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Stray studies, second series
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This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
COMO (April 16, 1871) Como lies just at one's feet as one looks down from the Baradello, the steep hill which screens the little town from the wide plain of Lombardy, a square mass within gloomy walls with grey bastions at each angle, its southern front broken by the huge, blank tower of the Milan gate. Within, it seems a mere rippling confusion of whites and greys and brown-red house-tiles, its level site giving a touch of monotony to it, its streets bright and busy, its few churches buried, all save the Duomo, amidst the crowded dwellings, its house-fronts unmarked by the picturesque balconies that sometimes give character to Italian cities. The town stretches across the meadows between the hill-ranges which edge the lake, nestling closer to the western slopes where the Romanesque Church of San Abbondio only just finds room between the walls and the hillside, but leaving space enough eastward for a wider plain rising gently in slopes of gardens and vineyards and maize fields. To the north lies the lake, the shadow-dappled heights of either bank mirrored in the bright calm of its waters, its head alone visible as it bends sharply round to the little pool which serves as the harbour of the town. Every town has its birth-point, if one may use the phrase; and what hill or rise is to the inland city, harbour or water's edge is to the seaman's or the fisher's town. Defence, security against attack, gives its value to the mound of Chartres or the cliff of Angers; towns like these spread downwardsfrom their original nucleus till their suburbs reach plain or stream. In the fisher or the trader city, in Como or London, the town grows from the water-side and climbs the higher ground round it. The two buildings that mark the older part of Como, its Duomo and Broletto, stand close to ...
This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
COMO (April 16, 1871) Como lies just at one's feet as one looks down from the Baradello, the steep hill which screens the little town from the wide plain of Lombardy, a square mass within gloomy walls with grey bastions at each angle, its southern front broken by the huge, blank tower of the Milan gate. Within, it seems a mere rippling confusion of whites and greys and brown-red house-tiles, its level site giving a touch of monotony to it, its streets bright and busy, its few churches buried, all save the Duomo, amidst the crowded dwellings, its house-fronts unmarked by the picturesque balconies that sometimes give character to Italian cities. The town stretches across the meadows between the hill-ranges which edge the lake, nestling closer to the western slopes where the Romanesque Church of San Abbondio only just finds room between the walls and the hillside, but leaving space enough eastward for a wider plain rising gently in slopes of gardens and vineyards and maize fields. To the north lies the lake, the shadow-dappled heights of either bank mirrored in the bright calm of its waters, its head alone visible as it bends sharply round to the little pool which serves as the harbour of the town. Every town has its birth-point, if one may use the phrase; and what hill or rise is to the inland city, harbour or water's edge is to the seaman's or the fisher's town. Defence, security against attack, gives its value to the mound of Chartres or the cliff of Angers; towns like these spread downwardsfrom their original nucleus till their suburbs reach plain or stream. In the fisher or the trader city, in Como or London, the town grows from the water-side and climbs the higher ground round it. The two buildings that mark the older part of Como, its Duomo and Broletto, stand close to ...
276 pages, Unknown Binding
First published December 31, 1972
About the author
John Richard Green
585 books3 followersJohn Richard Green was an English historian, most famous for A Short History of the English People (1874).
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