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.
