There are excellent roads in
every direction, and none of them can be taken without its leading
to some new feature of interest; I do not think any English family
will regret spending a fortnight at this charming place.
Most visitors to Mendrisio, however, make it a place of passage
only, en route for the celebrated hotel on the Monte Generoso, kept
by Dr. Pasta, Signora Pasta's brother-in-law. The Monte Generoso
is very fine; I know few places of which I am fonder; whether one
looks down at evening upon the lake of Lugano thousands of feet
below, and then lets the eye wander upward again and rest upon the
ghastly pallor of Monte Rosa, or whether one takes the path to the
Colma and saunters over green slopes carpeted with wild-flowers,
and studded with the gentlest cattle, all is equally delightful.
What a sense of vastness and freedom is there on the broad heaving
slopes of these subalpine spurs. They are just high enough without
being too high. The South Downs are very good, and by making
believe very much I have sometimes been half able to fancy when
upon them that I might be on the Monte Generoso, but they are only
good as a quartet is good if one cannot get a symphony.
I think there are more wild-flowers upon the Monte Generoso than
upon any other that I know, and among them numbers of beautiful
wild narcissuses, as on the Monte Cenere. At the top of the Monte
Generoso, among the rocks that jut out from the herbage, there
grows--unless it has been all uprooted--the large yellow auricula,
and this I own to being my favourite mountain wild-flower.
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