Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II " CERESIO " THE LAKES OF LUGANO AND VAEESE " Cebesio," the Home of Ceres ! What more delightful or appropriate name could be wished for the harvest-field of the gods which surrounds the sickle-shaped lake of Lugano ! Well and cunningly did those old Romans and Greeks, who colonized barbarous Europe, give names geographical where they listed. Lugano is the Lake of Ceres, the goddess Earth's riches, mother of Persephone, the gatherer of flowers, whom she lost awhile, but again recovered with the help of Mercury, much as spring and autumn succeed each other in the yearly round. There is a further conceit anent this divine patronage of the luxuriant Ticinese lake. Zeus and Plato, it was said, were privy to the rape of Persephone. Giant mountain gods and guardians of " Ceresio " are Salvatore and Generoso, rocky monuments of the two deities, and aptly named. The return of Persephone to Ceres produced amazing fertility, and the mother-goddess had as much as she could do with her golden sickle to gather in the harvest of the earth. i.—Lugano. The social conditions of the canton of Ticino and of the inhabitants of the lake-shores of Lugano are very different from those which obtain generally in the land of the Italian lakes proper. Strictly speaking, there are no " Lords and Ladies " of Lake Lugano, and none have there been these four hundred years or so. Before the time of Francis I. of France the history of the canton and of the lake ran concurrently with that of the neighbouring Piedmont-Lombard lands. Bellinzona, the ancient capital of the canton, is a thoroughly Italian town, quite Venetian in character, with three most picturesque castles— Gorbe, Picile, and Gian—but it gives place to Lugano as the most populous and best-known place in Ticino. Some m...