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This last summer I revisited Oropa, near Biella, to see what connection I could find between the Oropa chapels and those at Varallo. I will take this opportunity of describing the chapels at Oropa, and more especially the remarkable fossil, or petrified girl school, commonly known as the Dimora, or Sojourn of the Virgin Mary in the Temple.
Ascending the steps and passing under the colonnade, we find ourselves in the second or inner court, which is a complete quadrangle, and is, so at least we were told, of rather older date than the facade. This is the quadrangle which gives its collegiate character to Oropa.
They love Oropa, and flock to it in thousands during the summer; the President of the Administration assured me that they lodged, after a fashion, as many as ten thousand pilgrims on the 15th of last August. It is astonishing how living the statues are to these people, and how the wicked are upbraided and the good applauded.
If I do not take these works so seriously as the reader may expect, let me beg him, before he blames me, to go to Oropa and see the originals for himself. Have the good people of Oropa themselves taken them very seriously? Are we in an atmosphere where we need be at much pains to speak with bated breath?
East of Milan the Virgin's mother does not have eggs, and I suppose, from the absence of the eggs at Oropa, that the custom above referred to does not prevail in the Biellese district. The Virgin also is invariably washed. St. John the Baptist, when he is born at all, which is not very often, is also washed; but I have not observed that St.
A family, we will say, has just gathered its first harvest; the heat on the plains is intense, and the malaria from the rice- grounds little less than pestilential; what, then, can be nicer than to lock up the house and go for three days to the bracing mountain air of Oropa? So at daybreak off they all start trudging, it may be, their thirty or forty miles, and reaching Oropa by nightfall.
I shall return to this peculiarity of Oropa later on, but will leave it for the present. For the general characteristics of the place I must refer the reader to my book, "Alps and Sanctuaries." I propose to confine myself here to the ten or a dozen chapels containing life-sized terra-cotta figures, painted up to nature, that form one of the main features of the place.
This painter lived in the eleventh century that is to say, about seven centuries after the image of Oropa had been known and venerated! This is indeed an anachronism. "Other difficulties drawn either from the ancient discipline of the Church or from St.
The morning after our arrival at Biella, we took the daily diligence for Oropa, leaving Biella at eight o'clock. Before we were clear of the town we could see the long line of the hospice, and the chapels dotted about near it, high up in a valley at some distance off; presently we were shown another fine building some eight or nine miles away, which we were told was the sanctuary of Graglia.
Near at hand were the most exquisite pastures close shaven after their second mowing, gay with autumnal crocuses, and shaded with stately chestnuts; beyond were rugged mountains, in a combe on one of which we saw Oropa itself now gradually nearing; behind, and below, many villages, with vineyards and terraces cultivated to the highest perfection; farther on, Biella already distant, and beyond this a "big stare," as an American might say, over the plains of Lombardy from Turin to Milan, with the Apennines from Genoa to Bologna hemming the horizon.
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