The Great Cathedral of the Earth

The Owl
Vol. 2, Issue 33
August 21, 2008
Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Inquiring Traveler,

There were no jet flights over the Alps at the time of the Grand Tour. This meant no views of the pointed white crests from above and no peek at the Venetian lagoon from the air. Travelers from Northern Europe either walked their way across the mountains or embarked on a ship to avoid the hazardous climb.

Regards,

Editor, The Owl

P.S. Why not embark on your own Grand Tour next spring? Explore the essential cities of Paris, Venice, Florence and Rome… with your own private mentors, but without the hassle of treading mountain paths (we’ll fly you over the Alps and show you Venice from 25,000 feet above).

See all the details here.

The Great Cathedral of the Earth (part 1)

by Paul Lewis

When Sherlock Holmes and his arch nemesis, Professor Moriarty, tumbled off the cliff side into the boiling waters of Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls locked in a fatal embrace, it looked as if the Alps had claimed their most famous victim.

Actually, popular demand forced Conan Doyle to resurrect his famous detective a year later. But the fate first planned for him perfectly summarized the prevailing Victorian view of Europe’s great Alpine mountain chain—a spectacular natural wonder but also a thrillingly dangerous one.

This view was a considerable advance on earlier centuries when the Alps had been shunned as inhospitable and forbidding,  with peaks best left unscaled and glaciers unexplored, and passes untraveled. Ancient Greek geographers like Hecateus and Herodotus had not even known Europe’s greatest mountain range existed.

Pagan Refuge

Nor were the Alpine tribes easy to deal with, tucked away in their inaccessible valleys. Even after Christianity reached them, weird pagan rituals have survived amongst them to this day, with men and women dressing up as wild mythical creatures at Christmas time while for centuries they spoke such archaic languages as Romansch, Walser German, Lombardic, Rhaetic, and Ligurian.

Hannibal crossing the Alps—detail of an early 16th-century fresco in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Of course, the mountains had to be crossed from time to time. The Carthaginian general, Hannibal, brought an army and 38 African elephants round from Spain by the Col de la Traversette above Grenoble in 218 B.C. to take Rome by surprise—from the north. And 2,000 years later, Napoleon marched through the St. Bernard Pass to conquer Italy.

Between those dates, northern Christians needed the Alpine passes to keep in contact with Rome and Jerusalem, sending a steady stream of adventurous ecclesiastics, pilgrims and merchants over the mountains on frightening trips they never enjoyed. "Lord, restore me to my bretheren that I may tell them to come not to this place", prayed John de Bremble, a monk of Canterbury, who crossed the mountains in 1188.

Pirates or Peaks?

But as the age of Grand Tourism dawned, travelers bent on rediscovering the glories of ancient Greece and Rome could not afford to be so squeamish.

Some sought to bypass the Alpine ranges altogether, taking boats from the south coast of France to northwest Italy, but for most of the 18th century at least pirates made this a hazardous journey.

Instead, most Grand Tourists chose to engage light coaches which could easily be dismantled and carried over the mountains on mules, while they themselves—swathed in bonnets and muffs of beaver fur, and covered by bear skins—were borne through the passes in sedan chairs carried by servants.

"My humane feelings caused me some repugnance at being carried over a fearful mountain by my fellows, but this repugnance yielded to necessity," wrote the historian Edward Gibbon, who noted with relief that one of his porters had been working at this task for 34 years.

Spectacular Beauty

With the increase in Alpine traffic came a gradual improvement in the condition of the mountain tracks and passes and the construction of new bridges, particularly after Napoleon’s conquest of Italy. And this in turn brought a change in perceptions of the Alps as the fear and loathing expressed by earlier travellers gave way to a sense of awe and wonder at the spectacular beauty of the Alpine scenery that fitted in well with the dawning of the Romantic Age.

For John Ruskin, the art critic, the Alps seemed "the great cathedral of the earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of cloud, choirs of streams and altars of snow."

Viewing the mountains from the roof of Milan Cathedral, Alfred Lord Tennyson was inspired to write:

"How faintly flushed, how phantom fair

Was Mount Rosa hanging there

A thousand shadowy-pencilled valleys and

Snowy dells in a golden air."

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