The Italian Lakes

for offenders whose misdeeds have probably been of a civil rather than a political nature, and for whom the Italian police at the frontier a few kilometres away are on the watch, for there are few places of its size in which more forbidding types of the human countenance may be met with than in the streets of this little town. Apart from its population, Nature evidently intended Lugano and its lake to act as a kind of portal to that genuine Italy which is disclosed to the senses so soon as the mountain pass between the basin of the Lake of Lugano and that of Como has been traversed. Used as an entrance door, the Ceresian lake is admirable ; it is only when the traveller makes it his exit from Italy that its shortcomings and deceptions reveal themselves. In Lugano itself there is certainly little to detain any but the inveterate tourist who is happy in an atmosphere of hotels and compatriots. Its most interesting object is the great fresco by Luini in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. It is one of the great painter's later works and, unlike many of his compositions, has had the good fortune to be left in the place for which it was painted. Its principal theme is the Crucifixion. The unpleasant subject is treated with the skill of a master-hand, able to gratify to the full the tastes ofthose to whom representations of executions and scenes of violence and death appeal. The composition and grouping of the many actors in the tragedy are superb ; and it is not u...