Pergole

The flax-growth of Switzerland is replaced in Italy by the waving masses of maize or Indian corn, and birch and pine are represented by fig and chestnut; whilst the trim and meagre vineyards on the northern Alpine slopes scarcely suggest the same plant as that we find in its wild luxuriance, festooning from bough to bough or from column to column along the pergole, when we have once descended to the south.

Your afternoon stroll across the flax-fields and under the pergole on the shady side of the hill takes you somewhat abruptly into a tiny piazza, smoothly paved and remarkably clean, though the grass is growing thickly between the flag-stones.

The final process of drying cod in the sun takes place in wooden erections called flakes, which resemble the pergole of southern Europe, but on whose roof instead of roses the hardly less odorous dead and split cod basks.

Then, proceeding to execute the first range below those Loggie, Giovanni used another and quite different method in the distribution of the stucco-work and paintings on the walls and vaultings of the other Loggie; but nevertheless those also were very beautiful, by reason of the pleasing invention of the pergole of canes counterfeited in various compartments, all covered with vines laden with grapes, and with clematis, jasmine, roses, and various kinds of birds and beasts.

Suitably dressed, and armed with home-made triangular step-ladders, baskets with hooks on them so that we can hang them from the pergole (wine trellises) while we cut the grapes with scissors, secateurs or knives, all of which become equally painful to use after a day or two, we turn up at the right farm-house about seven-thirty.[…]The grapes are trained on the pergole over steep banks, anything up to eight feet high, which is picturesque but no longer accords with modern practice—no more pergole are being constructed and new vineyards are planted in regular widely spaced, parallel rows in fields bulldozed out of the hillside.