The tiled floor of the average Italian house, and of the kitchens and dining room of many an Italian inn, is the ever at hand receptacle of much refuse food that elsewhere is relegated to the garbage barrel. Between meals, and bright and early in the morning, everything is flushed out with as generous a supply of water as is used by the Dutch housvrou in washing down the front steps. Result: the microbes don’t rest behind, as they do on our own carpeted dining rooms, a despicable custom which is “growing” with the hotel keepers of England and America. Another idol shattered!
What you don’t find in the small Italian hotels are baths, nor in many large ones either. When you do find a baignoir in Europe (except those of the very latest fashion) it is a poor, shallow affair with a plug that pulls up to let the water out, but with no means of getting it in except to pour it in from buckets. This is a fault, sure enough, and it’s not the American’s idea of a bath tub at all, though it seems to suit well enough the Englishman en tour.
France is, undoubtedly, the land of good cooks par excellence, but the Italian of all ranks is more of a gourmet than he is usually accounted. There may be some of his tribe that live on bread and cheese, but if he isn’t outrageously poor he usually eats well, devotes much time to the preparing and cooking of his meals, and considerably more to the eating of them. The Italian’s cooking utensils are many and varied and above all picturesque, and his table ware invariably well conditioned and cleanly. Let this opinion (one man’s only, again let it be remembered) be recorded as a protest against the universally condemned dirty Italian, who supposedly eats cats and dogs, as the Chinaman supposedly eats rats and mice. We are not above reproach ourselves; we eat mushrooms, frog legs and some other things besides which are certainly not cleanly or healthful.
More than one Italian inn owes its present day prosperity to the travel by road which frequently stops before its doors. Twenty-five years ago, indeed much less, the vetturino deposited his load of sentimental travellers, accompanied perhaps by a courier, at many a miserable wayside osteria, which fell far short of what it should be. To-day this has all changed for the better.
Tourists of all nationalities and all ranks make Italy their playground to-day, as indeed they have for generations. There is no diminution in their numbers. English minor dignitaries of the church jostle Pa and Ma and the girls from the Far West, and Germans, fiercely and wondrously clad, peer around corners and across lagoons with field glasses of a size and power suited to a Polar Expedition. Everybody is “doing” everything, as though their very lives depended upon their absorbing as much as possible of local colour, and that as speedily as possible. It will all be down in the bill, and they mean to have what they are paying for. This is one phase of Italian travel that is unlovely, but it is the phase that one sees in the great tourist hotels and in the chief tourist cities, not elsewhere.
To best know Italian fare as also Italian manners and customs, one must avoid the restaurants and trattoria asterisked by Baedeker and search others out for himself; they will most likely be as good, much cheaper, more characteristic of the country and one will not be eternally pestered to eat beefsteak, ham and saurkraut, or to drink paleale or whiskey. Instead, he will get macaroni in all shapes and sizes, and tomato sauce and cheese over everything, to say nothing of rice, artichokes and onions now and again, and oil, of the olive brand, in nearly every plat. If you don’t like these things, of course, there is no need going where they are. Stick to the beefsteak and paleale then! Romantic, sentimental Italy is disappearing, the Italians are becoming practical and matter of fact; it is only those with memories of Browning, Byron, Shelley, Leopold Robert and Boeklin that would have Italy sentimental anyway.
Maximilien Mission, a Protestant refugee from France in 1688, had something to say of the inns at Venice, which is interesting reading to-day. He says: – “There are some good inns at Venice; the ‘Louvre,’ the ‘White Lyon,’ the ‘Arms of France;’ the first entertains you for eight livres (lire) per day, the other two somewhat cheaper, but you must always remember to bargain for everything that you have. A gondola costs something less than a livre (lire) an hour, or for a superior looking craft seven or eight livres a day.”
This is about the price of the Venetian water craft when hired to-day, two centuries and more after. The hotel prices too are about what one pays to-day in the smaller inns of the cities and in those of the towns. All over Italy, even on the shores of the Bay of Naples, crowded as they are with tourists of all nationalities and all ranks, one finds isolated little Italian inns, backed up against a hillside or crowning some rocky promontory, where one may live in peace and plenitude for six or seven francs a day. And one is not condemned to eating only the national macaroni either. Frankly, the Neapolitan restaurateur often scruples as much to put macaroni before his stranger guests as does the Bavarian inn-keeper to offer sausage at each repast. Some of us regret that this is so, but since macaroni in some form or other can always be had in Italy, and sausages in Germany, for the asking, no great inconvenience is caused.
Macaroni is the national dish of Italy, and very good it is too, though by no means does one have to live off it as many suppose. Notwithstanding, macaroni goes with Italy, as do crackers with cheese. There are more shapes and sizes of macaroni than there are beggars in Naples.
The long, hollow pipe stem, known as Neapolitan, and the vermicelli, which isn’t hollow, but is as long as a shoe string, are the leading varieties. Tiny grains, stars, letters of the alphabet and extraordinary animals that never came out of any ark are also fashioned out of the same pasta, or again you get it in sheets as big as a good sized handkerchief, or in piping of a diameter of an inch, or more.
The Romans kneaded their flour by means of a stone cylinder called a maccaro. The name macaroni is supposed to have been derived from this origin.
Naples is the centre of the macaroni industry, but it is made all over the world. That made in Brooklyn would be as good as that made in Naples if it was made of Russian wheat instead of that from Dakota. As it is now made it is decidedly inferior to the Italian variety. By contrast, that made in Tunis is as good as the Naples variety. Russian wheat again!
A macaroni factory looks, from the outside, like a place devoted to making rope. Inside it feels like an inferno. It doesn’t pay to get too well acquainted with the process of making macaroni.
The flour paste is run out of little tubes, or rolled out by big rollers, or cut out by little dies, thus taking its desired forms. The long, stringy macaroni is taken outside and hung up to dry like clothes on a line, except that it is hung on poles. The workmen are lightly and innocently clad, and the workshops themselves are kept at as high a temperature as the stoke-room of a liner. Whether this is really necessary or not, the writer does not know, but he feels sure that some genius will, some day, evolve a process which will do away with hand labour in the making of macaroni. It will be mixed by machinery, baked by electricity and loaded up on cars and steamships by the same power.
The street macaroni merchants of Naples sell the long ropy kind to all comers, and at a very small price one can get a “filling” meal. You get it served on a dish, but without knives, forks or chop sticks. You eat it with your fingers and your mouth.
The meat is tough in Italy, often enough. There is no doubt about that. But it is usually a great deal better than it is given credit for being. The day is past, if it ever existed, when the Anglo-Saxon traveller was forced to quit Italy “because he could not live without good meat.” This was the classic complaint of the innocents abroad of other days, whether they hailed from Kensington or Kalamazoo. They should never have left those superlatively excellent places. The food and Mazzini were the sole topics of travel talk once, but to-day it is more a question of whether one can get his railway connection at some hitherto unheard of little junction, or whether the road via this river valley or that mountain pass is as good as the main road. These are the things that really matter to the traveller, not whether he has got to sleep in a four poster in a bedroom with a tile or marble floor, or eat macaroni and ravioli when he might have – if he were at home – his beloved “ham” and blood-red beefsteaks.
The Italian waiter is usually a sunny, confiding person, something after the style of the negro, and, like his dark-skinned brother, often incompetent beyond a certain point. You like him for what he is though, almost as good a thing in his line as the French garçon, in that he is obliging and a great deal better than the mutton-chopped, bewhiskered nonentity who shuffles about behind your chair in England with his expectant palm forever outstretched.
The Italian camerière, or waiter, takes a pride in his profession – as far as he knows it, and quite loses sight of its commercial possibilities in the technicalities of his craft, and his seeming desire only to please. Subito momento is his ever ready phrase, though often it seems as though he might have replied never.
Seated in some roadside or seashore trattoria one pounds on the bare table for the camerière, orders another “Torino,” pays his reckoning and is off again. Nothing extraordinarily amusing has happened the while, but the mere lolling about on a terrace of a café overlooking the lapping Mediterranean waves at one’s feet is one of the things that one comes to Italy for, and one is content for the nonce never to recur to palazzos, villas, cathedrals, or picture galleries. There have been too many travellers in past times – and they exist to-day – who do not seek to fill the gaps between a round of churches and art galleries, save to rush back to some palace hotel and eat the same kind of a dinner that they would in London, Paris or New York – a little worse cooked and served to be sure. It’s the country and its people that impress one most in a land not his own. Why do so many omit these “attractions?”
The buona mano is everywhere in evidence in Italy, but the Italian himself seems to understand how to handle the question better than strangers. The Italian guest at a hotel is fairly lavish with the quantity of his tips, but each is minute, and for a small service he pays a small fee. We who like to impress the waiter – for we all do, though we fancy we don’t – will often pay as much to a waiter for bringing us a drink as the price of the drink. Not so the Italian; and that’s the difference.
Ten per cent, on the bill at a hotel is always a lavish fee, and five would be ample, though now and again the head waiter may look askance at his share. Follow the Italian’s own system then, give everybody who serves you something, however little, and give to those only, and then their little jealousies between each other will take the odium off you – if you really care what a waiter thinks about you anyway, which of course you shouldn’t.
These little disbursements are everywhere present in Italy. One pays a franc to enter a museum, a picture gallery or a great library, and one tips his cabman as he does elsewhere, and a dozen francs spent in riding about on Venetian gondolas for a day incurs the implied liability for another two francs as well.
CHAPTER IV
ITALIAN ROADS AND ROUTES
THE cordiality of the Italian for the stranger within his gates is undeniable, but the automobilist would appreciate this more if the Latin would keep his great highways (a tradition left by the Romans of old, the finest road-builders the world has ever known) in better condition.
Italy, next to France, is an ideal touring ground for the automobilist. The Italian population everywhere seems to understand the tourist and his general wants and, above all, his motive for coming thither, and whether one journeys by the railway, by automobile or by the more humble bicycle, he finds a genial reception everywhere, though coupled with it is always an abounding curiosity which is at times annoying. The native is lenient with you and painstaking to the extreme if you do not speak his language, and will struggle with lean scraps of English, French and German in his effort to understand your wants.
Admirably surveyed and usually very well graded, some of the most important of the north and south thoroughfares in Italy have been lately so sadly neglected that the briefest spell of bad weather makes them all but impassable.
There is one stretch between Bologna and Imola of thirty-two kilometres, straightaway and perfectly flat. It is a good road or a bad road, according as one sees it after six weeks of good weather or after a ten days’ rainy spell. It is at once the best and worst of its kind, but it is badly kept up and for that reason may be taken as a representative Italian road. The mountain roads up back of the lake region and over the Alpine passes, in time of snow and ice and rain – if they are not actually buried under – are thoroughly good roads. They are built on different lines. Road-building is a national affair in Italy as it is in France, but the central power does not ramify its forces in all directions as it does across the border. There is only one kind of road-building worth taking into consideration, and that is national road-building. It is not enough that Massachusetts should build good roads and have them degenerate into mere wagon tracks when they get to the State border, or that the good roads of Middlesex should become mere sloughs as soon as they come within the domain of the London County Council. Italy is slack and incompetent with regard to her road-building, but England and America are considerably worse at the present writing.
Entering Italy by the Riviera gateway one leaves the good roads of France behind him at Menton and, between Grimaldi, where he passes the Italian dogana and its formalities, and Ventimiglia, or at least San Remo, twenty-five kilometres away, punctures his tires one, three or five times over a kilometre stretch of unrolled stone bristling with flints, whereas in France a side path would have been left on which the automobilist might pass comfortably.
It isn’t the Italian’s inability to handle the good roads question as successfully as the French; it is his woefully incompetent, careless, unthinking way of doing things. This is not saying that good roads do not exist in Italy. Far from it. But the good road in Italy suddenly descends into a bad road for a dozen kilometres and as abruptly becomes a good road again, and this without apparent reason. Lack of unity of purpose on the part of individual road-building bodies is what does it.
Road-building throughout Italy never rose to the height that it did in France. The Romans were great exploiters beyond the frontiers and often left things at home to shuffle along as best they might whilst their greatest energies were spent abroad.
One well defined Roman road of antiquity (aside from the tracings of the great trunk lines like the Appian or Æmilian Ways) is well known to all automobilists entering Naples via Posilippo. It runs through a tunnel, alongside a hooting, puffing tram and loose-wheeled iron-tired carts all in a deafening uproar.
This marvellous tunnelled road by the sea, with glimpses of daylight now and then, but mostly as dark as the cavern through which flowed the Styx, is the legitimate successor of an engineering work of the time of Augustus. In Nero’s reign, Seneca, the historian, wrote of it as a narrow, gloomy pass, and mediæval superstition claimed it as the work of necromancy, since the hand of man never could have achieved it. The foundation of the roadway is well authenticated by history however. In 1442 Alphonso I, the Spaniard, widened and heightened the gallery, and Don Pedro of Toledo a century later paved it with good solid blocks of granite which were renewed again by Charles III in 1754. Here is a good road that has endured for centuries. We should do as well to-day.
There are, of course, countless other short lengths of highway, coming down from historic times, left in Italy, but the Roman viae with which we have become familiar in the classical geographies and histories of our schooldays are now replaced by modern thoroughfares which, however, in many cases, follow, or frequently cut in on, the old itineraries. Of these old Roman Ways that most readily traced, and of the greatest possible interest to the automobilist who would do something a little different from what his fellows have done, is the Via Æmilia.
With Bologna as its central station, the ancient Via Æmilia, begun by the Consul Marcus Æmilius Lepidus, continues towards Cisalpine Gaul the Via Flamina leading out from Rome. It is a delightfully varied itinerary that one covers in following up this old Roman road from Placentia (Piacenza) to Ariminum (Rimini), and should indeed be followed leisurely from end to end if one would experience something of the spirit of olden times, which one can hardly do if travelling by schedule and stopping only at the places lettered large on the maps.
The following are the ancient and modern place-names on this itinerary:
Placentia (Piacenza)
Florentia (Firenzuola)
Fidentia (Borgo S. Donnino)
Parma (Parma)
Tannetum (Taneto)
Regium Lepidi (Reggio)
Mutina (Modena)
Forum Gallorum (near Castel Franco)
Bononia (Bologna)
Claterna (Quaderna)
Forum Cornelii (Imola)
Faventia (Faenza)
Forum Livii (Forli)
Forum Populii (Forlimpopoli)
Caesena (Cesena)
Ad Confluentes (near Savignamo)
Ariminum (Rimini)
Connecting with the Via Æmilia another important Roman road ran from the valley of the Casentino across the Apennines to Piacenza. It was the route traced by a part of the itinerary of Dante in the “Divina Commedia,” and as such it is a historic highway with which the least sentimentally inclined might be glad to make acquaintance.
Another itinerary, perhaps better known to the automobilist, is that which follows the Ligurian coast from Nice to Spezia, continuing thence to Rome by the Via Aurelia. This coast road of Liguria passed through Nice to Luna on the Gulf of Spezia, the towns en route being as follows: —
The chief of these great Roman roadways of old whose itineraries can be traced to-day are:
These ancient Roman roads were at their best in Campania and Etruria. Campania was traversed by the Appian Way, the greatest highway of the Romans, though indeed its original construction by Appius Claudius only extended to Capua. The great highroads proceeding from Rome crossed Etruria almost to the full extent; the Via Aurelia, from Rome to Pisa and Luna; the Via Cassia and the Via Clodia.
The great Roman roads were marked with division stones or bornes every thousand paces, practically a kilometre and a half, a little more than our own mile. These mile-stones of Roman times, many of which are still above ground (milliarii lapides), were sometimes round and sometimes square, and were entirely bare of capitals, being mere stone posts usually standing on a squared base of a somewhat larger area.
A graven inscription bore in Latin the name of the Consul or Emperor under whom each stone was set up and a numerical indication as well.
Caius Gracchus, away back in the second century before Christ, was the inventor of these aids to travel. The automobilist appreciates the development of this accessory next to good roads themselves, and if he stops to think a minute he will see that the old Romans were the inventors of many things which he fondly thinks are modern.
The automobilist in Italy has, it will be inferred, cause to regret the absence of the fine roads of France once and again, and he will regret it whenever he wallows into a six inch deep rut and finds himself not able to pull up or out, whilst the drivers of ten yoke ox-teams, drawing a block of Carrara marble as big as a house, call down the imprecations of all the saints in the calendar on his head. It’s not the automobilist’s fault, such an occurrence, nor the ox-driver’s either; but for fifty kilometres after leaving Spezia, and until Lucca and Livorno are reached, this is what may happen every half hour, and you have no recourse except to accept the situation with fortitude and revile the administration for allowing a roadway to wear down to such a state, or for not providing a parallel thoroughfare so as to divide the different classes of traffic. There is no such disgracefully used and kept highway in Europe as this stretch between Spezia and Lucca, and one must of necessity pass over it going from Genoa to Pisa unless he strikes inland through the mountainous country just beyond Spezia, by the Strada di Reggio for a détour of a hundred kilometres or more, coming back to the sea level road at Lucca.
Throughout the peninsula the inland roads are better as to surface than those by the coast, though by no means are they more attractive to the tourist by road. This is best exemplified by a comparison of the inland and shore roads, each of them more or less direct, between Florence and Rome.
The great Strada di grande Communicazione from Florence to Rome (something less than three hundred kilometres all told, a mere mouthful for a modern automobile) runs straight through the heart of old Siena, entering the city by the Porta Camollia and leaving by the Porta Romana, two kilometres of treacherous, narrow thoroughfare, though readily enough traced because it is in a bee-line. The details are here given as being typical of what the automobilist may expect to find in the smaller Italian cities. There are, in Italy, none of those unexpected right-angle turns that one comes upon so often in French towns, at least not so many of them, and there are no cork-screw thoroughfares though many have the “rainbow curve,” to borrow Mark Twain’s expression.
On through Chiusi, Orvieto and Viterbo runs the highroad direct to the gates of Rome, for the most part a fair road, but rising and falling from one level to another in trying fashion to one who would set a steady pace.
It is with respect to the grades on Italian roads, too, that one remarks a falling off from French standards. North of Florence, in the valley of the Mugello, we, having left the well-worn roads in search of something out of the common, found a bit of seventeen per cent. grade. This was negotiated readily enough, since it was of brief extent, but another rise of twenty-five per cent. (it looked forty-five from the cushions of a low-hung car) followed and on this we could do nothing. Fortunately there was a way around, as there usually is in Europe, so nothing was lost but time, and we benefited by the acquisition of some knowledge concerning various things which we did not before possess. And we were content, for that was what we came for anyway.
From Florence south, by the less direct road via Arezzo, Perugia and Terni, there is another surprisingly sudden rise but likewise brief. It is on this same road that one remarks from a great distance the towers of Spoleto piercing the sky at a seemingly enormous height, while the background mountain road over the Passo della Somma rises six hundred and thirty metres and tries the courage of every automobilist passing this way.
To achieve many of these Italian hill-towns one does not often rise abruptly but rather almost imperceptibly, but here, in ten kilometres, say half a dozen miles, the Strada di grande Communicazione rises a thousand feet, and that is considerable for a road supposedly laid out by military strategists.
As a contrast to these hilly, switch-back roads running inland from the north to the south may be compared that running from Rome to Naples, not the route usually followed via Vallombrosa and Frosinone, but that via Velletri, Terracina and Gaeta. Here the highroad is nearly flat, though truth to tell of none too good surface, all the way to Naples. Practically it is as good a road as that which runs inland and offers to any who choose to pass that way certain delights that most other travellers in Italy know not of.
At Cisterna di Roma, forty-eight kilometres from Rome, one is in the midst of the Pontine Marshes it is true, and it is also more or less of a marvel that a decent road could have been built here at all. From this point of view it is interesting to the automobilist who has a hobby of studying the road-building systems of the countries through which he travels. Of the Pontine Marshes themselves it is certain that they are not salubrious, and malaria is most prevalent near them. Appius Claudius, in 312 B. C., tried to drain the marsh and so did Cæsar, Augustus and Theodoric after him, and the Popes Boniface VIII, Martinus V and Sixtus V, but the morass is still there in spite of the fact that a company calling itself Ufficio della Bonificazione delle Paludi Pontine is to-day working continuously at the same problem.
Putting these various classes of Italian roads aside for the moment there remains but one other variety to consider, that of the mountain roads of the high Alpine valleys and those crossing the Oberland and, further east, those in communication with the Austrian Tyrol. On the west these converge on Milan and Turin via the region of the lakes and the valleys of Aosta and Susa, and in the centre and east give communication from Brescia, Verona and Venice with West Germany and Austria.
These are the best planned and best kept roads in Italy, take them by and large. The most celebrated are those leading from Turin into France; via Susa and the Col du Mont Genevre to Briançon, and via Mont Cenis to Modane and Grenoble; via the Val d’Aosta and the Petit Saint Bernard to Albertville in France, or via the Grand Saint Bernard to Switzerland.
Just north of the Lago di Maggiore, accessible either from Como or from Milan direct via Arona, is the famous road over the Simplon Pass, at an elevation of 2,008 metres above the sea. By this road, the best road in all Italy, without question, one enters or leaves the kingdom by the gateway of Domodossola.
On entering Italy by this route one passes the last rock-cut gallery near Crevola and, by a high-built viaduct, thirty metres or more above the bed of the river, it crosses the Diveria. Soon the vineyards and all the signs of the insect life of the southland meet the eye. Italy has at last been reached, no more eternal snow and ice, no more peaked rooftops, the whole region now flattens out into the Lombard plain. Domodossola has all the ear-marks of the Italian’s manner of life and building of houses, albeit that the town itself has no splendid monuments.
Another entrance to the Italian lake region through the mountain barrier beyond is by the road over the San Bernardino Pass and Bellinzona. The San Bernardino Pass is not to be confounded with those of the Grand and Petit Saint Bernard. The present roadway dates from 1822, when it was built by the engineer Pocobelle, at the joint expense of the Sardinian and Grisons governments. Its chief object was to connect Genoa and Turin directly with Switzerland and west Germany. The pass crosses the Rheinwald at a height of 2,063 metres.
This passage across the Alps was known to the ancient Romans, and down to the fifteenth century it was known as the Vogelberg. A mission brother, Bernardino of Siena, preaching the gospel in the high valleys, erected a chapel here which gave the pass the name which it bears to-day.
In part the road tunnels through the hillsides, in part runs along a shelf beside the precipice, and here and there crosses a mountain torrent by some massive bridge of masonry.
Like most of the mountain roads leading into Italy from Switzerland and Germany the southern slope descends more abruptly than that on the north. The coach driver may trot his horses down hill, though, so well has the descent been engineered, and the automobilist may rush things with considerably more safety here than on the better known routes.
Another celebrated gateway into Italy is that over the Splugen Pass from Coire (in Italian nomenclature: Colmo dell’Orso). It was completed by the Austrian government in 1823 to compete with the new-made road a few kilometres to the west over the Bernardino which favoured Switzerland and Germany and took no consideration whatever of the interests of Austria. The summit of the Splugen Pass is 2,117 metres above sea-level and on a narrow ridge near by runs for six kilometres the boundary between Switzerland and Italy.
Entering Italy by the Splugen Pass one finds the dogana a dull, ugly group of buildings just below the first series of facets which drop down from the crest. It is as lonesome and gloomy a place of residence as one can possibly conceive as existing on the earth’s surface. One forgets entirely that it is very nearly the heart of civilized Europe; there is nothing within view to suggest it in the least, not a scrap of vegetation, not a silvery streak of water, not a habitation even that might not be as appropriately set upon a shelf of rock by the side of Hecla.
The French army under Maréchal Macdonald crossed the pass in 1800 when but a mere trail existed, but with a loss of a hundred men and as many horses.
Of late years the passage of the Col has been rendered the easier by the cutting of two long galleries. Another engineering work of note is met a little farther on in the Gorge of San Giacomo, a work completed by Carlo Donegani in the reign of the Emperor Francis II, and, just beyond, the boiling torrent of the Liro is spanned by a daring bridge of masonry.