“It was a little peaceful bay” (MS VIII; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—On 14 June 1833 at six oʼclock in the morning, the Ruskins left Chiavenna for their first excursion on the Italian lakes. The little bay, which was the point of embarkation, refers, not to Lago di Como which is the main subject of the poem, but to what Mary Richardson describes as “the lake of Chiavenna which joins that of Como”—that is, Lago Mezzola. Murrayʼs guidebook names the lake “Lago Mezzola, called also Lago di Riva”, and Starkeʼs guidebook calls it simply “La Riva” (i.e., lakeshore), a term Mary also uses. Describing the journey in Praeterita, Ruskin called the place “the little recessed lake of Chiavenna” (Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833, 41–42; Hand‐book for Travellers in Switzerland, 212; Starke, Travels in Europe, 568; Ruskin, Works, 35:116).

The Ruskinsʼ carriage having been loaded on a large boat bound for the town of Como, the family took a passenger boat, rowing down Lago Mezzola, “none but Italians with us . . . , Salvatore having gone with the carriage”. At Domaso, a village at the north end of Lake Como, the family transferred to a steamer to carry them down the length of the lake, Mary enthusing about the scenery presenting a different view every moment. By four oʼclock in the afternoon, they reached Cadenabbia, a town on the west bank at the top of the western “leg” of the lake, opposite Bellagio; and since the steamer did not stop there, they took a small boat to Cadenabbia, which they made their base for the weekend before traveling on to Como at the start of the next week (Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833, 42).

These movements are in keeping with the recommendations of the guidebooks. Murray cautioned travelers against pausing on their journey through these lakes, particularly “the lower valley of the Meira” (or Mera River), which connects “Chiavenna to the Lago di Riva” (i.e., Lago di Mezzola) and then continues onward to connect the latter to Lago di Como. Travelers should push onward, Murray urged, until reaching either Bellagio on the promontory dividing the lower legs of Lago di Como, or Cadenabbia on the west shore, or Varenna on the east shore. Until travelers reached those points south, Murray sternly lectured, they risked contracting malaria: “the stranger who neglects this warning may pay for his temerity by a fever” since “stopping for the night [anywhere] near the embouchure of a river, where it empties itself into a lake”, exposes the traveler to “the morasses and flat land created by the deposits of the river”, which “are the hotbeds of malaria, and inevitably teem with disease” (Hand‐book for Travellers in Switzerland, 212, xxiii). Mariana Starke, in her guidebook, confirms a lesser detail in Maryʼs account—that a separate boat conveyed the familyʼs carriage from Lago di Riva to Como, while the family took a small passenger boat, until joining a steamer at Domaso. Starke mentions that the steamer concession at Domaso was “managed by Englishmen” (Starke, Travels in Europe, 568).

Note that, in the poem, Ruskin does not mention the steamer, describing only the splash of oars in the water of Lago di Como. By confining his description to the gentle sounds of the excursion on the smaller passenger boats, he was erasing such signs of modernity as the noisy steam packet for the sake of maintaining the picturesque, just as in the poem “Calais” he replaces the “french steamer” on the horizon with the picturesque, lugubrious movements nearby of French fishing boats.

As detailed in the textual notes to this poem, W. G. Collingwood omitted the first ten lines of the MS VIII draft from the version of the poem in Poems (1891), an omission that effectively erases the prelude describing Lago Mezzola and focuses the poem on Lago di Como. With this omission, Collingwood blunted the strategy of the poem, which contrasts the severe character of Lago Mezzola with the blue breadth of Como and its richly vegetated banks.

“Beneath the precipices grey” (MS VIII; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—Here as well as in lines 18-19, where the narrator mentions having “launched from below / The shade of the tall cliffs”, Ruskin comments on the enclosed feeling of Lago Mezzola, compared with the breadth of Lago di Como, which "rolled his breast of flame” (line 20). Mary considered the smaller lake "rather gloomy" "with the mountains coming down close to the water" (Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833, 42). In 1833, the mountainous shore of Lago Mezzola perhaps appeared even more dramatic, since the perimeter of the lake was not as yet recessed by a road, which Murray says was opened in 1835. Even then, Murray comments on the “naked and savage mountains around [which] have a very peculiar outline. Their sides are furrowed with ravines, down which furious torrents precipitate themselves . . . , strewing the margin of the lake with wreck” (Hand‐book for Travellers in Switzerland, 212). These torrents must be what Ruskin means by a “thousand mountain rills”.