United States or Slovenia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In Austria the midsummer customs and superstitions resemble those of Germany. Thus in some parts of the Tyrol bonfires are kindled and burning discs hurled into the air. In the lower valley of the Inn a taterdemalian effigy is carted about the village on Midsummer Day and then burned. He is called the Lotter, which has been corrupted into Luther.
The restoration of the Tyrol to Bavaria was tacitly understood, and, in order to reduce the country to obedience, three fresh armies again approached the frontiers, the Italian, Peyry, from the south through the valley of the Adige, and Baraguay d'Hilliers from the west through the Pusterthal; the former suffered a disastrous defeat above Trent, but was rescued from utter destruction by General Vial, who had followed to his rear, and who, as well as Baraguay, advanced as far as Brixen.
With the army which occupied the Riviera and the Maritime Alps the young general marched on Piedmont at the opening of the summer, separated its army from the Austrian troops, and forced the king of Sardinia to conclude a humiliating peace. A brilliant victory at the bridge of Lodi brought him to Milan, and drove the Austrians into the Tyrol.
Had that gentleman known what is the practice of the heavy Tyrolese rifle he would not have written so confidently. But it is needless to go so far as to the Tyrol. There is a well known rifle-shot in New York, who can perform the feat, any day, which the Southern writer scoffed at as utterly impossible. "Well! you can't hit four, no how!" "Will you bet?" "Sartain!"
The trout, salmon, hucho, and others of the Salmo genus, which spawn in the beginning or end of winter, and which inhabit rivers fed by cold and rapid streams which descend from the mountains, deposit their eggs in shallows on heaps of gravel, as near as possible to the source of the stream where the water is fully combined with air; and to accomplish this purpose they travel for hundreds of miles against the current, and leap over cataracts and dams: thus the Salmo salar ascends by the Rhone and the Aar to the glaciers of Switzerland, the hucho by the Danube, the Isar, and the Save, passing through the lakes of the Tyrol and Styria to the highest torrents of the Noric and Julian Alps.
They clamored for its annexation on the ground of "self-determination," though refusing to accept that principle as applicable to the inhabitants of the Austrian Tyrol and failing to raise any question in regard to it in the case of the port of Danzig.
Barrymore pointed, towards the great Brenner Pass, leading straight to Innsbruck through Tyrol. How close the northern nations lay, yet in the warm Italian brightness how far away they seemed.
And the fact that in the future there will be more American, English, French and Italian visitors, and fewer Germans, will make South Tyrol a far pleasanter place to travel in.
It is not wholly improbable that the Etruscans may have come into Italy over the Raetian Alps; for the oldest traceable settlers in the Grisons and Tyrol, the Raeti, spoke Etruscan down to historical times, and their name sounds similar to that of the Ras.
At Sterzing, a little village beautifully situated at the base of the mountain called the Brenner, and containing, as I should judge, not more than two or three thousand inhabitants, we counted seven churches and chapels within the compass of a square mile. The observances of the Roman Catholic church are nowhere more rigidly complied with than in the Tyrol.