act of wisdom
or of shortsightedness only the future can tell.

The transition from the Italian Trentino to the German Tyrol begins a
few miles south of Bozen. Perhaps "occurs" would be a more descriptive
word, for the change from the Latin to the Teutonic, instead of being
gradual, as one would expect, is almost startling in its abruptness. In
the space of a single mile or so the language of the inhabitants changes
from the liquid accents of the Latin to the deep-throated gutturals of
the German; the road signs and those on the shops are now printed in
quaint German script; _via_ becomes _weg_, _strada_ becomes _strasse_,
instead of responding to your salutation with a smiling "_Bon giorno_"
the peasants give you a solemn "_Guten morgen_." Even the architecture
changes, the slender, four-square campaniles surmounted by bulging
Byzantine domes, so characteristic of the Trentino, giving place to
pointed steeples faced with colored slates or tiles. On the German side
the towns are better kept, the houses better built, the streets wider
and cleaner than in the Italian districts. Instead of the low,
white-walled, red-tiled dwellings so characteristic of Italy, the houses
begin to assume the aspect of Alpine chalets, with carved wooden
balconies and steep-pitched roofs to prevent the settling of the winter
snows. The plastered facades of many of the houses are decorated with
gaudily colored frescoes, nearly always of Biblical characters or
scenes, so that in a score of miles the traveler has had the whole story
of the Scriptures spread before him. They are a deeply religious people,
these Tyrolean peasants, as is evidenced not only by the many handsome
churches and the character of the wall-paintings on the houses, but by
the amazing frequency of the wayside shrines, most of which consist of
representations of various phases of the Crucifixion, usually carved and
painted with a most harrowing fidelity of detail. Occasionally we
encountered groups of peasants wearing the picturesque velvet jackets,
tight knee-breeches, heavy woolen stockings and beribboned hats which
one usually associates with the Tyrolean yodelers who still inflict
themselves on vaudeville audiences in the United States. As we sped
northward the landscape changed with the inhabitants, the sunny Italian
countryside, ablaze with flowers and green with vineyards, giving way to
solemn forests, gloomy defiles, and crags surmounted by grim, gray
castles which re