M. F. Mansfield

“ Verona, Vicenza and Padua were the capitals of three of the eight ancient provinces of Venezia.
Padua is built in the midst of a vast plain which merits being called Italian-Flanders. In everything but climate it is like a section of the Low Countries, and the city, with its domes and towers, looms up over the low-lying plain, faint and ghostly from afar, like a mirage of the desert.{279}
Canals and fortress walls enclose the city even to-day, and the nearer one approaches, until one actually sees it from within the walls, the less and less Padua becomes like Italy. ”

“ Great ox-carts, peasants in the fields and, far away, the brown sails of the Adriatic fishing boats are the only punctuating notes of a landscape which is anything but gay and lively. It is as Holland under a mediæval sun, for mostly the sun shines brilliantly here, which it does not in the Low Countries. Ravenna was the ancient capital of the Occidental Roman Empire, but to-day, in its marshy site, the city is in anything but the proud estate it once occupied. The aspect of the whole city is as weird and strange as that of its site. ”

“ The French Riviera and its gilded pleasures, its great hotels, its chic resorts and its entrancing combination of seascape and landscape are known to all classes of travellers, but at Menton, almost on the frontier, one is within arm’s reach of things Italian, where life is less feverish, in strong contrast to the French atmosphere which envelops everything to the west of the great white triangle painted on the cliff above the Pont Saint Louis and marking the boundary between the two great Latin countries. ”

“ 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 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 beaten track in Italy is not by any means an uninteresting itinerary, and there is no really unbeaten track any more. What one can do, and does, if he is imbued with the proper spirit of travel, is to cover as much little-travelled ground as his instincts prompt him. Between Florence and Rome and between Rome and Naples there is quite as much to interest even the conventional traveller as in those cities themselves, if he only knows where to look for it and knows the purport of all the remarkable and frequent historical monuments continually springing into view. ”

“ Between Brescia and Bergamo is the Lake of Iseo; the fourth in size of the north Italian lakes. The vegetation of its shores is purely Italian and vineyards and olive groves abound. A fringe of old castle towers, of walls, palaces and villas surround it, all blended together with a historic web and woof of mediævalism and romance.
From Brescia to Bergamo runs one of the best national highroads in Italy. The automobilist will appreciate this and will want to push on to the end. ”

“ The mere fact that these obstructions are there is enough of a penance for the automobilist, who in ten hours of running will certainly lose one or two hours waiting for the gates to be opened.
These Italian coast line vistas are quite the most savagely beautiful of any along the Mediterranean. We rave over the strip dominated by La Turbie and Monte Carlo’s rock, and over the Corniche d’Or of the Estérel in France, but really there is nothing quite so primitive and unspoiled in its beauty as this less-known itinerary. The background mountains rise, grim, behind, and beneath. ”

“ The Italian picture and its framing is like no other, whether one commences with the snow-crested Alps of Piedmont and finishes with Bella Napoli and its dazzling blue, or whether he finishes with the Queen of the Adriatic and begins with Capri. It is always Italy. ”

“ The tiled floor of the average Italian house, and of the kitchens and dining room of many an Italian inn, is the ever at hand receptacle of much refuse food that elsewhere is relegated to the garbage barrel. Between meals, and bright and early in the morning, everything is flushed out with as generous a supply of water as is used by the Dutch housvrou in washing down the front steps. Result: the microbes don’t rest behind, as they do on our own carpeted dining rooms, a despicable custom which is “growing” with the hotel keepers of England and America. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It takes us into the heart of the life of a country instead of forcing us to travel in a prison van on iron rails.
Let the tourist in Italy “do”—and “do” as thoroughly as he likes—the galleries of Rome, Florence, Siena, and Venice, but let him not neglect the more appealing and far more natural uncontaminated beauties of the countryside and the smaller towns, such as Caserta, Arezzo, Lucca, Montepulciana, Barberino in Mugello and Ancona, and as many others as fit well into his itinerary from the Alps to Ætna or from Reggio to Ragusa. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The new part of Genoa imitates Milan, as Milan imitates Paris. The galleries or arcades of Milan, Genoa and Naples, full of shops, cafés and restaurants, would be admirable institutions in a more northerly clime, where the sun is less strong and rain more frequent. Here their glass roofs radiate an insufferable heat, which only in the coldest and most intemperate months is at all bearable. Nevertheless these arcades are an amusing and characteristic feature of the large Italian cities.
Hotels in Genoa for the automobilist are of all ranks and at all prices. ”

“ It is easy for the superior person to sneer at the hand organ, as he sneers, by the way, at the phonograph and the pianola, but dull alleys and mean streets are brightened by the music of the itinerant Italian.
“It is a vision of the moyen-age,” wrote Paul Bourget when he first saw Volterra’s Etruscan walls. High up on its rocky plateau sits Volterra, protected by its walls and gorges and ravines, in almost impregnable fashion.
With this incentive no automobilist north or southbound should omit San Gimignano or Volterra from his itinerary. ”

“ The fishermen of the Guiadecca, swarthy hued and scarlet-capped, and with heavy hoops of gold hanging from their ears, stroll about the piazza as is their right, mingling with tourists and the “real Venetians.” All move about in lively measure like an operatic chorus, but with a much more graceful and less conscious gait.
Night on the Piazza or the Piazzetta is not the least of Venice’s charms.
The background hills bordering upon the Venetian plain are a very interesting corner of northern Italy. ”

“ The visitor to Venice must seek out for himself the things that interest him, with the aid of his guide-book, his hotel porter or his gondolier. Not all its splendours can be pointed out here; the record of the author and artist is a personal record; others if they will may choose a different itinerary.
The greatest fascination of all in Venice is undoubtedly the gondola, though the motor boat is pushing it hard for a place, and there be those matter-of-fact hurried tourists who prefer the practicality of the latter to the simplicity and romance of the former. ”

“ They all have relatives in America, in New York, New Orleans or Cripple Creek, or perhaps Brazil or the Argentine, and, since money comes regularly once or twice a year, and since thousands of touring Americans climb about the rocks at Capri or drive fire-spouting automobiles up through the Casentino, they know the new world as a land of dollars, and dream of the day when they will be able to pick them up in the streets paved with gold. That is a fairy-tale of America that still lives in Italy. ”

“ There have been too many travellers in past times—and they exist to-day—who do not seek to fill the gaps between a round of churches and art galleries, save to rush back to some palace hotel and eat the same kind of a dinner that they would in London, Paris or New York—a little worse cooked and served to be sure. It’s the country and its people that impress one most in a land not his own. ”

“ Lombardy has ever been considered the real paradise and land of riches of all Italy, and even now, in a certain luxuriousness of attitude towards life, it lives up to its repudiation of the days of the dominating Visconti and Sforza.
Milan is to-day the luxurious capital of Lombardy, as was Pavia in the past. At one time, be it recalled, Milan was a Duchy in its own right. Years of despotism at the hands of a man of genius made Milan a great city and the intellectual capital of Italy. Milanese art and architecture of the fifteenth century reached a great height. ”

“ 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 WAY ABOUT ITALY ONE travels in Italy chiefly in search of the picturesque, but in Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice or Milan, and in the larger towns lying between, there is, in spite of the romantic association of great names, little that appeals to one in a personal sense. One admires what Ruskin, Hare or Symonds tells one to admire, gets a smattering of the romantic history of the great families of the palaces and villas of Rome and Florence, but absorbs little or nothing of the genuine feudal traditions of the background regions away from the well-worn roads. ”

“ 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. ”