Italian Highways and Byways from a Motor Car

CHAPTER X

THE CAMPAGNA AND BEYOND

THE environs of Rome – those parts not given over to fox-hunting and horse-racing, importations which have been absorbed by the latter day Roman from the forestieri– still retain most of their characteristics of historic times. The Campagna is still the Campagna; the Alban Hills are still classic ground, and Tivoli and Frascati – in spite of the modernisms which have, here and there, crept in – are still the romantic Tivoli and Frascati of the ages long gone by.

The surrounding hills of Rome are, really, what give it its charm. The city is strong in contrast from every aspect, modernity nudging and crowding antiquity. Rome itself is not lovely, only superbly and majestically overpowering in its complexity.

The Rome of romantic times went as far afield as Otricoli, Ostia, Tivoli and Albano, and, on the east, these outposts were further encircled by a girdle of villas, gardens and vineyards too numerous to plot on any map that was ever made.

Such is the charm of Rome; not its ruined temples, fountains and statues alone; nor yet its great churches and palaces, and above all not the view of the Colosseum lit up by coloured fires, but Rome the city and the Campagna.

There is no question that the Roman Campagna is a sad, dreary land without a parallel in the well populated centres of Europe. Said Chateaubriand: “It possesses a silence and solitude so vast that even the echoes of the tumults of the past enacted upon its soil are lost in the very expansiveness of the flat marshy plain.”

Balzac too wrote in the same vein: “Imagine something of the desolation of the country of Tyre and Babylon and you will have a picture of the sadness and lonesomeness of this vast, wide, thinly populated region.”

The similes of Balzac and of Chateaubriand hold good to-day. Long horned cattle and crows are the chief living things – and mosquitoes. One can’t forget the mosquitoes.

Here and there a jagged stump of a pier of a Roman aqueduct pushes up through the herb-grown soil, perhaps even an arch or two, or three or five; but hardly a tangible remembrance of the work of the hand of man is left to-day, to indicate the myriads of comers and goers who once passed over its famous Appian Way. The Appian Way is still there, loose ended fragments joined up here and there with a modern roadway which has become its successor, and there is a very appreciable traffic, such as it is, on the main lines of roadway north and south; but east and west and round about, save for a few squalid huts and droves of cattle, sheep and goats, a wayside inn, a fountain beneath a cypress and a few sleepy, dusty hamlets and villages, there is nothing to indicate a progressive modern existence. All is as dead and dull as it was when Rome first decayed.

Out from Rome, a couple of leagues on the Via Campagna, on the right bank of the Tiber, one comes to the sad relic of La Magliana, the hunting lodge of the Renaissance Popes. The evolution of the name of this country house comes from a corruption of the patronymic of the original owners of the land, the family of Manlian, who were farmers in 390 B. C.

The road out from Rome, by the crumbling Circus Maxentius, the lone fragments of Aqueduct, and the moss-grown tomb of Cecilia Metellag, runs for a dozen kilometres at a dead level, to rise in the next dozen or so to a height of four hundred and sixty odd metres just beyond Albano, when it descends and then rises again to Velletri ultimately to flatten out and continue along practically at sea-level all the way to Cassino, a hundred and ninety kilometres from Rome. The classification given to this road by the Touring Club Italiano is “mediocre e polveroso,” and one need not be a deep student of the language to evolve its meaning.

A little farther away, but still within sight of the Eternal City, just before coming to Albano, is Castel Gandolfo, a Papal stronghold since the middle ages. Urban VIII built a Papal palace here, and the seigniorial château, since transformed into a convent, was a sort of summer habitation of the Popes. The status of the little city of two thousand souls is peculiar. It enjoys extra-territorial rights which were granted to the papal powers by the new order of things which came into being in 1871. A zone of loveliness surrounds the site which overlooks, on one side, the dazzling little Albano Lake and, on the other, stretches off across the Campagna to the shores of the Mediterranean.

Just beyond Castel Gandolfo is Albano, still showing vestiges of the city of Domitian, which, in turn, was built upon the ruins of that of Pompey. Albano’s fortifications rank as the most perfect examples of their class in all Italy. They tell a story of many epochs; they are all massive, and are largely built in rough polygonal masonry. Towers, turrets and temples are all here at Albano. Still the town is not ranked as one of the tourist sights.

The Albano Lake is another one of those mysterious bodies of water without source or outlet. It occupies the crater of an extinct volcano, so some day it may disappear as quickly as it came. Concerning its origin the following local legend is here related: “Where the lake now lies there stood once a great city. Here, when Jesus Christ came to Italy, he begged alms. None took compassion on Him but an old woman who gave Him some meal. He then bade her leave the city: she obeyed; the city instantly sank and the lake rose in its place.”

This legend is probably founded on some vague recollection or tradition of the fall of the city of Veii, which was so flourishing a state at the time of the foundation of Rome, and possessed so many attractions, that it became a question whether Rome itself should not be abandoned for Veii. The lake of Albano is intimately connected with the siege of Veii and no place has more vivid memories of ancient Roman history.

Here, overlooking the lake, once rose Alba Longa, the mother city of Rome, built by Ascanius, the son of Æneas, who named it after the white sow which gave birth to the prodigious number of thirty young.

On the shore of the lake, opposite Albano, is Rocca di Papa. The convent of the Passionist Fathers at Rocca di Papa, (the city itself being the one-time residence of the Anti-pope John) was built by Cardinal York, the last of the Stuarts, of materials taken from an ancient temple on the shores of Lake Albano.

Rocca di Papa is a most picturesque little hilltop village. Its sugar-loaf cone is crowned with an old castle of the Colonnas which remained their possession until 1487, when the Orsini in their turn took possession.

Frascati, on the Via Tusculum, about opposite Castel Gandolfo, as this historic roadway parallels that of Claudius Appius, was Rome’s patrician suburb, and to-day is the resort of nine-tenths of the excursionists out from Rome for a day or an afternoon.

Frascati, the villa suburb, and Tivoli alike depend upon their sylvan charms to set off the beauties of their palaces and villas. It was ever the custom among the princely Italian families – the Farnese, the Borghese, and the Medici – to lavish their wealth on the laying out of the grounds quite as much as on the building of their palaces.

Frascati’s villas and palaces cannot be catalogued here. One and all are the outgrowth of an ancient Roman pleasure house of the ninth century, and followed after as a natural course of events, the chief attraction of the place being the wild-wood site (frasche), really a country faubourg of Rome itself.

The Popes and Cardinals favoured the spot for their country houses, and the nobles followed in their train. The chief of Frascati’s architectural glories are the Villa Conti, its fountains and its gardens; the Villa Aldobrandini of the Cardinal of that name, the nephew of Pope Clement VIII; and the Villa Tusculana, or Villa Ruffinella, of the sixteenth century, but afterwards the property of Lucien Bonaparte and the scene of one of Washington Irving’s little known sketches, “The Adventure of an Artist.” The Villa Falconieri at Frascati, built by the Cardinal Ruffini in the sixteenth century, formerly belonged to a long line of Counts and Cardinals, but the hand of the German, which is grasping everything in sight, in all quarters of the globe, that other people by lack of foresight do not seem to care for, has acquired it as a home for “convalescent” German artists. Perhaps the omnific German Emperor seeks to rival the functions of the Villa Medici with his Villa Falconieri. He calls it a hospital, but it has studios, lecture rooms and what not. What it all means no one seems to know.

Minor villas are found dotted all over Frascati’s hills, with charming vistas opening out here and there in surprising manner. Not all are magnificently grand, few are superlatively excellent according to the highest æsthetic standards, but all are of the satisfying, gratifying quality that the layman will ever accept as something better than his own conceptions would lead up to. That is the chief pleasure of contemplation, after all.

Above Frascati itself lies Tusculum, founded, says tradition, by a son of Ulysses, the birthplace of Cato and a one time residence of Cicero. This would seem enough fame for any small town hardly important enough to have its name marked on the map, and certainly not noted down in many of the itineraries for automobile tourists which cross Italy in every direction. More than this, Tusculum has the ruins of an ancient castle, one day belonging to a race of fire-eating, quarrelsome counts who leagued themselves with any one who had a cause, just or unjust, for which to fight. Fighting was their trade, but Frederic I in 1167 beat them at their own game and razed their castle and its town of allies huddled about its walls. That is why Tusculum has not become a tourist resort to-day, but the ruin is still there and one can imagine a different destiny had fate, or a stronger hand, had full sway.

From Albano, another cross road, via Velletri to Valmontone, leads in twenty odd kilometres to Palestrina, whence one may continue his way to Subiaco and thence to Tivoli and enter Rome again via the Porta San Lorenzo, having made a round of perhaps a hundred and fifty kilometres of as varied a stretch of Italian roadway as could possibly be found. The gamut of scenic and architectural joys runs all the way from those of the sea level Campagna and its monumental remains to the verdure and romance of the Alban and Sabine Hills and the splendours of the memories of the Villa of Hadrian at Tivoli.

Lying well back from the Alban hills is Palestrina, the greatest stronghold of the Colonnas and where a branch of the family still maintains a country house. The cradle of this great family, which gave so many popes to Rome, and an inspiration and a divinity to Michelangelo, was a village near Palestrina. It had a Corinthian column rising in its piazza and from it the Colonna took their family arms. It is found on all documents relating to their history; on tapestries, furniture and medals in many museums and in many wood carvings in old Roman churches.

Palestrina, too, has memories of Michelangelo. The treasures of masterpieces left by him are scattered all over Italy to keep fresh the memory of his name and fame.

Subiaco should be made a stopping place on every automobilist’s itinerary out from Rome. Some wit has said that any one living in a place ending with o was bound to be unhappy. He had in mind one or two sad romances of Subiaco, though for all that one can hardly see what the letters of its name have got to do with it. Subiaco has for long been the haunt of artists and others in search of the picturesque, but not the general run of tourists.

Subiaco is still primitive in most things, and this in spite of the fact that a railway has been built through it in recent years. In feudal times the town could hardly have been more primitive than now, in fact the only thing that ever woke it from lethargy was a little game of warfare, sometimes with disaster for the inhabitants and sometimes for the other side.

The castle of the ruling baron sat high upon the height. What is left of it is there to-day, but its capture has been made easier with the march of progress. Down from the castle walls slopes the town, its happy, unprogressive people as somnolent as of yore.

Subiaco is one of the most accessible and conveniently situated hill towns of Italy, if any would seek it out. Nero first exploited Subiaco when he built a villa here, as he did in other likely spots round about. Nero built up and he burned down and he fiddled all the while. He was decidedly a capricious character. History or legend says that Nero’s cup of cheer was struck from his hand by lightning one day when he was drinking the wine of Subiaco here at his hillside villa. He escaped miraculously, but he got a good scare, though it is not recorded that he signed the pledge!

Subiaco’s humble inn, “The Partridge,” is typical of its class throughout Italy. It is in no sense a very comfortably installed establishment, but it is better, far better, than the same class of inn in England and America, and above all its cooking is better. A fowl and a salad and a bottle of wine and some gorgonzola are just a little better at “La Pernice” than the writer remembers to have eaten elsewhere under similar conditions.

Tourists now come by dozens by road and rail to Subiaco – with a preponderance of arrivals by road – whereas a few years ago only a few venturesome artists and other lovers of the open knew its charms. Some day of course this charm will be gone, but it is still lingering on and, if you do not put on too great a pretense, you will get the same good cheer at five francs a day at “The Partridge” whether you arrive in a Mercédès or come as the artist does, white umbrella and canvases slung across your back. The proprietor of “La Pernice” has not as yet succumbed to exploiting his clients.

From Subiaco back to Rome via Tivoli is seventy kilometres and all down hill.

One can have no complete idea of Roman life without an acquaintance with the villas and palaces of Frascati and Tivoli. Tivoli was the summer resort of the old Romans. Mecenate, Horace, Catullus and Hadrian built villas there and enjoyed it, though in a later day it was reviled thus:

Tivoli di mal conforto – O piove, o tira vento, o suona a morto!

Tivoli may be said to have received its boom under the Roman nobles of the Augustan age who came here and set the fashion of the place as a country residence. Things prospered beyond expectations, it would seem, land agents being modest in those days, and by the time of Hadrian reached their luxurious climax.

Pope Pius II founded Tivoli’s citadel on the site of an already ruined amphitheatre in 1460. The Villa d’Este at Tivoli, built by the Cardinal Ippolito d’Este in 1549, is usually considered the most typical suburban villa in Italy. The house itself is an enormous pile, on one side being three stories higher than on the other. It is a terrace house in every sense of the word. Statuary, originally dug up from Hadrian’s villa, once embellished the house and grounds to a greater extent than now, but under the régime of late years many of these pieces have disappeared. Where? The palace itself is comparatively a modest, dignified though extensive structure, the views from its higher terraces stretching out far over the distant campagna.

Hadrian’s Villa, with its magnificent grounds, occupies an area of vast extent. According to Spartian, Hadrian, in the second century B. C., built this marvel of architecture and landscape gardening according to a fond and luxurious fancy which would have been inconceivable by any other who lived at his time. All its great extent of buildings have suffered the stress of time, and some even have entirely disappeared, as a considerable part of the later monuments of Tivoli were built up from their stones. Many of its art treasures were removed to distant points, many found their ways into public and private museums, and many have even been transported to foreign lands. The Italian government has now stopped all this by purchasing the site and making of it a national monument.

With Hadrian’s Villa is connected a sad remembrance. Piranesi, that accomplished and erratic draughtsman whose etchings and drawings of Roman monuments have delighted an admiring world, died as a result of overwork in connection with a series of measured drawings he was making of this great memorial of Rome’s globe-trotting Emperor.

CHAPTER XI

LA BELLA NAPOLI

SOUTH from Rome the highroad to Naples, and on down into Calabria, at first follows the old Appian Way, built by Appius Claudius in 312 B. C. It is a historic highway if there ever was one, from its commencement at Rome’s ancient Porta Capuana (now the Porta San Sebastiano) to Capua. As historic ground it has been excavated and the soil turned over many, many times until it would seem as though nothing would be left to discover. Enough has been found and piled up by the roadside to make the thoroughfare a continuous “sight” for many kilometres. Great churches, tombs, vineyards, cypress-wind-breaks and the arches of the Claudian aqueducts line its length, and if the automobilist is so minded he can easily put in a day doing the first twenty kilometres.

Velletri, thirty-six kilometres from Rome, is the first town of importance after passing Albano, practically suburban Rome.

Cisterna di Roma, a dozen kilometres further on, is a typical hill top town overlooking the Pontine Marshes below.

Terracina, on the coast, sixty-two kilometres beyond Velletri, is the border town between the north and the south, practically the limit between the extent of the Papal power and that of the kingdom of Naples.

Terracina sits at sea-level, and in all probability it is none too healthy an abode, though ten thousand souls call it home and seem content. It has a sea-view that would make the reputation of a resort, and the French and Italian Touring Clubs recommend the Hotel Royal, while the local druggist sells gasoline and oil to automobile tourists at fair rates – for Italy.

At Formia one may turn off the direct road and in half a dozen kilometres come to the coast again at Gaeta. The road from Formia runs through a picture paradise, and an unspoilt one, considering it from the artist’s point of view. Little more shall be said, though indeed it is not as at Sorrento or Capri, but quite as good in its way, and the Albergo della Quercia, at Formia, is not as yet overrun with a clientèle of any sort. This is an artists’ sketching ground that is some day going to be exploited by some one; perhaps by the artist who made the pictures of this book. Who knows?

Over another fragment of the Appian Way the highroad now continues towards Naples via Capua.

At Capua the road plunges immediately into a maze of narrow streets and one’s only assurance of being able to find his exit from the town is by employing a gamin to sit on the running board and shout destra or sinistra at each turning until the open country is again reached at the dividing of the roads leading to Caserta and Naples respectively.

The highroad from Capua into Naples covers thirty kilometres of as good, or bad, roadway as is usually found on entering a great city where the numerous manifest industries serve to furnish a traffic movement which is not conducive to the upkeep of good roads. It is a good road, though, in parts, but the nearer you get to “la bella Napoli” the worse it becomes, as bad, almost, as the roads in and out of Marseilles or Genoa, and they are about the worst that exist for automobilists to revile.

By either Averso or Caserta one enters Naples by the rift in the hills lying back of the observatory, and finally by the tram-lined Strada Forvia, always descending, until practically at sea-level one finds a garage close beside the Hotel Royal et des Étrangers and lodges himself in that excellent hostelry. This is one way of doing it; there are of course others.

The man that first said “Vedi Napoli e poi mori!” didn’t know what he was talking about. No one will want to die after seeing Naples. He will want to live the longer and come again, if not for Naples itself then for its surroundings, for Pompeii, Herculaneum, Sorrento, Capri, Amalfi, Vesuvius and Ischia. Naples itself will be a good place at which to leave one’s extra luggage and to use as a mail address.

The history of Naples is vast, and its present and historic past is most interesting, but for all that Naples without its environs would be as naught.

The local proverb of old:

“When Salerno has its portNaples will be mort (dead),”

has no reason for being any more, for Naples’ future as a Mediterranean seaport is assured by the indefatigable German who has recently made it a port of call for a half a dozen lines of German steamers. Britain may rule the waves, but the German is fast absorbing the profitable end of the carrying trade.

Naples is a crowded, uncomfortable city, for within a circumference of scarce sixteen kilometres is huddled a population of considerably more than half a million souls.

Naples’ chief charms are its site, and its magnificently scenic background, not its monuments or its people.

“The lazzaroni,” remarked Montesquieu of the Neapolitan “won’t-works,” “pass their time in the middle of the street.” This observation was made many, many years ago, but it is equally true to-day.

Naples is not the only Italian city where one sees men live without apparent means of existence, but it is here most to be remarked. On the quays and on the promenades you see men and women without work, and apparently without ambition to look for it save to exploit strangers. On the steps of the churches you see men and women without legs, arms or eyes, and infants sans chemises, and they, too, live by the same idle occupation of asking for alms.

Everywhere at Naples, before your hotel, crowded around your carriage or automobile, or paddling around in boats just over your steamer’s side, are hoards of beggars of all sorts and conditions of poverty and probity. The beggar population of Naples is doubtless of no greater proportions than in Genoa, or even Rome, but it is more in evidence and more insistent. There are singing beggars, lame, halt and blind beggars, whining beggars, swimming beggars, diving beggars, flower-selling beggars and just plain beggars. Give to one and you will have to give to all – or stand the consequences, which may be serious or not according to circumstances. Don’t disburse sterilized charity, then, but keep hard-hearted.

Naples’ chief sights for the tourists are its museum, its great domed galleries and their cafés and restaurants, its Castello dell’Ovo and the Castel del Carmine.

The Castello dell’Ovo is out in the sea, at the end of a tiny bridge or breakwater, running from the Pizzofalcone, one of the slopes of the background hills of Naples running down to sea-level.

As a fortress the Castello dell’Ovo is outranked to-day by the least efficient in any land, but one of the Spanish Viceroys, in 1532, Don Pedro of Toledo, thought it a stronghold of prime importance, due entirely to its oval shape, which it preserves unto to-day. It is unique, in form at any rate.

Charles VIII of France, on his memorable Italian journeyings – when he discovered (sic) the Renaissance architecture of Italy and brought it back home with him – dismantled the castle and left it in its now barrack-like condition, shorn of any great distinction save the oval shape of its donjon. One is bound to remark this noble monument as it is from its quay that one embarks on the cranky, little, wobbling steamboat which bears one to Capri. Lucullus, who had some reputation as a good liver, once had a villa here on the very quay which surrounds the Castello.

Opposite the Villa del Popolo (near the Porta del Carmine), the People’s Park as we should call it, is a vast, forbidding, unlovely structure.

It was built in 1484 by Ferdinand I, but during Masaniello’s little disturbance it became a stronghold of the people. To-day it serves as a barracks – and of course as a military prison; all nondescript buildings in Italy may be safely classed as military prisons, though indeed the Italian soldiery do not look an unruly lot.

It is well to recall here that Masaniello, who gave his name to an opera as well as being a patriot of the most rabid, though revolutionary, type, failed of his ambition and died through sheer inability to keep awake and sufficiently free from anxiety to carry out his plans. Masaniello lost his head toward the end and got untrustworthy, but this was far from justifying either his murder or the infamous treatment of his body immediately after death by the very mob that the day before had adored him. His headless trunk was dragged for several hours through the mud, and was flung at nightfall, like the body of a mad dog, into the city ditch. Next day, through a revulsion of feeling, he was canonized! His corpse was picked out of the ditch, arrayed in royal robes, and buried magnificently in the cathedral. His fisherman’s dress was rent into shreds to be preserved by the crowd as relics; the door of his hut was pulled off its hinges by a mob of women, and cut into small pieces to be carved into images and made into caskets; while the very ground he had walked on was collected in small phials and sold for its weight in gold to be worn next the heart as an amulet.