The exceptional position of Varallo as regards North Italian art must be referred mainly to its selection by Bernardino Caimi as the site for the New Jerusalem which he founded there at the end of the fifteenth century; a few words, therefore, concerning him will not be out of place here; I learn from Torrotti that he was a “Frate Minore Osservante di S. Francesco,” and came of the noble and illustrious Milanese family of the Counts Caimi. He had been Patriarch of the Holy Land, and, as I find stated in Signor Galloni’s excellent work already referred to, {40} had been employed on important missions in the island of Cyprus, chiefly in connection with the reformation of abuses. Full of zeal and devotion he returned to his native country, and ere long conceived the design of reproducing in Italy a copy of the most important sites in the Holy Land, for the comfort and greater commodity of so many Christians who, being unable to commit themselves to long and weary voyages by land and sea, and among infidels, might gather thence some portion of that spiritual fruit which were otherwise beyond their reach. Old and mendicant as he was, he was nothing daunted by the magnitude of the task before him, and searched Lombardy from one end to the other in his desire to provide Providence with a suitable abode. For a long while he sought in vain, and could find no place that was really like Jerusalem, but at last, towards the end of 1491, he came to Varallo alone, and had hardly got there before he felt himself rapt into an ecstasy, in the which he was drawn towards the Sacro Monte; when he got up to the plain on the top of the mountain which was then called “La Parete,” perceiving at once its marvellous resemblance to Jerusalem, even to the existence of another mountain hard by which was like Calvary, he threw himself on the ground and thanked God in a transport of delight. It is said that for some time previously the shepherds who watched their flocks on this solitary height had been talking of nothing but of heavenly harmonies that had been heard coming from the sky; that Caimi himself while yet in the Holy Land had been shown this place in a vision; and that on reaching an eminence called Sceletta he had been conducted to the site itself by the song of a bird which sang with such extraordinary sweetness that he had been constrained to follow it.