On the Shores of the Mediterranean (9 page)

Tonight, what action there was was in the bar, which is about as comfortable as most bars have become in Italy, which means that there is hardly anything to sit on. In it three men and three girls were standing at the bar drinking Louis Roederer, which is a terrible price in a shop in Italy and an unimaginable price in such a place as Florian, where anything, even a beer, costs at least twice as much as it would in a more modest establishment.

The men were dressed in tweed and grey flannel. Two of them had camel-hair coats draped over their shoulders and the third wore a double-breasted herring-bone coat. All three of them wore Rolex watches and beautifully polished black or brown moccasins with tassels, one of the badges of the well-off, or those who want to be thought well-off, everywhere. All were over forty, possibly nearer fifty, with dark hair so uniformly and stylishly grizzled that I was tempted to ask them if they had barbers who grizzled it for them. They had typical Venetian faces: prominent, rather Semitic noses, the calculating eyes of shopkeepers, which in fact was probably what they were, shopkeepers who looked as if they might be involved in slightly questionable activities but nothing that would normally lead to actual prosecution, and if it did, and was successful, would only involve a fine which
they could afford. Hard faces, softened for the drinks with the girls; the faces of men not easily amused, or much given to laughter, unless in the form of some carefully controlled internal convulsion; the faces of men who were by nature slightly condescending, omniscient – to put it bluntly – know-alls, courteous, suspicious, contemptuous of outsiders, enjoying being in the position of being able to observe others, but not enjoying being scrutinized themselves.

The girls were in their middle twenties. All three wore wedding rings, in addition to other loot, on their fingers. What were they, we both wondered. These men’s mistresses, other men’s wives? They might, just conceivably, be their daughters, or their nieces. No one was giving anything away, not even the barman whom they all called by his first name. Uniformly well-formed, longhaired, long-legged, the sort of girls who can wear flat heels and still look as if they are wearing high heels, not particularly beautiful but so well-groomed that most men would not notice the fact, the product of female emancipation in post-war Italy where, until well into the sixties, girls stayed at home with their mothers in the evening, were chaperoned if they went out, and it was exceptional to find one who could drive a car. These girls looked not only as if they drove cars, but drove fast ones.

They did not look like typical Venetians, although, like the men, they interpolated whole paragraphs in Venetian dialect into their conversation, that strange amalgam which has strains of French, Arabic and Greek overlaying the Italian, blurring and contracting it. Perhaps girls do not become typical Venetians until they become older. Their mothers would look as Venetian as the men they were drinking with; their grandmothers would be the dies from which typical Venetians are pressed. These girls just looked like girls. Whether they were well-off or not, they were giving a convincing display of being so. It was difficult to imagine a band of such
overtly conspicuous consumers, dressed like this and loaded with expensive ephemera, sallying out into the fog from some drinking place in SW1 and walking home without being mugged, for this is what they were going to have to do when they did leave, in a city without motor cars, that is unless they slept over the premises or had bodyguards waiting for them.

One of the girls, who was wearing a Loden cape, announced that she had just inherited an eighteenth-century villa, in the country somewhere west of Treviso, destroying, in her case, the theory that she might be either daughter or mistress – perhaps they were assistants to the shopkeepers. Apparently it was in a very bad condition, having been used as a farmhouse for more than fifty years.

‘What should I do with it?’ she asked. ‘It could be very beautiful.’

‘I would insure it for a lot of money,’ one of the men said. ‘Say four hundred and fifty
milioni
[about £190,000 or $266,000]. And then I would pay someone to burn it down.’ It was difficult to know if he was joking.

The villa she was talking about was one of the country houses to which rich Venetians, Trevisans, Paduans and Vicenzans used to escape from the heat and stench of their cities in summer and in the autumn. They began building them in earnest in the sixteenth century, although some date from as early as the fourteenth century, and they built them in the plain between the foothills of the Alps and the lagoons. They continued to build them far into the eighteenth century, by which time they had become almost symbolic of the frivolity and lack of energy for commerce which characterized the last years of the Republic. They lined the banks of the Brenta Canal between Mestre and Padua with them, making of it a watery triumphal way. The best known is the mysterious
and withdrawn Villa Malcontenta, one of the masterpieces of Palladio – together with the Villa Capra at Vicenza, the most famous Palladian villas – which stands on its right bank near Mestre under what is now almost invariably a sulphurous sky, with the plants and factories of the Industrial Zone creeping closer to it every year. They built them on the banks of the Sile, which emerges as a pond full of vegetation in the plain west of Treviso and bubbles and seethes its way through this charming little city, apparently unpolluted. And they built them along the Terraglio, now a nightmare road, Strada Statale 13, between Mestre and Treviso, where villas with the sonorous names of past and present owners – Villa Gatterburg
ora
Volpi, Villa Duodo Malice
ora
Zoppolate (shades of Villa Newby), some in vast parks full of planes and cedars, with statues on the cornices looming against the sky – are today hemmed in by filling stations and windowless factories painted in bilious colours. And they built them in the depths of the country, miles from anywhere.

The Venetians went to their villas by gondola, or in the large rowing barges called
burchielli
, which had a sort of miniature villa on top of them in which the passengers could shield themselves from the elements and from the vulgar gaze. When there was no waterway leading to their villas, they travelled by ox-cart, which must have been pretty uncomfortable.

Their movements were as regular as those of migrant birds. The exodus from the city began on the eve of St Anthony’s Day in June and they stayed in the country until the end of July, after which they went back to the city. On October the first they went to the country again and in November, at the end of St Martin’s Summer, the time when the last grapes are picked which were not ripe at the
vendemmia
in October, they returned to Venice for a round of theatres and masked routs. As Venice declined, so the diversions increased in extravagance.

At night in their villas they gambled until dawn, unless there was some other diversion. They rose late, to watch other people cultivating their gardens and their vines, to visit their labyrinths, contemplate great nature, ponder further improvements and, as time went on, contemplate and ponder their diminished bank balances. For the Venetians were seldom content with one villa. It was not uncommon for a single family to own a dozen. At one time the Pisani owned fifty. More than two thousand villas are still in existence in the Veneto.

Of the great Venetian villas the grandest is the Pisani family’s villa at Stra
¹
on the Brenta Canal east of Padua, which has huge stables, a labyrinth, a fantastic gateway-cum-belvedere flanked by columns encircled by spiral staircases and crowned with statuary; and on the ceiling of the ballroom frescoes of angels blowing trumpets,
putti
, eighteenth-century gentry, one of them well placed between the thighs of a naked lady who has temporarily landed on a cloud, and what look like Red Indians, all by Giambattista Tiepolo, forever whirling across a pale blue sky. Another huge villa is the Villa Manin, at Passariano, south-west of Udine, which is so large that its outlines actually show up on the 1:200,000 Touring Club Italiano map. This was the villa built for the last Doge, Lodovico Manin, and with its immense all-embracing arcaded wings it resembles a small town rather than a habitation. The smallest of the villas is the exquisite Casa Quaglia – the Quail House – built in the fourteenth century at Paese, west of Treviso, now a shamefully neglected farmhouse, which has Venetian Gothic windows and a facade painted in the form of a tapestry with fabulous animals.

Some, however, like the one inherited by the girl in the bar at Florian’s, are in decay. In a typical one of this sort, if it is big,
several families of
contadini
may live in the
barchesse
, the curving wings, which spring from a central block in which most of the windows have been bricked up on the lower floor. Inside, the immense salon on the
piano nobile
, in which the ceiling may be entirely covered with seventeenth-century frescoes of gods and goddesses floating in the air, may also be half full of corn on the cob. There are great cracks in the ceiling, the door openings are covered with tattered sacking, and one day, soon, it will collapse.

‘How would you like to spend the evening?’ I asked, opening my favourite guide book. According to this, the
Guide Julliard de l’Europe
, there are four intelligent ways to spend an evening in Venice: the first and dearest is to hire a gondola (a closed one if one has improper thoughts and the means to gratify them); the second is to install oneself at a table in the Piazza San Marco; the third to look for adventures in the streets and alleys; the fourth to go to bed with a good book and a bottle of Scotch. ‘When one has tried all these,’ the authors say, ‘there are the night clubs.’

‘I know which one you’d choose,’ Wanda said, ‘but you can’t hire those closed gondolas any more.’

‘I wouldn’t choose any of them on a night like this.’

‘What time’s the train?’

‘Eight forty-five. It’s half past five now. I think we should go. I’m awfully hungry. We can have dinner at that place near the Colleoni monument. What do you call it?’

‘You mean the Trattoria alle Bandierette.’

‘Yes, that’ll take at least twenty minutes in this weather. We’d better telephone them and see if they can feed us around six-thirty. Then, by the time we’ve walked to the station, or if it’s going we might get the
circolare
²
from the Fondamente Nuove, and get the bags out of the
deposito
, we shall just make it. Lucky we booked
to go by train. We’d look pretty silly with plane tickets for London on a night like this.’

‘I’m glad we’re going home,’ Wanda said, who gets fed up when it’s cold, as she had done once in Siberia. ‘Just for now I’ve had enough of travelling and enough of the Mediterranean. I want to sleep in my own bed for a bit.’

One of the problems about travelling round the Mediterranean under your own steam and not as part of a group is the cost of transportation. Luckily, by one of those miracles to which we fortunately are no strangers, we were offered a trip back to Venice, which we had so capriciously abandoned because it was foggy, on the inaugural run of the Venice – Simplon – Orient Express.

The scenes at Victoria before this inaugural train was hauled away by a humdrum British diesel (it had not been possible to use steam engines on any sections of the route because of lack of steam train facilities) were memorable for anyone interested in such trivia, which included us. For the first time for many a day the rich, or those making a stab at being thought to be so, like
ourselves, could be seen travelling together and the station was awash with what Veblen described in his
Theory of the Leisure Class
as ‘conspicuous consumption’.

It had been suggested that we come dressed in the manner of the thirties and as a result pre-1939 taxis and motor cars of the same period hired from specialist hire firms were rolling up, one of them a mauve Panther which to my untutored eye looked like an overblown Bugatti. These disgorged a merry throng: gentlemen in wing collars and Panama hats, ladies in white felt and pill-box hats, and yards of beads. Liza Minnelli arrived bowler-hatless in non-period black, which suited her. Denise, Lady Kilmarnock, a partner in the firm which was promoting all this, was splendid in a shocking pink turban and was the life and soul of the party. I had a new shirt for the occasion. My wife had a new white beret. Nigel Dempster, gossip columnist of the
Daily Mail
, also had a new shirt. Calmest of all was Jennifer, society columnist of
Harpers and Queen
. The best organized of all the recorders of this and succeeding scenes, she had done her homework on her fellow travellers. She had no need to go scurrying around finding out who was who. Meanwhile the Coldstream Guards’ band played away like anything.

At 11.44 on the dot, having settled into a coach called Zena, used on the
Bournemouth Belle
from 1929 to 1946, we pulled out to the accompaniment of an enormous fanfare of trumpets. The interior was exquisite, the result of taking the whole thing to pieces and rebuilding it (in Lancashire) and the work of such people as cabinet-makers skilled in marquetry, and upholsterers.

Soon we were tucking into a delicious collation: watercress soup; salmon with tarragon cream, carrot and fennel; iceberg and mint leaf salad; tomatoes stuffed with mushrooms; and ‘Henley Pudding’, sort of mousse; with the glasses and cutlery, designed in France, which you can buy if you have enough of the necessary, setting up a magic tinkling.

Meanwhile, we were wondering who among this glittering throng was the Duchess of Westminster, Princess Esra Jah of Hyderabad, Rod Stewart, Sir Peter and Lady Parker (head of British Rail and designated ‘Folkestone only’), the grandson of George Mortimer, inventor of the Pullman Car, and Mrs Wheeler and son, the second people to book for this trip, back in 1978, all of whom were reputed to be on the train. As a result, although I had a pre-1914 Baedeker which would have given us a blow by blow account of the route to Folkestone, there was not much chance to use it or glimpse anything more than an occasional oast-house from the window.

At 14.00 we left Folkestone (and the Parkers, who had been given a good old grilling by the press as to why Sir Peter’s British Rail trains weren’t like this one) on a Sealink ferry, preserved from the common herd in the Verandah Deck Saloon which was reserved for VSOE passengers, but not protected from the media, who had been totally pre-empted by teams of Japanese television cameramen who had recorded the journey, travelling with the train all the way to Venice on a trial run and also following it with a fleet of helicopters.

Ninety minutes later, at Boulogne, we had our first sight of the European section of the train, seventeen coaches in the dark blue and gold livery of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits et des Grands Express Européens decorated with bronze cyphers, drawn up on the quay side. There were greetings from the Mayor, or was it the President of the Chamber of Commerce?

Eleven sleepers, each with sixteen or eighteen compartments, restaurant cars, a bar car with a grand piano in it, staff and baggage cars, had all been restored at Bremen and Slyke near Ostend with what must have been a goodly slice of the £11,000,000 it had cost to get the two trains on the rails. These sleepers were Lx, L denoting luxury, the cars associated in people’s minds with the old
Simplon – Orient. They had been everywhere, on the Rome Express, the Berlin – Naples, the Aegean Express and Taurus, the Nord Express to Riga before the war. We were in Wagon-Lit 3525, built at La Rochelle in 1929, decorated by René Prou, master of wagon-lit design, stored at Lourdes during the Second World War, last used on the Simplon – Orient and Rome Expresses between 1949 and 1961. Our luggage, which we hadn’t seen since Victoria, was already in the compartment. At 17.44, to the accompaniment of a band of serenading musicians, the train pulled out for Paris.

Changing for dinner in Lx 3525 – the decree was that ladies would dress and dinner jackets would be worn – was a feat of acrobatics, like the Marx Brothers in the cabin scene on the Atlantic liner (some of these compartments got smaller during conversion) and I got the bottom fly button of my trousers done up through the top buttonhole.

Down in the bar car it was like an Arabian night; everyone was dressed to the nines, with feathers and bandeaux. The champagne was flowing from those expensive Indian-club-shaped bottles. There we met an American husband and wife who owned their own parlour and sleeping cars back home in California where they hitched them on to trains and rode out to Kentucky or wherever the spirit moved them.

Dinner, which cost £20 ($28) a head (lunch and drinks on the train in England were included in the fare), was served while we were in the outskirts of Paris. It was cooked and presented by the chef, Michel Ranvier, late of the three-stars-in-
Michelin
Troisgros restaurant at Roanne. Memorable was the
Foie Gras de Canard Entier Cuit Tout Naturelle
, the little lobsters served
à Vinaigrette d’Huile d’Olive
, and the
Jambonnette de Poulette au Vin Jaune et Morilles
.

It took hours, due to one of the gas stoves in a kitchen going wrong, but who cared, we were not going on anywhere afterwards.

There was a red carpet down at the Gare d’Austerlitz, but no nobs to see us off, the present administrators of the country disapproving of conspicuous consumption and no one else wanting to be associated with the venture.

Then on through the night with a pianist, Monsieur Dars, at the grand piano in the bar, belting Scott Joplin and such as we roared down the line to Switzerland. The piano was such an impediment to navigation that sometimes I wished we’d brought a chain saw with us.

At 04.22 we arrived at Vallorbe, 266 miles from Paris, a station in the strange no-man’s-land between France and Switzerland, where as always a man plodded past groaning ‘VALLORBE … VALLORBE’, while another tapped the axles with a hammer, as in
Anna Karenina
.

I was asleep when they put the croissants on the train at Lausanne at 05.21, all the way along the shores of Lake Geneva and all the way up the Rhone Valley; waking in the entrance to the Simplon tunnel for the 12½-mile run under the Lepontine Alps, between Monte Leone and the Helsenhorn, where the previous week one of the Japanese camera crew had been nearly decapitated, putting his head out of the window in the middle of it.

We ate the croissants and drank coffee running along the shores of Lago Maggiore. Cork and cedar trees rose above the early mist on the Borromean Islands and the place names on the map – Stresa and Locarno – were those of long-forgotten treaties made before the war. It was going to be a lovely day. At Milan, at 10.00, the papers came on board with pictures of a frigate burning in the Falkland Islands.

Lunch on the train, £15 ($21) a head if you had to pay for it, was tagliatelle with butter, small chickens in a delicious sauce, smoked salmon, Parma ham, strawberry tart, the most delicious lemon cake and more of the Laurent-Perrier champagne on which
everyone had been over-indulging themselves. Then, three hours out of Milan, we rumbled through the hideous environs of Mestre and out along the causeway to the beautiful, sinking, stinking city in the Lagoon.

We arrived at Santa Lucia Station at 14.44 to be greeted on the platform when we descended by the station master, the massed concierges of the Cipriani, the Gritti and the Danieli, the assembled staff of the Venice – Simplon – Orient Express and the Gondolieri Chorus.

Miss Minnelli left in another little black number decorated with bugle beads. She told me she had enjoyed the trip. We never saw her again. Boats took us away up the Grand Canal, a vision in the sunshine, to stay at the Cipriani for free. It was all over.

Leaving Venice some considerable time later, this time in a van by the causeway across the Lagoon, turning right at Mestre on the old main road to Trieste, we crossed the plains of the Veneto and Venezia Giulia. For much of the way the road, as are most of the other main roads in northern Italy, is lined with developments, factories and furniture showrooms mostly, whose owners now choose what were previously remote rural locations for them, so that for long periods of time it is impossible to see the country on either side at all.

It is country which when one can see it is of endless flatness, through which the irrigation ditches stretch away to what seems like infinity between the high embankments, just as they do in the Po Delta. In summer, in the heat of the day, when the mirage is operating, this country sometimes looks more like a jelly than terra firma. In it, in summer, the farmhouses and villages stand like islands isolated in seas of ripening corn and grapes. (In winter they stand in seas of freezing mud.) In autumn, in late September or October, the
contadini
in their wide-brimmed straw hats, at
this season engaged in the
vendemmia
, take shelter beneath the vines, around half past nine or so, by which time it is already hot, to eat their
merenda
, just as we do in the vineyards around I Castagni.

The rivers that flow down through the plain from the Alps into the lagoons and marshes that fringe the coast are the Piave, the Tagliamento and the Isonzo, which first sees the light of day as the Soča, bubbling up over clean sand in a deep cleft in the rock in the Julian Alps in Yugoslavia, each of them in full, sometimes dangerous, flood in spring when the mountain snows melt. In the hot weather long reaches of them are often nothing more than arid wildernesses of shingle with a few livid green stagnant pools among them. Rivers that were practically unheard-of in the outside world until the First World War when hundreds of thousands of Italians and Austro-Hungarians died fighting one another on their banks.

Having crossed the Isonzo, the most eastward of these rivers, we arrived in the late afternoon in Monfalcone, a rather sad shipbuilding and industrial town on the shores of the Gulf of Panzano, an inlet at the head of the Gulf of Trieste, sad-looking because it was more or less destroyed in the First World War and then rebuilt in the early twenties at a time when domestic as well as public architecture was rather sad anyway.

The only old building of note is the castle, and even that is not exciting as castles go, although the view from it is magnificent, over what is actually only a small part of the vast plain which extends uninterruptedly for some 300 miles from the Julian Alps to the Maritime and the Cottian Alps in which the Po rises on the French frontier beyond Turin, with the shining lagoons reaching into it from the sea and with towers and campanili rising into the air above it, of which that of the cathedral of Aquileia, the Roman city sacked by Attila, is the most easily identifiable.

The castle stands on the very edge of what the Italians call Il Carso, the Yugoslavs call the Kras and German-speakers the Karst, a wilderness of limestone here rising in a steep escarpment abruptly above the town and the plain, like a whale surfacing from the depths of the ocean, scarred by quarrying, utterly bare except for a few plantations of conifers and innumerable electric pylons which protrude from it like harpoons. Having fought and negotiated so ferociously either to obtain or retain it, it would be comical, if it was not tragic, to see how the Italians have treated what they are always going on about as their patrimony.

Much of the Carso is bare rock, but parts of it are covered with ash, rowan, hawthorn shrubs and holm oaks, the last vestigial remains of the primeval forest that provided some of the wooden piles on which, miraculously, Venice still stands, although now plantations of conifers are rapidly changing its appearance.

Here, among what in some places look like torrents of rock, the making of the fields, before the coming of the bulldozer, was the back-breaking work of generations of men and women and their children. Here, you can still see piles of pale, rain-washed stones, as much as ten feet high and sixty feet long, like great burial cairns, all hand-picked from this wilderness to make a field of red earth perhaps three feet deep and thirty yards long in which vines, corn, turnips or potatoes could be grown.

It is a place of extremes. In winter the fearful wind called by the Slovenes the
Kraška Burja
, by the Italians the
Bora
, sweeps over the plateau from the north-east, sometimes attaining a velocity of up to 130 mph and in the past upsetting heavily laden ox-carts and even halting trains on the railway line from Trieste to Ljubljana, although it now rarely blows with such ferocity, possibly because the plateau is being protected by the reafforestation.