IN WHICH THE WYNNES AND OURSELVES MAKE A JOURNEY TO ITALY AND FIND
THE MIDDLE AGES
Since the events described in the last chapter I have been a
traveller. I forget if I have mentioned that Naomi has a brother
Frank, a journalist, with a pretty wife and three children. We do
not see very much of them, as they live out of London, but these
children having been ordered the best kind of sea bathing, and Mr.
Wynne--Frank, and Naomi's father--having generously put his hand deep
into his pocket, and Naomi having talked me round, we all went to
Rimini to bathe; because good authorities said that Rimini bathing
was of the superlative best.
When I had at last consented I began (as often happens) to be
enthusiastic. I used to go about London saying "Rimini, Rimini,"
just for the sheer joy of the syllables. For I can think of no other
three, in that Italian language of beautiful syllables, that contain
the suggestion of so much that is splendid and old and romantic. I
pictured it on the grand scale, a little as though Hugo had sketched
it, noble but decayed. I saw a crumbling fortress, an empty palace,
vast, sun-baked streets, a cool, twilit cathedral, and dark doorways
and passages in which the clash of steel was still almost audible.
That is how I began; but gradually, as I met travellers and conversed
with them, these poetical anticipations lost their fine bloom.
Said one: "It's the very dickens of a place for mosquitoes."
Said his son, a healthy schoolboy, who was present: "I believe it's
near San Marino. If I give you a couple of bob will you buy me some
stamps?" (What a lot the young know!)
"If you are going to Rimini," said Dabney, "you must get Symonds and
read up the Malatesta lot. They're awfully interesting. But perhaps
you're going to write about them."
"No," I said, "I think not. I'm going to Rimini solely for bathing
and mosquito bites."
A Scotch physician gave me advice of a different and totally
unexpected variety. "Don't forget the Rimini beer," he said. "It's
the best I ever tasted."
Rimini beer! Shade of Dante! But the doctor was right. The Rimini
beer is wonderful, especially with the Rimini sun to create a thirst
for it. Apollo and the brewer (who has, I regret to say, a German
name) working in partnership can always lead to admirable results,
but never more admirable than at Rimini.
One lady alone played the game. She threw up her hands in an
ecstasy. "Rimini!" she crooned. "How delightful! Paolo and
Francesca."
But the prettiest thing was said in a letter from a literary friend.
"Lucky you!" he wrote, "and if you stay till October you will see the
swallows and get some English news, for they always rest at Rimini on
the way south."
Our party was enormous and a tremendous responsibility for me, who
foolishly undertook to pilot it; for, in addition to ourselves, who
knew a little French and Italian, there were two maids who knew none,
one of them being the children's nurse, and the other Mrs. Wynne's
new maid, who was advertised for as not objecting to going abroad,
and replied that she was "fond of travail."
I pass over the horrors of the journey. No one who vividly
remembered his railway experiences would ever go to Italy again; but
Providence has a kindly way of blurring them or relegating them to a
distant background behind Italian joys. One quaint experience the
last stage offered. In the confusion of Bologna's crowded platforms,
and the absence of any official who knew anything, and the lateness
of our train, and the changing into the next, which was, like all
Italian trains, packed with passengers before we could reach it,
there had been no opportunity that I considered safe to buy any
refreshments. As, therefore, the appalling journey lengthened out
between Bologna and Rimini, where the line hits the Adriatic coast
and thereafter clings to it for many miles, we were all conscious of
the pangs of hunger.
In despair I explored the train for food, hoping against hope, and
came upon a peasant in a corner with a basket at his feet from which
oozed a thick fluid. That it would prove to be inedible I was
confident; but none the less I asked him what it was, and behold,
when he opened the mouth of the basket it was eggs. To his immense
astonishment I led him to the compartment which we had at last
obtained, and, to his greater surprise, he watched us each consume
one or more of his eggs broken into the cup of a pocket flask. Even
Naomi, whose horror of a raw egg amounts in England to a mania, took
one; even the children took one, with a reverence and distortion
proper only to medicine.
The strange part of the story, which otherwise lacks all the elements
of excitement, is, that when I offered the man some money he refused
it. It had given him pleasure to be of use to us, he said. He would
on no account accept any payment. Noble egg-merchant of Rimini, may
you have many children, and may they have many children, and so come
to repopulate and regenerate Italy! But, he said, if we really
wished to make some return, he would greatly esteem a taste of the
liquor which the flask contained and which some of us had poured into
the broken eggs. I therefore handed him a cup of the national
beverage of Caledonia, which he took at a gulp, and the last we saw
of our good Samaritan was his honest, sunburned face in spasms of
astonishment at its strength, and the last we heard of him was his
strangling gasps as he fought with the unaccustomed draught. I
looked for him after in Rimini but never saw him more.
And so, after many many hours in grubby carriages, we reached Rimini
late at night, which is the right thing to do, and in that dazed
state that follows sudden entry in the dark into a strange town,
after a fatiguing and noisy train, we were driven through narrow
streets to the hotel: having chosen, for fun, the ancient
posting-house of the centre rather than the new and splendid hostel
of the _plage_. In spite of certain disabilities I think we were
wise, for it made just the difference between being in Rimini and
being anywhere--Ostend, say, or Dieppe--for all _plage_ hotels are
the same and all ancient posting-houses have their own character.
The Golden Eagle and Three Kings was our magnificent sign and we
completely captured it. We had vast rooms in which gilt beds with
canopies over them (like royal couches in a fairy tale) occurred as
incidents, isolated as palm trees in the desert; while the
gaily-painted ceilings were high above as the vault of heaven. Such
a thing as a small room was unknown. The hostess was shrewd and
masterful, with all the machinery of geniality. The host was not
only landlord but housemaid, parlour-maid, cellar-man, and everything
else. Heavy, pallid, puffy, and unbuttoned, with a kind face and a
heavy moustache, he was to be met with on the stairs at all hours,
carrying either a broom or a pail or both. We called him (Heaven
forgive us!) the Golden Eagle; but his consort was liker that
commanding and predatory fowl. In addition there was an odd man or
two in an apron, also busy with brooms and pails, and also the
natural objective of the eagless's criticism; a head waiter (from
Florence, for the season); a piccolo, who smiled ever and longed to
be up to mischief but dared not; a kitchen staff; and two or three
prim and superior daughters, or eaglets, glimpses of whom were
occasionally to be caught in the hotel, avoiding their father, and
whom, with their efficient mother, all in black, we met more than
once returning from Mass. Such was the personnel of the Golden Eagle
and Three Kings.
But at lunch and dinner sparkling young commercial travellers
appeared from obscure regions of the building inaccessible to us,
where no doubt the rooms approximated to the English size, and these
would surround a long table and eat and drink and incessantly talk;
but always first executing some courteous preliminaries from which
emerged the senior, to take the head of the table.
Rimini has but this one hotel of any class at all, and one café, and
this café, I observed, has but one habitué who wears evening dress;
but he is so proud of it that his unceasing promenade before the
little tables outside conveys the illusion of a Smart Set.
The city, I may say at once, is not the city of my dreams. I do not
say it is disappointingly not so, for everything about it is so
foreign and so interesting and (with the exception of the _plage_,
the railway, and the trams) so mediæval--such a feat of
survival--that it is satisfying even to one who had expected too
much. The town itself is small and half derelict, and a long way (in
hot weather) from the sea. On the shore, for a mile and more, is a
new settlement of villas and bathing-boxes, a casino and the great
white _à la mode_ hotel. This mile, inhabited wholly by strangers,
comes to life in June and dies again in September, and has no
dealings with the old town and the Golden Eagle and Three Kings
whatever. Nor has the old town any dealings with the shore, for no
one living at Rimini ever bathes. The only way in which old Rimini
recognizes the sea is to circulate round the bandstand on Sundays and
musical nights, otherwise it prefers to crumble in the sun, and recks
nothing of salt water.
Rimini's streets are narrow and paved with stones chosen carefully
for their unsuitability for such a purpose. Its houses are high and
squalid, but most charmingly sheltered with green. Its palaces are
now rookeries. The main street is entered from the plain through a
massive gateway--the Porta Romana--and passing through the town
widens first into an arcaded oval, with a monument in it celebrating
Cæsar's crossing of the neighbouring Rubicon in 49 B.C., then narrows
again; then becomes the side of the principal square, the Piazza
Cavour, where the theatre, the post office, the Municipio, the café,
and the one suit of evening clothes are; then narrows again to pass
the Golden Eagle and Three Kings; and after a further narrow period
leaves the town by way of a stone bridge with five arches over the
Marecchia, which was begun before Christ by Augustus and finished by
Tiberius in A.D. 20; and so once more we enter the plain again.
There are a few by-streets and the castle of the Malatestas and an
amphitheatre, within the walls; and that is all. And everything has
the disintegrating baked appearance of a city with a past.
The famous cathedral has a façade as unfinished and untidy as a
peacock from behind, and it is usually deserted; but it is Rimini's
best, still. Interesting to loiter here and ruminate upon its
makers: chief of them the black Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, who
built it, not only as a service for a God whom he too often forgot,
but as a fitting resting-place when that orgy, his life, was over.
His story is a dark one. He was born in 1417 and died in 1468. His
imperious hawk-shaped head tells us that he could brook no
opposition, and throughout his tempestuous career he did everything
he wished, as Italian tyrants of the Middle Ages were peculiarly able
to. Three wives at least he espoused and then murdered, but at last
fell completely under the charm of the fair and gifted Isotta degli
Atti, who had enough influence with him to force him to marry her and
enough good fortune to survive him.
Sigismondo as a bold bad man has almost no superior in the annals of
wilfulness and turpitude, but alongside his abnormal cruelties and
excesses was a devotion to art and philosophy which not only led him
to invite Alberti here to design, and the sweet and simple Piero
della Francesca to paint, and certain of the best sculptors to carve,
his cathedral--but he entertained scholars and poets continually in
his city of lawless passions, and himself brought hither from Greece
the bones of the famous Neo-Platonist, Gemisthos Plethon, the father
of the New Learning, and reinterred them in state in this Christian
fane. Strange lurid times and strange anomalies in them!
Sigismondo's tomb, with the elephant pertaining to his crest, and
Isotto's tomb near it (with Isotto herself as an angel on the altar)
were both constructed in their lifetime and must have been visited
continually by their intended occupants to see what progress was
being made. His own tomb bears a cynical couplet which, with his
descriptive name, sufficiently describes the man for posterity.
As for the most famous figures in Rimini, those two fated lovers of
whom Dante first sang--Paolo and Francesca--one hears nothing of them
in the city to-day, and sees only picture post-cards representing a
modern meretricious painting of the hapless pair. It was an ancestor
of Sigismondo (he himself left no lawful descendants), Giovanni the
Lame, who was the husband of Francesca. And Francesca loved too well
her husband's brother Paolo the beautiful, and Giovanni had both of
them put to death in 1288, when Dante was a young man of twenty-three.
But the sweetest and rarest life to think upon in this forsaken
temple is that of its architect--Leon Battista Alberti, the first
Admirable Crichton of a period when Crichtons were almost the rule.
Of noble birth, Alberti developed his many-sided genius very early.
He controlled the wildest horses almost by a word; he could jump his
own height without a run; he could throw a coin accurately over the
tallest building; none could beat him at wrestling or archery; he
painted, modelled, and was a superb musician. To his skill and taste
as an architect this cathedral testifies, as do the façade of S.
Maria Novella at Florence and the old Ruccellai palace there. He
dived deeply into physical science, read everything that was readable
in those early days before printing, was among the keenest of the
Neo-Platonists, and, like Leonardo after him, a mountaineer. He
worshipped beautiful things, jewels, flowers, landscapes, and was
peculiarly delighted by the spectacle of healthy and handsome old
men. When one of his dogs died he wrote a funeral oration for it.
Among his literary works were a treatise on the family, essays on art
and science, and an autobiography. Like Michael Angelo and Leonardo,
his greatest successors, he never married, and his wealth was always
at the disposal of his friends. Such was Leon Battista Alberti, the
builder of this cathedral, who was dead nine years before our Edward
V came to the throne.
Neither universal genius nor tyrant is to be found in Rimini to-day.
The cathedral is forlorn and deserted; the castle of the Malatestas
is a prison; no fierce or genial despot stirs the languid populace to
activity. They loaf about in deshabille, gossip, sip their coffee,
read the papers, and care for nothing. Sun-beetles, every one of
them; that is, in summer. I cannot conceive of Rimini in winter at
all.
But the girls of Rimini. Ah! Olive coloured, with regular features
a little rounded, tall, straight, with level eyes that never wander,
they are the most beautiful things there. They walk proudly in
couples, talking, laughing; they are never seen with men. They come
along so statelily and easily, like sailing ships. At other times
they look out of the windows, but still never at men. Where else are
beautiful women so disdainful?