Italian Highways and Byways from a Motor Car

Palladio’s architectural ideas went abroad even to England and many a “stately home” in Britain to-day is a more or less faithful copy of a Vicenza sixteenth century palazzo.

The Rotonda Capra, now in ruins, so well known as Palladio’s villa, was copied by Lord Burlington and planted squat down on the banks of the Thames at Chiswick. It loses considerably by transportation; it were decidedly more effective at the base of Monte Berico in Venezia.

Palladio himself is buried in the local Campo Santo. His grave should become an art lover’s shrine, but no one has ever been known to worship at it.

Between Vicenza and Verona runs a charming highway, strewn with villas of a highly interesting if not superlatively grand architectural order.

A dozen or fifteen kilometres from Vicenza are the two castles of Montecchio, the strongholds of the family of the name celebrated by Shakespere as one of the rivals of the Capulets.

At the Bridge of Arcole is an obelisk in commemoration of the battle when Napoleon went against the Austrians after his check at Caldiero.

Soave, a little further on, is an old walled town as mediæval in its looks and doings as it was when its great gates and towers and its castle fortress on the height were built six centuries ago.

Verona is reached in thirty kilometres and has a sentimental, romantic interest beyond that possessed by any of the secondary cities of Italy. It has not the great wealth of notable architectural splendours of many other places, but what there is is superlatively grand, the structures surrounding the Piazza Erbe and the Piazza dei Signori, for instance; the old Ponte di Castel Vecchio; the great Roman Arena; and even the Albergo all’Accademia, where one is remarkably well cared for in a fine old mediæval palace with a monumental gateway, and an iron and carved stone well in the courtyard.

The glory and sentiment which overshadowed the Verona of another day have passed, and now the noise of electric trams and the hoot of automobile horns awaken the echoes in the same thoroughfares where one day trampled the feet of warring hosts.

“The glory of the Scaliger has passed,The Capuletti and Montague are naught:”

Instead we have the modern note sounding over all, and, if it is true that the “fair Juliet sleeps in old Verona’s town” hers must be a disturbed sleep. The romance of Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague was real enough; that is, there was a real romance of the sort, and there were real Capulets and Montagues. Just where the scene of this particular romance was laid one is not so sure.

The “House of Juliet” at Verona, one of the stock sights of the guide books, is of more than doubtful authenticity. Certainly, to begin with, it does not comport in the least with the dignified marble palace and its halls with which the stage-carpenter has built up the settings of Shakespere’s drama or Gounod’s opera. Perhaps they embroidered too much. Of course they did!

In 1905 the “Juliet House” was in danger of collapsing. As it is nothing more than a picturesque old house, such as northern Italy abounds in, perhaps it would not have mattered much had it fallen. It is no more Juliet’s house than Juliet’s tomb is the tomb of Juliet. This indeed has latterly been adjudged a mere water-trough. No house, it is asserted, in Verona to-day can be declared with certainty as the house of a Montague or a Capulet. Henry James points the moral of all this in “The Custodians,” and whether we can always make head and tail out of his dialogues or not, his judgments are always sound.

In Verona the very gutters are of white marble. Balustrades, window-sills and hitching posts are all of white or coloured marbles. Verona is luxurious, if not magnificent, and its architecture is marvellously interesting and beautiful, though frequently rising to no great rank.

The great Roman Arena, so admirably preserved, is surrounded by the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. The contrast between yesterday and to-day at Verona is everywhere to be remarked. Its old Arena and the Visconti gateway seen by moonlight look as ancient as anything on earth, but the cafés with their tables set out right across the Piazza, with a band playing on a temporary platform, set up on trestles in the middle, and electric trams swishing around the corner, are as modern as Earl’s Court or Coney Island, without however many of their drawbacks.

Verona is a city of marble and coloured stone, of terraces and cypresses and all the Italian accessories which stagecraft has borrowed for its Shakesperean settings. The cypresses planted around the outskirts of Verona are said to be the oldest in Europe, but that is doubtful. They are, some of them, perhaps four hundred years old, but on the shores of the Etang de Berre, in old Provence, is a group of these same trees, less lean, greater of girth and denser of foliage. Surely these must have five hundred years to their credit according to Verona standards.

Verona is one of the cities of celebrated art where the authorities control one’s desire to dig about with a view to discovering buried antiquities, even in one’s own cellar or garden; much less may one sell an old chimney pot or urn.

Recently a Signor and Signora Castello, who owned an ancient house in Via del Seminario, sold the magnificent red marble portals and two balconies without permission from the Government. They were fined two thousand five hundred lire each, and ordered to replace the objects of art.

After a long chase the Verona police discovered the articles in a warehouse where they had been temporarily deposited previous to shipping them abroad.

The balconies are of the same epoch as the famous one said to have been the scene of the meeting of Romeo and Juliet. “American collectors keep off” is the sign the Verona police would probably put up if they dared.

CHAPTER XVII

THROUGH ITALIAN LAKELAND

THE lake region of the north is perhaps the most romantic in all Italy; certainly its memories have much appeal to the sentimentally inclined. Indeed the tourists are so passionately fond of the Italian lakeland that they leave it no “close” season, but are everywhere to be remarked, from Peschiera on the east to Orta on the west. Seemingly they are all honeymoon couples and seek seclusion, and are therefore less offensive than the general run of conducted parties which now “do” the Italian round for a ten pound note from London, or the same thing from New York for a couple of hundred dollars.

It is the fashion to revile the automobilist as a hurried traveller, but he at least gets a sniff of the countryside en route which the others do not.

Coming from the east through Verona, the traveller by road might do worse than make a detour of a hundred kilometres out and back to Mantua.

Mantua, on the banks of the Mincio, sits like a water-surrounded town of the Low Countries. Mantua, above all, is a place of war, one of the strongest in North Italy, forming with Verona, Legnago and Peschiera the famous “Quadrilatera.” Mantua has at least a tenth part of its population made up of Jews. It sits partly surrounded by an artificial lake formed by the Mincio, and the marsh land to the south can be flooded, if it is deemed advisable, in case of siege. A great walled enclosure, a series of fortified dykes, and a collection of detached forts roundabout, put Mantua in a class quite by itself. It is a melancholy, unlovely place from an æsthetic standpoint, but picturesque in a certain crude way. The ancient Palazzo Gonzague of the Dukes of Mantua, now known as the Corte Reale, is one of the most ambitious edifices of its class in Italy. The view of the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua, with the rising background of roofs, towers and domes, as seen from the further end of the cobble-stone paved bridge over the Mincio, is delightful. Artists do not like it as a general rule because of the ugly straight line of the bridge, and the “camera fiend” makes a hopeless mess of it, unless he seeks an hour or more for a “point of view;” but for all that the scene is as quaint and beautiful a composition as one can get of unspoiled mediævalism in these progressive times, when usually telegraph poles and tram cars project themselves into focus whether or no. There is nothing of the kind here.

The road from Mantua to Cremona, following the banks of the Mincio, still preserves its Virgilian aspect. Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremonæ. From this one infers that it is a bad road, and in truth it is very bad; automobilists will not like it. Cremona’s tower is seen from afar, like the sailors’ beacon from the sea. It is one of the most hardy and the most renowned Gothic towers of Italy and has a height approximating a hundred and twenty odd metres, say a little less than four hundred feet.

Neighbouring upon this great Torrazo is the Palazzo Gonfaloneri, dating from 1292. These two monuments, together with the magnificent Romanesque Lombard Cathedral of the twelfth century, and the Casa Stradivari – where he who gave his name to a violin lived – are Mantua’s chief “things to see.” If the traveller can include Mantua in his itinerary, which truth to tell is not easy without doubling on one’s tracks, he should do so.

Travellers coming westward from Venice and passing Verona, hastening to the Italian and Swiss lakes, usually give that region lying between Verona and Como little heed. Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice and then Switzerland and the Rhine is still too often the itinerary of hurried papas and fond mamas. Even if the automobilist does not drop down on Mantua and Cremona he should take things leisurely through the lake region and stop en route as often as fancy wills. The Lago di Garda is the most easterly of the Italian Lakes and the largest.

It is of great depth, 350 metres or more, is sixty odd kilometres in length, and in places a third as wide. It is a product of the rivers and torrents flowing down from the mountains of the Italian Tyrol. The sudden storms which frequently come up to ruffle its bosom were celebrated by some lines of Virgil and his example has been followed by every other traveller ever caught in one of these storms. “Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens” sang the bard, and the words still echo down through time.

Peschiera and Desenzano are the principal ports at the southern end of the lake, and each in its way is trying to be a “resort.” The environs are charming and the towns themselves interesting enough, though chiefly from the point of view of the artist. The seeker after the gaieties and pleasures of the great watering places will find nothing of the sort here.

Between Peschiera and Desenzano juts out the promontory of Sermione. A village is entered by a drawbridge and a mediæval gate on the south. On the opposite side is a fortified wall that separates it from the northerly portion of the island, and through which opens the only gate in that direction. The old castle, in the form of a quadrangle, with a high square tower, was entered on the north by a drawbridge. This entrance is still well preserved, as well as its small port or darsena, surrounded by crenelated battlements; but the principal entrance is now on the side of the village, by a gate over which are shields bearing the arms of the Scaligers. It is one of the most imposingly militant of all the castles of north Italy. Only that of Fénis in the Val d’Aoste is more so.

Riva, at the Austrian end of the lake of Garda, has its drawbacks but it occupies a wonderful site nevertheless.

While Northern Tyrol is still wrapped in the white mantle of winter’s snow, and winter sports of every description furnish great amusement for old and young, the lovely Lake of Garda is already beginning to show signs of spring. All along the lake the great “stanzoni,” or lemon-houses for sheltering the lemon trees in winter, are, even in January, often filled with blossoms.

The best time to visit Riva is from February to June, and from the middle of August to the end of October, but Riva at all times will be a surprise and a delight to those who do not mind a régime table d’hôte, as the doctors have it, and the fact that everybody round about appears to be a semi-invalid.

To Brescia from the foot of the Lake of Garda is a matter of twenty odd kilometres, through a greatly varied nearby landscape, set off here and there by vistas of the azure of the distant lake, the Alps of Tyrol and the nearer Bergamese mountains.

“Bologna la Grassa” and “Brescia Armata” are two nick-names by which the respective cities are known up and down Italy. Brescia, like most Italian towns, is built on a hill top and is castle-crowned as becomes a mediæval burg. Brescia’s castle is an exceptionally strongly fortified feudal monument. Brescia Armata took its name from the fact that it was ever armed against its enemies, which in the good old days every Italian city was or it was of no account whatever. Brescia’s enemies could never have made much headway when attacking this hill-top fortress, and must have contented themselves with sacking the cities of the surrounding plain. To-day firearms in great quantities are made here, and thus the city is still entitled to be called Brescia Armata.

Brescia’s market place is more thickly covered with great, squat, mushroom umbrellas than that of any other city of its size in Italy.

Brescia is dear to the French because of its wraith of a mediæval castle, once so vigorously defended by the Chevalier Bayard, that famous knight sans peur et sans reproche.

A bastioned wall surrounds the gay little Lombard city in the genuine romance fashion, albeit there is to-day very little romance in Brescia, which lives mostly by the exploitation of its textile and metal industries.

Brescia housefronts are as gaily decorated as those of Nuremberg, many of them at least. It is a remarkable feature of Brescia’s domestic architecture.

The castle or citadel itself was built by the Viscontis in the fourteenth century on the summit of a hill overlooking the town. The Venetians strengthened it and again the Austrians. General Haynau bombarded the low-lying city round about in barbarous fashion, so much so that the memory of it caused him to be chased from London some years later, when he was sent there as Ambassador.

The men of Brescia seem to have a passion for wearing a great Capucin shoulder cloak, which looks very Spanish. It is most picturesque, and is one of the characteristic things seen in all Brescia’s public places, caffés and restaurants, and is worn by all those classes whom a discerning traveller once described as men who work hard at doing nothing, for Brescia’s street corners are never vacant and her caffés never empty.

Between Brescia and Bergamo is the Lake of Iseo; the fourth in size of the north Italian lakes. The vegetation of its shores is purely Italian and vineyards and olive groves abound. A fringe of old castle towers, of walls, palaces and villas surround it, all blended together with a historic web and woof of mediævalism and romance.

From Brescia to Bergamo runs one of the best national highroads in Italy. The automobilist will appreciate this and will want to push on to the end. He would do better to break it midway and drop down on the road to Martinengo, a detour of twenty kilometres only, passing the great Castle of Malpaga built by the celebrated Bartolommeo Colleoni, an edifice which gives a more complete idea of unspoiled, unrestored residence of a mediæval Italian nobleman than any other extant.

Bergamo is a strange combination of the new and the old. The upper and lower towns – for it is built on a rise of the Bergamon Alps – have nothing in common with each other. In the lower town there are great hotels, shops, and even a vast factory which turns out a celebrated make of automobiles. In the upper town there are market-men and women, with chickens, vegetables and fruit to sell, all spread out under an imposing array of great mushroom umbrellas only second to those of the market place at Brescia.

Bergamo’s chief architectural monuments are its churches, but its ancient Broletto, or castle, of not very pure Gothic, but with a most original façade, is worth them all put together in its appeal to one with an eye for the picturesque. Its tower is a remarkably firm, solid and yet withal graceful sentinel of diºgnity and power.

Bergamo’s great fair of Saint Alexander, held every year in August, was once the rival of those great trading fairs of Leipzig and Beaucaire. Of late it is of less importance, but holds somewhat to its ancient traditions. Certainly it filled the Albergo Capello d’Oro to such an extent that it was doubtful for a time if we could find a place. A sight of our mud-covered automobile and of our generally bedraggled appearance – for it had rained again, though that of itself is nothing remarkable in Italy, and we had “mud-larked it” for the last fifty kilometres, – caused somebody’s conscience to smite him and find us shelter.

Beyond Bergamo one enters the classic Italian Lake region, that which has usually been seen through a honeymoon perspective, a honeymoon that is long-lasting, as it invariably is in Italy as some of us know. All through this lakeland of north Italy is an unbroken succession of charms which certainly, from the sentimental and romantic point, has no equal in Italy, or out of it in the same area.

The whole battery of little cities, towns, and townlets which surround Lakes Como, Varese, Lugano and Maggiore are delightful from all points. Theirs is a unique variety of charm which comports with the tranquil mood, not at all the same as that possessed by the average scorching automobilist who reads as he runs, and wishes to eat and drink and absorb his romantic and historic lore in the same up-to-date fashion. Not that the region is unsuited to automobile travel. Not at all, the roads thereabouts are quite the best in Italy, and the towns themselves picturesquely charming, if often lacking in ruined monuments of mediævalism of the first rank. All of it is historic ground, and filled with echoes of fact and fancy which still reverberate from its hills and through its vales.

Not all of these lake-side towns can be catalogued here, no more than are all included in the average itinerary, but from Lecco, at the southern end of the Lecco arm of the Lago di Como, to Orta on the Lago d’Orta will be found myriads of scenic surprises, dotted here and there with quaint waterside towns, the lakes themselves being punctuated with great white winged barques, with here and there the not unpicturesque coil of smoke belching into the clear sky from a cranky, fussy little steamboat.

One most often approaches the lake district from the east, via Lecco on the eastern arm of Lake Como, or as it is locally called the Lago di Lecco. Lecco itself is of no importance. Its site is its all-in-all, but that is delightful. Between Lecco and Milan the highway crosses the Adda by a magnificent bridge of ten arches built by Azzo Visconti in 1335. Very few of the works of the old bridge-builders bear so ancient a date as this. From Lecco to Monza the highroad skirts the Brianza, as the last Alpine foot-hills are called before the mountains flatten out into the Lombard Plain. At Arcore is the villa of the Adda family with a modern chapel.

One can go north from Lecco to Bellaggio by steamer, when he will arrive in the very heart of lakeland, or he may go directly west by the highroad to Como and take his point of departure from there. The Lake of Como was the Lacus Larius of the Romans and the Lari Maxime of Virgil. It is a hundred and ninety metres above sea level and among all other of the Swiss and Italian lakes holds the palm for the beauty of its surroundings.

At Nesso is the Villa Pliniana, built in 1570. It is not named for Pliny, but because of a nearby spring mentioned in his writings. Pliny’s villa was actually at Lenno, in a dull gloomy site and he properly enough called the villa Tragedia.

Como, the city, is ancient, for the younger Pliny, who was born in the ancient municipium of Comum, asserts that it was then a “flourishing state.” It does not enter actively into history, however, after the fall of the Roman Empire, until 1107, when it became an independent city. It remained a republic for two centuries and then it fell under the dominion of the Visconti since which time its fate has ever been bound up with that of Milan.

The Broletto or municipal palace is curiously built of black and white marble courses, patched here and there with red. It is interesting, but bizarre, and of no recognized architectural style save that it is a reminder of the taste of the people of the Lombard Republics with respect to their civic architecture in the thirteenth century. Como’s Duomo is, on the contrary, a celebrated and remarkably beautiful structure. The distinction made between the taste in ecclesiastical and civic architecture of the time can but be remarked.

The military architecture of Como, as indicated by the gates in its old city wall, was of a high order. The Porta della Torre, the chief of the gates remaining, and leading out to the Milan road, rises five stories in air.

The Palazzo Giovio is now the local museum. Paolo Giovio built the crudely ornate edifice, and began the collection of antiquities and relics which it now contains. Above Como, but outside the city, rises a curious lofty tower called the Bardello. It may have been built as one of the defences of the Lombard Kings, or it may not, but at any rate there is no doubt that it witnessed the rise and fall of the Milanese dynasties from the first. Como, one of the first cities to assert its independence, was the first to lose it. Prisoners of state were put into iron cages and stowed away in the Bardello – like animals or birds in a live stock show. They were all tagged and numbered and were fed at infrequent, uncertain hours. Not many lived out their terms; mostly they died, some of hunger, some eaten up by vermin and more than one by having dashed their brains out on the iron bars of their cages.

All about Como are little lake settlements peopled with villas and hotels where many a mediæval and modern romance has been lived in the real. It is all very delightful, but in truth all is stagey.

At Cadenabbia is the Villa Carlotta, named for Charlotte the Duchess of Saxe-Meiningen. Its structural elements build up into something imposing, if not in the best of taste, and its gardens are of the conventionally artificial kind which look as though they might be part of a stage setting.

Bellaggio, on the eastern shore of the lake, is a place of large hotels, no history of remark, and the site of the villa Serbelloni, with which the proprietor of one of the hotels seems to have some special arrangement, in that he passes visitors to and fro from his establishment to the villa in genuine showman fashion. Beyond its site, which is entrancingly lovely, it has no appeal whatever from either the architectural or the landscape gardening point of view.

Mennagio, Belluno and Varenna are in the same category and are tourist show places only. Gravadona is different in that it has two remarkably beautiful churches, which can be omitted from no consideration of Italian church architecture, and the Palazzo de Pero, built in 1586 for Cardinal Gallio which, with its four angle-towers, is more like a fortress than a prelate’s residence.

Near Gravadona is the outline of an ancient highway known as the Strada Regina. Supposedly it was made centuries and centuries ago by Theodolinda, Queen of the Lombards, and must be one of the oldest roads in existence.

The Lago di Lugano is the most irregular of all the Italian Lakes. In part it lies in Lombardy and in part within the Swiss canton of Ticino. Its scenery is quite distinct from that of the other Italian lakes, not more beautiful perhaps, but less prolifically surrounded by that sub-tropical verdure which is characteristic of Garda and Como. In the northeasterly portion, around Porlezza, the precipitous outlines of the mountains round about lend an almost savage aspect.

Lugano itself is very near the Swiss border but is thoroughly Italian, with deep arcaded streets, and here and there a Renaissance façade such as can be found nowhere out of Italy.

The Lago di Varese is the smallest of all the lakes. In the neighbourhood is produced a great deal of silk, and a species of easily worked marble or alabaster called Marmo Majolica. Varese itself, while not destitute of monuments of architectural worth, is more noticeably a place of modern villas, most of which are occupied by wealthy Milanese.