how shall the truthful chronicler speak with becoming respect and becoming
dignity? For Cannes has its faults. Truly a wonderful place is that
cosmopolitan winter resort. Rococo châteaux, glorious gardens of
palm-trees, imitation Moorish villas, wooden châlets from the
scene-painter's ideal Switzerland, Elizabethan mansions stuck in Italian
grounds, lovely groves of mimosa, eucalyptus, and judas-trees, all mingle
together in so strange and incongruous a picture that one knows not when
to laugh, when to weep, when to admire, when to cry "Out on it!" Imagine a
conglomeration of two or three white-faced Parisian streets, interspersed
with little bits of England, of Brussels, of Algiers, of Constantinople,
of Pekin, of Bern, of Nuremberg and of Venice, jumbled side by side on a
green Provençal hillside before a beautiful bay, and you get modern
Cannes; a Babel set in Paradise; a sort of _boulevardier_ Bond Street,
with a view across blue waves to the serrated peaks of the ever lovely
Estérel. Nay; try as it will, Cannes cannot help being beautiful. Nature
has done so much for it that art itself, the debased French art of the
Empire and the Republic, can never for one moment succeed in making it
ugly; though I am bound to admit it has striven as hard as it knew for
that laudable object. But Cannes is Cannes still, in spite of Grand Dukes
and landscape gardeners and architects. And the Old Town, at least, is yet
wholly unspoilt by the speculative builder. Almost every Riviera
watering-place has such an old-world nucleus or kernel of its own, the
quaint fisher village of ancient days, round which the meretricious modern
villas have clustered, one by one, in irregular succession. At Cannes the
Old Town is even more conspicuous than elsewhere; for it clambers up the
steep sides of a little seaward hillock, crowned by the tower of an
eleventh century church, and is as picturesque, as gray, as dirty, as most
other haunts of the hardy Provençal fisherman. Strange, too, to see how
the two streams of life flow on ever, side by side, yet ever unmingled.
The Cannes of the fishermen is to this day as unvaried as if the new
cosmopolitan winter resort had never grown up, with its Anglo-Russian airs
and graces, its German-American frivolities, round that unpromising
center.
The Rue d'Antibes is the principal shopping street of the newer and richer
Cannes. If we follow it out into the country by its straight French
boulevard it leads us at last to the funny old border city from which it
still takes its unpretending name. Antibes itself belongs to that very
first crop of civilized Provençal towns which owe their origin to the
sturdy old Phocæan colonists. It is a Greek city by descent, the Antipolis
which faced and defended the harbor of Nicæa; and for picturesqueness and
beauty it has not its equal on the whole picturesque and beautiful
Riviera. Everybody who has travelled by the "Paris, Lyon, Méditerranée"
knows well the exquisite view of the mole and harbor as seen in passing
from the railway. But that charming glimpse, quaint and varied as it is,
gives by no means a full idea of the ancient Phocæan city. The town stands
still surrounded by its bristling fortification, the work of Vauban,
pierced by narrow gates in their thickness, and topped with noble
ramparts. The Fort Carré that crowns the seaward promontory, the rocky
islets, and the two stone breakwaters of the port (a small-scale Genoa),
all add to the striking effect of the situation and prospect. Within, the
place is as quaint and curious as without: a labyrinth of narrow streets,
poor in memorials of Antipolis, but rich in Roman remains, including that
famous and pathetic inscription to the boy Septentrio, QVI ANTIPOLI IN
THEATRO BIDVO SALTAVIT ET PLACVIT. The last three words borrowed from this
provincial tombstone, have become proverbial of the short-lived glory of
the actor's art.
The general aspect of Antibes town, however, is at present mediæval, or
even seventeenth century. A flavor as of Louis Quatorz pervades the whole
city, with its obtrusive military air of a border fortress; for, of
course, while the Var still formed the frontier between France and Italy,
Antibes ranked necessarily as a strategic post of immense importance; and
at the present day, in our new recrudescence of military barbarism, great
barracks surround the fortifications with fresh white-washed walls, and
the "Hun! Deusse!" of the noisy French drill-sergeant resounds all day
long from the exercise-ground by the railway station. Antibes itself is
therefore by no means a place to stop at; it is the Cap d'Antibes close
by that attracts now every year an increasing influx of peaceful and
cultivated visitors. The walks and drives are charming; the pine-woods,
carpeted with wild anemones, are a dream of delight; and the view from the
Lighthouse Hill behind the town is one of the loveliest and most varied on
the whole round Mediterranean.
But I must not linger here over the beauties of the Cap d'Antibes, but
must be pushing onwards towards Monaco and Monte Carlo.
It is a wonderful spot, this little principality of Monaco, hemmed in
between the high mountains and the assailing sea, and long hermetically
cut off from all its more powerful and commercial neighbors. Between the
palm-lined boulevards of Nice and the grand amphitheater of mountains that
shuts in Mentone as with a perfect semicircle of rearing peaks, one rugged
buttress, the last long subsiding spur of the great Alpine axis, runs
boldly out to seaward, and ends in the bluff rocky headland of the Tête de
Chien that overhangs Monte Carlo. Till very lately no road ever succeeded
in turning the foot of that precipitous promontory: the famous Corniche
route runs along a ledge high up its beetling side, past the massive Roman
ruin of Turbia, and looks down from a height of fifteen hundred feet upon
the palace of Monaco. This mountain bulwark of the Turbia long formed the
real boundary line between ancient Gaul and Liguria; and on its very
summit, where the narrow Roman road wound along the steep pass now widened
into the magnificent highway of the Corniche, Augustus built a solid
square monument to mark the limit between the Province and the Italian
soil, as well as to overawe the mountaineers of this turbulent region. A
round mediæval tower, at present likewise in ruins, crowns the Roman
work. Here the Alps end abruptly. The rock of Monaco at the base is their
last ineffectual seaward protest.
And what a rock it is, that quaint ridge of land, crowned by the strange
capital of that miniature principality! Figure to yourself a huge whale
petrified, as he basks there on the shoals his back rising some two
hundred feet from the water's edge, his head to the sea, and his tail just
touching the mainland, and you have a rough mental picture of the Rock of
Monaco. It is, in fact, an isolated hillock, jutting into the
Mediterranean at the foot of the Maritime Alps (a final reminder, as it
were, of their dying dignity), and united to the Undercliff only by a
narrow isthmus at the foot of the crag which bears the mediæval bastions
of the Prince's palace. As you look down on it from above from the heights
of the Corniche, I have no hesitation in saying it forms the most
picturesque town site in all Europe. On every side, save seaward, huge
mountains gird it round; while towards the smiling blue Mediterranean
itself the great rock runs outward, bathed by tiny white breakers in every
part, except where the low isthmus links it to the shore; and with a good
field-glass you can see down in a bird's eye view into every street and
courtyard of the clean little capital. The red-tiled houses, the white
palace with its orderly gardens and quadrangles, the round lunettes of the
old wall, the steep cobbled mule-path which mounts the rock from the
modern railway-station, all lie spread out before one like a pictorial
map, painted in the bright blue of Mediterranean seas, the dazzling gray
of Mediterranean sunshine, and the brilliant russet of Mediterranean
roofs.
There can be no question at all that Monte Carlo even now, with all its
gew-gaw additions, is very beautiful: no Haussmann could spoil so much
loveliness of position; and even the new town itself, which grows apace
each time I revisit it, has a picturesqueness of hardy arch, bold rock,
well-perched villa, which redeems it to a great extent from any rash
charge of common vulgarity. All looks like a scene in a theater, not like
a prosaic bit of this work-a-day world of ours. Around us is the blue
Mediterranean, broken into a hundred petty sapphire bays. Back of us rise
tier after tier of Maritime Alps, their huge summits clouded in a fleecy
mist. To the left stands the white rock of Monaco; to the right, the green
Italian shore, fading away into the purple mountains that guard the Gulf
of Genoa. Lovely by nature, the immediate neighborhood of the Casino has
been made in some ways still more lovely by art. From the water's edge,
terraces of tropical vegetation succeed one another in gradual steps
towards the grand façade of the gambling-house; clusters of palms and
aloes, their base girt by exotic flowers, are thrust cunningly into the
foreground of every point in the view, so that you see the bay and the
mountains through the artistic vistas thus deftly arranged in the very
spots where a painter's fancy would have set them. You look across to
Monaco past a clump of drooping date-branches; you catch a glimpse of
Bordighera through a framework of spreading dracænas and quaintly
symmetrical fan-palms.
Once more under way, and this time on foot. For the road from Monte Carlo
to Mentone is almost as lovely in its way as that from Nice to Monte
Carlo. It runs at first among the ever-increasing villas and hotels of the
capital of Chance, and past that sumptuous church, built from the gains
of the table, which native wit has not inaptly christened "Nôtre Dame de
la Roulette." There is one point of view of Monaco and its bay, on the
slopes of the Cap Martin, not far from Roquebrune, so beautiful that
though I have seen it, I suppose, a hundred times or more, I can never
come upon it to this day without giving vent to an involuntary cry of
surprise and admiration.
Roquebrune itself, which was an Italian Roccabruna when I first knew it,
has a quaint situation of its own, and a quaint story connected with it.
Brown as its own rocks, the tumbled little village stands oddly jumbled in
and out among huge masses of pudding-stone, which must have fallen at some
time or other in headlong confusion from the scarred face of the
neighboring hillside. From the Corniche road it is still quite easy to
recognize the bare patch on the mountain slope whence the landslip
detached itself, and to trace its path down the hill to its existing
position. But local legend goes a little farther than that: it asks us to
believe that the rock fell as we see it _with the houses on top_; in other
words, that the village was built before the catastrophe took place, and
that it glided down piecemeal into the tossed-about form it at present
presents to us. Be this as it may, and the story makes some demand on the
hearer's credulity, it is certain that the houses now occupy most
picturesque positions: here perched by twos and threes on broken masses of
conglomerate, there wedged in between two great walls of beetling cliff,
and yonder again hanging for dear life to some slender foothold on the
precipitous hillside.
We reach the summit of the pass. The Bay of Monaco is separated from the
Bay of Mentone by the long, low-headland of Cap Martin, covered with
olive groves and scrubby maritime pines. As one turns the corner from
Roquebrune by the col round the cliff, there bursts suddenly upon the view
one of the loveliest prospects to be beheld from the Corniche. At our
feet, embowered among green lemons and orange trees, Mentone half hides
itself behind its villas and its gardens. In the middle distance the old
church with its tall Italian campanile stands out against the blue peaks
of that magnificent amphitheater. Beyond, again, a narrow gorge marks the
site of the Pont St. Louis and the Italian frontier. Farther eastward the
red rocks merge half indistinctly into the point of La Mortola, with Mr.
Hanbury's famous garden; then come the cliffs and fortifications of
Ventimiglia, gleaming white in the sun; and last of all, the purple hills
that hem in San Remo. It is an appropriate approach to a most lovely spot;
for Mentone ranks high for beauty, even among her bevy of fair sisters on
the Ligurian sea-board.
Yes, Mentone is beautiful, most undeniably beautiful; and for walks and
drives perhaps it may bear away the palm from all rivals on that enchanted
and enchanting Riviera. Five separate valleys, each carved out by its own
torrent, with dry winter bed, converge upon the sea within the town
precincts. Four principal rocky ridges divide these valleys with their
chine-like backbone, besides numberless minor spurs branching laterally
inland. Each valley is threaded by a well-made carriage-road, and each
dividing ridge is climbed by a bridle-path and footway. The consequence is
that the walks and drives at Mentone are never exhausted, and excursions
among the hills might occupy the industrious pedestrian for many
successive winters. What hills they are, too, those great bare needles
and pinnacles of rock, worn into jagged peaks and points by the ceaseless
rain of ages, and looking down from their inaccessible tops with
glittering scorn upon the green lemon groves beneath them!
The next town on the line, Bordighera, is better known to the world at
large as a Rivieran winter resort, though of a milder and quieter type, I
do not say than Nice or Cannes, but than Mentone or San Remo. Bordighera,
indeed, has just reached that pleasant intermediate stage in the evolution
of a Rivieran watering-place when all positive needs of the northern
stranger are amply supplied, while crowds and fashionable amusements have
not yet begun to invade its primitive simplicity. The walks and drives on
every side are charming; the hotels are comfortable, and the prices are
still by no means prohibitive.
[Illustration]
San Remo comes next in order of the cosmopolitan winter resorts: San Remo,
thickly strewn with spectacled Germans, like leaves in Vallombrosa, since
the Emperor Frederick chose the place for his last despairing rally. The
Teuton finds himself more at home, indeed, across the friendly Italian
border than in hostile France; and the St. Gotthard gives him easy access
by a pleasant route to these nearer Ligurian towns, so that the Fatherland
has now almost annexed San Remo, as England has annexed Cannes, and
America Nice and Cimiez. Built in the evil days of the Middle Ages, when
every house was a fortress and every breeze bore a Saracen, San Remo
presents to-day a picturesque labyrinth of streets, lanes, vaults, and
alleys, only to be surpassed in the quaint neighboring village of Taggia.
This is the heart of the earthquake region, too; and to protect themselves
against that frequent and unwelcome visitor, whose mark may be seen on
half the walls in the outskirts, the inhabitants of San Remo have
strengthened their houses by a system of arches thrown at varying heights
across the tangled paths, which recalls Algiers or Tunis. From certain
points of view, and especially from the east side, San Remo thus resembles
a huge pyramid of solid masonry, or a monstrous pagoda hewn out by giant
hands from a block of white free-stone. As Dickens well worded it, one
seems to pass through the town by going perpetually from cellar to cellar.
A romantic railway skirts the coast from San Remo to Alassio and Savona.
It forms one long succession of tunnels, interspersed with frequent
breathing spaces beside lovely bays, "the peacock's neck in hue," as the
Laureate sings of them. One town after another sweeps gradually into view
round the corner of a promontory, a white mass of houses crowning some
steep point of rock, of which Alassio alone has as yet any pretensions to
be considered a home for northern visitors.
VIII
GENOA
Early history--Old fortifications--The rival of Venice--Changes of
twenty-five years--From the parapet of the Corso--The lower town--The
Genoese palazzi--Monument to Christopher Columbus--The old
Dogana--Memorials in the Campo Santo--The Bay of Spezzia--The Isola
Palmeria--Harbor scenes.
Genova la Superba--Genoa the Proud--an epithet not inappropriate for this
city of merchant princes of olden days, which was once the emporium of the
Tyrrhenian, as was Venice of the Adriatic sea, and the rival of the latter
for the commerce of the Eastern Mediterranean. No two cities, adapted to
play a similar part in history, could be more unlike in their natural
environments: Venice clustered on a series of mud banks, parted by an
expanse of water from a low coast-line, beyond which the far-away
mountains rise dimly in the distance, a fleet, as it were, of houses
anchored in the shallows of the Adriatic; Genoa stretching along the shore
by the deepening water, at the very feet of the Apennines, climbing up
their slopes, and crowning their lower summits with its watch-towers. No
seaport in Italy possesses a site so rich in natural beauty, not even
Spezzia in its bay, for though the scenery in the neighborhood certainly
surpasses that around Genoa, the town itself is built upon an almost level
plain; not even Naples itself, notwithstanding the magnificent sweep of
its bay, dominated by the volcanic cone of Vesuvius, and bounded by the
limestone crags of the range of Monte S. Angelo. Genoa, however, like all
places and persons, has had its detractors. Perhaps of no town has a more
bitter sarcasm been uttered, than the well known one, which no doubt
originated in the mouth of some envious Tuscan, when the two peoples were
contending for the mastery of the western sea, and the maker of the
epigram was on the losing side. Familiar as it is to many, we will venture
to quote it again, as it may be rendered in our own tongue: "Treeless
hills, a fishless sea, faithless men, shameless women." As to the reproach
in the first clause, one must admit there is still some truth; and in
olden days, when gardens were fewer and more land was left in its natural
condition, there may have been even more point. The hills around Genoa
undoubtedly seem a little barren, when compared with those on the Riviera
some miles farther to the south, with their extraordinary luxuriance of
vegetation, their endless slopes of olives, which only cease to give place
to oak and pine and myrtle. There is also, I believe, some truth in the
second clause; but as to the rest it is not for a comparative stranger to
express an opinion. So far however as the men are concerned the reproach
is not novel. Centuries since, Liguria, of which Genoa is the principal
town, was noted for the cunning and treacherous disposition of its people,
who ethnologically differ considerably from their neighbors. In Virgil's
"Æneid" a Ligurian chief shows more cunning than courage in a fight with
an Amazon, and is thus apostrophized before receiving his death-blow from
a woman's hand: "In vain, O shifty one, hast thou tried thy hereditary
craft." The people of this part of Italy form one of a series of
ethnological islands; where a remnant, by no means inconsiderable, of an
earlier race has survived the invading flood of a stronger people. This
old-world race--commonly called the Iberian--is characteristically short
in stature, dark in hair, eyes, and complexion. Representatives of it
survive in Brittany, Wales, Ireland, the Basque Provinces, and other
out-of-the-way corners of Europe; insulated or pressed back, till they
could no farther go, by the advance of the Aryan race, by some or other
representative of which Europe is now peopled. On the Ligurian coast,
however, as might be expected, in the track of two thousand years of
commerce and civilization, the races, however different in origin and
formerly naturally hostile, have been almost fused together by
intermarriage; and this, at any rate in Genoa, seems to have had a
fortuitous result in the production of an exceptionally good-looking
people, especially in the case of the younger women. I well remember some
years since, when driving out on a summer evening on the western side of
Genoa, to have passed crowds of women, most of them young, returning from
work in the factories, and certainly I never saw so large a proportion of
beautiful faces as there were among them.
Genoa for at least two thousand years has been an important center of
commerce; though, of course, like most other places, it has not been
uniformly prosperous. It fell under the Roman power about two centuries
before the Christian era, the possession of it for a time being disputed
with the Carthaginians; then it became noted as a seaport town for the
commerce of the western part of the Mediterranean, it declined and
suffered during the decadence and fall of the Empire, and then gradually
rose into eminence during the Middle Ages. Even in the tenth century
Genoa was an important community; its citizens, as beseemed men who were
hardy sailors, found a natural pleasure in any kind of disturbance; they
joined in the Crusades, and turned religious enthusiasm to commercial
profit by the acquisition of various towns and islands in the East. The
rather unusual combination of warrior and merchant, which the Genoese of
the Middle Ages present, is no doubt due not only to social character, but
also to exceptional circumstances. "The constant invasions of the Saracens
united the professions of trade and war, and its greatest merchants became
also its greatest generals, while its naval captains were also merchants."
Genoa, as may be supposed, had from the first to contend with two
formidable rivals: the one being Pisa in its own waters; the other Venice,
whose citizens were equally anxious for supremacy in the Levant and the
commerce of the East. With both these places the struggle was long and
fierce, but the fortune of war on the whole was distinctly favorable to
Genoa nearer home, and unfavorable in regard to the more distant foe. Pisa
was finally defeated in the neighborhood of Leghorn, and in the year 1300
had to cede to her enemy a considerable amount of territory, including the
island of Corsica; while Venice, after more than a century of conflict
with very varying fortune, at last succeeded in obtaining the supremacy in
the Eastern Mediterranean.
The internal history of the city during all this period was not more
peaceful than its external. Genoa presents the picture of a house divided
against itself; and, strange to say, falsifies the proverb by prospering
instead of perishing. If there were commonly wars without, there were yet
more persistent factions within. Guelphs, headed by the families of
Grimaldi and Fieschi, and Ghibellines, by those of Spinola and Doria,
indulged in faction-fights and sometimes in civil warfare, until at last
some approach to peace was procured by the influence of Andrea Doria, who,
in obtaining the freedom of the state from French control, brought about
the adoption of most important constitutional changes, which tended to
obliterate the old and sharply divided party lines. Yet even he narrowly
escaped overthrow from a conspiracy, headed by one of the Fieschi; his
great-nephew and heir was assassinated, and his ultimate triumph was due
rather to a fortunate accident, which removed from the scene the leader of
his opponents, than to his personal power. Then the tide of prosperity
began to turn against the Genoese. The Turk made himself master of their
lands and cities in the East. Venice ousted them from the commerce of the
Levant. War arose with France, and the city itself was captured by that
power in the year 1684. The following century was far from being a
prosperous time for Genoa, and near the close it opened its gates to the
Republican troops, a subjugation which ultimately resulted in no little
suffering to the inhabitants.