Ch. 23: Fusio - Page 2

over 4200 feet above the level of the sea. I do not know wherein its peculiar charm lies, but it is the best of all the villages of a kindred character that I know. Below is a sketch of it as it appears from the cemetery.

There is another good view from behind the village; at sunset this second view becomes remarkably fine. The houses are in deep cool shadow, but the mountains behind take the evening sun, and are sometimes of an incredible splendour. It is fine to watch the shadows creeping up them, and the colour that remains growing richer and richer until the whole is extinguished; this view, however, I am unable to give.

I hold Signor Dazio of Fusio so much as one of my most particular and valued friends, and I have such special affection for Fusio itself, that the reader must bear in mind that he is reading an account given by a partial witness. Nevertheless, all private preferences apart, I think he will find Fusio a hard place to beat. At the end of June and in July the flowers are at their best, and they are more varied and beautiful than anywhere else I know. At the very end of July and the beginning of August the people cut their hay, and then for a while the glory of the place is gone, but by the end of August or the beginning of September the grass has grown long enough to re-cover the slopes with a velvety verdure, and though the flowers are shorn, yet so they are from other places also.

There are many walks in the neighbourhood for those who do not mind mountain paths. The most beautiful of them all is to the valley of Sambucco, the upper end which is not more than half-an-hour from Signor Dazio's hotel. For some time one keeps to the path through the wooded gorge, and with the river foaming far below; in early morning while this path is in shade, or, again, after sunset, it is one of the most beautiful of its kind that I know. After a while a gate is reached, and an open upland valley is entered upon-- evidently an old lake filled up, and neither very broad nor very long, but grassed all over, and with the river winding through it like an English brook. This is the valley of Sambucco. There are two collections of stalle for the cattle, or monti--one at the nearer end and the other at the farther.

The floor of the valley can hardly be less than 5000 feet above the sea. I shall never forget the pleasure with which I first came upon it. I had long wanted an ideal upland valley; as a general rule high valleys are too narrow, and have little or no level ground. If they have any at all there often is too much as with the one where Andermatt and Hospenthal are--which would in some respects do very well--and too much cultivated, and do not show their height. An upland valley should first of all be in an Italian-speaking country; then it should have a smooth, grassy, perfectly level floor of say neither much more nor less than a hundred and fifty yards in breadth and half-a-mile in length. A small