Italian Highways and Byways from a Motor Car

Guidoguerra IV, Count Palatine of Tuscany in the early thirteenth century, was a sort of Robin Hood, except that he was not an outlaw. He made a road near the home of the monks of Camaldoli, and intruded armed men into their solitude, “and worse still, play actors and women,” where all women had been forbidden: moreover, he had all the oxen of the monks driven off. He played pranks on the minstrels and buffoons who came to his palace. One minstrel, named Malanotte, he compelled to spend a bad night on the rooftop in the snow; another, Maldecorpo, had to lie and sizzle between two fires; while a third, Abbas, he tonsured by pulling out his hair.

Literally translated Casentino means “the valley enclosed.” It is a most romantic region, and the praises of its mountain walls and chestnut woods have been sung by all sojourners there, ever since Dante set the fashion.

The life of the peasant of the Casentino to-day is much the same as in Dante’s time, and his pleasures and sorrows are expressed in much the same manner as of old. Strange folksongs and dances, strange dramas of courtship, and strange religious ceremonies all find place here in this unspoiled little forest tract between Florence and Arezzo; along whose silent paths one may wander for hours and come across no one but a few contented charcoal-burners who know nothing beyond their own woods.

On the lower levels, the highway leading from Florence to Perugia and Foligno rolls along, as silent as it was in mediæval times. It is by no means a dull monotonous road, though containing fewer historic places than the road by Siena or Viterbo. It is an alternative route from north to south; and the most direct one into the heart of Umbria.

On arriving from Florence by the highroad one passes through the long main street of Montevarchi, threading his way carefully to avoid, if possible, the dogs and ducks which run riot everywhere.

A great fertile plain stretches out on each side of the Arno, the railway sounding the only modern note to be heard, save the honk! honk! (the French say coin, coin, which is better) of an occasional passing automobile.

Up and down the hills ox teams plough furrows as straight as on the level, and the general view is pastoral until one strikes the forests neighbouring upon Arezzo, eighty kilometres from Florence.

Here all is savage and primeval. Here was many a brigand’s haunt in the old days, but the Government has wiped out the roving banditti; and to-day the greatest discomfort which would result from a hold-up would be a demand for a cigar, or a box of matches. At Palazzaccio, a mere hamlet en route, was the hiding place of the once notorious brigand Spadolino; a sort of stage hero, who affected to rob the rich for the benefit of the poor – a kind of socialism which was never successful. Robin Hood tried it, so did Macaire, Gaspard de Besse and Robert le Diable and they all came to timely capture.

Spadolino one day stopped a carriage near Palazzaccio, cut the throats of its occupants and gave their gold to a poor miller, Giacomo by name, who wanted ninety francesconi to pay his rent. This was the last cunning trick of Spadolino, for he was soon captured and hung at the Porta Santa Croce at Florence, as a warning to his kind.

Not every hurried traveller who flies by express train from Florence to Rome puts foot to earth and makes acquaintance with Arezzo. The automobilist does better, he stops here, for one reason or another, and he sees things and learns things hitherto unknown to him.

Arezzo should not be omitted from the itinerary of any pilgrim to Italy. It was one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan federation, and made peace with Rome in 310 A. D. and for ever remained its ally.

The Flaminian Way, built by the Consul Flaminius in 187 B. C., between Aretium (Arezzo) and Bononia (Bologna), is still traceable in the neighbourhood.

Petrarch is Arezzo’s deity, and his birthplace is to be found to-day on the Via del Orto. On the occasion of the great fête given in 1904 in honour of the six hundredth anniversary of his birth, the municipality made this place a historic monument.

Vasari, who as a biographer has been very useful to makers of books on art, was also born at Arezzo in 1512. His house is a landmark. Local guides miscall it a palace, but in reality it is a very humble edifice; not at all palatial.

The Palazzo Pretoria at Arezzo has one of the most bizarre façades extant, albeit its decorative and cypher panels add no great architectural beauty.

Arezzo’s cathedral is about the saddest, ugliest religious edifice in Italy. Within is the tomb of Pope Gregory X.

Poppi and Bibbiena are the two chief towns of the upper valley. Each is blissfully unaware of the world that has gone before, and has little in common with the life of to-day, save such intimacy as is brought by the railroad train, as it screeches along in the valley between them half a dozen times a day.

Poppi sits on a high table rock, its feet washed by the flowing Arno. The town itself is dead or sleeping; but most of its houses are frankly modern, in that they are well kept and freshly painted or whitewashed.

The only old building in Poppi, not in ruins, is its castle, occupying the highest part of the rock; a place of some strength before the use of heavy guns. It was built by Lapo in 1230, and bears a family resemblance to the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence. The court-yard contains some curious architecture, and a staircase celebrated for the skill shown in its construction. It resembles that in the Bargello at Florence, and leads to a chapel containing frescoes which, according to Vasari, are by Spinello Aretino.

Poppi is a good point from which to explore the western slopes of Vallombrosa or Monte Secchieta. The landlord and the local guides will lead one up through the celebrated groves at a fixed price “tutto compreso,” and, if you are liberal with your tip, will open a bottle of “vino santo” for you. Could hospitality and fair dealing go further?

Bibbiena, the native town of Francesco Berni, and of the Cardinal Bibbiena, who was the patron of Raphael, has many of the characteristics of Poppi, in point of site and surroundings. It is the point of departure for the convent of La Verna, built by St. Francis of Assisi in 1215; situated high on a shoulder of rugged rock. The highest point of the mountain, on which it stands, is called La Penna, the “rock” or “divide” between the valleys of the Arno and the Tiber. To the eastward are seen Umbria and the mountains of Perugia; on the west, the valley of the Casentino and the chain of the Prato Magno; to the northward is the source of the Arno, and to the northeast, that of the Tiber.

To the east, just where the Casentino, by means of the cross road connecting with the Via Æmilia, held its line of communication with the Adriatic, is the Romagna, a district where feudal strife and warfare were rampant throughout the middle ages. From its story it would seem as though the region never had a tranquil moment.

The chain of little towns of the Romagna is full of souvenirs of the days when seigneuries were carved out of pontifical lands by the sword of some rebel who flaunted the temporal power of the church. These were strictly personal properties, and their owners owed territorial allegiance to the Pope no more than they did to the descendants of the Emperors.

Rex Romanorum as a doctrine was dead for ever. Guelph and Ghibelline held these little seigneuries, turn by turn, and from the Adriatic to the Gulf of Spezia there was almost constant warfare, sometimes petty, sometimes great. It was warfare, too, between families, between people of the same race, the most bloody, disastrous and sad of all warfare.

CHAPTER IX

THE ROAD TO ROME

SIENA, crowning its precipitous hillside, stands, to-day, unchanged from what it was in the days of the Triumvirate. Church tower and castle wall jut out into a vague mystery of silhouetted outline, whether viewed by daylight or moonlight. The great gates of the ramparts still guard the approach on all sides, and the Porta Camollia of to-day is the same through which the sons of Remus entered when fleeing from their scheming Uncle, Romulus.

Siena’s Piazza Vittorio Emanuele is a landmark. Dante called it “a great square where men live gloriously free,” though then it was simply the Piazza; and the picture is true to-day, in a different sense. In former days it was a bloody “mis-en-scène” for intrigue and jealousy; but, to-day, simply the centre of the life and movement of a prosperous, thriving, though less romantic city of thirty thousand souls.

This great Piazza is rounded off by a halo of magnificent feudal palaces, whose very names are romantic.

All about Siena’s squares and street corners are innumerable gurgling, spouting fountains, many of them artistically and monumentally beautiful, and a few even dating from the glorious days of old.

Dante sang of Siena’s famous fountains which, in truth, form a galaxy of artistic accessories of life hardly to be equalled in any other city of Siena’s class. Leaving that “noble extravagance in marble,” Siena’s Cathedral, and its churches quite apart, the city ranks as one of the most interesting tourist points of Italy.

Siena has still left a relic of mediævalism in the revival of its ancient horse racing festa, when its great Piazza Vittorio Emanuele is built up and barricaded like a circus of Roman times. Chariot races, gladiatorial combats and bull fights, all had their partisans among municipalities, but Siena’s choice was horse racing. And each year, “Il Palio,” on July the 2nd and on August the 16th, becomes a great popular amusement of the Sienese. It is most interesting, and still picturesquely mediæval in costuming and setting; and is a civic function and fête a great deal more artistically done – as goes without saying – than the Guy Fawkes celebrations of London, or the fourth of July “horribles” in America. For the thoroughly genuine and artistic pageant Anglo Saxons have to go to Italy. There is nothing to be learned from the Mardi-Gras celebrations of Paris nor the carnivals of the Cote d’Azur.

Some one has said that Siena sits on the border land between idyllic Tuscany and the great central Italian plain. Literally this is so. It marks the distinction between the grave and the gay so far as manners and customs and conditions of life go. On the north are the charming, smiling hills and vales, bright with villas, groves and vines; whilst to the south, towards Rome and the Campagna, all is of an austerity of present day fact and past tradition. Indeed, the landscape would be stern and repellent, were it not picturesquely savage.

Straight runs the highroad to Rome via Viterbo, or makes a détour via Montepulciano and Orvieto. At Asinalunga, Garibaldi was arrested by government spies, by the order of the monarch to whom he had presented the sovereignty of Naples. Such is official ingratitude, ofttimes! The town itself is unworthy of remark, save for that incident of history.

By the direct road the mountains of Orvieto and Montepulciano rise grimly to the left. The towns bearing the same names are charming enough from the artistic point of view, but are not usually reckoned tourist sights.

Montepulciano is commonly thought of slight interest, but it is the very ideal of an unspoiled mediæval town, with a half dozen palazzo façades, which might make the name and fame of some modern scene painter if he would copy them.

Chiusi, on the direct road, lies embedded in a circle of hills and surrounded by orange groves. It is nothing more nor less than a glorified graveyard, but is unique in its class. Lars Porsena of Clusium comes down to us as a memory of school-time days, and for that reason, if no other, we consider it our duty to visit the Etruscan tombs of Clusium, the modern Chiusi.

There are three distinct tiers, or shelves, of these ancient tombs, and interesting enough they are to all, but only the antiquary will have any real passion for them, so most of us are glad enough to spin our way by road another fifty odd kilometres to Orvieto.

Four kilometres of a precipitous hill climb leads from the lower road up into Orvieto, zig-zagging all the way. It is the same bit of roadway up which the Popes fled in the middle ages when hard pressed by their enemies. Clement VII, one of the unhappy Medici, fled here after the sinning Connétable Bourbon attempted the sacking of Rome; and a sheltering stronghold he found it.

This Papal city of refuge is, to-day, a more or less squalid place, with here and there a note of something more splendid. On the whole Orvieto’s charm is not so much in the grandeur of its monuments as in their character. The cathedral is reckoned one of the great Gothic shrines of Italy, and that, indeed, is the chief reason for most of the tourist travel. The few mediæval palaces that Orvieto possesses are very splendid, though they, one and all, suffer from their cramped surroundings.

The Hotel Belle Arti, to-day, with a garage for automobiles, was the ancient Palazzo Bisenzi. It had a reputation among travellers, of a decade or a generation ago, of being a broken-down palace and a worse hotel. If one wants to dwell in marble halls and sleep where royal heads have slept, one can do all this, at Orvieto, for eight or nine lire a day.

One enters Viterbo, forty-seven kilometres from Orvieto, by the highroad to Rome. The little town preserves much of its mediæval characteristics to-day, though, indeed, it is a progressive, busy place, of something like twenty thousand souls, most of whom, appear to be engaged in the wine industry. On the Piazza Fontana is a magnificent Gothic fountain dating from the thirteenth century, and the Municipio, on the Piazza del Plebiscito, is of a contemporary period, with a fine fountained court-yard.

In the environs of Viterbo is a splendid palace, built by Vignola for the Cardinal Farnese, nephew of the Pope Paul III. In form it was a great square mass with its angles reinforced by square towers, with a circular court within, surrounded by an arcade by which one entered the various apartments. It was, perhaps, the most originally conceived work of its particular epoch of Renaissance times; and all the master minds and hands of the builders of the day seem to have had more or less to do with it. These Italians of the Renaissance were inventors of nothing; but their daring and ingenuity in combining ideas taken, bodily, from those of antiquity, made more successful and happy combinations than those of the architects of to-day, who build theatres after the models of Venetian palaces, and add a Moorish minaret; or railway stations on the plan of the Parthenon, and put a campanile in the middle, like the chimney of a blast furnace. The Italian campanile was a bell-tower, to be sure, but it had nothing in common with the minaret of the east, nor the church spire of the Gothic builder in northern climes.

From Siena the coast road to Rome, practically the same distance as the inland route, is one of surprising contrast. It approaches the coast at Grosseto, seventy kilometres from Siena, and thence, all the way to Rome, skirts the lapping waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Off shore is Elba, with its Napoleonic memories, and the Island of Monte Cristo which is considered usually a myth, but which exists in the real to-day, as it did when Dumas romanced (sic) about it. A long pull of a hundred kilometres over a flat country, half land, half water, brings one to Civita-Vecchia, eighty kilometres from the Eternal City itself.

Civita-Vecchia is a watering-place without historical interest, where the Romans come to make a seaside holiday. Hotels of all ranks are here, and garage accommodations as well. The Italian mail boats for Sardinia leave daily, if one is inclined to make a side trip to that land of brigandage and the evil-eye, which are reputed a little worse than the Corsican or Sicilian varieties.

One enters the heart of Rome by the Porta Cavalleggeri and crosses the Ponte S. Angelo to get his bearings.

The hotels of Rome are like those of Florence. One must hunt his abiding place out for himself, according to his likes and dislikes. The Grand-Hotel and the Hotel de la Minerve are vouched for by the Touring Club, and the former has garage accommodation. At either of these modern establishments you get the fare of Paris, Vienna, London and New York, and very little that is Italian. You may even bathe in porcelain tubs installed by a London plumber and drink cocktails mixed by an expert from Broadway.

This makes one long for the days when a former generation ate in a famous eating house which stood at the southeast corner of the Square Saint Eustace. It was the resort of artists and men of letters and the plats that it served were famous the world over.

The Romans’ pride in Rome is as conventional as it is ancient. They promptly took sides when the “Italians” entered their beloved city in 1870. The priests, the higher prelates, and the papal nobility were “for the Pope,” but the great middle class, the common people, were for the “Italians.” Traditions die hard in Rome, and many an old resident will tell tales to-day of the blessings of a Papal Government, which formerly forbade the discussion of religion or politics in public places, and “contaminating” books and newspapers were stopped at the frontier. Even a non-smoker was considered a protestor against the Papacy, because to smoke was to be a supporter of the Papal Government’s revenue from the tobacco trade.

Rome without the forestieri, or strangers, would lose considerable of its present day prosperity. Rome exploits strangers; there is no doubt about that; that is almost its sole industry. As Henri Taine said: “Rome is nothing but a shop which sells bric-à-brac.” He might have added: “with a branch establishment which furnishes food and lodging.”

The Roman population, as Roman, is now entirely absorbed by “the Italian.” No more are the contadini, the peasants of the Campagna, or the bearded mountaineers of the Sabine hills, different from their brothers of Tuscany or Lombardy; their physiognomies have become the same. The monks and seminarists and priests and prelates are still there, but only by sufferance, like ourselves. They are no more Romans than are we. Tourists in knickerbockers, awe-struck before the art treasures of the Vatican, and cassocked priests on pilgrimage are everywhere in the city of the Cæsars and the Popes. The venerable Bede was half right only in his prophecy.

“While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;And when Rome falls – the world!”

Rome is still there, and many of its monuments, fragmentary though they be.

The difference in the grade (ground level) of modern Rome, as compared with that of antiquity, a difference of from sixty to seventy feet, may still be expected to give up finds to the industrious pick and shovel properly and intelligently handled. The archæological stratum is estimated as nine miles square.

Rome is a much worked-over field, but the desecrations of the middle ages were hardly less disastrous to its “antiquities” than the new municipality’s transformations. Some day the seven hills will be levelled, and boulevards and public gardens laid out and trees planted in the Forum; then where will be the Rome of the Cæsars? “Rome, Unhappy City!” some one has said, and truly; not for its past, but for its present. Whatever the fascination of Rome may be it is not born of first impressions; the new quarters are painfully new and the streets are unpicturesque and the Tiber is dirty, muddy and ill-smelling. Byron in his day thought differently, for he sang: “the most living crystal that was e’er.” Should he come back again he would sing another song. These elements find their proper places in the city’s ensemble after a time, but at first they are a disappointment.

Next to Saint Peter’s, the Vatican and the Colosseum, the Castle of Sant’Angelo is Rome’s most popular monument. It has been a fortress for a thousand years. For a thousand years a guard has been posted at its gateway.

The ruin of men which has passed within its walls is too lengthy a chronicle to recount here. Lorenzo Colonna, of all others, shed his blood most nobly. Because he would not say “Long live the Orsini,” he was led to the block, a new block ready made for this special purpose, and having delivered himself in Latin of the words: “Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit,” gave up his life in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, “on the last day of June when the people of Rome were celebrating the festivity of the decapitation of Saint Paul the Apostle.” This was four centuries and more ago, but the circling walls and the dull, damp corridors of the Castel Sant’Angelo still echo the terror and suffering which formerly went on within them. It is the very epitome of the character of the structure. Its architecture and its history are in grim accord.

Within the great round tower of Sant’Angelo was imprisoned the unnatural Catherine Sforza while the Borgias were besieging her city.

The Castel of Sant’Angelo and the bridge of the same name are so called in honour of an Angel who descended before Saint Gregory the Great and saved Rome from a pest which threatened to decimate it.

Close to the bridge of Sant’Angelo, just opposite Nona’s Tower, once stood the “Lion Inn,” kept by the lovely Vanozza de Catanei, the mother of Cæsar, Gandia and Lucrezia Borgia. She was an inn-keeper of repute, according to history, and her career was most momentus. The automobilist wonders if this inn were not a purveyor of good cheer as satisfactory as the great establishments with French, English and German names which cater for tourists to-day.

The Villa Medici just within the walls, and the Villa Borghese just without, form a group which tourists usually do as a morning’s sight seeing. They do too much! Anyway one doesn’t need to take his automobile from its garage for the excursion, so these classic villas are only mentioned here.

To describe and illustrate the Villa Medici one must have the magic pen of a Virgil and the palette of a Poussin and a Claude Lorrain. In antiquity the site was known as the Collis Hortorum, the Hillside of Gardens. Lucullus, Prince of Voluptuousness, and Messaline, the Empress of debauch, there celebrated their fêtes of luxury and passion, and it became in time even a picnic ground for holiday making Romans.

The Villa Medici was originally built for Cardinal Ricci in 1540, but by the end of the century had come into the hands of Cardinal Alessandro di Medici. The Tuscan Grand Dukes owned it a century or so later on, and it was finally sold to the French to house the academy of arts founded at Rome by Louis XV.

It is useless for a modern writer to attempt to describe the quiet charm of the surroundings of the Villa Borghese, the nearest of the great country houses to the centre of Rome. Many have tried to do so, but few have succeeded. Better far that one should point the way thither, make a personal observation or two and then onward to Tivoli, Albano or Frascati.

One word on the Forum ere leaving. Not even the most restless automobilist neglects a stroll about the Forum, no matter how often he may have been here before, though its palaces of antiquity have little more than their outline foundations to tell their story to-day.

Commendatore Boni, who has charge of the excavations, brought to light recently a curiously inscribed stone tablet, which, owing to the archaic Latin it contained, he found it impossible to read. A number of learned Latinists and archæologists soon gathered about him. This is what they read:

QUESTAELA VIADEGLIA SINI

While some declared that “que” was an enclitic conjunction, and that therefore the inscription must be incomplete, others asserted that the word was an abbreviation of “queo,” and that the inscription might be read: “I am able to gaze upon the star without pain.”

While the dispute was on, a peasant of the Campagna passed by. He approached and asked the reason of the crowd. He was told, and gazing at the inscription for several minutes he read slowly:

“Questa e la via degli asini” (“This is the way of asses.”).

And the Latinists, the archæologists, and the other savants crept quietly away, while the Commendatore in good, modern Tuscan made some remarks unprintable and untranslatable.