From the lake the road descends suddenly for a considerable distance through a narrow gorge, following a torrent which rushes among granite boulders.  Chestnut trees begin to replace the pines.  The sunnier terraces are planted with tobacco, and at a lower level vines appear at intervals in patches.  One comes at length to a great red gate across the road, which separates Switzerland from Italy, and where the export dues on wine are paid.  The Italian custom-house is romantically perched above the torrent.  Two courteous and elegant finanzieri, mere boys, were sitting wrapped in their military cloaks and reading novels in the sun as we drove up.  Though they made some pretence of examining the luggage, they excused themselves with sweet smiles and apologetic eyes—­it was a disagreeable duty!

A short time brought us to the first village in the Valtelline, where the road bifurcates northward to Bormio and the Stelvio pass, southward to Sondrio and Lombardy.  It is a little hamlet, known by the name of La Madonna di Tirano, having grown up round a pilgrimage church of great beauty, with tall Lombard bell-tower, pierced with many tiers of pilastered windows, ending in a whimsical spire, and dominating a fantastic cupola building of the earlier Renaissance.  Taken altogether, this is a charming bit of architecture, picturesquely set beneath the granite snow-peaks of the Valtelline.  The church, they say, was raised at Madonna’s own command to stay the tide of heresy descending from the Engadine; and in the year 1620, the bronze statue of S. Michael, which still spreads wide its wings above the cupola, looked down upon the massacre of six hundred Protestants and foreigners, commanded by the patriot Jacopo Robustelli.

From Madonna the road leads up the valley through a narrow avenue of poplar-trees to the town of Tirano.  We were now in the district where Forzato is made, and every vineyard had a name and history.  In Tirano we betook ourself to the house of an old acquaintance of the Buol family, Bernardo da Campo, or, as the Graubuendeners call him, Bernard Campbell.  We found him at dinner with his son and grandchildren in a vast, dark, bare Italian chamber.  It would be difficult to find a more typical old Scotchman of the Lowlands than he looked, with his clean close-shaven face, bright brown eyes, and snow-white hair escaping from a broad-brimmed hat.  He might have sat to a painter for some Covenanter’s portrait, except that there was nothing dour about him, or for an illustration to Burns’s ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night.’  The air of probity and canniness combined with a twinkle of dry humour was completely Scotch; and when he tapped his snuff-box, telling stories of old days, I could not refrain from asking him about his pedigree.  It should be said that there is a considerable family of Campells or Campbells in the Graubuenden, who are fabled to deduce their stock from a Scotch Protestant of Zwingli’s time; and this made it irresistible to imagine that in our friend Bernardo I had chanced upon a notable specimen of atavism.  All he knew, however, was, that his first ancestor had been a foreigner, who came across the mountains to Tirano two centuries ago.[3]