Leading the Blind (14 page)

Dinner finally comes, the waiter ‘placing on the table the
minestra
, or soup, in a huge tureen, containing plenty of hot water, with some half-boiled macaroni in it. If you don't like this kind of soup, you may have bread boiled in water; it is all the same. There is always a plate of grated parmesan cheese, to mix with the
minestra
, of whatever sort it may be, without which even Italian palates could never tolerate such a potion. This is generally followed by a
frittura
, which consists of liver, brains, or something of that sort, fried in oil. Then comes the
rosto
, which to-day appears in the shape of half a starved turkey, attended by some other indescribable dish, smelling strong of garlic.'

Our authoress-traveller and her companions found Siena to have a somewhat antiquated appearance, though later guidebooks were to see it in a better light. ‘Its streets, or rather lanes, are lined with high gloomy old-fashioned houses, looking like jails, and called, or rather miscalled, palaces, which have fallen into decay like their possessors, who are too proud to resign, and too poor to inhabit them.'

She duly visits all the sites, including the library, ‘which contains a great quantity of books, though I would not answer for their value', concluding that ‘Siena is a very dull place. Some English friends of ours who spent a winter there found a great want of cultivated society. There is no theatre, nor opera, nor public amusement of any kind. Life stagnates here; for its active pursuits, its interests, its honours, its pleasures, and its hopes, can have no place. No happy Briton can see and know what Siena is, without looking back with a swelling heart to his own country.'

After leaving Siena, ‘night closed in upon us long before we reached our destined place of rest, the wretched
Osterìa
of the still more wretched village of Buon Convento. Thither, when a wearisome pilgrimage of four mortal hours had at last conducted us, its half-starved looking denizens would not admit us into the horrible pig-stye in which they wallowed themselves, but conducted us to a lone uninhabited house on the other side of the way, in which there was not a human being. We were ushered up an old ghastly staircase, along which the wind whistled mournfully, into an open hall, the raftered roof of which was overhung with cobwebs, and the stone floor was deep in filth. Four doors entered into this forlorn-looking place, two of which led to the chill, dirty, miserable holes which were our destined places of repose; and the other two, to rooms that the people said did not belong to them, one old woman assuring us they were inhabited by nobody, while the other maintained they were occupied by very honest people. In the meantime, it was certain that the frail doors of our dormitories would yield on the slightest push; that the door of the hall itself, leading upon the stairs, had no fastening at all; that the stairs were open to the road in front, and to the fields behind, the house itself having no door whatever; and thus, that whoever chose to pay us a nocturnal visit, might do so without the smallest inconvenience or difficulty to himself.'

Worse than anything was that ‘the wind blew about us, and we could get no fire. But there was no remedy for these grievances, and we resigned ourselves to fate and to bed. The two hideous old beldames who had brought us our wretched supper, had left us for the night, and no human being was near us, when we heard the sound of a heavy foot on the creaking staircase, and a man wrapped in a cloak, and armed with a sword and musket, stalked into the hall.

‘If we had been heroines, what terrors might have agitated, and what adventures might not have befallen us! But as we were not heroical, we neither screamed nor fainted, we only looked at him; and notwithstanding his formidable appearance, and that he had long black moustachios and bushy eye-brows, he did us no mischief, though he might have cut our throats with all the ease in the world; indeed, he had still abundance of leisure for the exploit, for he informed us that he had the honour of lodging in the house, that he was the only person who had that honour, and that he should have the honour of sleeping in the room next to ours.'

Whoever he was, Charlotte treated him like a gentleman and, after several formal good-nights, ‘our whiskered neighbour retreated into his apartment, the key of which he had in his pocket, and we contented ourselves with barricading our door with the only table and chair that our desolate chamber contained; then, in uncurtained and uncoverleted wretchedness, upon flock beds, the prey of innumerable fleas, and shaking with cold, if not with fear, we lay the live-long night; not even having wherewithall to cover us, for the potent smell of the filthy rug, which performed the double duties of blanket and quilt, obliged us to discard it, and our carriage cloaks were but an inadequate defence against the blasts that whistled through the manifold chinks of the room.' They got up at four o'clock the next morning and ‘began in the dark to wend our weary way from this miserable
Osterìa
'.

After several hours on the road they stopped at a solitary house called La Scala. ‘It was the filthiest place I ever beheld, and the smell was so intolerable, that nothing but the excessive cold out of doors could have induced us to have remained a single moment within it. Two hours, however, did we stay, cowering over the smoke of a wet wood fire, waiting till the mules were fed – for they could get something to eat, but for us there was nothing; neither bread, coffee, eggs, milk, meat, vegetables, nor even macaroni, were to be had; so that we might have starved, or breakfasted upon salt dried fish in oil, had not our
Vetturino
, more provident than ourselves, produced a store of stale loaves and hard boiled eggs, that he had laid in at Siena.'

After La Scala they toiled up apparently interminable hills: ‘The countrymen were all clothed in shaggy sheep-skins, with the wool outside, rudely stitched together to serve as a covering to their bodies, and pieces of the same were tied about their thighs, partially concealing the ragged vestments they wore beneath. Their legs and feet were bare; and this savage attire gave a strange, wild effect to the dark eyes that glared at us from beneath their bushy and matted locks. Indeed their whole appearance reminded us literally of wolves in sheep's clothing.'

It was late when they stopped for the night at a lone house by the wayside and, after the usual description of its filth and squalor, she goes on: ‘The
Vetturino
had providentially brought with him our supper, or else we should have got none; and it was cooked and sent up on coarse brown earthenware. Wretched as this house was, it seemed to contain a number of inmates; and the wild, ferocious appearance of those we saw, and the hoarse voices of the men whom we did not see, which frequently met our ear in loud altercation, conspired, with the appearance of the place, and the nature of the country, to make it seem fit for the resort of banditti, and the perpetration of robbery and murder.'

The doors to their rooms having neither bolts nor locks, they again barricaded themselves in, and went to bed in fear of their lives, to be awakened in the middle of the night by the fall of one of the chairs. ‘Starting up in sudden trepidation, I flew to the door, stumbling in the dark over the empty dishes of the supper, and extinguished lamps, which rolled about with a horrible clatter; and assuming a courage I did not feel, I authoritatively demanded to know who was there, as I hastily attempted to repair my outworks. I was answered by a gruff voice, demanding admittance. In my fright and confusion, it was some time before I understood that it was for the purpose of lighting the fire, and that it was four o'clock. To us it seemed that the night had only just begun, but it was clear our repose was at an end; so, wrapping myself in my dressing-gown, and guided by the light that streamed through the numerous crevices of the door, I began to demolish the pile of chairs and tables I had raised. When the door was opened, there came in a woman with long, dishevelled hair, a dim lamp burning in her withered, skinny hand, followed by a man clad in sheep-skins, and bending beneath a burden of sticks. His face was half hid with black, bushy hair, and his eyes were overhung with shaggy eyebrows; he had shoes, but his legs were bare, and by his side was fastened a huge knife or axe, much resembling one formerly in use for cutting off people's heads, but which I suspect he had applied to the less obnoxious purpose of cutting the wood he was carrying.'

If one looks carefully at the other side of her Gothic account it seems obvious that the people were anxious to make them as comfortable as was possible within their primitive means. But the party proceeds on its way, without breakfast, though: ‘Tea we had with us, but nothing could be got to make it or drink it in.'

On Sunday they arrived at the town of Acqua Pendente and ‘the streets were filled with men wrapped in their large cloaks, who were loitering about, or standing grouped together in corners, in that apathetic state of indolent taciturnity so expressive of complete bodily and mental inertion.

‘How unlike our English associations is a village in these countries, where a narrow street of dilapidated and windowless hovels, surrounded by filth, and inhabited by squalid wretchedness, is all that answers to the name! How melancholy and miserable do they seem, and how often has my fancy returned to the smiling villages of my own country, where neat cottages, and little gardens, scattered over the green, present the happy picture of humble contentment, cheerful industry, and rural happiness!'

And so our intrepid travellers went on their way. At one inn, where they got little or nothing to eat, the author says that the famed Muscat wine was so delicious that she hoped they would ‘not follow the example of an old German prelate, who, it seems, drank it at this inn till he died'.

A week of filthy beds and vile food did not tame her combative spirit. ‘If we did not eat, however, we were eaten; whole hosts made us their prey during the night, while we lay shivering and defenceless. This indeed is almost invariably the case throughout Italy. The people drain your purses by day, and the fleas your blood by night. They came within sight of all their endeavours!'

She was given perhaps to a fair amount of romantic exaggeration for the sake of her readers, but one must nevertheless concede that she did indeed rough it on the road to Rome. ‘Our longing eyes were intently fixed on the spot where we were told that it would first appear; when, at length, the carriage having toiled up to the top of a long hill, the
Vetturino
exclaimed, “Eccola!” The dome of St. Peter's appeared in view; and, springing out of the carriage, and up a bank by the road side, we beheld from its summit, Rome!'

CHAPTER EIGHT

ROME AND NAPLES

Railways soon ran the length and breadth of Italy, so that the journey to Rome became far more comfortable. Even by the 1850s tourists could get there from London in four and a half days, by taking the train as far as Marseilles and a boat to Civitta Vecchia – where Stendhal had been the French consul in the 1830s. With regard to the shipping lines, Murray's
South Italy and Naples
, 1853, states: ‘Formerly there was considerable competition between the companies; but they have latterly amalgamated, by no means to the advantage of travellers. The fares are exorbitant, and there is no longer any inducement to accelerate the speed. The complaints are consequently numerous, and travellers are frequently exposed both to annoyance and loss by the failure of the steamers to keep their engagements. Considering the importance of the line, and the large profits which the companies derive from English travellers, the proprietors should bear in mind that a want of punctuality, incivility on the part of their officers, or exorbitant charges, will inevitably force their best customers to support the French mail line exclusively, or to fall back on the old system of travelling by land.'

These complaints are omitted from the next edition of the handbook, suggesting that they had some effect; or perhaps Murray himself had been taken to task, because a note in the preface says: ‘The Publisher thinks proper to state that Mr. Blewitt, the author of the former edition of this Handbook, having been prevented superintending the present, is not responsible for the changes that have been introduced in it.'

By 1872 the railway to Rome went via Paris, Munich, Innsbruck and the Brenner Pass, a distance of 1547 miles which took three days, for the fare of twelve pounds. In 1875 there were 1600 miles of railway in Italy, and 8164 by 1889. Bradshaw, in 1897, says that Rome could be reached from London in two and a half days for ten pounds.

Such progress towards becoming a great European power was not, according to Macmillan's
Italy and Sicily
, 1905, an unmixed blessing, was even ‘a little precipitate, as no social transformation had taken place which correspond to the political revolution. Owing to the variety of local conditions, one district is almost a century behind another. The Italian revolution was a triumph for the middle classes, and the labouring classes had to bear an undue share of its burdens, while they profited but little from its immediate benefits.'

Most of the hotels were full when Charlotte Eaton and her companion arrived in Rome after their arduous journey from Florence, but when they found one: ‘You cannot conceive, without having travelled
Vetturino
, and lodged in the holes we have done, how delightful is the sensation of being in a habitable hotel, how acceptable the idea of a good dinner, and how transporting the prospect of sleeping in a clean bed.'

Thirty years later there were not only far more hotels, but many comfortable lodging houses. Families who intended to stay a long time ‘may meet with roomy and splendid apartments in some of the great palaces; in those of the Dukes Braschi, Altieri, Ceva, and Sermoneta, there is a princely suite generally let to foreigners. However respectable the landlord may appear, a formal written agreement is desirable, and a careful verification of the inventory still more so. In the Corso it will be as well to stipulate for the exclusive possession of the windows during the Carnival, or the lodger may be surprised to find his apartments converted into show-rooms during the festivities, besides being obliged to pay for a place at his own window.'