Note 6 — Chapter VII · NORTH TIROL—UNTERINNTHAL (RIGHT INN-BANK). EXCURSIONS FROM SCHWATZ.

The stately Serviten-kloster outside Volders suggests another adaptation of this metaphor. From the root of one saint’s maxims and example, what an ‘over-arching labyrinth’ of good works will grow up and spread over and adorn the face of the earth, even in the most distant parts. In the year 1590 there was born at Trent a boy named Hyppolitus Guarinoni, who was destined to graft upon Tirol the singular virtues of St. Charles Borromeo. Attached early to the household of the saintly Archbishop of Milan, Guarinoni grew up to embody in action his spirit of devotion and charity. By St. Charles’s advice and assistance he followed the study of medicine, and took his degree in his twenty-fifth year. Shortly after, he was appointed physician in ordinary to the then ruler of Tirol, Archduke Ferdinand II. His fervent piety marked him as specially fit to be further entrusted with the sanitary care of the convent founded some years before by the Princesses Magdalen, Margaret, and Helena, Ferdinand’s sisters, at Hall, and called the Königliche Damenstift.6 All the time that was left free by these public engagements he spent by the bedsides of the poor of the neighbourhood. The care of the soul ever accompanied his care for their bodies, and many a wanderer owed his reconciliation with heaven to his timely exhortations. Just about this time the incursions of the new doctrines were making themselves felt in this part of Tirol, and some localities, which from their remoteness were out of the way of regular parochial ministrations, were beginning to listen to them. Guarinoni discovered this in the course of his charitable labours, for which no outlying Sennerhütte was inaccessible. In 1628 he obtained special leave, though a layman, from the Bishop of Brixen, to preach in localities which had no resident pastor; he further published a little work which he used to distribute among the people, designed to show them how many corporal infirmities are induced by neglect of the whole-some maxims of religion. Besides the restored unity of the faith in his country, two other monuments of his piety remain: the Church of St. Charles by the bridge of Volders, and the Sanctuary of Judenstein. In his moments of leisure it was his favourite occupation to commit to writing for the instruction of posterity the traditional details of the life of St. Nothburga, and of the holy child Andreas of Rinn, which were at his date even more rife in the mouths of the peasantry of the neighbourhood than at present. He only died in 1654, having devoted himself to these good works for nearly half a century.