ITALIAN ROADS AND ROUTES
The cordiality of the Italian for the stranger within his gates is
undeniable, but the automobilist would appreciate this more if the Latin
would keep his great highways (a tradition left by the Romans of old,
the finest road-builders the world has ever known) in better condition.
Italy, next to France, is an ideal touring ground for the automobilist.
The Italian population everywhere seems to understand the tourist and
his general wants and, above all, his motive for coming thither, and
whether one journeys by the railway, by automobile or by the more humble
bicycle, he finds a genial reception everywhere, though coupled with it
is always an abounding curiosity which is at times annoying. The native
is lenient with you and painstaking to the extreme if you do not speak
his language, and will struggle with lean scraps of English, French and
German in his effort to understand your wants.
Admirably surveyed and usually very well graded, some of the most
important of the north and south thoroughfares in Italy have been lately
so sadly neglected that the briefest spell of bad weather makes them all
but impassable.
There is one stretch between Bologna and Imola of thirty-two kilometres,
straightaway and perfectly flat. It is a good road or a bad road,
according as one sees it after six weeks of good weather or after a ten
days' rainy spell. It is at once the best and worst of its kind, but it
is badly kept up and for that reason may be taken as a representative
Italian road. The mountain roads up back of the lake region and over the
Alpine passes, in time of snow and ice and rain--if they are not
actually buried under--are thoroughly good roads. They are built on
different lines. Road-building is a national affair in Italy as it is in
France, but the central power does not ramify its forces in all
directions as it does across the border. There is only one kind of
road-building worth taking into consideration, and that is national
road-building. It is not enough that Massachusetts should build good
roads and have them degenerate into mere wagon tracks when they get to
the State border, or that the good roads of Middlesex should become mere
sloughs as soon as they come within the domain of the London County
Council. Italy is slack and incompetent with regard to her
road-building, but England and America are considerably worse at the
present writing.
Entering Italy by the Riviera gateway one leaves the good roads of
France behind him at Menton and, between Grimaldi, where he passes the
Italian dogana and its formalities, and Ventimiglia, or at least San
Remo, twenty-five kilometres away, punctures his tires one, three or
five times over a kilometre stretch of unrolled stone bristling with
flints, whereas in France a side path would have been left on which the
automobilist might pass comfortably.
It isn't the Italian's inability to handle the good roads question as
successfully as the French; it is his woefully incompetent, careless,
unthinking way of doing things. This is not saying that good roads do
not exist in Italy. Far from it. But the good road in Italy suddenly
descends into a bad road for a dozen kilometres and as abruptly becomes
a good road again, and this without apparent reason. Lack of unity of
purpose on the part of individual road-building bodies is what does it.
Road-building throughout Italy never rose to the height that it did in
France. The Romans were great exploiters beyond the frontiers and often
left things at home to shuffle along as best they might whilst their
greatest energies were spent abroad.
One well defined Roman road of antiquity (aside from the tracings of the
great trunk lines like the Appian or Æmilian Ways) is well known to all
automobilists entering Naples via Posilippo. It runs through a tunnel,
alongside a hooting, puffing tram and loose-wheeled iron-tired carts all
in a deafening uproar.
This marvellous tunnelled road by the sea, with glimpses of daylight now
and then, but mostly as dark as the cavern through which flowed the
Styx, is the legitimate successor of an engineering work of the time of
Augustus. In Nero's reign, Seneca, the historian, wrote of it as a
narrow, gloomy pass, and mediæval superstition claimed it as the work of
necromancy, since the hand of man never could have achieved it. The
foundation of the roadway is well authenticated by history however. In
1442 Alphonso I, the Spaniard, widened and heightened the gallery, and
Don Pedro of Toledo a century later paved it with good solid blocks of
granite which were renewed again by Charles III in 1754. Here is a good
road that has endured for centuries. We should do as well to-day.
There are, of course, countless other short lengths of highway, coming
down from historic times, left in Italy, but the Roman _viae_ with which
we have become familiar in the classical geographies and histories of
our schooldays are now replaced by modern thoroughfares which, however,
in many cases, follow, or frequently cut in on, the old itineraries. Of
these old Roman Ways that most readily traced, and of the greatest
possible interest to the automobilist who would do something a little
different from what his fellows have done, is the Via Æmilia.
With Bologna as its central station, the ancient Via Æmilia, begun by
the Consul Marcus Æmilius Lepidus, continues towards Cisalpine Gaul the
Via Flamina leading out from Rome. It is a delightfully varied itinerary
that one covers in following up this old Roman road from Placentia
(Piacenza) to Ariminum (Rimini), and should indeed be followed leisurely
from end to end if one would experience something of the spirit of olden
times, which one can hardly do if travelling by schedule and stopping
only at the places lettered large on the maps.
The following are the ancient and modern place-names on this itinerary:
Placentia (Piacenza)
Florentia (Firenzuola)
Fidentia (Borgo S. Donnino)
Parma (Parma)
Tannetum (Taneto)
Regium Lepidi (Reggio)
Mutina (Modena)
Forum Gallorum (near Castel Franco)
Bononia (Bologna)
Claterna (Quaderna)
Forum Cornelii (Imola)
Faventia (Faenza)
Forum Livii (Forli)
Forum Populii (Forlimpopoli)
Caesena (Cesena)
Ad Confluentes (near Savignamo)
Ariminum (Rimini)
Connecting with the Via Æmilia another important Roman road ran from the
valley of the Casentino across the Apennines to Piacenza. It was the
route traced by a part of the itinerary of Dante in the "Divina
Commedia," and as such it is a historic highway with which the least
sentimentally inclined might be glad to make acquaintance.
Another itinerary, perhaps better known to the automobilist, is that
which follows the Ligurian coast from Nice to Spezia, continuing thence
to Rome by the Via Aurelia. This coast road of Liguria passed through
Nice to Luna on the Gulf of Spezia, the towns en route being as
follows:--
Varium fl. The Var (river)
Nicæ Nice
Cemenelium Cimiez, back of Nice
Portus Herculis Monoeci Monaco
Albium Intermelium Ventimiglia
Albium Ingaunum Albenga
Vada Sabbata Vado, near Savona
Genua Genoa
Portus Delphini Portofino
Tigullia Tregesco, near Sestri
Segesta Sestri
Portus Veneris Porto Venere
Portus Erici Lerici
The chief of these great Roman roadways of old whose itineraries can be
traced to-day are:
Via Æmilia The most celebrated of N. Italy
Via Æmilia-Scauri Built long after the original Via Æmelia
Via Ameria From Rome to Amelia
Via Appia Of which the main trunk line ran from Rome to Capua
Via Aquilla
Via Ardentina
Via Aurelia From Rome to Pisa
Via Cassia
Via Flaminia The Great North Road of the Romans
Via Latina One of the most ancient of Roman roads
Via Laurentia
Via Ostiensis From Rome to Ostia
Via Salaria Leading from Rome through the valley of the Tiber
Via Valeria From the Tiber to the Adriatic at Ancona
These ancient Roman roads were at their best in Campania and Etruria.
Campania was traversed by the Appian Way, the greatest highway of the
Romans, though indeed its original construction by Appius Claudius only
extended to Capua. The great highroads proceeding from Rome crossed
Etruria almost to the full extent; the Via Aurelia, from Rome to Pisa
and Luna; the Via Cassia and the Via Clodia.
The great Roman roads were marked with division stones or bornes every
thousand paces, practically a kilometre and a half, a little more than
our own mile. These mile-stones of Roman times, many of which are still
above ground (_milliarii lapides_), were sometimes round and sometimes
square, and were entirely bare of capitals, being mere stone posts
usually standing on a squared base of a somewhat larger area.
A graven inscription bore in Latin the name of the Consul or Emperor
under whom each stone was set up and a numerical indication as well.
Caius Gracchus, away back in the second century before Christ, was the
inventor of these aids to travel. The automobilist appreciates the
development of this accessory next to good roads themselves, and if he
stops to think a minute he will see that the old Romans were the
inventors of many things which he fondly thinks are modern.
The automobilist in Italy has, it will be inferred, cause to regret the
absence of the fine roads of France once and again, and he will regret
it whenever he wallows into a six inch deep rut and finds himself not
able to pull up or out, whilst the drivers of ten yoke ox-teams, drawing
a block of Carrara marble as big as a house, call down the imprecations
of all the saints in the calendar on his head. It's not the
automobilist's fault, such an occurrence, nor the ox-driver's either;
but for fifty kilometres after leaving Spezia, and until Lucca and
Livorno are reached, this is what may happen every half hour, and you
have no recourse except to accept the situation with fortitude and
revile the administration for allowing a roadway to wear down to such a
state, or for not providing a parallel thoroughfare so as to divide the
different classes of traffic. There is no such disgracefully used and
kept highway in Europe as this stretch between Spezia and Lucca, and
one must of necessity pass over it going from Genoa to Pisa unless he
strikes inland through the mountainous country just beyond Spezia, by
the Strada di Reggio for a détour of a hundred kilometres or more,
coming back to the sea level road at Lucca.
Throughout the peninsula the inland roads are better as to surface than
those by the coast, though by no means are they more attractive to the
tourist by road. This is best exemplified by a comparison of the inland
and shore roads, each of them more or less direct, between Florence and
Rome.
The great Strada di grande Communicazione from Florence to Rome
(something less than three hundred kilometres all told, a mere mouthful
for a modern automobile) runs straight through the heart of old Siena,
entering the city by the Porta Camollia and leaving by the Porta Romana,
two kilometres of treacherous, narrow thoroughfare, though readily
enough traced because it is in a bee-line. The details are here given as
being typical of what the automobilist may expect to find in the smaller
Italian cities. There are, in Italy, none of those unexpected
right-angle turns that one comes upon so often in French towns, at least
not so many of them, and there are no cork-screw thoroughfares though
many have the "rainbow curve," to borrow Mark Twain's expression.
On through Chiusi, Orvieto and Viterbo runs the highroad direct to the
gates of Rome, for the most part a fair road, but rising and falling
from one level to another in trying fashion to one who would set a
steady pace.
It is with respect to the grades on Italian roads, too, that one remarks
a falling off from French standards. North of Florence, in the valley of
the Mugello, we, having left the well-worn roads in search of something
out of the common, found a bit of seventeen per cent. grade. This was
negotiated readily enough, since it was of brief extent, but another
rise of twenty-five per cent. (it looked forty-five from the cushions of
a low-hung car) followed and on this we could do nothing. Fortunately
there was a way around, as there usually is in Europe, so nothing was
lost but time, and we benefited by the acquisition of some knowledge
concerning various things which we did not before possess. And we were
content, for that was what we came for anyway.
From Florence south, by the less direct road via Arezzo, Perugia and
Terni, there is another surprisingly sudden rise but likewise brief. It
is on this same road that one remarks from a great distance the towers
of Spoleto piercing the sky at a seemingly enormous height, while the
background mountain road over the Passo della Somma rises six hundred
and thirty metres and tries the courage of every automobilist passing
this way.
To achieve many of these Italian hill-towns one does not often rise
abruptly but rather almost imperceptibly, but here, in ten kilometres,
say half a dozen miles, the Strada di grande Communicazione rises a
thousand feet, and that is considerable for a road supposedly laid out
by military strategists.
As a contrast to these hilly, switch-back roads running inland from the
north to the south may be compared that running from Rome to Naples, not
the route usually followed via Vallombrosa and Frosinone, but that via
Velletri, Terracina and Gaeta. Here the highroad is nearly flat, though
truth to tell of none too good surface, all the way to Naples.
Practically it is as good a road as that which runs inland and offers to
any who choose to pass that way certain delights that most other
travellers in Italy know not of.
At Cisterna di Roma, forty-eight kilometres from Rome, one is in the
midst of the Pontine Marshes it is true, and it is also more or less of
a marvel that a decent road could have been built here at all. From this
point of view it is interesting to the automobilist who has a hobby of
studying the road-building systems of the countries through which he
travels. Of the Pontine Marshes themselves it is certain that they are
not salubrious, and malaria is most prevalent near them. Appius
Claudius, in 312 B. C., tried to drain the marsh and so did Cæsar,
Augustus and Theodoric after him, and the Popes Boniface VIII, Martinus
V and Sixtus V, but the morass is still there in spite of the fact that
a company calling itself Ufficio della Bonificazione delle Paludi
Pontine is to-day working continuously at the same problem.
Putting these various classes of Italian roads aside for the moment
there remains but one other variety to consider, that of the mountain
roads of the high Alpine valleys and those crossing the Oberland and,
further east, those in communication with the Austrian Tyrol. On the
west these converge on Milan and Turin via the region of the lakes and
the valleys of Aosta and Susa, and in the centre and east give
communication from Brescia, Verona and Venice with West Germany and
Austria.
[Illustration: Road Map of North Italy]
These are the best planned and best kept roads in Italy, take them by
and large. The most celebrated are those leading from Turin into France;
via Susa and the Col du Mont Genevre to Briançon, and via Mont Cenis to
Modane and Grenoble; via the Val d'Aosta and the Petit Saint Bernard to
Albertville in France, or via the Grand Saint Bernard to Switzerland.
Just north of the Lago di Maggiore, accessible either from Como or from
Milan direct via Arona, is the famous road over the Simplon Pass, at an
elevation of 2,008 metres above the sea. By this road, the best road in
all Italy, without question, one enters or leaves the kingdom by the
gateway of Domodossola.
On entering Italy by this route one passes the last rock-cut gallery
near Crevola and, by a high-built viaduct, thirty metres or more above
the bed of the river, it crosses the Diveria. Soon the vineyards and all
the signs of the insect life of the southland meet the eye. Italy has at
last been reached, no more eternal snow and ice, no more peaked
rooftops, the whole region now flattens out into the Lombard plain.
Domodossola has all the ear-marks of the Italian's manner of life and
building of houses, albeit that the town itself has no splendid
monuments.
Another entrance to the Italian lake region through the mountain barrier
beyond is by the road over the San Bernardino Pass and Bellinzona. The
San Bernardino Pass is not to be confounded with those of the Grand and
Petit Saint Bernard. The present roadway dates from 1822, when it was
built by the engineer Pocobelle, at the joint expense of the Sardinian
and Grisons governments. Its chief object was to connect Genoa and Turin
directly with Switzerland and west Germany. The pass crosses the
Rheinwald at a height of 2,063 metres.
This passage across the Alps was known to the ancient Romans, and down
to the fifteenth century it was known as the Vogelberg. A mission
brother, Bernardino of Siena, preaching the gospel in the high valleys,
erected a chapel here which gave the pass the name which it bears
to-day.
In part the road tunnels through the hillsides, in part runs along a
shelf beside the precipice, and here and there crosses a mountain
torrent by some massive bridge of masonry.
Like most of the mountain roads leading into Italy from Switzerland and
Germany the southern slope descends more abruptly than that on the
north. The coach driver may trot his horses down hill, though, so well
has the descent been engineered, and the automobilist may rush things
with considerably more safety here than on the better known routes.
Another celebrated gateway into Italy is that over the Splugen Pass from
Coire (in Italian nomenclature: Colmo dell'Orso). It was completed by
the Austrian government in 1823 to compete with the new-made road a few
kilometres to the west over the Bernardino which favoured Switzerland
and Germany and took no consideration whatever of the interests of
Austria. The summit of the Splugen Pass is 2,117 metres above sea-level
and on a narrow ridge near by runs for six kilometres the boundary
between Switzerland and Italy.
Entering Italy by the Splugen Pass one finds the _dogana_ a dull, ugly
group of buildings just below the first series of facets which drop down
from the crest. It is as lonesome and gloomy a place of residence as one
can possibly conceive as existing on the earth's surface. One forgets
entirely that it is very nearly the heart of civilized Europe; there is
nothing within view to suggest it in the least, not a scrap of
vegetation, not a silvery streak of water, not a habitation even that
might not be as appropriately set upon a shelf of rock by the side of
Hecla.
The French army under Maréchal Macdonald crossed the pass in 1800 when
but a mere trail existed, but with a loss of a hundred men and as many
horses.
Of late years the passage of the Col has been rendered the easier by the
cutting of two long galleries. Another engineering work of note is met a
little farther on in the Gorge of San Giacomo, a work completed by Carlo
Donegani in the reign of the Emperor Francis II, and, just beyond, the
boiling torrent of the Liro is spanned by a daring bridge of masonry.
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.
[Illustration: Italian Road Signs]
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.
[Illustration: Profile Road Map, Bologna--Florence]
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.