Note 368 — Chapter VII · —Geographical Boundaries

If we turn to northern Italy, where a mountain barrier might have been expected to segregate the long-headed Mediterranean stock from the broad-headed Alpine stock, we find as a matter of fact that the ethnic type throughout the Po basin is markedly brachycephalic and becomes more pronounced along the northern boundary in the Alps, till it culminates in Piedmont along the frontier of France, where it becomes identical with the broad-headed Savoyards.368 More than this, Provençal French is spoken in the Dora Baltea Valley of Piedmont; and along the upper Dora Riparia and in the neighboring valleys of the Chisone and Pellice are the villages of the refugee Waldenses, who speak an idiom allied to the Provençal. More than this, the whole Piedmontese Italian is characterized by its approach to the French, and the idiom of Turin sounds very much like Provençal.369 To the north there is a similar exchange between Italy and Switzerland with the adjacent Austrian province of the Tyrol. In the rugged highlands of the Swiss Grisons bordering upon Italy, we find a pure Alpine stock, known to the ancients as the Rhaetians, speaking a degenerate Latin tongue called Romansch, which still persists also under the names of Ladino and Frioulian in the Alpine regions of the Tyrol and Italy. In fact, the map of linguistic boundaries in the Grisons shows the dovetailing of German, Italian, and Romansch in a broad zone.370 The traveller in the southern Tyrol becomes accustomed in the natives to the combination of Italian coloring, German speech, and Alpine head form; whereas, if on reaching Italy he visits the hills back of Vicenza, he finds the German settlements of Tredici and Sette Communi, where German customs, folklore, language, and German types of faces still persist, survivals from the days of German infiltration across the Brenner Pass.371