Letters from Italy/Chapter 20

Formerly it was known as “faithful Tyrol.” To-day it is a Venetian province, and in fifty years’ time it will probably be an entirely Italian country; one is struck by the speed with which the Italian language takes root. Children babble a sentence in German and another in Italian; the little peasant in the train, with his blessed goitre, soon shows off his mastery of Italian; maidservants are crazy after the curly young fellows of the Italian garrison. Otherwise the new lords of the land take due consideration of the inhabitants they leave the local Germans their national monuments, names of streets, and I know not what else. Besides their garrisons they send school expeditions here by way of conquest; a young ten-year old Fascist abused me for nothing at all as a Schubbjack^[1]: I do not know what that is, but he bore himself very heroically and nationally.

And yet is it through and through a German country, of course in a specially good sense of the word clean and affable, sightly and careful; and the mountains are sprinkled with fresh snow ​and provided with wirerope railways and spotless inns; down below they cultivate a light wine, and on each hillock is a sort of fort, and the people are serious and neat, reflective and agreeable, the ladies with alarmingly large teeth but sometimes uncommonly pretty and comely; and believe me, after an Italian pilgrimage it is a special delight to look into their light blue, welling eyes. On the mountains abound notably fine views, examined through telescopes; you travel with the eye over snow-fields, with a pleasant dizziness measure a dread precipice, and occasionally down below encounter genuine tourists who have just negotiated some huge mountain; they have enormous knees and seven-leagued boots, speak in strikingly loud tones and in their hats wear an Alpine flower; lady tourists are usually speckled and not pretty, and too broad-shouldered.

And when I speak of mountains, the most charming things in that region are the smell of wood, flowing water, and meadows. Here, wanderer, is precisely what you missed down in the south, without being aware of it. Now all at once you remember that throughout all the journey you did not tread on wooden floors, only on cold and dead pavements, ate off plated metal or marble tables, slept in brass and breathed stone dust. For the whole antique is of stone and metal and has nothing wooden whatever; all its genius lies in stone; I, however, am from a ​land where wood abounds and love wood withsense of touch and eyes, for it is almost living material, naïve and humane, Gothic, non-antique, and good for domestic construction. Flowing water, that is the whole poetry of the north; the motive of the kelpie and undine opposed to that of the satyr. Ye rivers never running dry, eternal rivulets, rills and springs; and ye, finest threads of water; and art not thou, pure, graceful, living water—all one with the sea? For dreadful is the sight of a dried-up reservoir and waterless rocks. “Hallowed be water, holy creation,” is written over the aqueduct at San Marino, pia creatura, flowing brooklet. And meadows, those real meadows, are not down below there; they have their vines and tamarinds, olives and palms and oranges, but meadows, the thick, green, and silky meadows of my childhood—where are they? Only here and there tough rooted tufts nibbled by goats. No sparrows are there, nor blackbirds nor wagtails, nor crested larks nor goldfinches nor crickets; something has been missed, all the time something has been missed by you.

But when I am on this side of the Tyrol I must look at Gossensass, Ibsen’s Tusculum. For seven years, it is said, old Ibsen courted a young German lady here. Those years are inscribed on a memorial tablet at the hotel, and to this day you find in that hotel a maiden, an Alpine rosebud so pretty that it is worth while journeying here. ​All round are forests of perfumed wood, mown meadows and rustling water; and the spirit of Ibsen hovers anew round blue-eyed Hilda. This is just so northern, utterly northern, and yet it is the last contact with new Italy.