- "People Are Not So Worthy Of Being Believed As You Think They
Are; Do Not Believe Anything That You Do Not See Yourself."
Big with our discoveries, we returned towards our inn, Jones
leaving me sketching by the roadside.
Presently an elderly English
gentleman of some importance, judging from his manner, came up to
me and entered into conversation. Englishmen do not often visit
Mesocco, and I was rather surprised. "Have you seen that horrid
fresco of St. Christopher down at that church there?" said he,
pointing towards it. I said I had. "It's very bad," said he
decidedly; "it was painted in the year 1725." I had been through
all that myself, and I was a little cross into the bargain, so I
said, "No; the fresco is very good. It is of the fifteenth
century, and the facciata was restored in 1720, not in 1725. The
old fresco was preserved." The old gentleman looked a little
scared. "Oh," said he, "I know nothing about art - but I will see
you again at the hotel;" and left me at once. I never saw him
again. Who he was, where he came from, how he departed, I do not
know. He was the only Englishman I saw during my stay of some four
weeks at Mesocco.
On the first day of my first visit to Mesocco in 1879, I had gone
on to S. Bernardino, and just before getting there, looking down
over the great stretches of pasture land above S. Giacomo, could
see that there was a storm raging lower down in the valley about
where Mesocco should be; I never saw such inky blackness in clouds
before, and the conductor of the diligence said that he had seen
nothing like it. Next morning we learnt that a water-spout had
burst on the mountain above Anzone, a hamlet of Mesocco, and that
the water had done a great deal of damage to the convent at
Mesocco. Returning a few days later, I saw where the torrent had
flowed by the mud upon the grass, but could not have believed such
a stream of water (running with the velocity with which it must
have run) to have been possible under any circumstances in that
place unless I had actually seen its traces. It carried great
rocks of several cubic yards as though they had been small stones,
and among other mischief it had knocked down the garden wall of the
convent of S. Rocco and covered the garden with debris. As I
looked at it I remembered what Signor Bullo had told me at Faido
about the inundations of 1868, "It was not the great rivers," he
said, "which did the damage: it was the ruscelli" or small
streams. So in revolutions it is not the heretofore great people,
but small ones swollen under unusual circumstances who are most
conspicuous and do most damage. Padre Bernardino, of the convent
of S. Rocco, asked me to make him a sketch of the effect of the
inundation, which I was delighted to do. It was not, however,
exactly what he wanted, and, moreover, it got spoiled in the
mounting, so I did another and he returned me the first with an
inscription upon it which I reproduce below.
First came the words-
[Ricordo a Mesocco]
Then came my sketch; and then -
[In the book there is some handwriting at this point - unfortunately
I cannot read it]
The English of which is as follows:- "View of the church, garden,
and hospice of S. Rocco, after the visitation inflicted upon them
by the sad torrent of Anzone, on the unhallowed evening of the 4th
of August 1879." I regret that the "no" of Padre Bernardino's
name, through being written in faint ink, was not reproduced in my
facsimile. I doubt whether Padre Bernardino would have got the
second sketch out of me, if I had not liked the inscription he had
written on the first so much that I wanted to be possessed of it.
Besides, he wrote me a note addressed "all' egregio pittore S.
Butler." To be called an egregious painter was too much for me, so
I did the sketch. I was once addressed as "L'esimio pittore." I
think this is one degree better even than "egregio."
The damage which torrents can do must be seen to be believed.
There is not a streamlet, however innocent looking, which is not
liable occasionally to be turned into a furious destructive agent,
carrying ruin over the pastures which at ordinary times it
irrigates. Perhaps in old times people deified and worshipped
streams because they were afraid of them. Every year each one of
the great Alpine roads will be interrupted at some point or another
by the tons of stones and gravel that are swept over it perhaps for
a hundred yards together. I have seen the St. Gothard road more
than once soon after these interruptions and could not have
believed such damage possible; in 1869 people would still shudder
when they spoke of the inundations of 1868. It is curious to note
how they will now say that rocks which have evidently been in their
present place for hundreds of years, were brought there in 1868; as
for the torrent that damaged S. Rocco when I was in the valley of
Mesocco, it shaved off the strong parapet of the bridge on either
side clean and sharp, but the arch was left standing, the flood
going right over the top. Many scars are visible on the mountain
tops which are clearly the work of similar water-spouts, and
altogether the amount of solid matter which gets taken down each
year into the valleys is much greater than we generally think. Let
any one watch the Ticino flowing into the Lago Maggiore after a few
days' heavy rain, and consider how many tons of mud per day it must
carry into and leave in the lake, and he will wonder that the
gradual filling-up process is not more noticeable from age to age
than it is.
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