Approach To Milan - Italy

AFTER three days spent at Turin, we proceeded towards Milan, travelling along a fine road, and through a beautiful country, rich in the vine and olive, and enlivened by innumerable little white dwellings, that gave the pleasing impression of a busy and crowded population. At the distance of about twenty-five or thirty miles from Milan, you enter Vercelli, a fine city of considerable extent, seated on the confluence of the Sessia with the Po. From this point the face of the country takes a different aspect; the culture of rice, which begins here, wearies the eye with its unvaried green, covering a long and wide-spread tract of flat ground. On reaching Novarre, a pretty small fortified town, sixteen or eighteen miles from Milan, the prospect again assumes a lively appearance; the rich foliage and fine verdure of the wooded banks of the Tessino, or Ticino, and as you approach the city, the elegant villas by which it is surrounded, give great beauty to the whole scene. In these climates, the purity of the air enables the eye, even in flat grounds, to discern distant objects, and to scan long spaces, and the flood of light and sunshine gives an inconceivable splendour to every scene examined through this gay medium. The landscape seems more beautiful; the cities more splendid; every spire, or tower, which, in gloomy sombre skies, takes the cast of the atmosphere, and is little observed, here glitters in the sunbeams, and bears its part in the general effect.