The proprietor
of the converted palace where we stopped in Naples was the very
image of a tomcat we used to own, named Plutarch's Lives, which
was half Maltese and half Mormon. He was a cat that had a fine
carrying voice - though better adapted for concert work than parlor
singing - and a sweetheart in every port. This hotelkeeper might
have been the cat's own brother with clothes on - he had Plute's
roving eye and his bristling whiskers and his sharp white teeth,
and Plute's silent, stealthy tread, and his way of purring softly
until he had won your confidence and then sticking his claw into
you. The only difference was, he stuck you with a bill instead
of a claw.
Another interesting idiosyncrasy of the Italian hotelkeeper is
that he invariably swears to you his town is the only honest town
in Italy, but begs you to beware of the next town which, he assures
you with his hand on the place where his heart would be if he had
a heart, is full of thieves and liars and counterfeit money and
pickpockets. Half of what he tells you is true - the latter half.
The tourist agencies issue pamphlets telling how you may send money
or jewelry by registered mail in Italy, and then append a footnote
warning you against sending money or jewelry by registered mail
in Italy. Likewise you are constantly being advised against
carrying articles of value in your trunk, unless it is most carefully
locked, bolted and strapped. It is good advice too.
An American I met on the boat coming home told me he failed to
take such precautions while traveling in Italy; and he said that
when he reached the Swiss border his trunk was so light he had to
sit on it to keep it from blowing off the bus on the way from the
station to the hotel, and so empty that when he opened it at both
ends the draft whistling through it gave him a bad cold. However,
he may have exaggerated slightly.
If you can forget that you are paying first-class prices for
fourth-rate accommodations - forget the dirt in the carriages and
the smells in the compartments - a railroad journey through the
Italian Peninsula is a wonderful experience. I know it was a
wonderful experience for me.
I shall not forget the old walled towns of stone perched precariously
on the sloping withers of razorbacked mountains - towns that were
old when the Saviour was born; or the ancient Roman aqueducts, all
pocked and pecked with age, looping their arches across the land
for miles on miles; or the fields, scored and scarified by three
thousand years of unremitting, relentless, everlasting agriculture;
or the wide-horned Italian cattle that browsed in those fields; or
yet the woman who darted to the door of every signal-house we
passed and came to attention, with a long cudgel held flat against
her shoulder like a sentry's musket.
I do not know why a woman should exhibit an overgrown broomstick
when an Italian train passes a flag station, any more than I know
why, when a squad of Paris firemen march out of the engine house
for exercise, they should carry carbines and knapsacks. I only
know that these things are done.
In Tuscany the vineyards make a fine show, for the vines are trained
to grow up from the ground and then are bound into streamers and
draped from one fruit tree or one shade tree to another, until a
whole hillside becomes one long, confusing vista of leafy festoons.
The thrifty owner gets the benefit of his grapes and of his trees,
and of the earth below, too, for there he raises vegetables and
grains, and the like. Like everything else in this land, the
system is an old one. I judge it was old enough to be hackneyed
when Horace wrote of it:
Now each man, basking on his slopes,
Weds to his widowed tree the vine;
Then, as he gayly quaffs his wine,
Salutes thee god of all his hopes.
Classical quotations interspersed here and there are wonderful
helps to a guide book, don't you think?
In rural Italy there are two other scenic details that strike the
American as being most curious - one is the amazing prevalence of
family washing, and the other is the amazing scarcity of birdlife.
To himself the traveler says:
"What becomes of all this intimate and personal display of family
apparel I see fluttering from the front windows of every house in
this country? Everybody is forever washing clothes but nobody ever
wears it after it is washed. And what has become of all the birds?"
For the first puzzle there is no key, but the traveler gets the
answer to the other when he passes a meat-dealer's shop in the
town and sees spread on the stalls heaps of pitiably small starlings
and sparrows and finches exposed for sale. An Italian will cook
and eat anything he can kill that has wings on it, from a cassowary
to a katydid.
Thinking this barbarity over, I started to get indignant; but just
in time I remembered what we ourselves have done to decimate the
canvas-back duck and the wild pigeon and the ricebird and the
red-worsted pulse-warmer, and other pleasing wild creatures of the
earlier days in America, now practically or wholly extinct. And
I felt that before I could attend to the tomtits in my Italian
brother's eye I must needs pluck a few buffaloes out of my own;
so I decided, in view of those things, to collect myself and
endeavor to remain perfectly calm.
We came into Venice at the customary hour - to wit, eleven P.M.
- and had a real treat as our train left the mainland and went
gliding far out, seemingly right through the placid Adriatic, to
where the beaded lights of Venice showed like a necklace about the
withered throat of a long-abandoned bride, waiting in the rags of
her moldered wedding finery for a bridegroom who comes not.
