The Challenge of Folklore

Extract

These Remarks are written on a hotel balcony overlooking the last of the plains of Lombardy and the beginning of the Alps. The first snowfall of the season covers the distant heights and outlines clearly the great barrier between Italy and the rest of Europe. Just here two thousand years ago was the edge of the ancient classical world. Beyond the Alps were the hordes that threatened that world, that were to conquer much of it, and that in turn were to absorb its culture and carry it to lands then undreamed of. Through all the changes of the millennia these mountains have looked down on this spot. The snows of early autumn with which they are powdered today are no doubt much the same as those surveyed by Hannibal with his elephants, by Caesar on his way to Helvetia and Gaul, by Napoleon, and in these latter days so tragically by Mussolini and Hitler.