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Chiavenna is the first Italian town which the tourist reaches by this route, and I know no town in the North of Italy which is so closely surrounded by beautiful scenery. The traveller as he falls down to it from the Splugen road is bewildered by the loveliness of the valleys, -that is to say, if he so arranges that he can see them without pressing his nose against the glass of a coach window.
As I looked at him cowering over the stove, and saw how oppressed he was with great coats and warm wrappings for his throat, I quite agreed with him that he had not begun to enjoy himself as yet. Then we all got into our places again, and I saw no more of the Greenes till we were standing huddled together in the large courtyard of Conradi's hotel at Chiavenna.
"And now, Socrates," said I at parting, "we go on our several ways, you to steal tomatoes, I to filch ideas from other people; for the rest which of these two roads will be the better going, our father which is in heaven knows, but we know not." I have never seen Mendelssohn, but there is a fresco of him on the terrace, or open-air dining-room, of an inn at Chiavenna.
To pass from the town of Tamarack on the north of the mountain to Rockland on the south was like crossing from Coire to Chiavenna. There is nothing gives glory and grandeur and romance and mystery to a place like the impending presence of a high mountain.
Three or four o'clock seems to them quite a natural hour for commencing the day's work. Why we should have started from Chiavenna at four o'clock in order that we might be kept waiting for the boat an hour and a half on the little quay at Colico, I don't know; but such was our destiny. There we remained an hour and a half; Mrs. Greene sitting pertinaciously on the one important box.
A very jolly place indeed. After ten days' stay a sledge took me over the mountains to Chiavenna, thence steamer over the lake to Como, and train to Milan. It was very cold and foggy there, but the city is a handsome one; I saw the Cathedral, the arcade, etc., and visited the famous Scala Opera House and its wonderful ballet.
"We are going to drive over the Maloja to Chiavenna," said Claire; "Maurice has a party to go with. We shall start by the earlier post, and have lunch together at Vico-Soprano before he comes. And then when Maurice comes we shall say good-by; and then and then, Miss Marley, I've been thinking we mustn't meet again!
For my part I am inclined to think that Italian hotels have received a worse name than they deserve; and I must profess that, looking merely to creature comforts, I would much sooner stay a week at the Golden Key at Chiavenna, than with mine host of the King's Head in the thriving commercial town of Muddleboro, on the borders of Yorkshire and Lancashire.
Cardinal Schinner, pleased at this, immediately shook a bag of gold, with fifty-three thousand guilders, in favor of the Pope and of Venice. At once, 1512, twenty thousand Swiss and Grisons crossed the high Alps and joined the Venetians against the French. The Grisons took possession of Valtelina, Chiavenna, and Bormio.
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