House & Garden 
AT ST. MICHAEL, (EPPAN) 
NEAR BOTZEN, TYROL 
distant age in which the student may read 
a story and the poet may weave a tale. 
And the busy village grows and prospers. 
The building materials which characterize, 
chiefly by their color, the Tyrolese villages 
are two in number : wood and stone. These 
vary in direct proportion to the size of the 
village. In the remote mountain hamlets, 
timber is used exclusively and the settle¬ 
ments are uniformly brown on a background 
of green. The larger the village, and like¬ 
wise the individual houses, the more stone 
is employed ; not cut stone, but a coarse 
rubble, over which a tinted roughcast is 
spread by the local white-washer, plasterer 
and decorator (three professions which in the 
Tyrol are rolled into one). Whatever pig¬ 
ments are employed in this material to give 
to the walls the small degree of variety 
desired, the prevailing tone is always gray. 
Likewise, the larger the village, the less 
variety there is in the individual buildings, 
the less freedom of outline, often gained at a 
stroke by the picturesque over-hanging bal¬ 
conies of wood, which nearly surround some 
of the mountain chalets. But the most 
monotonous group of houses in all the Tyrol 
would still be unconstrained freedom and ca¬ 
price compared to the architecture of other 
