Loe raamatut: «Italian Highways and Byways from a Motor Car», lehekülg 10

The Blue Grotto’s goddess is Amphitrite, and if any one catches a glimpse of her traditional scanty draperies swishing around a corner, let him not be misguided into following her into her retreat. If he does the sea is guaranteed to rise and close the orifice so that he may not get out again as soon as he might wish.

In that case one must wait till the wind, which has veered suddenly from east to west, comes about again and blows from the south. Without bringing Amphitrite into the matter at all it sometimes happens that visitors entering the grotto for a pleasant half hour may be obliged to stay there two, three or even five days. The boatmen-guides, providing for such emergencies, carry with them a certain quantity of biscotti with which to sustain their victims. As for fresh water it trickles through into the grotto in several places in a sufficient quantity to allay any apprehensions as to dying of thirst. One might well blame the Capri guides for not calling the visitor’s attention to these things. But if one is reproached he simply answers: “Ma che! eccelenza, if we should call attention to this thing, half the would-be visitors would balk at the first step, and that would be bad for our business.”

Alexandre Dumas tells of how on a visit to Capri in 1835 the fisherman was pointed out to him who had ten years earlier re-discovered the Blue Grotto of Augustus’ time, whilst searching for mussels among the rocks. He went at once to the authorities on the island and told them of his discovery and asked for the privilege of exploiting visitors. This discoverer of a new underground world was able by means of graft, or other means, to put the thing through and lived in ease ever after, through his ability to levy a toll on other guides to whom he farmed out his privilege.

Quite the best of Capri is above ground, the isle itself, set like a gem in the waters of the Mediterranean. The very natural symphonic colouring of the rocks and hillsides and rooftops of its houses, and indeed the costuming of its very people, make it very beautiful.

For Amalfi, Salerno and Pæstum the automobilist must retrace his way from Sorrento to Castellamare, when, in thirty kilometres, he may gain Amalfi, and, in another twenty-five, Salerno. Pæstum and its temples, to many the chief things of interest in Italy, the land of noble monuments, lie forty kilometres away from Salerno. The automobilist, to add this to his excursion out from Naples, is debarred from making the round in a day, even if he would. It is worth doing however; that goes without saying, though the attempt is not made here of purveying guide-book or historical information. If you don’t know anything about Pæstum, or care anything about it, then leave it out and get back to Naples as quickly as you can, and so on out of the country at the same rate of speed.

CHAPTER XIII
ACROSS UMBRIA TO THE ADRIATIC

THE mountain district of Umbria, a country of clear outlines against pale blue skies, is one of the most charming in the peninsula though not the most grandly scenic.

The highway from Rome to Ancona, across Umbria, follows the itinerary of one of the most ancient of Roman roads, the Via Valeria. The railway, too, follows almost in the same track, though each leaves the Imperial City, itself, by the great trunk line via Salaria and the Valley of the Tiber.

Terni is the great junction from which radiate various other lines of communication to all parts of the kingdom. Terni is, practically, the geographical centre of Italy. It is a bustling manufacturing town and, supposedly, the Interamna where Tacitus was born.

From Terni one reaches Naples, via Avezzano in 257 kilometres; Rome, via Civita Castellana in 94 kilometres; Florence via Perugia and Arezzo in 256 kilometres and Ancona, on the shores of the Adriatic, via Foligno in 209 kilometres. All of these roads run the gamut from high to low levels and, though in no sense to be classed as mountain roads, are sufficiently trying to even a modern automobile to be classed as difficult.

The Cascades of Terni used to be one of the stock sights of tourists, a generation ago, but, truth to tell, they are not remarkable natural beauties, and, indeed, are too apparently artificial to be admired. Moreover one is too much “exploited” in the neighbourhood to enjoy his visit. It costs half a lira to enter by this gate, and to leave by that road; to cross this bridge, or descend into that cavern; and troops of children beg soldi of you at every turn. The thing is not worth doing.

Spoleto, twenty-six kilometres away, is somewhat more interesting. It is famous for the fine relics, which still exist, of its more magnificent days, when, 242 B. C., it was named Spoletium.

The towers of Spoleto, like those of San Gimignano and Volterra, are its chief glory; civic, secular and churchly towers, all blending into one hazy mass of grim, militant power. The Franciscan convent, on the uppermost height, seems to guard all the towers below, as a shepherd guards his flock, or a mother hen her chickens.

In 1499 the equivocal, enigmatic Lucrezia Borgia came to inhabit the castle of Spoleto. The fair but unholy Lucrezia was a wandering, restless being who liked apparently to be continually on the move.

Here, in the fortress of Spoleto, Lucrezia Borgia, coming straight from the Vatican, held for a brief year the seals of the state in her frail hands, her father at the time being governor.

The aspect of this grim fortress-château, grim but livable, as one knows from the historical accounts, is to-day, so far as outlines are concerned, just as it was five centuries ago. It is grandiose, severe and majestic, and is dominant in all the landscape round about, not even its mountain background dwarfing its proportions. The military defence was that portion lying lowest down in the valley, while the residence of the governor was in the upper portion. One reads the history of three distinct epochs in its architecture, the Gothic of the fifteenth century, that of the sixteenth, and the later interpolated Renaissance decorations.

Through Foligno and Assisi runs the road to Perugia. Assisi is a much visited shrine, but Foligno is remembered by most of those who have travelled that way only as a grimy railway junction.

Assisi, the little Umbrian hill town, is deservedly the popular shrine that it is. Assisi is a religious shrine, but its skyline silhouette is more like that which properly belongs to a warlike stronghold. The city of St. Francis is loved by men of all creeds who recall the story of the holy man who, with poverty as a garment, trod his long way, singing, talking to the birds and succouring all who were sore or heavy laden.

Immense antiquity is suggested by everything round about, from the tombs of the Etruscan Necropolis, dating from 150 B.C., down to the triple-storied convent church of San Francesco of 1230 and the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli of 1509.

The now secularized convent and its triple church have all the characteristics of a mediæval fortress when viewed from afar.

The town itself owes most, if not all, of its fame to its beloved San Francesco. His birthplace has disappeared and its site occupied by the Chiesa Nuova, but a part of it has been built into the church, making it another shrine of the holy man who did so much good to his fellows during his life, and to his native town in these late days by bringing tens, nay, even hundreds, of thousands of tourists thither to spend their money on local guides, cabmen and inn-keepers. A sordid point of view some may think. But is it? What would Assisi be without the tourists? Still wooing the Lady Poverty, there’s no doubt about that. What would Venice be without the tourists? Not what it is to-day. No indeed. It is dead and dull enough even now at certain seasons. It would become so for all time without the strangers.

Perugia is the big town of Umbria. To-day it boasts of twenty odd thousand souls, but in the days when it struggled against papal control it was even more populous. Its history is one long drawn out tale of revolt and submission in turn, from the days when it first submitted to the Romans in 310 B. C. until it threw its fate in with that of the other states of Victor Emmanuel in 1860.

If ever a city was blood-baptized that honour is Perugia’s. It has not a crooked old street nor gate nor fountain nor piazza or palazzo but what is gory with bloody memories.

Perugia was a dominant mediæval influence all through the neighbourhood and levied tribute on all her vassal cities and towns. Foligno’s walls and ramparts had fallen and the people of Perugia came and carted off the stone for their own needs; Arezzo stripped her churches and palaces to provide the marbles for Perugia’s cathedral.

Perugia’s oxen are famous in literature and art, but they have almost become a memory, though an occasional one may be seen standing in the market place or a yoke working in the nearby fields. Electric cars haul passengers and freight about the city at a death-dealing pace, and the ox as a beast of burden is out-distanced and out-classed.

The ancient civilization is represented at Perugia by a remarkable series of old fortification walls, still admirably conserved, a kilometre or more from the centre of town, a necropolis of ten chambers, and an antique Roman arch of Augustus.

Perugia’s lode star for travellers has ever been the fact that it was the centre of the school of Umbrian painters. This is not saying that it has no architecture worth mentioning, for the reverse is the case.

Out from Perugia by the Porta di Elce, on the Cortona road, one passes a couple of imposing edifices. One, from a distance, looks grandly romantic and mediæval, but is only a base modern reproduction in cement and timber – and for all the writer knows, steel beams as well – of an ancient feudal castle. The other is less grand, less luxurious possibly, but is the very ideal of an Italian country house, habitable to-day, but surrounded with all the romantic flavour of mediævalism. It is still called the Villa of the Cardinal by virtue of the fact that Cardinal Fulvio della Corgna built it in 1580. Locally, it is also known as the Villa Umberto, and it belongs to, and is inhabited by, the family of Commendatore Ferdinando Cesaroni. Architecturally, perhaps, the villa is not a great work, but it is marvellously satisfying to the eye by reason of its disposition and its outlook.

Gubbio, thirty-nine kilometres away by road, is not readily accessible by rail from Perugia, though on the direct line from Arezzo, Ancona and Foligno.

The automobilist may reach Gubbio from Perugia in less time than the rail-tied traveller may check his baggage and take his place in the train.

Not many include Gubbio in their Italian tours. Its Etruscan lore and relics have been made the subject of volumes, but little has been done to set forth its charms for the Italian pilgrim who would seek to get away from the herding crowds of the great cities and towns.

Gubbio’s ducal palace is moss grown and weedy, so far as its rooftop and courtyard are concerned, but it is a very warm and lively old fabric nevertheless, and those that love historic old shrines will find much here that they will often not discover in a well restored, highly furbished monument kept frankly as a show-place for throngs of trippers who cannot tell old bronze from new copper, or wrought iron from font.

The hurly-burly of twentieth century life has not yet reached Gubbio, and that is why it presents itself to the visitor within its walls in such agreeable fashion.

Off in the Marches, sixty-five kilometres from Gubbio, is the little town of Urbino. It has a Palazzo Ducale most remarkable in its architecture and its emplacement. It was begun in 1648 by Frederigo di Montefeltro, on the site of a former palace of a century before. The apartments within are not merely the halls of a museum, but are remarkably interesting and livable mediæval apartments, and to-day are much as they were in the days of the gallant dukes, one of whom, Guidobaldo II, was a poet himself and a patron of letters who gave his protection to the last Italian poet whose fame was European – Torquato Tasso.

Urbino, too, was the birthplace of him whom we know familiarly as Raphael, though curiously enough the local museum contains but a single example of his work, and that a drawing of “Moses in the Bulrushes.”

Urbino’s chief “sight,” though it is not beautiful in itself, is the birthplace of Raphael, situated in a little street running off from near the ducal palace, a street which mounts heavenward so steeply that it was formerly called the Via del Monte. The authorities, in an effort to keep up with popular taste, have recently changed the name to Via Raffaello.

It is a mean, simple and grim looking little house, not at all beautiful according to palatial standards. On the 6th of April, 1483, its fame began, but pilgrims have only in recent years come to bow down before it. Nevertheless popes and prelates and princes came here to sit to the “painter of Urbino” and have left an added distinction to the house. Muzio Oddi, the celebrated architect and mathematician, caused to be graven the following on its façade: —

 
“Ludet in humanis divina potentia rebus
Et saepe in parvis claudre magna solet.”
 

A tablet marks the house plainly. It will not be possible to miss it.

Urbino sits high above the surrounding valley, twelve or fifteen hundred feet above sea level. A coach of doubtful antiquity formerly made the same journey as that covered by the railway and deposited its mixed freight of travellers and inhabitants in one of the most splendid of the Renaissance cities of Italy. Now, the automobile brings many more tourists than ever before came by coach, or railway even, and accordingly Urbino will undoubtedly become better known.

The court of Urbino in the sixteenth century was one of the most refined and learned of the courts of Italy, and therefore of the world. Coryat in his “Crudities,” of the seventeenth century, remarks a difference between English and Italian manners.

“I observed a custom in all those Italian cities and towns through which I passed, that is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels; neither do I think that any other nation of Christendom doth use it, but only Italy. The Italian, and also most strangers that are commorant in Italy, do always at their meals use a little fork when they cut their meat.” Is it that the fork came to earth as a seventeenth century Italian innovation?

Urbino’s Albergo Italia merits the sign of the crossed knife and fork, the Automobile Club’s endorsement of good food.

One of the classic figures of mediæval Urbino was Oddantonio, of the great house of Montefeltro, who, succeeding to the dukedom at the age of fifteen, fell under the ill control of the brilliant, but corrupt, Sigismondo Malatesta, of Rimini.

Thirty five kilometres east of Urbino lies the blue Adriatic, perhaps the most beautiful of all the Italian seas. The descent from four hundred metres at Urbino to sea level is gradual and easy, but it is a steady fall that is bound to be remarked by travellers by road, with the sea in sight for the major part of the way.

One comes to the Adriatic shore at Pesaro, midway on the coast between Ravenna and Ancona. North and south, from the Venetian boundary to the rocky, sparse-populated shores of Calabria, flanking upon the Ionian sea, is a wonderland of little-travelled highroad, all of it a historic itinerary, though indeed the road is none of the best. To the jaded traveller, tired of stock sights and scenes, the covering of this coast road from Venice to Brindisi would be a journey worth the making, but it should not be done hurriedly.

CHAPTER XIV
BY ADRIATIC’S SHORE

THE Italian shore of the Adriatic is a terra incognita to most travellers in Italy, save those who take ship for the east at Brindisi, and even they arrive from Calais, Paris or Ostende by express train without break of journey en route.

The following table gives the kilometric distances of this shore road by the Adriatic, through the coast towns from Otranto in Pouilles to Chioggia in Venetia. The itinerary has, perhaps, never been made in its entirety by any stranger automobilist, but the writer has seen enough to make him want to cover its entire length.

The above are the cold figures as worked out from the Road Books, Maps and Profiles of the Touring Club Italiano. The whole forms a rather lengthy itinerary but, in part, it is within the power of every automobilist in Italy to make, as he crosses Umbria from Rome to the Adriatic, by including that portion of the route between Ancona and Chioggia. This cuts the distance to the more reasonable figure of a little more than three hundred kilometres.

Taranto, Otranto and Bari are mere place names for which most do not even know where to look on the map. Conditions of life were not easy or luxurious here in the outposts of the western empire, and the influx of alien Greek and Turk and Jew has ever tended to change the Italian colouring to one almost Oriental in tone and brilliance.

Brindisi has usually been considered a mere way station on the traveller’s itinerary, where he changes train for boat. But it is more than that. It was the ancient Brentesion of the Greeks, indeed it was the gateway of all intercourse between the peninsula and the Greece of the mainland and the islands of Ægina.

Virgil died here on his return from Greece in 19 B.C., and for that reason alone it at once takes rank as one of the world’s great literary shrines. But who ever heard of a literary pilgrim coming here!

Brindisi’s Castello, built by Ferdinand II and Charles V, still overlooks the harbour and, though it performs no more the functions of a fortress, it is an imposing and admirable mediæval monument.

Near the harbour is a svelt Greek column with a highly sculptured capital and an inscription to the memory of a Byzantine ruler who built up the city anew in the tenth century, after it had fallen prey to the Saracens. This column, too, supposedly marks the termination of the Appian Way, which started from Rome’s Forum and wandered across the Campagna and on to this eastern outpost.

Bari, like Brindisi, was an ancient seaport. Horace sang its praises, or rather the praises of its fish, as did Petrarch of the carp at Vaucluse, and the town was one of the most ancient bishoprics in Italy.

From the tenth to the fourteenth century the fate of the town was ever in the balance, changing its allegiance from one seigneur to another, who, for the moment, happened to be the more masterful. In the fourteenth century it became an independent Duchy, and in 1558 was united with the kingdom of Naples.

Bari’s Castello was built in 1160 and, like that at Brindisi, is of that grim militant aspect which bespeaks, if not deeds of romance, at least those of valour.

In the Piazza Mercanto is a great bronze lion wearing an exaggerated dog-collar on which is inscribed the “Custos Justitiæ,” the heraldic motto and device of the city.

Manfredonia, Termoli, Ortona and Pescara are all of them charming Adriatic towns, each and all possessed of vivid reminders of the days of the corsairs, adventurers and pirate Saracen hordes. Their battlemented walls and castles still exist in the real, and little of twentieth century progress has, as yet, made its mark upon them. Mythology, history and romance have here combined.

Ancona is not included in every one’s Italian itinerary. This is the more to be regretted in that it is very accessible, not only by road but by rail from Ravenna or Perugia, or by sea, in eight or ten hours, from Venice. The city of fifty thousand inhabitants, with a Ghetto of six thousand Jews, is beautifully situated on an amphitheatre of hills overlooking the Adriatic. The mole which encloses its harbour supports two triumphal arches, making a sort of monumental water-gate unequalled by anything similar in all the world. One of these arches was erected by the Roman Senate in 122, to the honour of Trajan, and the other in honour of Pope Clement XII in 1740.

Trajan undoubtedly deserved the honour. It was he who was the first to hold that “it was better a thousand guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned.” When he appointed Subarranus Captain of the Guard, he presented him, according to custom, with a drawn sword, saying, as he handed it, these memorable words: “Pro me, si merear, in me” (“Use this sword for me: If I deserve it, against me”). It is good to know that men like these may have memorial arches as well as mere cut-throat conquerors.

Every student of Italian architecture knows Piranesi’s drawing of the famous Trajan arch at Ancona. It was more truthful than many of his drawings of Roman antiquities, and might indeed have been made in these latter years, for little is changed on Ancona’s seafront.

There is at Ancona a memory of Filippo Lippi, a monkish draughtsman of great ability, a contemporary of the better known Fra Angelico.

Once he set out on the blue waters of the Adriatic, from the very steps below the Arch of Trajan where the waves lap to-day, for a little sail. Like many people who make excursions in boats, he was unskilful, and worse, for, drifting out to sea, he was in due time picked up by a Barbary pirate and next put foot on shore in Africa. He drew the pirate chief’s portrait on the wall of his prison, and in spite of the interdiction of the Koran, the Moor was pleased and gave the Fra his liberty forthwith, taking him back to within sight of Trajan’s arch, when he was precipitately put over side and made to swim ashore, the pirate returning from whence he came.

Senegallia, between Ancona and Pesaro, was an appanage of the Dukes of Urbino. It is an enchanting, unworldly little town, even to-day, its great protecting walls pierced by six gateways, the same through which a whole hierarchy of conquerors passed in the long ago. It is a place of dreams, if one is given to that sort of thing. The Mediæval Palazzo Communal is still in evidence, and the little creek-like harbour is full of wobbly little boats with painted masts and sails, all most quaint. Behind are the gentle slopes of vine-clad hills shutting out the western world beyond.

Pesaro, the ancient Pisaurum, is the capital of the united provinces of Pesaro and Urbino. The Malatesta, the Sforza and the Rovere families all ruled its destinies in their time, and the little capital came to be a literary and art centre which, in a small way, rivalled its more opulent compeers.

Pesaro’s ducal palace is, in a way, a monument to the Queen Lucrezia Borgia, as is the rude fortress of the walls a memory of Giovanni Sforza, her first husband. At the age of twenty-six, Giovanni married the daughter of Alessandro Borgia, who was but thirteen, and brought his bride forthwith, blessed with the Papal benediction, to this bijou of a palace where fêtes and merrymakings of a most prodigal sort went on for many nights and days.

Back to the coast and one comes to Rimini, the southern terminus of the Via Æmilia. Rimini’s Arco d’Augusto was erected as a memorial to the great Augustus in 27 B. C. The Ponte d’Augusto, too, is a monument of the times, which date back nearly nineteen centuries. It was begun in the last year of the life of Augustus.

The Palazzo del Comune contains the municipal picture-gallery, and before it stands a bronze statue of Pope Paul V, but the greatest interest lies in the contemplation of the now ruined and dilapidated Castel Malatesta. Its walls are grim and sturdy still, but it is nothing but a hollow mockery of a castle to-day, as it has been relegated to use as a prison and stripped of all its luxurious belongings of the days of the Malatesta. The family arms in cut stone still appear above the portal.

The chief figure of Rimini’s old time portrait gallery was the famous Lord of Rimini, Sigismondo Malatesta, a man of exquisite taste, a patron of the arts, a sincere lover of beauty.

From Rimini to Ravenna, still within sight of the Adriatic’s waves, is some fifty kilometres by road or rail, through a low, marshy, unwholesome-looking region, half aquatic, half terrestrial.

La Pineta, or the Pine Forest, the same whose praises were sung by Dante, Boccaccio, Dryden and Byron, and which supplied the timber for the Venetian ships of the Republic’s heyday is in full view from Ravenna’s walls.

Boccaccio made the Pineta the scene of his singular tale, “Nostagio degli Onesti”; the incidents of which, ending in the amorous conversion of the ladies of Ravenna, have been made familiar to the English reader by Dryden’s adoption of them in his “Theodore and Honoria.”

 
“Where the last Cæsarean fortress stood,
Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio’s lore
And Dryden’s lay made haunted ground.”
 

Ravenna sits grim and proud in the very midst of wide, flat, marshy plains across which straight arrow-like roads roll out seemingly interminable kilometres to the joy of the automobilist and the despair of the traveller with a hired hack. The region between Ravenna and the sea is literally half land, half water, marshes partitioned off by canals and pools stretching away in every direction. It is lone and strange, but it is not sad and above all is most impressive. Turn out of any of Ravenna’s great gates and the aspect is invariably the same. Great ox-carts, peasants in the fields and, far away, the brown sails of the Adriatic fishing boats are the only punctuating notes of a landscape which is anything but gay and lively. It is as Holland under a mediæval sun, for mostly the sun shines brilliantly here, which it does not in the Low Countries. Ravenna was the ancient capital of the Occidental Roman Empire, but to-day, in its marshy site, the city is in anything but the proud estate it once occupied. The aspect of the whole city is as weird and strange as that of its site. It is of far too great an area for the few thousand pallid mortals who live there. It has ever been a theatre of crime, disaster and disappointment, but its very walls and gateways echo a mysterious and penetrating charm. It possesses, even to-day, though more or less in fragments it is true, many structures dating from the fifth to the eighth centuries, though of its old Palace of the Cæsars but a few crumbled stones remain. Ravenna is the home of the classic typical Christian architecture which went out broadcast through Europe in the middle ages. The Palace of Theodoric hardly exists as a ruin, but some poor ugly stone piers are commonly granted the dignity of once having belonged to it, as well as an ancient wall of brick.

Theodoric’s tomb is in La Rotonda, a kilometre or more from Ravenna in the midst of a vineyard. The earliest portrait in Ravenna’s great gallery of notables is that of Theodoric, an art-loving ruler, an enlightened administrator, with simple, devout ideas, and a habit of nightly vigils. Ravenna was to him a world, a rich golden world, polished yet primitive.

Aside from its magnificent churches, Ravenna’s monuments are not many or great.

There is Theodoric’s Palace before mentioned, the Archiepiscopal Palace, a restored work of the sixteenth century, and the Palazzo Governativo built in the eighteenth century, with many splendid fragments – columns and the like – of an earlier period incorporated therein.

On the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele are two great granite columns, erected in 1484 by the Venetians, and some fragments of a colonnade or loggia which may be a part of the Hall of Justice of Theodoric’s time.

The tomb of Dante is near the church of San Francesco. It is an uncouth shrine which covers the poet’s remains, but it ranks high among those of its class from more sincere motives than those which usually induce one to rave over more pompous and more splendid charms.

 
“Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar,”
 

sang Byron.

Northward from Ravenna, but in roundabout fashion whether one goes by road or rail is Comacchio. Comacchio is four kilometres from the Adriatic and forty-four from Ferrara. Ariosto called the inhabitants: —

 
“   . . .  .    .gente desiosa
Che il mar si turbi e sieno i venti atroci,”
 

but this need not deter the seeker after new sensations from going there to see them catch eels on a wholesale plan, and handle them afterwards in a manner of cleanliness and with a rapidity which is truly marvellous.

They are caught by wholesale, and a tagliatore armed with a useful-looking hatchet called a manarino chops them into pieces called morelli. After this the eels are cooked on a great open-fire spit and finally packed in boiling oil, like the little fishes of the Breton coast, and ultimately sold and served as hors d’œuvres in Italian restaurants the world over. North of Comacchio on the shore of a Venetian lagoon is Chioggia.

Chioggia has no great architectural or historical monuments, but is as paintable as Venice itself; indeed, it is a little brother to Venice, but lacking its splendour and great palaces. Its quay-side Madonna is venerated by all the fishing folk round about.

Venice early conquered Chioggia and in turn the Genoese came along and took it from their rival in 1379, though the Venetians within the year got it back again. With such a fate ever hanging over it, Chioggia had not great encouragement to build great palaces and so its inhabitants turned to fishing and have always kept at it.

Unless one is crossing direct from Florence to Venice, by the Futa Pass and Bologna, Ferrara, as a stopping place on one’s Italian itinerary, is best reached from Ravenna. The road is flat, generally well-conditioned and covers a matter of seventy kilometres, mostly within sight of the sea or lagoons, more like Holland even than the country through which one has recently passed.

Of all the romantic Renaissance shrines of Italy none have a more potent attraction than Ferrara.

The Ferrara of the Middle Ages, like the Ferrara of to-day, is a paradox. No Italian State of similar power and magnificence ever exerted such disproportionate influence upon mediæval Italy; no city in United Italy in which are so combined the fascinating treasures of the past and modern political and industrial enterprise is so ignored by the casual traveller. Once the strongest post on the frontier of the Papal States, the seat of the House of Este, the abiding place of Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto, and the final marital home of Lucrezia Borgia, the golden period of its sixteenth century magnificence has sunk into an isolation unheeded by contingent development, and its inhabitants have shrunken to a bare third of their former numbers.