No one; until a carping
Englishman came to the place, and thought it incumbent upon him to
be scandalised, or to pretend to be so; on this the authorities
were made very uncomfortable, and changed the position of the
plate.
Granted that the Englishman was right; granted, in fact,
that we are more logical; this amounts to saying that we are more
rickety, and must walk more supported by cramp-irons. All the
"earnestness," and "intenseness," and "aestheticism," and "culture"
(for they are in the end one) of the present day, are just so many
attempts to conceal weakness.
But to return. The church of St. Mary of the Snow at Campra was
incorporated into the Graglia institution in 1628. There was
originally no connection between the two, and it was not long
before the later church became more popular than the earlier,
insomuch that the work at Graglia was allowed to fall out of
repair. On the death of Velotti the scheme languished, and by and
by, instead of building more chapels, it was decided that it would
be enough to keep in repair those that were already built. These,
as I have said, are the chapels of S. Carlo, and the small ones
which are now seen upon the way up to it, but they are all in a
semi-ruinous state.
Besides the church of St. Mary of the Snow at Campra, there was
another which was an exact copy of the Santa Casa di Loreto, and
where there was a remarkable echo which would repeat a word of ten
syllables when the wind was quiet. This was exactly on the site of
the present sanctuary. It seemed a better place for the
continuation of Velotti's work than the one he had himself chosen
for it, inasmuch as it was where Signor Muratori so well implies a
centre of devotion ought to be, namely, in "a milder climate, and
in a spot which offers more resistance to the inclemency of the
weather, and is better adapted to attract and retain the concourse
of the faithful."
The design of the present church was made by an architect of the
name of Arduzzi, in the year 1654, and the first stone was laid in
1659. In 1687 the right of liberating a bandit every year had been
found to be productive of so much mischief that it was
discontinued, and a yearly contribution of two hundred lire was
substituted. The church was not completed until the second half of
the last century, when the cupola was finished mainly through the
energy of a priest, Carlo Giuseppe Gastaldi of Netro. This poor
man came to his end in a rather singular way. He was dozing for a
few minutes upon a scaffolding, and being awakened by a sudden
noise, he started up, lost his balance, and fell over on to the
pavement below. He died a few days later, on the 17th of October,
either 1787 or 1778, I cannot determine which, through a misprint
in Muratori's account.
The work was now virtually finished, and the buildings were much as
they are seen now, except that a third storey was added to the
hospice about the year 1840. It is in the hospice that the
apartments are in which visitors are lodged. I was shown all over
them, and found them not only comfortable but luxurious - decidedly
more so than those of Oropa; there was the same cleanliness
everywhere which I had noticed in the restaurant. As one stands at
the windows or on the balconies and looks down on to the tops of
the chestnuts, and over these to the plains, one feels almost as if
one could fly out of the window like a bird; for the slope of the
hills is so rapid that one has a sense of being already suspended
in mid-air.
I thought I observed a desire to attract English visitors in the
pictures which I saw in the bedrooms. Thus there was "A view of
the black lead mine in Cumberland," a coloured English print of the
end of the last century or the beginning of this, after, I think,
Loutherbourg, and in several rooms there were English engravings
after Martin. The English will not, I think, regret if they yield
to these attractions. They will find the air cool, shady walks,
good food, and reasonable prices. Their rooms will not be charged
for, but they will do well to give the same as they would have paid
at an hotel. I saw in one room one of those flippant, frivolous,
Lorenzo de' Medici match-boxes on which there was a gaudily-
coloured nymph in high-heeled boots and tights, smoking a
cigarette. Feeling that I was in a sanctuary, I was a little
surprised that such a matchbox should have been tolerated. I
suppose it had been left behind by some guest. I should myself
select a matchbox with the Nativity, or the Flight into Egypt upon
it, if I were going to stay a week or so at Graglia. I do not
think I can have looked surprised or scandalised, but the worthy
official who was with me could just see that there was something on
my mind. "Do you want a match?" said he, immediately reaching me
the box. I helped myself, and the matter dropped.
There were many fewer people at Graglia than at Oropa, and they
were richer. I did not see any poor about, but I may have been
there during a slack time. An impression was left upon me, though
I cannot say whether it was well or ill founded, as though there
were a tacit understanding between the establishments at Oropa and
Graglia that the one was to adapt itself to the poorer, and the
other to the richer classes of society; and this not from any
sordid motive, but from a recognition of the fact that any great
amount of intermixture between the poor and the rich is not found
satisfactory to either one or the other.
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