On my recent cycling holiday we peddled from Lake Garda to the Stelvio Pass. We had some pleasant days passing lakes and rivers, through gorges and up a few steep climbs. Overall we were gradually gaining height towards the Dolomites.
As we get closer there is another interesting change, we move from the free and easy Italian speaking region to the German speaking part. The landscape changes and gets more bottled up. I leave Jerome K. Jerome to describe the problem in his wonderfully observant book Three Men on the Bummel. 
A story of the same three friends who went on a boating trip undertaking a cycling holiday in Germany.
“Your German is not averse even to wild scenery, provided it be not too wild. But if he consider it too savage, he sets to work to tame it. I remember , in the neighbourhood of Dresden, discovering a picturesque and narrow valley leading down towards the Elbe. The winding roadway ran beside a mountain torrent, which for a mile or so fretted and foamed over rocks and boulders between wood covered banks. I followed it enchanted until, turning a corner, I suddenly came across a gang of eighty or a hundred workmen. They were busy tidying up that valley, and making that stream respectable. All the stones that were impeding the course of the water they were carefully picking out and carting away. The bank on either side they were bricking up and cementing. The overhanging trees and bushes, the tangled vines and creepers they were rooting up and trimming down. A little further I came upon the finished work— the mountain valley as it ought to be, according to German ideas. The water , now a broad, sluggish stream, flowed over a level, gravelly bed, between two walls crowned with stone coping. At every hundred yards it gently descended down three shallow wooden platforms. For a space on either side the ground had been cleared, and at regular intervals young poplars planted. Each sapling was protected by a shield of wickerwork and bossed by an iron rod . In the course of a couple of years it is the hope of the local council to have “finished” that valley throughout its entire length, and made it fit for a tidy-minded lover of German nature to walk in. There will be a seat every fifty yards, a police notice every hundred, and a restaurant every half-time.”
And so in German Italy the mountain torrent surging down from melting snows above is tamed. Someone, or some many, have built a channel so that it is straight. No meandering white water thundering over boulders, just mile after mile of straight river kept in check with a lining of stones.
Even the spectacular waterfalls like grey mare’s tails swishing on the steep hillsides get cut off. These Cutty Sarks use concrete, bricks and cobbles.
The water flowing freely away from the Stelvio Pass towards the Italian speaking region
wildonabike 
I can see you enjoyed your holiday – but counting in primes…..
LikeLike