Das Buch von der Alp

Publication Year: 1940.

Das Buch von der Alp, by Giuseppe Zoppi. 8vo., pp. 176, with illustrations from pen-drawings by Hans Tomamichel. Einsiedeln: Benziger and Co., 1939.

The author, now a professor at Zurich, was once a herd-boy on the alplands of Canton Ticino. He has written with great charm of his childhood experiences of thirty years ago, in a book of sharply-drawn sketches of the mountain peasant, of the things that seem so bright and wonderful when one is nine years old. It is no small luck for a man who spends his later years with books in sedentary occupation, to have had a youth like his, in the clear air of a hidden valley, in company of strong men and their animals amid primitive surroundings. Zoppi writes of the Alps as Segantini painted them, his book loses nothing in translation from the original Italian, and is the best of its kind since the appearance of Javelle’s recollections.

J. M. T.