Italian Highways and Byways from a Motor Car

Santa Margherita is now a full-blown resort with great hotels, bathing-machines and all the usual attributes of a place of its class. Lace-making and coral-fishing are the occupations of the inhabitants who do not live off of exploiting the tourists. Both products are made here (and in Belgium and Birmingham) in the imitation varieties, so one had best beware.

If one doesn’t speak Italian, German will answer in all these resorts of the Levantine Riviera, quite as well as French or English. The “Tea-Shop” and “American Bar” signs here give way to those of “Munich” and “Pilsner.”

The village of Portofino itself is delightful; a quaint little fishing port surrounded by tree-clad hills running to the water’s edge. There is a Hôtel Splendide, once a villa of the accepted Ligurian order, and a less pretentious, more characteristic, Albergo Delfino lower down on the quay. The arms of the little port are a spouting dolphin as befits its seafaring aspect, so the Albergo Delfino certainly ought to have the preference for this reason if no other.

On the cliff road running around the promontory from Portofino to Rapallo are a half a dozen more or less modern villas of questionable architecture, but of imposing proportions, and one and all delightfully disposed.

The Villa Pagana is the property of the Marchese Spinola, and the Castel Paraggi, the property of a gentleman prosaically named Brown, is theatrically and delightfully disposed, though bizarre in form.

Rapallo, at the head of the bay, is a continuation of what has gone before. There are great hotels and pensions, and many of them. Its campaniles and church towers set off the framing of Rapallo delightfully. The Hôtel de l’Europe has more than once been the abode of Queen Margherita of Italy, and most of the notables who pass this way. The hotel curiously enough seems none the worse for it; it is good, reasonable in price and conveniently situated on the quay, overlooking a picturesque granite tower built up from a foundation sunk in the waters of the Mediterranean. The Corsair Dragutte, a buccaneer of romantic days, came along and plundered these Ligurian towns as often as he felt like it. Frequently they paid no attention to his visits, save to give up what blackmail and tribute he demanded; but Rapallo built this tower as a sort of watch tower or fortress. It is an admirable example of a sentinel watch tower, and might well be classed as a diminutive fortress-château.

From Rapallo to Chiavari the coast road winds and rises and falls with wonderful variety between villa gardens and vineyards. On the slopes above are dotted tiny dwellings, and church towers point skywards in most unexpected places.

The chief architectural attributes of Chiavari are its arcaded house fronts, a queer blend of round and pointed arches, and columns of all orders. The effect is undeniably good. The town was one of the most important in the old Genoese Republic, save the capital itself.

The towers scattered here and there through the town and in the neighbourhood are all feudal relics, albeit they are fragmentary. The Castle which the native points out with pride is neither very magnificent nor very elegant, but is indicative of the style of building of the feudal time in these parts. Decidedly the best things of Chiavari are its house fronts, and some crazy old streets running back from the main thoroughfares. There are some slate quarries in the neighbourhood and a ten foot slab, larger than the top of a billiard table, can be cut if occasion requires. The church of San Salvatore near Lavagna, where the quarries are, was founded by Pope Innocent IV in 1243.

Lavagna, near by, has a Palazzo Rosso, in that it is built of a reddish stone, though that is not its official name. It was an appanage of the Fieschi family, who owned to Popes, Cardinals and soldiers in the gallant days of the Genoese Republic. Sestri-Levante, a half a dozen kilometres beyond Chiavari, is the last of the Riviera resorts. It is a mere strip of villa and hotel-lined roadway with a delightful water front and a charming and idyllic background.

Spezia is reached only by climbing a lengthy mountain road up over the Pass of the Bracco; sixty kilometres in all from Sestri to Spezia. The highroad now leaves the coast to wind around inland over the lower slopes of the Apennines. The railway itself follows the shore.

It is a finely graded road with entrancing far-away vistas of the sea, the distant snow-capped summits of the mountains to the north and, off southward, the more gently rising Tuscan hills.

After having climbed some twenty-one hundred feet above the sea, the highroad runs down through the valley of the Vara, until finally at Spezia, Italy’s great marine arsenal, one comes again to the Mediterranean shore.

Just before Spezia is reached, snuggled close in a little bay, is Vernazza – where the wine comes from, at least, the wine the praises of which were sung by Boccaccio “as the paragon of wines.” Wine is still a product of the region, but its quality may not be what it once was.

Spezia is a snug, conservative and exclusive military and naval town. The gold-lace and blue-cloth individuals of the “service” dominate everything, even to the waiters in the hotels and cafés. No one else has a show.

The Hotel Croix de Malte (with a French name be it observed) is the chic hotel of Spezia, with prices on a corresponding scale, and no garage. The Albergo Italia, equally well situated, a typical Italian house of its class, is more modest in its prices and better as to its food. It has no garage either, but under the circumstances, that of itself is no drawback. Across the street, in a vacant store, you may lodge your automobile for two francs a night, or for one franc if you tell the ambitious and obliging little man who runs it that he demands too much. He is really the best thing we found in Spezia. We had run out of gasoline in entering the city, the long run down hill flattened out into a plain just before the town was reached, but he accommodatingly sent out a five gallon tin (“original package” goods from Philadelphia) and would take no increase in price for his trouble. Such a thing in the automobile line ought to be encouraged. We pay “through the nose,” as the French say, often enough as it is.

Spezia’s suburban villas are a natural outcome of its environment, but they are all modern and have, none of them, the flavour of historic romanticism about them.

An ancient castle tower on the hills above Spezia is about the only feudal ruin near by. The viper, the device of the Viscontis, is still graven above its entrance door to recall the fact that the device of the Milanese nobles was a viper, and that their natures, too, took after that of the unlovely thing. The Viper of Milan and the Viscontis is a worthy cage companion to the hedgehog of François I.

Spezia’s gulf is all that Spezia is not; romantic, lovely and varied. It was described in ancient times by Strabo, the geographer, and by Persius. Little of its topographical surroundings or climatic attributes have changed since that day.

The road down the coast from Spezia is marked on the maps as perfectly flat, but within a dozen kilometres, before Arcola is reached, is as stiff a couple of hair-pin turns as one will remember ever having come across suddenly in his travels. They are not formidable hills, perhaps, but they are surprising, and since one has to drop down again immediately to sea level they seem entirely unnecessary.

The river Magra which enters the sea just east of Spezia divided the Genoese territory from that of Tuscany.

“Macra che per cammin cortoLo Gonovese parta dal Toscano.”– Dante, “Paradisio.”

Sarzana is not a tourist point, but the traveller by road will not be in a hurry to pass it by. It has, curiously enough, an Albergo della Nuova York, built on the fortification walls of feudal days. It is not for this, though, that one lingers at Sarzana. The Bonapartes were originally descended from Sarzana ancestry. It was proven by contemporary documents that a certain Buonaparte, a notary, lived here in 1264. Supposedly, it was this limb of the law who became the chief of the Corsican family.

The old feudal castle of Sarzana, with its round tower, its moat and its later Renaissance gateway is the very ideal of mouldy mediævalism.

From Sarzana, it is, figuratively speaking, but a step to Carrara and Massa, the centres of the marble industry. Of all the materials the artist requires, none is so much sought after as the pure white marble of Carrara. The sculptured marble of Carrara goes out into the world from thousands of ateliers to thousands of resting places but it all comes from this great white mountainside in the Apennines which has made the region famous and rich. This little Tuscan town of Carrara owes its all to its, seemingly, inexhaustible stores of milk-white, fine-grained marbles. More especially is the marble of Carrara in demand for statuary; but in all the finer forms of carven stone it finds its place supreme.

Men and beasts, oxen, horses and mules, and carts of all shapes and sizes, make the vicinity of Carrara the centre of an uproar that would be maddening if one had to live in it; but it is all very interesting to the stranger, and speaks more loudly than words of the importance of the great industry of the neighbourhood.

All around are great heaps – mountains almost – of broken, splintered marble; the débris merely of the great blocks which have, in times past, been quarried and sent to all quarters of the earth.

The quarries of Carrara have been worked ever since the Roman epoch, and the tufted hillsides round about have been burrowed to their bowels in taking out this untold wealth which, without exaggeration, has been as great as that of many mines of gold.

Quite twenty per cent. of the population work at the industry, and five hundred men are actually engaged in hewing out and slicing off the great blocks. Ten thousand, at least, find their livelihood dependent upon the industry, and two hundred thousand tons is a normal annual output; in price, valued at from 150 to 1,500 francs the cubic metre.

At Massa one joins the main road again running south by the shore. One never hears of the conventional tourist stopping at Massa; but we found the Hotel Massa and its dinner in the garden worth the taking and agreed that the Château, in base rococo style, (now the public administrative buildings), a curiosity worth seeing. Massa has a Napoleonic memory hanging over it, too, in that it was once the residence of the Little Corporal’s sister. Massa’s Castello, high above all else in the town, is grim, lofty and spectacular though to be viewed only from without. Massa is worth making a note of, even by the hurried traveller.

Since leaving Sarzana the high road has become worse and worse, until in the vicinity of Carrara and Massa it is almost indescribably bad. There is no such stretch of bad road in Europe as this awful fifty kilometres, for it continues all the way to Lucca and Livorno. The vast amount of traffic drawn by ten head of oxen at a time is what does it of course, and as there is no way around one has to go through it, though it’s a heart-breaking job to one that cares anything for his automobile.

Pietrasanta, eight kilometres farther on, was, for us, an undiscovered beauty spot and historic shrine; at least, none of us had ever heard of it till we passed the portals. Now we know that the walls, through which we passed, were the same that the blood-thirsty, battling Lorenzo di Medici besieged in 1482; and that the ancient bronze font in the Baptistery was the work of Donatello. We were glad that Massa and Pietrasanta were counted in, as they should be by everyone passing this way, even though they did take up half a day’s time – all on account of the awful road – part of which time, however, you are eating that excellent lunch in the garden of the Hotel Massa. That time will not be lost anyway, one must eat somewhere.

Eight kilometres beyond Massa is Viareggio, an unlovely, incipient seaside resort for dwellers in the Tuscan towns; but a historic spot nevertheless, and interesting from that viewpoint at any rate.

Viareggio has no villas or palaces of note, and its chief associations for the traveller lie in its memories of Shelley and Ouida, the Marquise de la Ramée. There is a monument, erected to Shelley in 1894, commemorating the fact that he was drowned here, in the Tyrrhenian Sea, and his body consumed by fire, on the shore.

It was in the village of Massarosa, near Viareggio, that that much-abused and very abusive old lady, Ouida, the Marquis de la Ramée, died in January, 1908. Since 1877 she had made Italy her home, and for years she had lived here alone, not in poverty or misery, for she had a “civil pension” which was more than sufficient to keep the wolf from the door. She died miserable and alone however. Ouida was a more real, more charitable person than she was given credit for being. She didn’t like the English, and Americans she liked still less, but she loved the Italians. Whose business was it then if she chose to live among them, with her unkempt and unwholesome-looking dogs and her slatternly maid-of-all-work? Ouida, as she herself said, did not hate humanity; she hated society; and she had more courage than some of the rest of us in that she would have nothing to do with it.

The vineyards lying back of Viareggio may not be the most luxuriant in Italy, but they blossom abundantly enough.

Lucca is thirty-five kilometres from Viareggio and the road still bad – on to Livorno, turning to the right instead of the left at Viareggio, it is worse.

Lucca has a right to its claim as one of the most ancient cities of Tuscany, for it is one of the least up-to-date of Italian cities. When Florence was still sunk in its marsh Lucca was already old, and filled with a commercial importance which to-day finds its echo in the distribution of the Lucca olive oil of trade which one may buy at Vancouver, Johannesburg or Rio. Indeed the label on the bottle of olive oil is the only reminiscence many have of Lucca.

The decadence came to Lucca in due time and it degenerated sadly, about its last magnificent ray being that shot out when Napoleon gave the city to his sister Eliza Bacciochi, with the title of Princess of Lucca. She was a real benefactress to the country, but with the fall of Napoleon all his satellites were snuffed out, too, and then the benign influences of the Princess Eliza were forgotten and ignored.

Southwest from Lucca, with Pisa lying between, is the great port of Leghorn, whence are shipped the marbles of Carrara, the oil of Lucca, the wines of Chianti and the Leghorn hats and braids of all Tuscany. These four things keep Livorno going.

Leghorn is as modern as Lucca is antiquated and is the most cosmopolitan of all Italian cities.

When Philip III expelled the Moors from Spain Cosmo II, Duke of Livorno, invited two thousand of them to come to his Dukedom.

Montesquieu remarked upon this conglomerate population, and approved of it apparently, as he called the founding and populating of the city the master work of the Medici dynasty.

CHAPTER VII

ON TUSCAN ROADS

THE valley of the Arno, as the river flows through the heart of Tuscany from its source high in the hills just south of Monte Falterona, is the most romantic region in all Italy. It is the borderland between the south and the north, and, as it was a battle-ground between Guelph and Ghibellines, so too is it the common ground where the blood of the northerner and southerner mingles to-day.

As great rivers go, the Arno is neither grand nor magnificent, but, though its proportions are not great, its banks are lined with historic and artistic ruins, from the old fortress at Marina di Pisa to Poppi, the ancient capital of the Casentino, perched so quaintly upon its river-washed rock.

Pisa, Leghorn and Lucca are a triumvirate of Tuscan towns which should be viewed and considered collectively. One should not be included in an itinerary without the others, though indeed they have little in common, save the memories of the past.

Pisa is another of these dead cities of Europe, like Bruges, Leyden, and Rothenburg. Once ardent and lively in every activity of life, its population now has sunk into a state of lethargy. Industry and commerce, and the men who should busy themselves therewith, are in the background, hidden behind a barrier of bureaucracy. Pisa, a town of twenty-six thousand inhabitants, has a tribunal of nine civil judges, a criminal court presided over by sixty-three more, and a “roll” of more than half a hundred notaries. Then there is a service of Domains, of Registry and of Public Debt; besides an array of functionaries in charge of seminaries, orphan asylums, schools and colleges. All these belong to the state.

Pisa, sitting distant and proud on the banks of the Arno, enjoys a softer climate than most of the coast cities or interior towns of central Italy. The Tyrrhenian Sea is but a gulf of the Mediterranean, but just where it bathes the shore about the mouth of the Arno, it has a higher temperature than most northern Mediterranean waters.

Pisa is more of a sanitarium than it is a gay watering place however. The city is, in fact, like its celebrated leaning tower, half tottering on the brink of its grave. Commerce and industry are far from active and its streets are half deserted; many of them are literally grass-grown and all the others are paved with great flat clean-swept flags, a delight for the automobilist, whose chief experience of pavements has been in France and Belgium.

The entrance to Pisa by road from the north is one of the most pleasing of that of any Italian city. For the last half dozen kilometres the road steadily improves until it becomes one of the best as it circles around that wonderful triumvirate of architectural splendours, the Duomo, the Baptistery and the tottering Torre. The group is one of the scenic surprises of Italy, and the automobilist has decidedly the best opportunity of experiencing the emotions it awakes, for he does not have to come out from town (for the monuments are some ways from the centre) to see it. It is the first impression that the traveller by road gets of Pisa and of its architectural wonders, as he draws suddenly upon it from the slough-like road through which he has literally ploughed his way for many kilometres. And it is an impression he will never forget.

All along the banks of the Arno, as it flows through Pisa, are dotted here and there palaces of Renaissance days. One is now a dependence of a hotel; another has been appropriated by the post office; others are turned into banks and offices; but there are still some as well ordered and livable as in their best days.

The Palazzo Agostini on the Lung’ Arno, its façade ornamented with terra cotta medallions, is now a part of the Hotel Nettuno which, as well as any other of Pisa’s hotels, cares for the automobilist in a satisfactory manner. Its garage accommodations are abominably confined, and to get in and out one takes a considerable risk of damaging his mud-guards, otherwise they are satisfactory, though one pays two francs a night for them, which one should not be obliged to do. Here is another point where France is superior to Italy as an automobile touring ground.

Pisa and its palaces are a delight from every point of view, though indeed none of the edifices are very grand, or even luxurious. They strike a middle course however, and are indicative of the solid comfort and content in which their original owners must have lived at Pisa in latter Renaissance times.

Pisa’s Campo Santo is the most famous example of graveyard design and building in all the world. It is calm and dignified, but stupendous and startling in its immensity.

From Pisa to Florence by road, following the valley of the Arno, one passes through the typical Tuscan countryside, although the hill-country lies either to one side or the other. It is the accessible route however, and the one usually claimed by the local garage and hotel keepers to be one of the best of Italian roads. It is and it isn’t; it all depends upon the time of the year, the fact that the road may recently have been repaired or not, and the state of the weather. We went over it in a rain which had been falling steadily for three days and found it very bad, though unquestionably it would have been much more comfortable going in dry weather. It is the approved route between the two cities however, and unless one is going directly down the coast to Rome, via Grosseto, Pisa is the best place from which to commence the inland détour.

Cascina, a dozen kilometres away, was the scene of a sanguinary defeat of the Pisans by the Florentines on the feast of San Vittorio in 1364, and each year the event is celebrated by the inhabitants. It seems singular that a people should seek to perpetuate the memory of a defeat, but perhaps the original inhabitants sympathized with Florence rather than with Pisa.

Pontedera is a big country town at the juncture of the Era and the Arno. It has no monuments and no history worth remarking, but is indicative of the prosperity of the country round about. Pontedera has no hotel with garage accommodations, and if you get caught in a thunder storm, as we did, you will have to grin and bear it and plug along.

San Miniato de Tedeschi rises on its hill top a few kilometres farther on in an imposing manner. It is the most conspicuous thing in the landscape for a wide radius. Francesco Sforza was born here, and Frederic II made it the seat of the Imperial vicarage. San Miniato is a hill town of the very first rank, and like others of the same class – Fiesole, Colle and Volterra – (though its hill-top site may have nothing to do with this) it had the privilege of conferring nobility on plebeians. The Grand Duke of Tuscany in the nineteenth century accordingly made “an English gentleman of Hebrew extraction” – so history reads – the Marquis of San Miniato. At any rate it was probably as good a title as is usually conferred on any one, and served its soi-disant owner well enough for a crest for his note paper or automobile door. One wonders what the gentleman took for his motto. History does not say.

Empoli is a thriving town, engaged principally in killing fowls and sending them to the Florence market, plaiting straw to be made into hats, and covering chianti bottles with the same material.

The Ghibellines would have made Empoli their capital in 1260, after their meeting or “parliament” here. It was proposed too, that Florence should be razed. One man only, Farinata degli Uberti, opposed it. “Never,” said he, “will I consent that our beloved city, which our enemies have spared, shall be destroyed or insulted by our own hands.”

The old palace in which the Ghibelline parliament met still stands on the Piazza del Mercato.

No automobilist who “happens” on Empoli will ever want to see it again, on account of the indignities which will be heaped on his automobile, though the Albergo Guippone, run by a mother and son in most competent, but astonishing, fashion, is the real thing. The food and cooking are extraordinarily good, and the house itself new and cleanly. You eat at a big round table, with a great long-necked bottle of chianti swung on a balance in the centre. It must hold at least two gallons, and, without the well-sweep arrangement for pouring out its contents, you would go dry. The wine served is as good as the rest of the fare offered. The fault with Empoli’s hotel is that there is no garage and the proprietors recommend no one as competent to house your automobile, saying you can take your choice of any one of a half a dozen renters of stallagio near by. They are all bad doubtless; but the one we tried, who permitted us to put the automobile in an uncovered dirty hole with horses, donkeys and pigs, took – yes, took, that’s the word – two lire for the service! If you do go to Empoli keep away from this ignorant, unprogressive individual.

North of Empoli, on the direct road from Lucca to Florence, are Pistoja and Prato.

Pistoja is one of the daintiest of Tuscan cities, but not many of the habitués of Florence know it, at least not as they know Pisa or Siena.

Its past is closely intermingled with Florentine and Italian history, and indeed has been most interesting. Practically it is a little mountain city, though lying quite at the base of the Apennines, just before they flatten out into the seashore plain. Its country people, in town for a market-day, are chiefly people of the hills, shepherds and the like, but their speech is Tuscan, the purest speech of Italy, the nearest that is left us to the speech of Boccaccio’s day.