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Excepting in the case of forests, the trend is away from working the lands in common. Examples of the later methods are to be seen in the cantons of Ticino and Glarus, as follows: Several communes in Ticino, notably Airolo, have much public wealth. Airolo has seventeen mountain pastures, each of which feeds forty to eighty head of cattle.
Till gradually the gully opened, then opened into a wide valley-head, and we saw Airolo away below us, the railway emerging from its hole, the whole valley like a cornucopia full of sunshine. Poor Emil was tired, more tired than I was. And his big boots had hurt his feet in the descent. So, having come to the open valley-head, we went more gently. He had become rather quiet.
For, believe it or not, of that kind were Delia Robbia's enrichments, Ghirlandajo's frescos, Raphael's Madonnas, and Alberti's broad marble churches: of that kind and of no other; on a level with the painted lady smiling out of a painted window at Airolo, whose frozen lips assure the traverser of the Saint Gothard that he has passed the ridge and may soon smell the olives.
On the top of a cliff, his rifle slung across his shoulders, frantically waving his hat, appeared the wild chamois hunter Andrea of Airolo, an Italian village on the other side of the mountain. "Don't go into the wood!" screamed the riflemen. Andrea did not understand. "Don't go into the sacred wood," shouted the magistrate, "or the mountain will fall on us!"
Gothard, and automobiles aren't allowed on the Swiss passes," remarked Jack. This, to me, sounded final, so far as Airolo was concerned, but not so with the Honourable Mrs. Winston! "What do they do to you if you do go?" she asked, turning slightly pale. "They fined an American gentleman who crossed the Simplon in his automobile last year, five thousand francs," answered Herr Widmer.
I could figure it myself upon that little neck of the Lucendro Pass, upon the shoulder of the Piz Lucendro, for there once I lunched and talked very pleasantly, and we are looking down upon the Val Bedretto, and Villa and Fontana and Airolo try to hide from us under the mountain side three-quarters of a mile they are vertically below.
We left Airolo early the next morning, to continue our journey down the valley of the Ticino. The mists and clouds of Switzerland were exchanged for a sky of the purest blue, and we felt, for the first time in ten days, uncomfortably warm. The mountains which flank the Alps on this side, are still giants lofty and bare, and covered with snow in many places.
Andrea recovered and returned to work; he was in the strike of 1875, threw a stone, and underwent a term of imprisonment. In the year 1877 his native village, Airolo, was destroyed by fire. "Now I have burnt my boats behind me," he said, "there is no going back I must go on." The 19th of July 1879 was a day of mourning.
Reaching at dusk the last height above the vale of the Ticino, we saw the little village of Airolo with its musical name, lying in a hollow of the mountains. A few minutes of leaping, sliding and rolling, took us down the grassy declivity, and we found we had descended from the top in an hour and a half, although the distance by the road is nine miles!
In 1845 after saying good-bye and "Why will you go to Switzerland? there will be such a fidge about you when you're gone" Turner lost his health, and was never himself again. Gothard to Airolo," showed his condition unmistakably; and the lonely restlessness of the last, disappointing years were, for all his friends, a melancholy ending to a brilliant career.
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