powerful touring cars bearing the
license-plates of half the countries in Europe, bands played in the
parks, the shady promenade beside the river was crowded with
pleasure-seekers, and its great tourist hostelries--there were said to
be upwards of 150 hotels and _pensions_ in the town--were gay with
laughter and music. But this time all was changed. Most of the large
hotels were closed, the streets were deserted, the place was as dismal
as a cemetery. It reminded me of a beautiful house which has been closed
because of its owner's financial reverses, the servants discharged, the
windows boarded up, the furniture swathed in linen covers, the carpets
and hangings packed away in mothballs, and the gardens overrun with
weeds. At the Hotel Savoy, where rooms had been reserved for us, it was
necessary, in pre-war days, to wire for accommodations a fortnight in
advance of your arrival, and even then you were not always able to get
rooms. Yet we were the only visitors, barring a handful of Italian
commercial travelers and the Italian governor-general and his staff. The
proprietor, an Austrian, told me that in the four years of war he had
lost $300,000, and that he, like his colleagues, was running his hotel
on borrowed money. Of the pre-war visitors to Meran, eighty per cent.
had been Germans, he told me, adding that he could see no prospect of
the town's regaining its former prosperity until Germany is on her
financial feet again. Personally, I think that he and the other
hoteliers and business men with whom I talked in Meran were rather more
pessimistic than the situation warranted, for, if Italy will have the
foresight to do for these new playgrounds of hers in the Alps even a
fraction of what she has done for her resorts on the Riviera, and in
Sicily, and along the Neapolitan littoral, if she will advertise and
encourage and assist them, if she will maintain their superb roads and
improve their railway communications, then I believe that a few years, a
very few, will see them thronged by even greater crowds of visitors than
before the war. And the fact that in the future there will be more
American, English, French and Italian visitors, and fewer Germans, will
make South Tyrol a far pleasanter place to travel in.

The Italians are fully alive to the gravity of the problems which
confront them in attempting to assimilate a body of people, as
courageous, as sturdily independent, and as tenacious of their
traditional independe