ON TUSCAN ROADS
The valley of the Arno, as the river flows through the heart of Tuscany
from its source high in the hills just south of Monte Falterona, is the
most romantic region in all Italy. It is the borderland between the
south and the north, and, as it was a battle-ground between Guelph and
Ghibellines, so too is it the common ground where the blood of the
northerner and southerner mingles to-day.
As great rivers go, the Arno is neither grand nor magnificent, but,
though its proportions are not great, its banks are lined with historic
and artistic ruins, from the old fortress at Marina di Pisa to Poppi,
the ancient capital of the Casentino, perched so quaintly upon its
river-washed rock.
Pisa, Leghorn and Lucca are a triumvirate of Tuscan towns which should
be viewed and considered collectively. One should not be included in
an itinerary without the others, though indeed they have little in
common, save the memories of the past.
[Illustration: ON A TUSCAN HIGHWAY
Blanche McManus
1908]
Pisa is another of these dead cities of Europe, like Bruges, Leyden, and
Rothenburg. Once ardent and lively in every activity of life, its
population now has sunk into a state of lethargy. Industry and commerce,
and the men who should busy themselves therewith, are in the background,
hidden behind a barrier of bureaucracy. Pisa, a town of twenty-six
thousand inhabitants, has a tribunal of nine civil judges, a criminal
court presided over by sixty-three more, and a "roll" of more than half
a hundred notaries. Then there is a service of Domains, of Registry and
of Public Debt; besides an array of functionaries in charge of
seminaries, orphan asylums, schools and colleges. All these belong to
the state.
Pisa, sitting distant and proud on the banks of the Arno, enjoys a
softer climate than most of the coast cities or interior towns of
central Italy. The Tyrrhenian Sea is but a gulf of the Mediterranean,
but just where it bathes the shore about the mouth of the Arno, it has a
higher temperature than most northern Mediterranean waters.
Pisa is more of a sanitarium than it is a gay watering place however.
The city is, in fact, like its celebrated leaning tower, half tottering
on the brink of its grave. Commerce and industry are far from active and
its streets are half deserted; many of them are literally grass-grown
and all the others are paved with great flat clean-swept flags, a
delight for the automobilist, whose chief experience of pavements has
been in France and Belgium.
The entrance to Pisa by road from the north is one of the most pleasing
of that of any Italian city. For the last half dozen kilometres the road
steadily improves until it becomes one of the best as it circles around
that wonderful triumvirate of architectural splendours, the Duomo, the
Baptistery and the tottering Torre. The group is one of the scenic
surprises of Italy, and the automobilist has decidedly the best
opportunity of experiencing the emotions it awakes, for he does not have
to come out from town (for the monuments are some ways from the centre)
to see it. It is the first impression that the traveller by road gets of
Pisa and of its architectural wonders, as he draws suddenly upon it from
the slough-like road through which he has literally ploughed his way for
many kilometres. And it is an impression he will never forget.
All along the banks of the Arno, as it flows through Pisa, are dotted
here and there palaces of Renaissance days. One is now a dependence of a
hotel; another has been appropriated by the post office; others are
turned into banks and offices; but there are still some as well ordered
and livable as in their best days.
The Palazzo Agostini on the Lung' Arno, its façade ornamented with terra
cotta medallions, is now a part of the Hotel Nettuno which, as well as
any other of Pisa's hotels, cares for the automobilist in a satisfactory
manner. Its garage accommodations are abominably confined, and to get in
and out one takes a considerable risk of damaging his mud-guards,
otherwise they are satisfactory, though one pays two francs a night for
them, which one should not be obliged to do. Here is another point where
France is superior to Italy as an automobile touring ground.
Pisa and its palaces are a delight from every point of view, though
indeed none of the edifices are very grand, or even luxurious. They
strike a middle course however, and are indicative of the solid comfort
and content in which their original owners must have lived at Pisa in
latter Renaissance times.
Pisa's Campo Santo is the most famous example of graveyard design and
building in all the world. It is calm and dignified, but stupendous and
startling in its immensity.
From Pisa to Florence by road, following the valley of the Arno, one
passes through the typical Tuscan countryside, although the hill-country
lies either to one side or the other. It is the accessible route
however, and the one usually claimed by the local garage and hotel
keepers to be one of the best of Italian roads. It is and it isn't; it
all depends upon the time of the year, the fact that the road may
recently have been repaired or not, and the state of the weather. We
went over it in a rain which had been falling steadily for three days
and found it very bad, though unquestionably it would have been much
more comfortable going in dry weather. It is the approved route between
the two cities however, and unless one is going directly down the coast
to Rome, via Grosseto, Pisa is the best place from which to commence the
inland détour.
Cascina, a dozen kilometres away, was the scene of a sanguinary defeat
of the Pisans by the Florentines on the feast of San Vittorio in 1364,
and each year the event is celebrated by the inhabitants. It seems
singular that a people should seek to perpetuate the memory of a
defeat, but perhaps the original inhabitants sympathized with Florence
rather than with Pisa.
Pontedera is a big country town at the juncture of the Era and the Arno.
It has no monuments and no history worth remarking, but is indicative of
the prosperity of the country round about. Pontedera has no hotel with
garage accommodations, and if you get caught in a thunder storm, as we
did, you will have to grin and bear it and plug along.
San Miniato de Tedeschi rises on its hill top a few kilometres farther
on in an imposing manner. It is the most conspicuous thing in the
landscape for a wide radius. Francesco Sforza was born here, and
Frederic II made it the seat of the Imperial vicarage. San Miniato is a
hill town of the very first rank, and like others of the same
class--Fiesole, Colle and Volterra--(though its hill-top site may have
nothing to do with this) it had the privilege of conferring nobility on
plebeians. The Grand Duke of Tuscany in the nineteenth century
accordingly made "an English gentleman of Hebrew extraction"--so history
reads--the Marquis of San Miniato. At any rate it was probably as good a
title as is usually conferred on any one, and served its soi-disant
owner well enough for a crest for his note paper or automobile door.
One wonders what the gentleman took for his motto. History does not say.
Empoli is a thriving town, engaged principally in killing fowls and
sending them to the Florence market, plaiting straw to be made into
hats, and covering chianti bottles with the same material.
The Ghibellines would have made Empoli their capital in 1260, after
their meeting or "parliament" here. It was proposed too, that Florence
should be razed. One man only, Farinata degli Uberti, opposed it.
"Never," said he, "will I consent that our beloved city, which our
enemies have spared, shall be destroyed or insulted by our own hands."
The old palace in which the Ghibelline parliament met still stands on
the Piazza del Mercato.
No automobilist who "happens" on Empoli will ever want to see it again,
on account of the indignities which will be heaped on his automobile,
though the Albergo Guippone, run by a mother and son in most competent,
but astonishing, fashion, is the real thing. The food and cooking are
extraordinarily good, and the house itself new and cleanly. You eat at a
big round table, with a great long-necked bottle of chianti swung on a
balance in the centre. It must hold at least two gallons, and, without
the well-sweep arrangement for pouring out its contents, you would go
dry. The wine served is as good as the rest of the fare offered. The
fault with Empoli's hotel is that there is no garage and the proprietors
recommend no one as competent to house your automobile, saying you can
take your choice of any one of a half a dozen renters of _stallagio_
near by. They are all bad doubtless; but the one we tried, who permitted
us to put the automobile in an uncovered dirty hole with horses, donkeys
and pigs, took--yes, took, that's the word--two lire for the service! If
you do go to Empoli keep away from this ignorant, unprogressive
individual.
North of Empoli, on the direct road from Lucca to Florence, are Pistoja
and Prato.
Pistoja is one of the daintiest of Tuscan cities, but not many of the
habitués of Florence know it, at least not as they know Pisa or Siena.
Its past is closely intermingled with Florentine and Italian history,
and indeed has been most interesting. Practically it is a little
mountain city, though lying quite at the base of the Apennines, just
before they flatten out into the seashore plain. Its country people, in
town for a market-day, are chiefly people of the hills, shepherds and
the like, but their speech is Tuscan, the purest speech of Italy, the
nearest that is left us to the speech of Boccaccio's day.
Pistoja's old walls and ramparts are not the least of its crumbling
glories. They are a relic of the Medicis and the arms and crests of this
family are still seen carved over several of the entrance gates. One has
only to glance upward as he drives his automobile noisily through some
mediæval gateway to have memories of the days when cavalcades of lords
and ladies passed over the same road on horseback or in state coaches.
All is primitive and unworldly at Pistoja, but there is no ruinous
decay, though here and there a transformed or rebuilt palace has been
turned into some institution or even a workshop.
Prato, a near neighbour of Pistoja on the road to Florence, is also a
fine relic of an old walled Tuscan town. Aside from this its specialty
is churches, which are numerous, curious and beautiful, but except for
the opportunity for viewing them the lover of the romantic and
picturesque will not want to linger long within the city.
Between Empoli and Florence is seen at a distance the Villa Ambrogiana;
a transformation by Ferdinand I of an old castle of the Ardinghelli;
its towers and pinnacles still well preserved, but the whole forming a
hybrid, uncouth structure.
Further on at Montelupo there is a castle, now in ruins, built and
fortified by the Florentines in 1203. It owes its name, Montelupo, to
the adoption of the word _lupo_, wolf, by the Florentines when they
sought to destroy a neighbouring clan called the Capraja (_capra_,
goat).
Signa is reached after crossing the Arno for the first time. The city
walls, towers and pinnacles, with their battlements and machicolations,
are still as they were when the Florentines caused them to be erected to
guard the high road leading to their city.
Suburban sights, in the shape of modern villas, market gardens and what
not, announce the approach to Florence, which is entered by a broad
straight road, the Strada Pisana, running beneath the Porta S. Frediano.
Instinctively one asks for the Lung' Arno that he may get his bearings,
and then straightway makes for his hotel or pension.
[Illustration: FLORENCE and its PALACES]
Hotels for the automobilist in Florence are numerous. The Automobile
Club de France vouches for the Palace Hotel, where you pay two francs
and a half for garage, and for the Grand Hotel de la Ville with no
garage. The writer prefers the Hotel Helvetia, or better yet the Hotel
Porta Rossa, a genuine Italian _albergo_, patronized only by such
strangers as come upon it unawares. It is very good, reasonable in
price, and you may put your automobile in the _remissa_, which houses
the hotel omnibus, for a franc a night. It is convenient to have your
automobile close at hand instead of at the F. I. A. T. garage a mile or
more away, and the hotel itself is most central, directly to the rear of
the Strozzi Palace.
"What sort of city is this Florence?" asked Boniface VIII, amazed at the
splendour of the Florentine procession sent to Rome to honour his
jubilee. No one was found ready with an answer, but at last a Cardinal
timidly remarked, "Your Holiness, the City of Florence is a good city."
"Nonsense," replied the Pope, "she is far away the greatest of all
cities! She feeds, clothes and governs us all.... She and her people are
the fifth element of the universe."
One comes to Florence for pictures and palaces, and, for as long or
short a time as fancy suggests, the automobile and the chauffeur, if you
have one, take a needed repose. Your automobile safely housed, your
chauffeur will most likely be found, when wanted, at the Reininghaus on
the Piazza Vittorio-Emanuel drinking German beer and reading "Puck" or
"Judge" or "Punch" or "Le Rire." This is a café with more foreign
papers, one thinks, than any other on earth.
[Illustration: TORCH-HOLDERS PALAZZO STROZZI]
[Illustration: A LANTERN PALAZZO STROZZI]
[Illustration: Palazzo Vecchio, Florence]
Down through the heart of Tuscany, and through the Chianti district,
runs the highroad from Florence to Rome, via Siena. It is a delightful
itinerary, whether made by road or rail, and, whether one's motive is
the admiration and contemplation of art or architecture, or the sampling
of the chianti, en route, the journey through the Tuscan Apennines will
ever remain as a most fragrant memory. It is a lovely country of
vineyards and wheatfields, intermingled, and, here and there, clumps of
mulberry trees, and always great yoked oxen and _contadini_ working,
walking or sleeping.
These, indeed, are the general characteristics of all the countryside of
central Italy, but here they are superlatively idyllic. The simple life
must be very nearly at its best here, for the almost unalterable fare of
bread and cheese and wine, which the peasants, by the roadside, seem
always to be munching and drinking, is not conducive to grossness of
thought or action.
From Florence to Rome there are three principal roads favoured by
automobilists: that via Siena and Grosseto, 332 kilometres; via Siena,
Orvieto and Viterbo, 325 kilometres; and via Arezzo, Perugia and Terni,
308 kilometres. They are all equally interesting, but the latter two are
hilly throughout and the former, in rainy weather, is apt to be bad as
to surface.
The towers of Tuscany might well be made the interesting subject of an
entire book. Some of them, existing to-day, date from the Etruscans,
many centuries before Christ, and Dionysius wrote that the Etruscans
were called Tyrrhene or Turreno because they inhabited towers, or strong
places--_Typeie_.
In the twelfth century, local laws, throughout Tuscany, reduced all
towers to a height of fifty _braccia_. Pisa, Siena and Florence in
the past had several hundred towers, but Volterra and San Gimignano
in the Val d'Elsa are the only remarkable collections still grouped
after the original manner. "San Gimignano delle belle Torri" is a
classic phrase and has inspired many chapters in books and many magazine
articles.
[Illustration: _San Gimignano_]
Massimo d'Azeglio, whose opinions most people who write books on Italy
exploit as their own, said, with reason, that San Gimignano was as
extraordinary a relic of the past as Pompeii. Of all the fifty odd
towers of the city, none is more imposing than that of the Palazzo
Publico, rising up above the very apartment, where, in the thirteenth
century, Dante was received when he was sent from Florence to parley
with the Guelphs of San Gimignano.
San Gimignano's Palazzo del Commune dates from 1298, but its tower was
an afterthought, built a century later. This tower of the Palazzo del
Commune is, perhaps, the best preserved of all the "belle torri" of the
city.
[Illustration: VOLTERRA]
San Gimignano and Volterra are much alike, though the latter's strong
point lies more in its fortification walls. Volterra and its Etruscan
lore and pottery have ever been a source of pride among Italian
antiquarians. The Etruscans of old must have been passionately fond of
pottery, for, so plentifully were the environs of Volterra strewn with
broken pitchers, that one suspects that each square yard must have
contained a well. Some one called the Etruscans lunatics, who were shut
up in Volterra and allowed to pursue their craze for pottery in peace;
but they were harmless lunatics, who devoted themselves to the arts of
peace, rather than those of war. The alabaster bric-à-brac trade and
traffic still exists, and provides a livelihood for a large part of the
population of the city; but thousands of Tuscans, many of them from
Volterra, doubtless, have deserted their former arts for the pleasure
of dragging a hand organ from street to street, in London and New York,
and gathering soldi by ministering to the pleasures of the populace. It
is easy for the superior person to sneer at the hand organ, as he
sneers, by the way, at the phonograph and the pianola, but dull alleys
and mean streets are brightened by the music of the itinerant Italian.
"It is a vision of the moyen-age," wrote Paul Bourget when he first saw
Volterra's Etruscan walls. High up on its rocky plateau sits Volterra,
protected by its walls and gorges and ravines, in almost impregnable
fashion.
With this incentive no automobilist north or southbound should omit San
Gimignano or Volterra from his itinerary. They are but a few kilometres
off the main road, from Poggibonzi via Val d'Elsa between Siena and
Florence.
On a height overlooking Volterra, just over the Romitorio, and almost
within sight of San Gimignano's towers, Campanello, the celebrated
brigand, was captured, a quarter of a century ago. He had quartered
himself upon an unsuspecting, though unwilling, peasant, as was the
fashion with brigands of the time, and, through a "faux pas," offended a
youth who was in love with one of his host's daughters. This was his
undoing. The youth informed the local authorities; and Campanello led
away himself by the blind passion of love, fell precipitately into the
trap which the injured youth had helped to set.
Thus ended another brigand's tale, which in these days are growing fewer
and fewer. One has to go to Corsica or Sardinia to experience the
sensation of being held up, or to the Paris boulevards where _apaches_
still reign, or to the east end of London.
Going south from Florence by this road the automobilist has simply to
ask his way via the "Strada per Siena;" after Siena it is the "Strada
per Roma;" and so on from one great town to another. In finding one's
way out of town the plan is simple, easily remembered and efficient;
there are no false and confusing directions such as one frequently gets
in France. You are either on the Via This or That which ultimately leads
to the Strada of the same name, or you are not. Start right and you
can't miss the road in Italy.
Among all the secondary cities of Italy, none equals Siena in romantic
appeal. Its site is most picturesque, its climate is salubrious, and it
has an entirely mediæval stamp so far as the arrangement of its palaces
is concerned. Siena possesses something unique in church architecture,
as might be expected of a city which once contained sixty places of
worship, a special patois, and women of surpassing beauty. More than by
anything else, Siena is brought to mind by the recollection of that
Saint Catherine, who, according to Pope Pius II, made all who approached
her better for her presence.
The railway and its appurtenances, automobiles and their belongings, the
electric light and the telegraph, are almost the only signs of modernity
in Siena to-day. The rest is of the middle ages, and the chief
characters who stand out to-day are not the political personages of our
time; but Bianca Capello and Marie de Medici and Charles V, who of all
other aliens is best remembered of Siena, because of the Holbein
reproduction of his face and figure which he presented to its citizens.