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Updated: May 26, 2025
Nor is it difficult to forget unsightly objects here, when we have only to raise our eyes to behold a scene of surpassing beauty, Isola Madre and Isola dei Pescatori look but a stone's throw from us across the shining water, and beyond a girdle of snow mountains seems to encircle the lake, our beloved Monte Rosa, white as a swan's breast, dominating them all.
The Scuola dei Battuti, built in 1451, has a door with a frescoed tympanum beneath a pointed arch on brackets, a good deal weather-worn Madonna sheltering the penitents beneath her cloak and pretty arabesque scrolls on the soffit. Isola is delightful from outside; but inside there is much dirt, and little food for the traveller. All that we could obtain was bread and rough red wine.
He left the key on the window-sill, with a quick gesture pulled his hat-brim down farther over his eyes, hastened along the terrace, and, turning to the left beyond the archway, took the path that led through the olive-trees towards Isola Bella and the sea.
The most charming contrasts of foliage, the rarest trees, long valleys, and prospects the most picturesque that could be brought from abroad, Borromean islands floating on clear eddying streams like so many rays, which concentrate their various lustres on a single point, on an Isola Bella, from which the enchanted eye takes in each detail at its leisure, or on an island in the bosom of which is a little house concealed under the drooping foliage of a century-old ash, an island fringed with irises, rose-bushes, and flowers which appears like an emerald richly set.
Once he met her on a footpath that runs through a wood by the side of the lake to the little hamlet of Isola, and he was minded to raise his hat, as he would have done to any other woman in the hotel whom he encountered under similar circumstances; but she deliberately looked away, and his intended courtesy must have passed unheeded.
When presently he reached the high-road by Isola Bella he encountered the fisherman, Giuseppe, who had spent the night at the Casa del Prete. "Are you going to see the place where the poor signore was found, signore?" asked the man. "Si," said Artois. "I was his friend. I wish to see the Pretore, to hear how it happened. Can I? Are they there, he and the others?"
What wine do you like, Monsieur Artois?" He tried to change the conversation, but Hermione, quite innocently, returned to the subject. "They fish at night, you know, Emile, all along that coast by Isola Bella and on to the point there that looks like an island, where the House of the Sirens is." A tortured look went across Maurice's face.
"Oh, signore, you must come, you will come!" "Where? In a boat?" "No. We go down to the shore, to Isola Bella. We take food, wine, red wine, and a net. Between twenty-two and twenty-three o'clock is the time to begin. And the sea must be calm. Is the sea calm to-day, Sebastiano?" "Like that." Sebastiano moved his hand to and fro in the air, keeping it absolutely level.
One evening she was returning home in the company of an English lady who was also a great lover of nature, from Isola Bella, when they met a beautiful private boat in which a very unusual couple were sitting; a small, delicate, light-haired woman, wrapped in a white burnoose, and a handsome, athletic man, in tight, white breeches, a short, black velvet coat trimmed with sable, a red fez on his head, and a riding whip in his hand.
In size and shape the private apartments were simply a continuation of the state apartments, but they were furnished in modern fashion, with a great deal of luxury, and, in so far as the enveloping brown hollands would permit one to opine, with a great deal of taste. "The family occupy this palace during the cold months only. In summer they make a villegglatura to Isola Nobile.
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