this dull season and the somewhat sombre light of the churches of Italy! A singular instance of this disagreeable effect of an Italian winter occurred to two Englishmen at Rome in 1828; they arrived on the 10th of November, and set off on their return on the 11th, to the great regret of their banker, M. Torlonia, with whom they had a credit of more than a hundred thousand franks. At the same period I also knew a young Frenchman at Rome, who, like others, had come to Italy in winter; on leaving Paris, he was fearful of his enthusiasm for that illustrious land, though when I saw him it was very sedate. This disappointed traveller had caught cold on the road; he was a dilettante, and the music he had heard was indifferent; Turin and Florence, which he had merely passed through, seemed to him, as regards the streets and people in them, nothing more than chief towns of a province, and the little shops of the Corso, or the hotels of the Piazza d'Espagna, where he had stopped, were but little calculated to excite that admiration which he at first feared being obliged to restrain. The great number of foreigners who flock to Italy in winter also deprive the country of a part of its physiognomy; the distinguished natives seem as it were to disappear, lost in the midst of this exotic bustling society; one can only catch a glimpse of them, and it is less easy to gain their friendship or to derive advantage from their information, borne away as they are by the whirlpool. As to the popular feasts and pilgrimages to Nostra Signora del Monte, della Grotta, dei Fiori, they have altogether ceased, and I have the bad taste to prefer them to the pompous routs of bankers or ambassadors. The foreigner, or countryman whom I prefer and try to find in Italy is some artist, a painter or architect, sketching views, examining monuments on the spot instead of looking at them on paper, working, studying, and loving the long days, a cheerful companion in mountain excursions and the horrors of the locanda, or a passenger like yourself on board the rapid bark wafted to many a shore famous in fable or history. Such is the happy companionship that I wish to every real traveller; and certainly he will find it more agreeable than that of managers of the new houses. This great prison, at the entrance of Italy, reminded me of the important part occupied by the fashionables who only cross the Alps for the Scala of Milan, the Cascine of Florence, the Corso of Rome, the Chiaja of Naples and other frivolous rendez-prisons in her history; independently of Yous of European vanity. Italy, the inexhaustible source of mental enchantments and fanciful musings, is for such people no more than a spectacle to be gazed at, a kind of race or theatrical representation, to which they travel post, with no object but to show themselves, to see who is there, and talk of what they saw. At the period chosen by these visiters, the beautiful solitudes of Vallombrosa, Mount Cassino, the Camaldoli, are almost inapproachable; and a person would return with a very imperfect idea of Italy, who had not been able to contemplate them. the political imprisonments common to all nations and countries, never has any land had so many nor such illustrious captives; poets, literati, historians, artists, whenever they have attained a certain degree of celebrity, have nearly all been confined. It seems as if a prison was in the destiny of every one that surpasses his fellows, and that it then becomes an accident, an ordinary event of life: it is to glory what ostracism at Athens was to popularity, or what the bowstring is at Constantinople; one might say that it becomes a natural consequence. The prisons of Italy are a part of its monuments, and if their traditions were less vague, they would not be without their grandeur, since they have received such inmates as Tasso, Machiavelli, and Galileo. It is, besides, my opinion that different countries ought to be viewed with the climates peculiar to them; the hoary winter to Russia, the sun to Italy. The summer is not so oppressive there as generally supposed; there is always an air, The cathedral possesses at the high and the inhabitants are much cleverer altar, the relics of Saint Warmond Arthan we at protecting themselves from borio, bishop of Ivrea, about the year the heat Italy doubtless owes its repu- 1001, and in the sacristy a picture by tation for intolerably hot weather to the Perugino, Saint Joseph kneeling before Engish and travellers from the North; the Infant Jesus, with the Virgin on but the temporary inconvenience it causes his right, and Saint Warmond on his for a few hours in the day is amply coin-left, leaning on the shoulder of the pensated by the brilliancy and purity of Canon abbot Ponzone d' Aseglio, who the light, the magnificence of the morn- ordered this fine piece. A curious piece ing and evening, and the charms of of mosaic in white, red, and black stones, night. framed in the wall of the seminary, and apparently of the twelfth century, represents the five liberal arts of that time. Grammar, Philosophy, Dialectics, Geometry, and Arithmetic. CHAPTER X. Bvres-Bridge-Castle.-Prisons of Italy.- | CHAPTER XI. Vercelli-Invasion of the Barbarians.-St. Andrew. -Mausoleum of T. Gallo.-Duomo. -Eusebius's book of the Gospels-Saint Christopher-Fresco by Gaudenzio Ferrari. -Noble example of the Marquis de Leganez-Saint Julian.—Library.Archives. Before reaching the road from Turin to Milan we come to Ivrea, which has a fine aspect at a distance, but is ill-looking within: the Roman bridge of a single arch, thrown over the Dora from the rocks on its banks, and the castle composed of four lofty towers joined by a high brick wall, have an imposing mien and seem in harmony with their picturesque loca- It was in the plains of Vercelli that laty The castle is a frightful prison, Marius overthrew the Teutonic and which bears no resemblance to the hu- Cimbrian army which several Roman gemane penitentiary establishments of Generals had previously repulsed. The Deva and Lausanne. It must have been ancient invasions of the barbarians were very duhcult to effect an escape from Lose ancient fortresses, and the jailers of the old rock no doubt kept a much stricter watch than the philanthropic natural, as the sun and abundance must have attractions for such people; whereas nothing but the infatuation of the last years of the Empire could have induced |
