Road signs in Italy are not as good or as frequent as one finds in France, but where they exist they are at least serviceable. The Roman milestone of old has ceased to serve its purpose, though solitary examples still exist, and their place is taken by the governmental “bornes” and the placards posted at the initiation of the Touring Club and various automobile organizations in certain parts, particularly in the north.
The signboards of the Touring Club Italiano are distinctly good as far as they go, but they are infrequent.
All hotels and garages affiliated with the club hang out a characteristic and ever welcome sign, and there one is sure of finding the best welcome and the best accommodations for man and his modern beast of burden, the mechanical horses of iron and bronze harnessed to his luxurious tonneau or limousine.
With regard to road maps for Italy there exist certain governmental maps like those of the Ordnance Survey in England or of the État Major in France, but they are practically useless for the automobilist, and are only interesting from a topographic sense.
Taride, the French map publisher, issues a cheap series of Italian road maps, covering the entire peninsula in three sheets printed in three colours, with main roads marked plainly in red. They are easily read and clear and have the advantage of being cheap, the three sheets costing but a franc each, but one suspects that they were not composed entirely from first hand, well-authenticated, recent sources of information. Little discrepancies such as just where a railway crosses a road, etc., etc., are frequently to be noted. This is perhaps a small matter, but the genuine vagabond tourist, whether he is plodding along on foot or rolling smoothly on his five inch pneumatics, likes to know his exact whereabouts at every step of the way. On the whole the Italian “Taride” maps are fairly satisfactory, and they are much more easily read than the more elaborate series in fifty-six sheets on a scale of 1-1,250,000 issued by the Touring Club Italiano, or the thirty-five sheets of the Carta Stradale d’Italia Sistema Becherel-Marieni, which by reason of the number of sheets alone are in no way as convenient as the three sheet map.
The Becherel-Marieni maps are, however, beautifully printed and have a system of marking localities where one finds supplies of gasoline, a mechanician or a garage which is very useful to the automobilist, besides giving warning of all hills and, with some attempt at precision, also marking the good, mediocre and bad roads. This is important but, as the writer has so often found that a good road of yesterday has become a bad road of to-day, and will be perhaps a worse one to-morrow, he realizes that the fluctuating quality of Italian roads prevents any genius of a map-maker from doing his best. These maps in seven colours are perhaps the best works of their kind in Italy, at least ranking with the Touring Club maps, and completely cover the country, whereas the other series is not as yet wholly complete.
Membership in the great Touring Club Italiano is almost a necessity for one who would enjoy his Italian tour to the full. The “Annuario,” giving information as to hotels and garages and miniature plans of all the cities and principal towns – presented gratis to members – is all but indispensable, while the three pocket volumes entitled Strade di Grande Communicazione, with the kilometric distances between all Italian places except the merest hamlets and the profile elevations (miniature maps, hundreds of them) of the great highways are a boon and a blessing to one who would know the easiest and least hilly road between two points. The accompanying diagram explains this better than words.
CHAPTER V
IN LIGURIA
THE most ravishingly beautiful entrance into Italy is by the road along the Mediterranean shore. The French Riviera and its gilded pleasures, its great hotels, its chic resorts and its entrancing combination of seascape and landscape are known to all classes of travellers, but at Menton, almost on the frontier, one is within arm’s reach of things Italian, where life is less feverish, in strong contrast to the French atmosphere which envelops everything to the west of the great white triangle painted on the cliff above the Pont Saint Louis and marking the boundary between the two great Latin countries.
The “Route Internationale,” leading from France to Italy, crosses a deep ravine by the Pont Saint Louis with the railway running close beside.
Not so very long ago there was a unity of speech and manners among the inhabitants of Menton and the neighbouring Italian towns of Grimaldi, Mortola and Ventimiglia, but little by little the Ravine of Saint Louis has become a hostile frontier, where the custom house officials of France and Italy regard each other, if not as enemies, at least as aliens. The two peoples are, however, of the same race and have the same historic traditions.
It was just here, on passing the frontier, that we asked a deep-eyed, sun-burnt young girl of eighteen or twenty if she was an Italian, thinking perhaps she might be a Niçoise, who, among the world’s beautiful women, occupy a very high place. She replied in French-Italian: “Oui, aussi bien Venitienne!” This was strange, for most Venetians, since Titian set the style for them, have been blondes.
A château of the Grimaldi family crowns the porphyry height just to the eastward of the Italian frontier, and below is the Italian Dogana, where the automobilist and other travellers by road go through the formalities made necessary by governmental red tape. Red tape is all right in the right place, but it should be cut off in proper lengths, so that officials need not be obliged to quibble over a few soldi while individuals lose a dozen francs or more in valuable time.
This matter of customs formalities at Grimaldi is only an incident. The automobilist’s troubles really commence at a little shack in Menton, on French soil, just before the Pont Saint Louis is crossed. Here he has his “passavant” made out, an official taking a lot of valuable time to decide whether the cushions of your automobile are red, orange or brown. You stick out for orange because they were that colour when you bought the outfit, but the representative of the law sticks out too – he for red. The result is, you compromise on brown, and hope that the other customs guardian on duty at the frontier post by which you will enter France again will be blessed with the same sense of colour-blindness as was his fellow of Menton. Once this formality gone through – and you pay only two sous for the documents – you have no trouble getting back into France again by whichever frontier town you pass. There are no duties to pay and no disputes, so really one cannot complain. It is for his benefit anyway that the “passavant” describing the peculiarities of automobile is issued.
At the Grimaldi Dogana on entering Italy you are made to pay duty on what little gasoline you may have in your tanks, even for as little as a litre. Presumably you pass your machine through the Italian customs with one of the “triptyches” issued by any of the great automobile clubs or touring associations, as otherwise you have to put down gold, and a thousand or fifteen hundred francs in gold one does not usually carry around loose in his pocket. We passed through readily enough, but a poor non-French, non-Italian speaking American who followed in our wheel-tracks had not made his preparations beforehand, and French banknotes didn’t look good enough to the Italian customs official, and a day was lost accordingly while the poor unfortunate rolled back down hill to Menton and sought to turn the notes into gold. The banks having just closed he was not able to do this as readily as he thought he might, and it was well on after sunrise that he followed our trail – and never caught up with us all the way to Grosetto.
Mortola is the first town of note that one passes on entering Italian soil, but beyond its aspect, so alien to that of the small town in France, it is not worthy of remark.
Ventimiglia comes next, where the traveller by rail goes through equally annoying customs formalities to those experienced by the traveller by road at Grimaldi. These are not apt to be so costly, as the customs officials take him at his word, graciously chalk his luggage and pass him on. The Guardie-Finanze, or customs officer, of Italy is a genteel looking young person with a bowler hat, topped with a feather cockade. He is even as gay and picturesque as the “carabinieri reales,” though he is a mere plebeian among the noblesse of soldierdom.
The Vintimille of the French, or the Ventimiglia of the Italians, was the ancient Intemilium of the Romans. To-day, on the left bank of the Roja, is a new city made up of the attributes of a great railway and frontier station and a numerous assemblage of alberghi, hotels, restaurants and the like.
Ventimiglia is not unlovely, neither is it lovely in a picturesque romantic sense. Its site is charming, on the banks of the tumbling Roja at the base of the Alps of Piedmont, just where they plunge, from a height of a thousand or twelve hundred metres, down into the lapping Mediterranean waves.
Ventimiglia is, practically, the frontier town of Piedmont, and it was fought for by all the warring houses of these parts in the middle ages. The Genoese held it for a time, then the Counts of Provence and the Duke of Savoy. It was a game of give-and-take all round, and in the mêlée most of the town’s mediæval monuments have disappeared.
Across the Nervia, to the north, is Monte Appio, one of the chief spurs of the Maritime Alps in Italy. On a jutting crag of rock, in plain view from the town below, is an ancient Roman castellum. Two fragmentary towers alone remain, and as a ruin, even, it is beneath consideration. One only notices it in passing and recalls the more magnificent Tower of Augustus at La Turbie, high above Monte Carlo’s rock, and still in plain view of Ventimiglia – with a good glass.
A fine relic of the Dorias – that great family of great Genoese – is still to be seen in picturesque ruin at Dolce Acqua, a few miles further up the valley of the torrent.
Bordighera is the first of the Italian Riviera winter stations for invalids. That describes it perfectly. Its surroundings are delightful enough, but there is little that is attractive about the place itself. The automobilist will have no trouble finding his way through the town if he keeps straight on but drives carefully and avoids the invalids and baby carriages.
It was a sailor of Bordighera who gave the order to “wet the ropes” – an old seafaring trick, known the world over – when the obelisk on the Piazza san Pietro at Rome, erected by Sixte-Quint, was tottering on its base. In return for the service he asked the favour of the Pope that his native town should have the honour of supplying the churches of Rome with their greenery on Palm Sunday. The supplying of palm branches and the exploiting of semi-invalids are the chief industries of Bordighera.
San Remo is very like Bordighera, except that it is an improvement on it. The quarter where the great hotels are found looks like all towns of its class, but the old town with its narrow canyon-like streets, its buttressed roofs and walls, still breathes of the mediæval spirit. It is as crowded a quarter, where dwell men, women and children, – seemingly children mostly, – as can be found east of Grand, Canal or Hester Streets, in down-town New York. The automobile tourist will not care much for San Remo unless he is hungry, in which case the Hotel de Paris will cater for him a little better than any other of the town’s resort hotels.
The road continues close beside the sea, as it has since Fréjus in the Var was passed, sweeping around bold promontories on a shelf of rock, tunnelling through some mountain spur, dipping down to sea-level here and rising three or five hundred metres ten kilometres further on.
This delightfully disposed road by the sea may well be reviled by the automobilist because of the fact that every half dozen kilometres or so it crosses the railway at the same level. These level crossings are about as dangerous as the American variety; in a way more so. They are barred simply by a great swinging tree-trunk, which, of all things, swings outwards and across the road when not in use. Even when closed this bar is so placed that an automobile at speed could well enough slip beneath it, and the passengers who were not thrown out and killed by this operation surely would be by the train which would probably come along before they could pick themselves up.
These railway barriers are almost always closed, whether a train is due or not, and it is commonly said that they are only opened for the automobilist on the payment of a few soldi. This, the writer knows to be calumny. It is conceivable that the circumstance has been met with, and it is conceivable that, in many more instances, stranger automobilists have scattered coin in their wake which led to the development of the practice, but all the same one need not, should not, in fact, countenance any such practice of blackmail. The mere fact that these obstructions are there is enough of a penance for the automobilist, who in ten hours of running will certainly lose one or two hours waiting for the gates to be opened.
These Italian coast line vistas are quite the most savagely beautiful of any along the Mediterranean. We rave over the strip dominated by La Turbie and Monte Carlo’s rock, and over the Corniche d’Or of the Estérel in France, but really there is nothing quite so primitive and unspoiled in its beauty as this less-known itinerary. The background mountains rise, grim, behind, and beneath. At the bottom of the cliff, a hundred metres below the road on which you ride, break the soapy waves of the sea. Gulls circle about uttering their shrill cries, an eagle soars above, and far below a fisherman pushes lazily at his oar in the conventional stand-up Mediterranean fashion, or a red-brown latteen-rigged fishing boat darts in or out of some half-hidden bay or calanque. The whole poetic ensemble is hard to beat, and yet this part of the average Italian journey is usually rolled off in express trains, with never a stop between the frontier and Genoa, most of the time passing through the fifty rock-cut tunnels which allow the railway access to these parts. To see this wonderful strip of coast line at its best it must be seen from the highroad.
At Arma, as the road runs along at the water’s very edge, is an old square donjon tower, reminding one of those great keeps of England and of Foulque’s Nerra in Normandy. Its history is lost in oblivion, but it is a landmark to be noted.
Porto Maurizio is the very ideal of a small Mediterranean sea-port. It is a hill-top town too, in that it crowns a promontory jutting seawards, forming a sheltering harbour for its busy coming and going of small-fry shipping.
Olive oil and a sweet white wine, like that of Cyprus, grown on the hillsides roundabout, form the chief of the merchandise sent out from the little port; but the whole town bears a prosperous well-kept air that makes one regret that it had not a battery of “sights,” in order that one might linger a while in so pleasant a place. Porto Maurizio’s church is a remarkably vast and handsome building.
Oneglia, the birthplace of the great Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria, lies just beyond. Wine in skins, hung up on rafters to mellow, seems to be Oneglia’s substitute for wine cellars, but otherwise the hurried traveller at Oneglia remarks nothing but that it is a “resort” with big hotels and big gardens and many guests lolling about killing time. The older part of the town, with the wine skins, is decidedly the most interesting feature.
At Marina-Andora is the ruin of an old castle with a ghostly legend to it to add an attraction it might not otherwise have. A Papal Nuncio was one day murdered here within its walls and “in extremis” the prelate called down curses upon the surrounding country, praying that it might wither and dry up. It must have been an efficacious imprecation as the country roundabout looks like a desert waste. Not an olive nor an orange grove is in sight and only a few scrubby vineyards dot the landscape.
At the Capo delle Melle, a dozen kilometres beyond, it all changes and the land blossoms again, though truth to tell both the wine and olive products have the reputation of falling off in quality as one goes further east.
Alassio is a now well-developed Italian seaside resort. The Italians and the Germans fill it to overflowing at all seasons of the year, and prices are mounting skywards with a rapidity which would do credit to Monte Carlo itself. There is a considerable fishing and coastwise trade at Alassio which along the quais endows it with a certain picturesqueness, and the chief hotel is quartered in a seventeenth century palazzo, formerly belonging to the Marchese Durante. Alassio took its name from Alassia, a daughter of Otho the Great, who, fleeing from the paternal roof, came here with her lover long years ago. This was the beginning of the development of Alassio as a Mediterranean resort. And the Germans have been coming in increasing numbers ever since.
Off shore is the isle of Gallinaria. It has a circular tower on it, and a legend goes with it that the name of the island is derived from a species of hens and chickens which were bred here. The connection seems a little vague, but for the sake of variation, it is here given.
Here and there as the road winds along the coast some vine-clad ruin of a castle tower is passed, and the background foot-hills of the Alps are peopled with toy villages and towns like Switzerland itself.
Albenga is primarily a great big overgrown coast town of to-day, but was formerly the ancient metropolis of a minor political division of Liguria, and the one time ally of Carthage. Evidences of this fallen pride of place are not wanting in Albenga to-day. There are innumerable great brick and stone towers, now often built into some surrounding structure. Three may be remarked as landmarks of the town’s great civic and military glory of the past: the Torre de Marchese Malespina, the Torre dei Guelfi, and another, unnamed, built up into the present Casa del Commune.
Albenga is not a resort, since it has the reputation of being an unhealthful place, but probably this is not so as there is no particular squalidness to be noticed, save that incident to the workaday affairs of factories, workshops and shipping. The inhabitants of the neighbouring towns profess to recognize the native of Albenga at a glance when they hail him with the remark: “Hai faccia di Albenga.” – “You have the Albenga face.” This is probably local jealousy only, and is not really contempt.
A short way out from Albenga is the Ponte Lungo, an old Roman bridge of the time of the Emperor Honorius. Savona, the largest place between the frontier and Genoa, is still fifty kilometres to the eastward, but midway between it and Albenga is Finale Marina, a town of one main street, two enormous painted churches, an imposing fortification wall, a palm-planted promenade and a municipal palace bearing, over its portal, the arms of a visiting Spanish monarch who ruled here temporarily in the fifteenth century.
The Castello Gavone, on a hillside above the town and back from the coast, is a ruin, but its picturesque outer walls, with diamond-cut stone facets, like those of the great round tower of Milan or of Tantallon Castle in Scotland, are quite remarkable.
Finale Marina’s Albergo Grimaldi is housed in an old château of some noble of the days when the town was the capital of a Marquisate. Not much changed is the old château, except to put new wine in the old bottles and new linen on the antique beds. To be sure there are electric push-buttons in the chambers, but as they are useless they can hardly be taken into consideration.
The Albergo Grimaldi has scant accommodation for automobiles. Three might range themselves along the wall in the lower corridor, and would indeed be well enough housed, though in no sense is there the least semblance of a garage. You pay nothing additional for this, and that’s something in Italy where automobiles – in the small towns – are still regarded as mechanical curiosities and their occupants as fanatics with more money than good sense. The Italian country population is by no means hostile to the automobilist, but their good nature, even, is often exasperating.
Finale Marina is the best stopping place between Menton and Genoa if one is travelling by road, and would avoid the resorts.
Noli, just beyond the Capo di Noli, is an unimportant small town; nevertheless it is the proud possessor of a collection of ruined walls and towers which would be a pride to any mediæval “borgo.” Noli, like Albenga, was once the chief town of a little political division; but to-day it is a complete nonentity.
In bright sunshine, from the road winding over the Capo di Noli, one may see the smoke of Genoa’s chimneys and shipping rising, cloud-like, on the horizon far away to the eastward, and may even descry that classic landmark, the great lighthouse called “La Lanterna” at the end of the mole jutting out between San Pier d’Arena and Genoa.
A castle-crowned rocky islet, the Isola dei Bergeggi, lies close off shore beneath the Capo di Vado, itself crowned with a seventeenth century fortress cut out of the very rock.
Still following the rocky coastline, one draws slowly up on Savona. Savona is backed up by olive gardens and pine-clad hills, while above, away from the coast, roll the first foot-hills of the Apennines, their nearby slopes and crests dotted, here and there, with some grim fortress of to-day or a watch tower of mediæval times. The Alps are now dwindling into the Apennines, but the change is hardly perceptible.
Above the roofs and chimneys of the town itself rises an old tower of masonry on which is perched a colossal madonna, a venerated shrine of the Ligurian sailor-folk. It bears an inscription which seems to scan equally well in school-book Latin or colloquial Italian.
“In mare irato, in subita procella
Invoco te, nostra benigna stella.”
Mago, the Carthaginian, made Savona a refuge after his sack of Genoa. The Genoese, in turn, came along and blocked up the port out of sheer jealousy, lest it might become a commercial rival of Genoa itself.
The bay of Savona is delightful, even Wordsworth, who mostly sang of lakes and larks, remarked it, though in no way is it superior in beauty to a score of other indentations in the Mediterranean coastline from Marseilles around to Naples.
The automobilist will best remember Savona for its exceedingly bad exits and entrances, and the clean and unencumbered streets in the town itself. Here are great wide park-like thoroughfares flagged with flat smooth stones which are a dream to the automobilist. There never were such superbly laid paving blocks as one finds in Savona.
As one leaves Savona he actually begins to sense the smoke and activities of Genoa in his nostrils, albeit they are a good fifty kilometres away as yet; around a half a dozen jutting barrier capes, and across innumerable railway tracks.
Varazze is not a stopping point on many travellers’ Italian journeyings and, to state it frankly, perhaps, for the majority, it is not worth visiting. It is a sort of overflow Sunday resort for the people of Genoa, in that each of its two hotels have dining accommodation for a hundred people or more. Aside from this it is endowed with a certain quaint picturesqueness. It has a palm-tree-lined quay which borders a string of ship-building yards where the wooden walls of Genoa’s commerce-carrying craft were formerly built in large numbers, and where, to-day, a remnant of this industry is still carried on. Great long-horned white oxen haul timber through the crooked streets and along the quays, and there is ever a smell of tar and the sound of sawing and hammering. An artist with pen or brush will like Varazze better than any other class of traveller. The automobilist will have all he can manage in dodging the ox teams and their great trundling loads of timber.
There is a fragment of a ruined castle near by on the outskirts of the town, and farther away, back in the hills, is a monastery called “Il Deserto,” and properly enough named it is. It was founded by a lady of the Pallavicini family who as a recompense – it is to be presumed – insisted on being represented in the painted altar-piece as the Madonna, though clad in mediæval Genoese dress. What vanity!
Cogoletto, practically a Genoese suburb, claims to be the birth place of Columbus. Perhaps indeed it is so, as his father Dominico was known to be a property owner near Genoa. Savona, Oneglia and Genoa itself all have memories of the family, so the discoverer was of Ligurian parentage without doubt.
“Sestri-Ponente! Cornigliano-Ligure! San Pier d’Arena!” (with its Villa Serra and its Babylonian-like gardens) cry out the railway employees at each stop of the Genoa-bound train; and the same names roll up on the automobilist’s road map with a like persistency. Each class of traveller wonders why Genoa is not reached more quickly, and the automobilist, for the last dozen kilometres, has been cursed with a most exasperating, always-in-the-way tramway, with innumerable carts, badly paved roads and much mud. The approaches to almost all great cities are equally vile; Genoa is no exception and the traffic in the city – and in all the built up suburbs —keeps to the left, a local custom which is inexplicable since in the open country it goes to the right.
Voltri is a long drawn-out, uninteresting, waterside town with more chimneys belching smoke and cinders in strong contrast to the pine-clad background hills, in which nestle the suburban villas of the Doria, the Galliera and the Brignole families of other days.
Pegli is but a continuation of Voltri, Genoa La Superba is still a dozen kilometres away. Pegli is a resort of some importance and its chief attraction is the Villa Pallavicini, with a labyrinth of grottoes, subterranean lakes, cement moulded rocks, Chinese pagodas and the like. It is not lovely, but is commonly reckoned a sight worth stopping off to see. The Italians call this hodge podge “a ferocity of invention.” The phrase is worthy of perpetuation.
The Palazzo Pallavicini was the suburban residence of the banker of the Court of Rome, but he was a sort of renegade financier, for he went off to England with the churchly funds and became an English country gentleman, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. His “past” was known, for some poet-historian of the time branded him with the following couplet: —
“Sir Horatio Palvasene,
Who robbed the Pope to pay the Queen.”
The Villa Doria at Pegli was a work of Canzio built for one of the richest merchants of Genoa in the days of Charles V. It was, like its contemporaries, a gorgeous establishment, but in popular fancy it enjoys not a whit of the enthusiasm bestowed upon the stagy, tricky bric-à-brac and stucco Villa Pallavicini.
The entrance to “Genoa la Superba” by road from the west is a sorry spectacle, a grim, crowded thoroughfare decidedly workaday and none too cleanly. From San Pier d’Arena one comes immediately within the confines of Genoa itself, just after circling the western port and passing the sky-piercing “La Lanterna,” one of the most ancient lighthouses extant, dating from 1547.
Genoa is neglected or ignored by most travellers and searchers after the picturesque in Italy. This is a mistake, for Genoa’s park of Acquasola, the gardens of the Villa Rosazza and of the Villa de Negroni, and the terraces of the Palazzo Doria offer as enchanting a series of panoramas as those of Rome or Florence, and quite different, in that they have always the vista of the blue Mediterranean as a background.
Genoa is a bizarre combination of the old and the new, of the mountain and the plain, of great docks and wharves, and of streets of stairs rising almost vertically.
The general effect of Genoa is as if everything in it had been piled one on top of another until finally it had to spread out at the base. Enormous caserns fringe the heights and great barracks line the wharves, while in between, and here, there and everywhere, are great and venerable palaces and churches of marble, many of them built in layers of black and white stone, indicating that they were built by the commune in mediæval days, or by one of the four great families of Doria, Grimaldi, Spinola or Fieschi, the only ones who had the privilege of using it.
Genoa’s labyrinth of twisting, climbing streets and alleys are all but impracticable for wheeled traffic, and, for that reason, strangers, who do not walk “en tour” as much as they ought, save in the corridors of picture galleries and the aisles of churches, know not Genoa save its main arteries – nor ever will, unless they change their tactics.
The automobile is only useful in Genoa in getting in and out of town, and even that is accomplished with fear and trembling by the most cold-blooded chauffeur that ever lived. What with the vile roads, the magnificent distances and the ceaseless irresponsible traffic of carts and drays, tramways and what not, Genoa is indeed, of all other cities on earth, in need of a boulevard for the new traffic. To get to your hotel at the further end of the town as you make your entrance by the road circling the base of “La Lanterna,” can only be likened to a trip down Broadway in New York at four o’clock in the afternoon. That would not be pleasure; neither is getting in and out of Genoa at any time between five in the morning and seven at night.
To what degenerate depths these great palaces of the Genoa of other days have fallen only the curious and inquisitive are likely to know. One into which we penetrated – looking for something which wasn’t there – was a veritable hive of industry, and as cosmopolitan as Babylon. It was near the Bourse and one entered marble halls by a marble staircase, flanked by a marble balustrade and finished off with newel posts supported by marble lions. The great entrance hall was surrounded by a colonnade of svelt marble columns, and in the centre ascended a monumental marble staircase. Two marble fountains played in an inner courtyard, which was paved with marble flags, and a statue, also marble, in a niche faced the great doorway.