Edith Wharton

Italian Backgrounds Edith Wharton

Nowhere is this contrast more acutely felt than in one of the upper Grisons villages. The anecdotic Switzerland of the lakes is too remote from Italy, geographically and morally, to evoke a comparison. The toy chalet, with its air of self-conscious neatness, making onefeel that if one lifted the roof it would disclose a row of tapes and scissors, or the shiningcylinders of a musical box, suggests cabinet-work rather than architecture; the swept andgarnished streets, the precise gardens, the subjugated vines, present the image of an oldmaid's paradise that would be thrown into hopeless disarray by the introduction ofanything so irregular as a work of art. In the Grisons, however, where only a bald grey passdivides one from Italy, its influence is felt, in a negative sense, in the very untidiness of thestreets, the rank growth of weeds along the base of rough glaring walls, the drone of fliesabout candidly-exposed manure-heaps. More agreeably, the same influence shows itself inthe rude old centaur-like houses, with their wrought-iron window-grilles and stoneescutcheons surmounting the odorous darkness of a stable. These are the houses of peopleconscious of Italy, who have transplanted to their bleak heights, either from poverty ofinvention, or an impulse as sentimental as our modern habit of "collecting," the thick walls, the small windows, the jutting eaves of dwellings designed under a sultry sky. So vivid isthe reminiscence that one almost expects to see a cypress leaning against the bruisedpeach-coloured walls of the village douane; but it is just here that the contrast accentuatesitself. The cypress, with all it stands for, is missin