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It should be written as an axiom in the philosophy of travel that the easiest way is best for your luggage, and the hardest way is best for yourself. All along the rough road up to the Pass, we had a glorious outlook backward over the Val d' Ampezzo, and when we came to the top, we looked deep down into the narrow Val Buona behind Sorapis.
But, whatever the weather may be, they make no change in the large, full dark skirts, almost completely covered with immense silk aprons, by preference light blue. It is not a remarkably brilliant dress, compared with that which one may still see in some districts of Norway or Sweden, but upon the whole it suits the women of the Ampezzo wonderfully.
But then agriculture is not a specialty of the Ampezzo Thal, and the wealth of Cortina is derived essentially from its pasture-lands and forests. These last, in consequence of the increased and increasing value of timber, have been lavishly cut down of late years by the Commune too probably at the expense of the future interests of Cortina.
We might easily have imagined ourselves at a Fourth of July celebration in Vermont, if it had not been for the costumes. The men of the Ampezzo Valley have kept but little that is peculiar in their dress. Men are naturally more progressive than women, and therefore less picturesque.
But the women of the Ampezzo strong, comely, with golden brown complexions, and often noble faces are not ashamed to dress as their grandmothers did. They wear a little round black felt hat with rolled rim and two long ribbons hanging down at the back. Their hair is carefully braided and coiled, and stuck through and through with great silver pins.
Hundreds of agile, swarthy figures were busily boring, blasting, shoveling and digging for the new railway, which is to convey next season shoals of passengers and civilization, rightly or wrongly so called, into this great yet primitive artery of Southern Tyrol, the Pusterthal already forming, by means of the Ampezzo, a highway between Venice and the Brenner Pass.
Ball gives the village an elevation of 4,048 feet above the level of the sea; and one of the parish priests an intelligent old man who has devoted many years of his life to collecting the flora of the Ampezzo assured me that he had never known the thermometer drop so low as fifteen degrees of frost in even the coldest winters.
It has about a hundred houses and seven hundred inhabitants, a large church and two small ones, a fine stone campanile with excellent bells, and seven or eight little inns. But it is more important than its size would signify, for it is the capital of the district whose lawful title is Magnifica Comunita di Ampezzo a name conferred long ago by the Republic of Venice.
I was to meet my dear Bianca early in the morning on the Lido; thence we were to go by boat to Mestre, where a carriage was to be in waiting for us; and the same evening we were to be married by a priest, to whom I have given due notice, at a place called Longarone. And so we should have gone on, across the Ampezzo Pass homeward.
It must have at least twenty-five members, and as we heard them at the Festa they seemed to play with extraordinary accuracy and expression. This Festa gave us a fine chance to see the people of the Ampezzo all together.
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