Italian Highways and Byways from a Motor Car

The Palazzo Valentino, built in 1633 by Christine of France, the daughter of Henri IV and Marie de Medici, and wife of Vittorio Amedeo II, is now devoted to the usages of an educational institution. It is on the classic French chateau order and is as out of place in Italy as the Italian Renaissance architecture is in England.

On the Piazza Castello rises Turin’s old castle of the fourteenth century, built of brick, and, though moss-grown, it is hardly a ruin.

The Palazzo Reale, built in 1678 on the north side of the Piazza, is severe and simple as to exterior, but luxurious enough within by reason of the collections which it houses.

In the armory of Turin’s royal palace is the full suit of armour worn by Duke Emanuele-Filiberto on the occasion of the battle of St. Quentin, and made by his own hand. He was an armourer, a silversmith and a worker in fine metals beyond compare. In peace he was a craftsman without an equal; in war he was the same kind of a fighter.

Another armour suit is of gigantic proportions. Who its owner was history and the catalogue fail to state. The breast-plate bears a ducal coronet and the letter F. The suit contains enough metal to armour plate a small battle ship. For the more sentimentally inclined there is a cabinet of delicately fashioned stilettos, which we have always fondly believed were the national arms of Italy. These particular stilettos were taken from fair ladies after they had made away with their lovers when they came to be a nuisance. Fickle women!

Turin is one of the many places on the map of Europe famous for a specialty in the eating line. This time it is chocolate. Let not any one think that all chocolate comes from Aiguebelle or Royat. The bread of Turin, “grissini,” is also in a class by itself. It is made in long sticks about the diameter of a pipe stem, and you eat yards of it with your minestra and between courses.

The puppet show or marionette theatres of Turin have ever been famous, indeed the fantoccini theatre had its origin in Piedmont. The buffon Gianduja was of Piedmontese birth, as was Arlequino of Bergamo.

Around Turin are various suburban neighbourhoods with historic memories and some palace and villa remains which might well be noted.

The Vigna della Regina, or the Queen’s Vineyard, is the name given to a once royal residence, now a girls’ school. The house was built in 1650 by Cardinal Maurice of Savoy. Another one of the nearby sights, not usually “taken in,” is the natural garden (an undefiled landscape garden) arranged in the sixteenth century by the Duke of Savoy, Emanuele Filiberto.

King Carlo Felice had a country house called the Castello d’Aglie to the north of the city. It is remarkable for nothing but the pure air of the neighbourhood, and that abounds everywhere in these parts.

At Rivoli, a few kilometres out on the Mont Cenis road, is a clumsily built, half finished mass of buildings, planned by Vittorio Amedeo II. in the eighteenth century as a royal residence to which he some day might return if he ever got tired of playing abdicator. He occupied it surely enough, in due course, but as a prisoner, not as a ruler. He was a well-meaning monarch, and through him the house of Savoy obtained Sardinia, but he made awful blunders at times, or at least one, for ultimately he landed in prison where he died in 1732.

Six leagues from Turin is the little garrison town of Pinerolo. A heap of stones on the mountain marks the site of a chateau where were once imprisoned the man of the Iron Mask, Lauzun, the political prisoner of history, and Fouquet, the money-grabbing minister of Louis XIV.

Lauzun and his personal history make interesting reading for one versed in things Italian and French. He made a famous mot when being transported to his mountain prison. He was requested from time to time to descend from his carriage, whenever by chance it had got stuck in the mud or wedged between offending rocks. With much apology he was begged to descend. “Oh! this is nothing; these little misfortunes of travel are nothing of moment compared to the object of my journey.” Other prisoners may have put things similarly, but hardly with the same grace of diction.

Let no automobilist, on leaving Turin, come out by way of Pinerolo unless he is prepared for a detour of a hundred kilometres, a rise of 2,000 metres and a drop down again to 1,300 metres at Cesana Tarinese, where he strikes the main road over the Col de Mont Cenis to Modane in France, or via the Col de Mont Genevre to Briançon. The direct road from Turin is via Rivoli and Suse.

Not every traveller in Italy knows the half-hidden out-of-the-way Val d’Aoste, the obvious gateway from Turin to the north via the Col du Saint Bernard. Travellers by rail rush through via the Simplon or Mont Cenis and know not the delights and joys which possess the traveller by road as he plunges into the heart of the Alps through the gateway of the Val d’Aoste.

The Val d’Aoste, less than a hundred kilometres, all counted, has more scenic and architectural surprises than any similar strip in Europe, but it is not a piste to be raced over by the scorching automobilist at sixty miles an hour. On the contrary it can not be done with satisfaction in less than a day, even by the most blasé of tourists. The railway also ascends the valley as far as Aoste, and one may cross over by coach into France or Switzerland by either the Col du Petit Saint Bernard or the Col du Grand Saint Bernard. It is worth doing!

The whole Val d’Aoste is one great reminder of feudal days and feudal ways. Curiously enough, too, in this part of Piedmont the aspect is as much French as Italian, and so too is the speech of the people. At Courmayer, for instance, the street and shop signs are all in French, and ’om the diminutive of homme replaces the Italian uomo; cheur stands for cœur and sita for cité and citta. This patois is universal through the upper valleys, and if one has any familiarity with the patois of Provence it will not be found so very strange. French, however, is very commonly understood throughout Piedmont, more so than elsewhere in north Italy, where, for a fact, a German will find his way about much more readily than a Frenchman.

One blemish lies all over the Val d’Aoste. It was greatly to be remarked by travellers of two or three generations ago and is still in evidence if one looks for it, though actually it is decreasing. Large numbers of the population are of the afflicted class known as Cretins, and many more suffer from goitre. It is claimed that these diseases come from a squalid filthiness, but the lie is given to this theory by the fact that there is no apparent filthiness. The diseases are evidently hereditary, and at some time anterior to their appearance here they were already known elsewhere. They are then results of an extraneous condition of affairs imported and developed here in this smiling valley through the heedlessness of some one. There are certain neighbourhoods, as at Courmayer and Ivrea, where they do not exist at all, but in other localities, and for a radius of ten kilometres roundabout, they are most prevalent.

The southern gateway to the Val d’Aoste is the snug little mountain of Ivrea, 50 kilometres from Turin. The cheese and butter of the Italian Alps, known throughout the European market as Beurre de Milan, is mostly produced in this neighbourhood, and the ten thousand souls who live here draw almost their entire livelihood from these products. Ivrea has an old Castle of imposing, though somewhat degenerate, presence. It has been badly disfigured in the restorations of later years, but two of its numerous brick towers of old still retain their crenelated battlements. The place itself is of great antiquity, and Strabon has put it on record that 3,600 of the inhabitants of the Val d’Aoste were once sold en bloc in the streets of Ivrea by Terentius Varro, their captor.

The Val d’Aoste, from Ivrea to Courmayer, about one hundred kilometres, will some day come to its own as a popular touring ground, but that time is not yet. When the time comes any who will may know all the delights of Switzerland’s high valleys without suffering from the manifest drawback of overexploitation. One doesn’t necessarily want to drink beer before every waterfall or listen to a yoedel in every cavern. What is more to the point is that one may here find simple, unobtrusive attention on the part of hotel keepers and that at a price in keeping with the surroundings. This you get in the Val d’Aoste and throughout the Alps of Piedmont, Dauphiny and Savoy.

Up high in the Val d’Aoste lies a battery of little Alpine townlets scarce known even by name, though possessed of a momentous history and often of architectural monuments marvellously imposing in their grandeur and beauty.

Near Pont Saint Martin, high above the torrent of the Doire, is the picturesque feudal castle of Montalto, a name famous in Italian annals of the middle ages.

Over the river Lys, at Pont Saint Martin, there is a Roman bridge; a modern iron one crosses it side by side, but the advantages, from an æsthetic and utilitarian view-point, as well, are all in favour of the former. A ruined castle crowns the height above Pont Saint Martin and a few kilometres below, at Donnas, is an ancient Roman mile stone still bearing the uneffaced inscription XXXII M. P.

This whole region abounds in Napoleonic souvenirs. Fort Bard, the key to the valley, garrisoned by only eight hundred Austrians, gave Bonaparte a check which he almost despaired of overcoming. The Little Corporal’s ingenuity pulled him through, however. He sent out a patrol which laid the streets of the little village below the fort with straw and his army passed unobserved in the night as if slippered with felt. But for this, the Battle of Marengo, one of the most brilliant of French feats of arms, might never have been fought.

Bard, the fort and the village, is now ignored by the high road which, by a cut-off, avoids the steep climb in and out of the place.

Unheard of by most travellers in Italy, and entirely unknown to others, Verrex in the Val d’Aoste possesses a ravishing architectural surprise in the shape of a feudal castle on a hillside overlooking the town. It is of the square keep, or donjon, variety, and played an important part in the warlike times of the past.

The chateau of Issogne near by, built by the Prior Geor. Challant, less of a castle and more of a country house, is an admirable fifteenth century domestic establishment still habitable, and inhabited, to-day.

All up and down the valley are relics of the engineering skill of the great Roman road and bridge builders. The road over Mont Jovet, a sheer cut down into the roof of a mountain, was theirs; so were the bridges at Chatillon and Pont Saint Martin, and another at Salassiens. At the Pont d’Ael is a Roman aqueduct.

Chatillon, like Verrex, is not marked in big letters on many maps, but it belongs in every architect lover’s Italian itinerary. Its two bridges of olden time are veritable wonder works. Its chateau Ussel, a ruin of the fourteenth century, is still glorious under its coat of mail of moss and ivy, while the Castle of Count Christian d’Entréves is of the kind seen by most people only in picture books.

At Fénis is a magnificent feudal battlemented castle with donjon tower, a chemin ronde and a barbican so awe-inspiring as to seem unreal. With Verrex and Issogne, near by, Fénis completes a trio of chateaux-forts built by the overlords of the name of Challant who possessed feudal rights throughout all the Val d’Aoste.

Aimon de Challant built the castle of Fénis in 1330. Virtually it was, and is, a regular fortress, with as complete a system of defence as ever princely stronghold had. At once a sumptuous seigneurial residence and a seemingly impregnable fortress, it is one of the most remarkable works of its class above ground.

Aoste is a little Italian mountain town far more French than Italian from many points of view. It is of great antiquity and was the Augusta Prætoria of various Roman itineraries.

Like most Roman cities Aoste was laid out on the rectangular parallelogram plan, an aspect which it still retains.

Aoste’s triumphal arch, its city gate and walls, and its ancient towers all lend a quaint aspect of mediævalism which the twentieth century – so far as it has gone – has entirely failed to contaminate.

For lovers of English church history it will be a pleasure to recall that Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in the eleventh century, was born at Aoste. Another churchly memory at Aoste is a tablet inscribed with the particulars of the flight of Calvin from his refuge here in 1541.

Saint Bernard, who has given his name to two neighbouring mountain passes and to a breed of dogs, was Archbishop of Aoste in his time. His perilous journeys in crossing the Alps, going and coming to and from his missions of good, led to his founding the celebrated hospice on the nearby mountain pass which bears his name. The convent of the Great St. Bernard is the highest habited point in Europe.

From Aoste to the Hospice of the Grand Saint Bernard is twenty-six kilometres, with a rise of nearly 2,000 metres and a fall of a like amount to Martigny in Switzerland. The percentage of rise is considerably greater than the route leading into France by the Little Saint Bernard, which falls short of the former by three hundred metres, but the road is rather better. By far the easiest route from Turin into France is via the Col de Mont Cenis to Modane; but a modern automobile will not quarrel seriously with any of these save one or two short, ugly bits of from fifteen to seventeen per cent. They are pretty stiff; there’s no doubt about that, and with a motor whose horse power is enfeebled by the rarefied atmosphere at these elevations the driver is likely to meet with some surprises.

CHAPTER XX

FROM THE ITALIAN LAKES TO THE RIVIERA

THERE is one delightful crossing of Italy which is not often made either by the automobilist or the traveller by rail. We found it a delightful itinerary, though in no respect did it leave the beaten track of well worn roads; simply it was a hitherto unthought of combination of highroads and byroads which led from Como, on the shores of its mountain lake, to Nice, the head centre of the Riviera, just across the Italian border in France, entering that land of good cooks and good roads (better cooks and better roads than are found in Italy, please remember) via the Col de Tende and the Custom House of San Dalmazzo.

The itinerary covers a length of 365 kilometres and all of it is over passably good roads, the crossing of the frontier and the Lower Alps at the Col de Tende being at a lower level than any other of the Franco-Italian mountain passes, although we encountered snow on the heights even in the month of May.

This route is a pleasant variation from the usual entrance and exit from Italy which the automobilist coming from the south generally makes via one of the high Alpine valleys. If one is bound Parisward the itinerary is lengthened by perhaps five hundred kilometres, but if one has not entered Italy by the Cote d’Azur and the Riviera gateway the thing is decidedly worth the doing.

Como itself is the head centre for this part of the lake region, but we used it only as a “pointe de départ.” Cernobbio is far and away the best idling place on the Lago di Como and is getting to be the rival of Aix-les-Bains in France, already the most frequently visited automobile centre in Europe.

From Cernobbio to Como, swinging around the foot of the lake, is but a short six kilometres, and from the latter place the Milan road leaves by the old barbican gate and winds upwards steadily for a dozen kilometres, crossing the railway line a half a dozen times before Milan is reached.

The detour to Monza was made between Como and Milan, a lengthening of the direct route by perhaps a dozen kilometres, and the Strada Militaire, which joins with the Bergamo-Milan road, was followed into the Lombard capital through the Porto Orientale. The direct road, the post road from Como, enters the city by the Porta Nuova. There seems to be nothing to choose between the two routes, save that to-day one may be good and the other bad as to surface and six months later the reverse be the case.

On entering Milan one circles around the Foro Bonaparte and leaves the city by the Porta Magenta for Turin. Magenta, twenty-five kilometres; Novara, forty-six kilometres; so runs the itinerary, and all of it at the dead level of from 120 to 150 metres above the sea.

We were stoned at Novara and promptly made a complaint to the authorities through the medium of the proprietor of the Hotel de la Ville, where we had a most gorgeous repast for the rather high price of five francs a head. It was worth it, though, in spite of the fact that we garaged the automobile in the dining room where we ate. We got satisfaction, too, for the stoning by the sight of half a dozen small boys being hauled up to the justice, accompanied by their frightened parents. The outcome we are not aware of, but doubtless the hotel proprietor insisted that his clients should not be driven out of town in this manner, and, though probably no serious punishment was inflicted, somebody undoubtedly got a well-needed fright.

The road still continues towards Turin perfectly flat for a matter of a hundred kilometres beyond Novara, the glistening mountain background drawing closer and closer until one realizes to the full just why Turin and Milan are such splendid cities, an effect produced as much by their incomparable sites as by their fine modern buildings, their great avenues and boulevards, and their historic traditions.

This borderland between Lombardy and Piedmont forms the very flower of present day Italy. The diarist Evelyn remarked all this in a more appreciative manner than any writer before or since.

He wrote: “We dined at Marignano near Milan, a grette cittie famous for a cheese a little short of the best Parmeggiano, where we met half a dozen suspicious cavaliers who yet did us no harm. Then passing through a continuous garden we went on with exceeding pleasure, for this is the Paradise of Lombardy, the highways as even and straight as a cord, the fields to a vast extent planted with fruit, and vines climbing every tree planted at equal distances one from the other; likewise there is an abundance of mulberry trees and much corn.”

To arrive on the Riviera from Turin one leaves the roads leading to the high Alpine valleys behind. Directly north from Turin runs the highroad which ultimately debouches into the Val d’Aosta and the Saint Bernard Passes; to the west, those leading through Pinerolo and the Col de Sestrières and Susa and the Cols of Mont Genèvre and Mont Cenis.

Just out of Turin on the road to Cuneo (which is perhaps more often called by its French name, Coni, for you are now heading straight for the frontier, a matter of but a half a hundred kilometres beyond) is Moncalieri, the possessor of a royal chateau where was born, in 1904, Prince Humbert of Piedmont, the present heir to the Italian throne.

When Italy’s present Queen Helena sojourned here after the birth of her son she took her promenades abroad en automobile and so came to be a partisan of the new form of locomotion as already had the dowager Queen before her. The latter may properly enough be called the automobiling monarch of Europe for she is heard of to-day at Aix-les-Bains, to-morrow at Paris or Trouville and the week after at Pallanza or Cadennabia, and in turn in Spain, at Marienbad, Ostend, Biarritz or Nice, and she always travels by road, and at a good pace, too.

This up-to-date queen’s predilection for the automobile in preference to the state coach of other days or the plebeian railway has doubtless had much to do with the development of the automobile industry in Italy. It has, too, made the gateway into Italy from the Riviera over the Col de Tende the good mountain road that it is. Those who pass this way – and it’s the only way worth considering from the South of France to the Italian Lakes – will have cause to bless Italy’s automobiling queen. The chiefs of state of Italy, France and Germany know how to encourage automobilism and all that pertains thereto better than those of Republican America or Monarchial Britain.

Carignano, twelve kilometres beyond Moncalieri, is famous for its silk industry and its beautiful women. We saw nothing of the former, but the latter certainly merit the encomium which has been bestowed upon them ever since the Chevalier Bayard remarked the gentilezza and beauty of the widow Bianca Montferrat, and fought for her in a tournament centuries ago.

Carmagnola, a half a dozen kilometres off the direct road, just beyond Carignano, takes much the same rank as the latter place. Neither are tourist points to the slightest degree, but each is delightfully unworldly and give one glimpses of native life that one may find only in the untravelled hinterland of a well known country. The peasant folk of Carmagnola are as picturesque and gay in their costume and manner of life as one can possibly expect to see in these days when manners and customs are changing before the new order of things. Here is the home of the celebrated Dance of the Carmagnole, a gyrating, whirling, dervish-like fury of a dance which makes a peasant girl of the country look more charming than ever as she swishes and swirls her yards of gold or silver neck beads in a most dazzling fashion. The French Revolution borrowed the “Carmagnole” for its own unspeakable orgies, by what right no one knows, for there is nothing outré about it when seen in its native land. Possibly some alien Savoyards, who may have joined their forces with the Marseilles Batallion, may have brought it to France with their light luggage – proverbially light, for the Savoyard has the reputation of always travelling with a bundle on a stick. Would that we touring automobilists could, or would, travel lighter than we do!

Racconigi, a half a dozen kilometres farther on, has another royal chateau, and, passing Saluzza, through the arch erected in memory of the marriage of Victor Amedeo and Christine of France, one arrives at Cuneo in thirty kilometres more. From Carmagnola to Cuneo direct, by Savigliano, is practically the same distance, but the other route is perhaps the more picturesque.

At Cuneo one has attained an elevation of some five hundred and thirty-five metres above sea level, the rise thence to the Col de Tende being eight hundred metres more, that is to say the pass is crossed at an elevation not exceeding 1,300 metres.

Cuneo’s Albergo Barra di Ferro (a new name to us for a hotel) accommodates one for the price of five francs a day and upwards, and gives a discount of ten per cent. to members of the Touring Club Italiano. These prices will certainly not disturb any one who can afford to supply a prodigal automobile with tires at the present high prices.

We climbed up from Cuneo to the Col, a matter of thirty-three kilometres of a very easy rise, in something less than a couple of hours, the last six kilometres, the steepest portion, averaging but a five per cent. grade.

On leaving Cuneo the road ascends very gradually, running along the valley of the Vermagnana to the foot of the Col where it begins to mount in earnest. Below is the great plain of Piedmont watered by the Po and its tributary rivers, while above rises the mass of the Maritime Alps, with Mount Viso as its crowning peak, nearly four thousand metres high. It is a veritable Alpine road but not at all difficult of ascent. About midway on the height one remarks the attempt to cut a tunnel and thereby shorten the route, an attempt which was abandoned long years ago. From the crest, the Col itself, one gets a view ranging from Mont Viso to Mont Rosa in the north and on the south even to the blue waters of the Mediterranean. For fully a third of the year, and often nearer half, the Col de Tende is cursed with bad weather and is often impassable for wheeled traffic in spite of the fact of its comparatively low elevation. The wind storms here are very violent.

From Tende the road winds down into the low French levels, and in this portion takes rank as one of the earliest of Alpine roads, it having been built by Carlo Emanuele I in 1591.

Down through the valley of the Torrent of the Roya glides the mountain road and, passing San Dalmazzo and numerous rock villages, a distinct feature of these parts, in sixteen kilometres reaches Breil, the first place of note on French territory.