Italian Alps

Douglas Freshfield

Douglas William Freshfield

Italian Alps Sketches in the Mountains of Ticino, Lombardy, the Trentino, and Venetia

NOTE

The First Chapter is reprinted with corrections and additions from 'Fraser's Magazine.' The Thirteenth and fragments of one or two others have previously appeared in the 'Alpine Journal,' from which three of the illustrations have also been borrowed. The remaining seven have been engraved for this work under the care of Mr. G. Pearson.

The heights throughout the book and in all the maps are given in English feet.

PREFACE

I owe a double apology for the publication of this volume; in the first place to the public, secondly to my friends.

'Mountaineering' has been by this time fully described by very competent writers. No new book is likely to have any chance of rivalling the popularity of the first series of 'Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers,' or of the dramatic story of the Matterhorn, as told and illustrated by Mr. E. Whymper. There is no longer the least novelty in the small feats of gymnastics annually performed, or supposed to be performed, by members of the Alpine Club. Few readers, I think, outside that body of enthusiasts, are eager to hear anything more of guides and glaciers, arГЄtes and sГ©racs, cols, couloirs and crevasses. Such subjects recur more often than I could wish in the following pages. But in attempting to give any adequate picture of a mountain region it is impossible to leave out the snow mountains. My object has been to keep them as far as possible in their proper place in the landscape. I could not, like some tourists, ignore everything above the snow-level, but I have not, I trust, written as if the world began only at that point and everything beneath it was also beneath notice.

The sketches here brought together are a patchwork from the journals of seven summers. Their chief claim to interest lies in the fact that they deal with portions of the Alpine chain, about which English readers have hitherto found no information in their own language except in guide-books. General experience proves that the British mind – the remark does not, I believe, hold equally good of the German – will not readily take in a new lesson through this medium. Few of our fellow-countrymen turn their steps towards an unknown region unless directed thither either by the report of friends or by some book less technical and abstruse than a Dictionary of Peaks and Passes. Such a book, I venture to hope, the present volume may be found.

The gap which it is intended to fill has long remained one of the broadest in our English Alpine literature.

We have already two works of permanent value dealing with the southern side of the Alps. But Val Formazza was the eastern limit of the late Mr. King's 'Italian Valleys of the Pennine Alps.' The authors of 'The Dolomites' did not go west of the Adige. The exquisite valleys round the head of Lago Maggiore, so easily accessible from the lake or the St. Gothard road, have been completely passed over. The mountains of Val Masino and Val Livigno, distant respectively only a day's journey west and east of the crowded Upper Engadine, are still left to their bears and Bergamasque shepherds. The Punta Trubinesca, a noble peak, which, seen from Monte Generoso, heads the army of the Rhætian Alps, has been but once ascended, although it is accessible to anybody who can cross the Diavolezza Pass or climb the Titlis. In the highlands of Lombardy and the Trentino – speaking roughly, the country between Lago di Como and Trent – Italy and Switzerland seem to join hands. There, under an Italian sky and girt round by southern flowers and foliage, the fantastic rock-ridges and mighty towers of the Brenta stand opposite the broad snow-plains of the Adamello. Yet the beauties of this region, one of the most fascinating in the Alps, have, but for a stray mountaineer or a scanty notice in the 'Alpine Journal,' remained unsought and unsung.

The few friends and companions who have hitherto shared with me its enjoyment may here ask, 'And why could n