CHAPTER XVII - Soazza and the Valley of Mesocco
I regret that I have not space for any of the sketches I took at
Bellinzona, than which few towns are more full of admirable
subjects. The Hotel de la Ville is an excellent house, and the
town is well adapted for an artist's headquarters. Turner's two
water-colour drawings of Bellinzona in the National Gallery are
doubtless very fine as works of art, but they are not like
Bellinzona, the spirit of which place (though not the letter) is
better represented by the background to Basaiti's Madonna and
child, also in our gallery, supposing the castle on the hill to
have gone to ruin.
At Bellinzona a man told me that one of the two towers was built by
the Visconti and the other by Julius Caesar, a hundred years
earlier. So, poor old Mrs. Barratt at Langar could conceive no
longer time than a hundred years. The Trojan war did not last ten
years, but ten years was as big a lie as Homer knew.
Almost all days in the subalpine valleys of North Italy have a
beauty with them of some kind or another, but none are more lovely
than a quiet gray day just at the beginning of autumn, when the
clouds are drawing lazily and in the softest fleeces over the pine
forests high up on the mountain sides.
