Italian Peninsula

“ The blue Mediterranean with warm and buoyant waters laps and breaks around Italy’s peninsula, and Italy’s people are none the less fond of their fair and treacherous sea than we of our greyer and more boisterous Atlantic, even though theirs leaves them no passage northward into other lands, nor binds them about with her waves. ”

“ Italy is almost always dramatic, and perhaps invariably romantic. There is drama in the plains of Lombardy, and romance in the Venetian lagoons, and sheer scenic [Pg 131] excitement in nearly all the hilly parts of the peninsula. Perhaps it is the natural floridity of lime-stone formations. But Italian landscape is really eighteenth-century landscape, to be represented in that romantic-classic manner which makes everything rather marvelous and very topical: aqueducts, and ruins upon sugar-loaf mountains, and craggy ravines and Wilhelm Meister water-falls: all up and down. ”

“ HOW THE CRUSADES ONCE MORE MADE THE MEDITERRANEAN A BUSY CENTRE OF TRADE AND HOW THE CITIES OF THE ITALIAN PENINSULA BECAME THE GREAT DISTRIBUTING CENTRE FOR THE COMMERCE WITH ASIA AND AFRICA
THERE were three good reasons why the Italian cities should have been the first to regain a position of great importance during the late Middle Ages. The Italian peninsula had been settled by Rome at a very early date. There had been more roads and more towns and more schools than anywhere else in Europe. ”

“ At Foggia the line of railway which crosses the Italian peninsula from Naples eastward joins the great European line which for the most part skirts the Western Hadriatic shore. From Rome itself the iter ad Brundisium is still made by way of Beneventum; for the great mass of mankind Bologna has in this matter supplanted Beneventum and Rome too. Our eastward course across the peninsula has done for us much the same as would be done by the like course across our own island. ”

“ We have done for a while with the hill-cities, though it would not be hard to find several other spots of the same kind, rivalling in historical interest, and, by all accounts, rivalling also as to existing remains, any of those which we have gone through. But the special necessities of an iter ad Brundisium carry us to quite other parts of the Italian peninsula, to parts where the sources of interest are fully equal to those of Etruscan or Latin cities, but where they are wholly different in kind. We leave the hills, or touch only their lowest slopes. ”

“ This means that when the whole Italian peninsula was separated from Gaul as well as from Iberia (after the close of the 5th century) and became again one homogeneous whole, the forms without s found their way into the north of Italy only slowly, so that s has remained in the west, i.e. in Piedmont, in monosyllabic words to this day, e.g. as, “thou hast,” ses, “thou art” ”

“ In our parlance all that is not the Adriatic is the Mediterranean, but the Italians only give this name to the waters that separate Italy and Spain from Africa, and differentiate the remainder as the Ligurean Sea—in the Bay of Genoa, the Tyrrhenian that Rome and Naples contemplate, and the Ionian, which washes up from Sicily under Italy’s instep in the Gulf of Taranto. ”

“ There is no more poetic region on the continent than the bay south of Point Conception, and the pen and the camera have made the world tolerably familiar with it. There is a graciousness, a softness, a color in the sea, the cañons, the mountains there that dwell in the memory. It is capable of inspiring the same love that the Greek colonists felt for the region between the bays of Salerno and Naples. It is as fruitful as the Italian shores, and can support as dense a population. The figures that have been given as to productiveness and variety of productions apply to it. ”

“ What is called the continental part, or the great plain traversed by the Po, which extends between the Alps, the Apennines, and the Adriatic, was separated from it. This plain, and part of the mountains on the coasts of the Mediterranean, formed Liguria, Cisalpine Gaul, and Venetia. The peninsula, or Italy proper, was bounded, on the north, by the Rubicon, and, probably, by the lower course of the Arno; [162] on the west, by the Mediterranean; on the east, by the Adriatic; on the south, by the Ionian Sea. (See the Maps, No. 1 and No. 2.)
II
The Apennines traverse Italy in its whole length. ”

“ How much our Italy of Rome and Naples owes to the Apennines! How gratefully should lovers of romance and history regard that mighty chain that runs, an inland sea of crag and peak, forest and ravine, between shore and shore! Physically and morally, it is the backbone of the country, the fortress of tradition, the nurse of what our modern cant calls “plain living and high thinking.” ”

“ A study of the map will show us that though the Apennines shut off Italy proper from Cisalpine Gaul along a line roughly from Genoa to Rimini, actually that difficult and barren range just fails to reach the Adriatic as it curves southward to divide the peninsula in its entire length into two not unequal parts. ”

“ CENTRAL ITALY, Italia Propria, or Italy Proper, included all of the peninsula below these rivers as far down as Apulia and Lucania. In this division are the rivers Tiber, Arnus, Liris, and Volturnus, which empty into the Mediterranean, and the Metaurus, Aesis, and Aternus, which empty into the Adriatic. ”

“ Where the winding chain of the Apennines stretches upward from the sea, crossing and recrossing the land with so many and such strange devices that from off the height of one of the mountains themselves there seems scarce room for a space of level plain, wedged in between ridges or sunk in clefts of hills, are the fair valleys of North Italy. Away from the blue sea and its blinding beauty, and from the leaden heat of the shores, they hold a fresh and free life of their own. ”

“ How we English do love Italy! Somewhere in our colder nature flows a warm Gulf Stream of love for what is sunny and clear-skied and genial, and I think I may say, though my compatriots little realize it, that the evidences of a living faith which are inseparable from Italian landscape greatly add to the charm that attracts us to this land. What would her hills be if decapitated of the convents on their summits, with each its cypress-lined Via Crucis winding up the hillside? The time of the after-glow would be voiceless if deprived of the ringing of the Angelus. ”

“ It excites and interests the appetite for the wonderful rather than soothes and satisfies our longing for complete and harmonious beauty.
Landscapes composed of blue surging waves of mountains, broken by sharp fins and tusks of rock, of deep skies peopled with luminous masses of white cloud, are familiar to the eyes of thousands who have never seen Italy nor heard of a dolomite. Side by side with the wide sunny spaces, the soft hills and unclouded heaven of the early schools of Perugia and Tuscany, they remain to us as types of what Italian art found most beautiful and sympathetic in nature. ”

“ The whole question turned, observed the Prussian Chancellor, on the mastery of the Mediterranean: here France and Italy must find themselves at variance whether they willed it or not. 'The configuration of the terrestrial globe not being amenable to change, they will be always rivals and often enemies.' Nature has thrown between them an apple of discord, the possession of which they will not cease to contest. The Mediterranean ought to become an Italian lake. ”

“ In these bickerings it is to be feared that the way from Castellammare to Sorrento must needs go to the wall; for indeed it does not possess the grandeur of the others. The northern face of the peninsula has an aspect wholly different from that of the precipices which look towards Pæstum and the islands of the Sirens. It is softer, more exquisitely wooded; its hillsides sink more often into valleys and ravines; its cliffs are certainly not awful; its mountain slopes are sweet and homely, clad with olive groves and pastures, studded with villas and with monasteries. ”

“ Italy itself was no inconsiderable state—a beautiful peninsula, extending six hundred and sixty geographical miles from the foot of the Alps to the promontory of Leucopetra. Its greatest breadth is about one hundred and thirty miles. It was always renowned for beauty and fertility. Its climate on the south was that of Greece, and on the north that of the south of France. The lofty range of the Apennines extended through its entire length, while the waters of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic tempered and varied its climate. ”

“ A glance at a map is sufficient to convince us that Corsica is a dependency of Italy, for while abyssal depths of more than 500 fathoms separate it from Provence, it is joined to the coast of Tuscany by a submarine plateau, the mountains of which rise above the surface of the waters as islands. The climate and natural productions of the island are those of Italy, and the language of its inhabitants is Italian. ”

“ In the earliest times we find on the peninsula of Italy groups of heterogeneous people, the linguistic relationships of many of which have remained obscure up to the present time. From the earliest prehistoric times on, we see wave after wave of people invading Italy from the north. Very early Greeks settled in the greater part of southern Italy, and Phœnician influence was well established on the west coast of the peninsula. ”

“ At last we reach our goal; we go for a season even beyond it. And when we have gone as far as the devices of modern science can carry us, when we have reached the very end of the general railway system of Central Europe, our landscape again takes in both the sea and the mountains. But the eye now ranges beyond the bounds of Italy, beyond the bounds of Western Europe. We see across the narrowed waters to the heights of another peninsula. ”

“ From the heights, however, you enjoy magnificent prospects of the most picturesque portion of the Italian coast; a lofty, undulating, and wooded shore, with an infinite variety of bays and jutting promontories; while the eye, wandering from Leghorn on one side towards Genoa on the other, traces an almost uninterrupted line of hamlets and casinos, gardens and orchards, terraces of vines, and groves of olive. ”

“ It was at first confined to the southern portion of Calabria, and was gradually extended northward, till about the time of the Punic wars it indicated the whole peninsula south of the Rivers Rubicon and Macra, the former separating Cisalpine Gaul and Umbria, the latter Liguria and Etruria. Italy, properly so called, is a very mountainous country, being filled up more or less by the broad mass of the Apennines, the offshoots or lateral branches of which, in some parts, descend quite to the sea, but in others leave a considerable space of level or low country. ”

“ The Alps separate Italy on the north and northwest from the rest of Europe. The pass over these mountains which presents the least difficulties is through the Julian Alps on the east. It was over this pass that the Barbarians swept down in their invasions of the country. The Apennines, which are a continuation of the Alps, extend through the whole of the peninsula. Starting in the Maritime Alps, they extend easterly towards the Adriatic coast, and turn southeasterly hugging the coast through its whole extent. ”

“ In the second place, Italy, which has few good harbors but possesses fine mountain pastures and rich lowland plains, was better adapted to cattle raising and agriculture than was Greece. The Italian peoples, in consequence, instead of putting to sea, remained a conservative, home-staying folk, who were slow to adopt the customs of other nations. Finally, the location of Italy, with its best harbors and most numerous islands on the western coast, brought that country into closer touch with Gaul, Spain, and northwestern Africa than with Greece and the Orient. Italy fronted the barbarous West. ”

“ Its hard yet beneficent climate, with sharp delimitations of season, its passes so obdurate to the tainting allurements of railways, its hundreds of sturdy self-contained little towns, each with its story of its own saints and heroes, its ancestry of tradition that laughs at the flight of centuries—all this has bred a race of men and women of whom modern Italy knows little, but who form the residue by which the mixed enfeebled masses of her cities and plains will in the end be saved. ”

“ Even seaport town people seek the mountains less [126] readily than some village on the coast which they have seen all their lives, for, though briny breezes from off these inland waters can never be invigorating as those that travel across the Atlantic, Italians have none the less fond a belief both in them and in the soft waves wherein they delight to plunge. And of all the sea-loving people of the south the people of Genoa are best at the sport. Crowds seek the Lido at Venice, bathing-houses are built into the waves, music plays and fine water-costumes are there displayed. ”

“ One especial cause of the picturesque beauty of Italian scenery is the contrast thus afforded between the bare rock, and the islands if I may so call them of luxuriant vegetation scattered over its surface. Wherever the rock is less intersected with fissures, so that it retains water at the surface, and where it is covered with vegetable mould, there, as on the enchanting shores of the Lake of Albano, Italy has her oak forests, with glades as deeply embowered and verdure as fresh as those which we admire in the North of Europe. ”