all along the road from Porta Pila, and many a lovely palace standing
in its garden and fruit-groves along the coast—so many, indeed, that
even a quarter of a mile has not been left untenanted by man-kind; but
Nervi is a prettier place than any of the other places since Albaro’s
villas were left behind. The hills that stand for background to it are
straight hills and fairly wooded, yet they are not the best features in
its beauty, for, excepting from the sea, no one has seen their shapes
impressively, so close do they rise, looking down upon the village.
Nervi’s loveliness is in her gardens, with the palms and pines that
grow there, and the stately palaces whose time-tinted marble walls
stand in the midst; it is in her lemon orchards and orange groves,
where the breeze blows laden with scent in the flowering time, and the
pale or golden fruit hangs heavily-gorgeous through the early spring
days; it is in her rocky beach, where the changing sea laps for ever
and is never the same, where fishers spread their nets, and children
wade and play, and the wonderful water-line is broken and perilous
because of the cloven rocks that lie guarding it.
The little straight street is not beautiful, though its barber and
dressmaker and its _Fabbrica di paste_ be indispensable to the dwellers
round about, and though dirty shops and tall houses, because strange,
have often been called picturesque; the Mediterranean lies hid from
Nervi’s street, and, when one is on the Riviera the Mediterranean is
the thing most powerful to charm. But, on the sea-shore, street and
barber and shops are forgotten. The sun gleams on white wave-crests
that temper the sea’s blue on some breezy spring day; the sun lies
scorching the weed-grown jagged rocks, the sloping slate rocks that
slide far down beneath water that grows green near shore; the sun
sweetens the oranges, and makes the flowers more luscious of scent,
and the fishermen lay their nets. Though Nervi is a village where rich
folk have their dwellings and marble steps lead down to the water for
bathing, there are hamlets near around, of poorly squalid mien and
strangest name, where fisher-folk live and fisher-children hunt crabs
and shell-fish in the bays.
Walking along the winding way that creeps round the lip of little
gulfs, and dives into dark crevices of crags—or along the way that,
being poised midway aloft upon the cliff some hundred feet above
the water, leads from Nervi to the fishing village of Bogliasco—you
might see Maso, perhaps, out at sea in his broad and tanned old boat,
spreading nets for the night’s fishery, or, further on, from off the
smoother shingle, Paolo pushing out upon the coming wave, with the
children standing by to help with shout and laughter, and the women
with parting joke or reproof.
May is near to her end now, and the long evenings make summer again.
The water is warm, because the sun has lain upon it all day, and blue
with a memory of the clouds overhead, that are paling now in the waning
lights. A golden glamour comes down upon the waves; the sun is near
to setting. Paolo stands in the sea, making ready to push off; his
brown, broad feet upon the yellow shingle are broader, but not browner,
beneath the green water that reaches to his knee where the striped hose
rolls up; the golden light strikes across his face on its way to the
bright group upon shore and to the bright spring green over the hill
beyond. He is a tall man and strongly built, but his face is battered
and seamed; they call him in the fishery ‘the furrowed one,’ but he
is liked well enough notwithstanding, and, truly, that careworn face
has a kindling eye and an honest smile. Paolo is a married man. That
mischievous urchin is his own first-born, who leans against the boat
with his calves in deep water—as the calves of the rising generation
are apt to be; his hard young hands are eager to help, his keen black
eyes look for the signal. And that is Paolo’s wife—that broad-hipped
woman with the full, free figure, who waits upon the beach with the
swaddled infant in one arm and the year-old boy clinging to her skirt;
all the other children play around, they are waiting to see father
away.
Now his ropes are coiled, his nets are in order; Gian-Battista has
arrived leisurely—Paolo’s lazy nephew, who helps in the fishery.
When his lighter skiff has also been made ready, two strong pairs of
hands—that nine-year-old boy helping lustily—start both old crafts out
to sea. Paolo leaps in swiftly, the oars are dipped, and the golden
sun sinks a little lower upon the horizon. ‘_Andiamo bambini!_’ calls
Maddalena shrilly, only she calls it in strangest dialect, to the
loitering children. And by the time she has dragged the younger and
driven the elder up the short, steep slope of beach on to the jagged
rocks beyond, that lie beneath the village, the boats have pulled a
mile out to sea, and Paolo has sunk his nets for the tunny fishery.
[Illustration: PAOLO AT SEA.]
Some two hundred yards and more each of them spreads around; you may
see the little brown bobbins, that mark the circumference, float and
jerk up and down on the water as Gian-Battista spreads his end of
net, rowing across the marked space meanwhile; then the two boats
lie sentinels at either end, to guard their sacred surface from other
craft, and to watch for the haul. So when the time has come, and the
watching has been long enough, calling to one another across the space
with deep, loud voices that are tempered to softness as they travel
over the water, Paolo and Battista begin slowly to row towards the
net’s centre with the net’s ends fastened to their separate boats, and,
when they meet in the middle, the net’s mouth will have closed upon the
captured fish.
There are not many this time. When Battista has got into his
uncle’s boat, and when together, with cheery cry and many a passing
ejaculation, they have hauled in the great net, it is but a _cattiva
pesca_ that is the result of their evening’s labour. And the sun has
gone down now behind the purple clouds and beneath the waves; the
sea’s blue is dark, almost to blackness, as the night breeze creeps up;
Sestri’s coast can no longer be seen—scarce even the great promontory
that hides La Spezia from sight in the daytime. Yet further out to
sea they lay down the net again, and little lanterns have had to
be lighted in either boat, other lights and lanterns have been long
put out that glimmered faintly from the village ashore, before Paolo
and Battista row back again towards the rock-bound bay beneath the
cliff. But a dying memory of sunset from the west can still light
the boats homewards though the summer night be far advanced, and,
against the background of this dim and distant brightness, Paolo’s
tall figure stands taller than before as he waits, with forward foot
and well-poised body, upon the boat’s prow, till the shingle shall
grind beneath her keel, and it be time to leap out into shallow water
and pull her high upon the yellow beach. Maddalena’s shrill voice is
hushed, the children are all a-bed and the hearth swept up; but, if the
fire be spent, the fisher’s meal has not been forgotten by the fisher’s
wife; cold _polenta_, brown bread and chestnuts stand ready by the
settle, though the portly fishwife lies asleep whose work it will be to
bear the haul of tunny-fish to early market.
The morning dawns, pure and bright. Beneath the _pergolas_ of Bogliasco
cottages the sun is warm already, though night-dews lie wet still on
flowers and herbage. The blue water below laps but gently against the
gnarled rocks where it can dash at will so wildly, for the sea is calm
to-day under a tender sky. ‘It will be hot,’ fisher-wives say, ‘but
what will you have when June days are so near?’ Scarce a ripple stirs
the water surface, whose blue is as only the Mediterranean’s blue can
be when the sky is full of colour as now, and the sun is strong to
perfect and enhance. Paolo has been abroad betimes, and Maddalena is
already on her way to the fish-market with last evening’s produce; but
we, who have not cared to rise so early, will follow Maso this time,
who, having neither wife nor children, begins only to fish when the sun
is aloft.
Maso has not so handsome a fame as he who stood last night against the
sunset. In fact, he is an ugly man, for, besides a face that is brown
and weather-beaten, and pitted with the small-pox (as his nickname in
the village dialect would tell you), he has a short, wiry figure, that
for all its ease of movement cannot compare with the tall, spare grace
of his neighbour. Maso had wonderful luck with the _bianchette_, that
are a kind of whitebait, through the past month of April, and he had
a good net of anchovies some three days ago; but anchovies are not the
surest sport, and this morning he will lay for the sardines, as Paolo
has done. Maso has a little brother—a brisk, lithe little ragamuffin
of ten years, one of those who rarely have time for aught but mischief,
as his keen eyes would tell you; him he sends up on the hill for watch.
And while the two men—for the fishing is all done in couples, and Maso
has a comrade like the rest—while the men spread their nets just beyond
the rocks in the creek’s clear water below, Giannino’s bare feet have
climbed the hill where the stones were sharpest for his long toes to
cling to, and is squatting on the hot earth amid the thyme and the
flowers and beneath the grey-toned olives, between the frail network of
whose boughs those blue waves shine with fairest glory.
But Giannino notes none of the things of Nature; he is watching the
sardine shoals come on. Maso and the other have parted company in
their separate boats now; each is posted at an opposite side, with a
net’s end fastened to his skiff. And presently Giannino, from behind
the olive trees, sees a goodly company of little slim and silvery fish
making towards that very pool of clearest blue-green water, where the
cruel snare lies spread in the rock’s great shade. A silent signal
is enough to the fishers, who are watching for it, and the boats row
slowly centre-wards, till the net’s mouth has closed upon the dainty
prisoners. Silver and gold gleam in the sun’s own silver light, for the
little fish struggle pitifully amid those horrible meshes. It has been
a _buona pesca_ this time, and the brown and dingy coils are soon in
the boat, the spoil secured safely within the well. It is Nicoletta who
goes to market with the sardines; but not into town, only to Bogliasco,
where men and women buy the fish from the fishers, to take into Genoa.
Nicoletta is a spare and tanned little maiden, with brown feet and
ankles that have never known shoes or stockings; she is sister to Maso
and Giannino, but it is the latter she resembles in her wild, wiry
strength, for she, too, is something of a pickle!
The sun climbs the sky till its rays are so hot that even Riviera men
and women are fain to fly from it for an hour or so, while they eat the
_merenda_, and sleep their own calm sleep beneath the shadows of rock
or fig-tree. The olives shine silver-white in the fair beams that ripen
their fruit; aloes and palms flourish, broad pines are darkly green and
perfumed; in bays and upon burning rocks the colour-laden water ebbs
quietly. But at last the sun sets again, and in the evening’s cool,
fishers sink the lobster baskets in rock-bound pools of the coast,
where the water is nigh to blackness in its depth beside the cliffs.
Night is near, and the sea’s colour fades awhile with the last of the
sunlight.
Santa Margherita.
Santa Margherita is one of the many little towns which have gradually
grown up along the eastern Riviera, gathering themselves together
around the country palace of some _signore_, which, first, had been
built alone upon the shore, or springing up where, for convenience
sake, a little fishing hamlet had been set in creek or bay, until now
the whole of the coast line from Genoa to La Spezia is studded thickly
with the white walls and glistening roofs of human habitations. The
little place has had a station since the railroad has come this way—a
station of its own, and not one shared with another village, as some
of its neighbours, and one, too, at which all the trains must stop
which run during the day to Sestri. There was a great palace built up
here many years ago. I forget to what family it belongs, but it is a
stately pile, whose marble steps creep down to the water’s edge, and
on whose battered face the dim colours of ancient frescoes still show
quaintly through the dirt which has encrusted them. The _signori_ used
to come here for the sea-bathing, and perhaps it was in this wise that
the town of Santa Margherita came to be built. Nevertheless it is in a
fair position upon the coast, and it was probably a prosperous little
fishing village long before it could boast its stone pavements and
its piazza of now-a-days. The coast swerves in gently so as to form a
smooth and ample bay just where the town stands, and jutting out on
either side into the blue waves stand two promontories guarding the
gulf. To the right is Porto Fino, and, within the bay round the point,
a little village bears the name. It is so called from the many dolphins
which, near to that shore, sport in bevies beneath the clear water
quickly to disperse at the approach of a boat. ‘Fino,’ for shortness
and convenience sake, apparently can mean _delfino_.
Hills, graceful and undulating, clothed with many trees and watered by
many a cool stream, are set against the sky for background, and Santa
Margherita lies within their lap, sending the gayest houses to adorn
her front upon the coast. Buildings of any note belonging to the place
are but few—only the Campanile, which stands up tall against the hill,
and has some pretty colouring in the mosaic of its belfry, and one or
two decrepit old mansions belonging to the gentry of the neighbourhood.
The great palace of which we have already spoken stands upon a low hill
without the town; orange groves gather round and about it, and woods
where dark and spreading pines are set against the tenderer foliage of
chestnuts and arbutus: its white loggias and colonnades face the sea,
hung richly with creepers and vines. In the town there are many poorer
houses—most of them modern—tall and thinly built, with ill-designed
proportions, and gaudily coloured paintings nowise resembling the
frescoes of olden times. Along the façade of the town houses stand
closely wedged together whose windows are thickly studded up and
down, and hung with the white linen from which meaner habitations in
Italy are rarely unadorned. This is the most populous part of Santa
Margherita, and between these houses and the waters of the bay there
is only the paved street from whence steps lead to the higher part of
the town, the railway station and the fair country beyond. Here roads
branch out on all sides; one leads from behind the town, over the hill
to more towns and villages inland, another is hemmed by tall rows of
ilexes, and others again, less important, creep up the clefts of the
valley until they are lost in the woods, and only peep out again on
the barren crests of mountains, where pine trees alone stand as fringes
against the sky.
[Illustration: VIEW OF SANTA MARGHERITA.]
Santa Margherita is but one of a hundred nooks along the Cornice from
Nice to La Spezia; the villages all breathe the same balmy sea air
and bask in the same sunshine, and wear the same garb of luxuriant
vegetation, of quaint picturesqueness, side by side with gaudy
vulgarity; and yet each has its own life, each is home, as no other
place can be to its citizens. Santa Margherita, like the rest, has its
full sum of incongruity. Squalid habitations that yet have something
of the grace of Italy, with their green shutters, large windows, and
marble mosaic floors, stand, in dirt and poverty, side by side with
stately palaces of olden time or with the pretentious structures
of modern architecture. And in the inhabitants is the same apparent
discord. Men and women who for years have been used to exact the homage
of their inferiors, live side by side with the lowest and the poorest
of the people, and, even more, with a perfect grace and courtesy;
ladies to whom fashion is a necessity, and excitement has become a
second nature, take a naïve pleasure in the pursuits and interests of
poor fisherwives, of _contadine_ cooking the porridge, or lace-weavers
at their pillow.
And nature is there to keep all this strange medley in countenance.
Down upon the beach, where the fishers stow their craft when the day’s
work is over at sea, and where the little dark-eyed children, ragged
and dirty, play in and out the nets upon the shingle, the wind blows
hot from off the great moving plain of the Mediterranean and the sun
shines heavily for many an hour upon the houses and groves and gardens
that are on the water’s level. Leave the town a space, and take one
of those roads which lead upward among the mountain valleys, and in
a little half-hour the face of nature seems subtly to have changed,
and her voice tells a different tale, while yet murmuring of the
sea which is near. The summer breeze is scarcely cooler or the sun’s
rays less powerful where they break between the large-leaved foliage
of the chestnuts, yet a sense of freshness creeps silently around,
vigour is in the flowers that grow, in the trees, in the water that
flows and ripples. Ferns are tall and waving upon the banks of little
rills and beside cascades, or frail and feathery growing between the
crevices of loose stone walls. Maiden-hair is there in profusion, and
hart’s-tongue and holly fern, besides many others. The ways are rough
and stony, sometimes losing themselves in what seems to be but a mere
water-course, sometimes steeply climbing the hills in tortuous coils;
but even these rough footpaths look upon fair valleys, and the pale
sky is spread out above them, till they reach the mountain’s summit
and wind round again upon its crown back towards the whispering sea.
And now you will enter upon the region of stone pines, and this is
the promontory of Porto Fino. The goodly trees rise up from out soft
earth, and their straight stems, with the curiously carved bark, stand
tall and erect, many feet on high, ere the branches begin gracefully to
strike out on the several sides. Then the boughs grow more forked and
multiply again, and still there are no leaves yet to be seen, only when
you look up from below you see that there is a great shade spread above
you, and that all those thickly matted branches are clothed and adorned
with the dark and sweet-scented foliage. Then you sit down, perhaps, in
the dreamy cool and the twilight of this forest—where the trees do not
need to be thickly set that they may throw their shadows densely—and
you breathe the heavy-perfumed air from the pines, while you hear from
afar the murmur of the sea. These pine trees can grow on the narrowest
ledges of soil that have found a place up the face of the cliffs, and
can yet stretch their branches far out over the waves, so that the most
barren edge of land by them is made beautiful and softened. And all
the time, perhaps, that you have been walking you have scarce caught
more than a far-off vision of the magic water. As you made a turn in
the road or climbed some little knoll on your way there came a sudden
picture before you of a brilliant colour, neither blue nor green nor
purple, such as you ever saw it before, framed in the stately branches
of the dark pines. And the sky is pale, and yet the sky, too, seems
pregnant with colour, and fathomless, and so the sea and the sky meet
in one. Then you dive down into a little dale again and into a lonely
glen, and the sea is away and the memory of it, only still mysteriously
its influence seems to be around. The village of Porto Fino lies to
your left, but far below upon the sea-shore. You must descend. The
pines still fringe the ridge of land, where it overhangs the water,
but now the vegetation will change. Little tufts and sprigs of divers
shrubs cling to the rock—myrtle—and gracefully twining sarsaparilla;
but green things are not abundant here, where strange boulders of rock
strike down into the sea, or lift up their great forms from its depths
a little way from the shore; and when the cape is rounded, and the
woods begin again, they are no longer pine plantations but sweeping
chestnut groves that drape the hill-side. There is a little shrine that
has been built upon the farthest point of the Porto Fino promontory.
On windy days the ‘Madonetta’ has bidden fair to be cast from her home
and hurled into the treacherous Mediterranean, for the gales rise up
suddenly on this coast, and I have seen the smiling waters wax dark and
livid in one short hour, dashing their waves in mighty billows upon
the rocks, and tossing their white foam far aloft. Then the dolphins
gather themselves in companies below the surface, and the ships are
fain to take refuge in one of the bays which nature has provided along
the coast. Of these Porto Fino is by far the best and largest for many
miles ahead. The harbour can hold even large ships, and is a constant
halting-place for the smaller craft which ply their trade along the
coast. Then the little fishing-smacks are forced to be moored upon the
beach, for the swell of the sea is heavy even in this sheltered bay.
So the footpath will have brought you down, curling round the cliff’s
front till you come where the chestnut woods are growing luxuriantly
above the shores of the little harbour. Porto Fino’s church is to the
right of the village, and above it. It is on the neck of the peninsula,
just where the land is narrowest, so that standing beside it some windy
day you can feel, on the one hand, from the turbid billows beneath, the
foam that dashes up against the rocks, and on the other you can see the
gentle heaving of the calmer waters in the little bay at your left. You
must needs pass the church as you make your way down to the village.
The way is steep, but it is paved, though the round stones are somewhat
hard and slippery. Porto Fino is a small place. There is a piazza upon
the shore whence the little pier juts out into the water, and around
which the houses are built in a square. They are poor dwellings most
of them, though one or two pink and yellow houses, with balconies,
suppose themselves to be charming summer residences for strangers.
The village is a fishing village, and therefore is pretty well huddled
together upon the shore; but there are a few cosier looking cottages in
the woods behind, where the lace-makers live; and the odds and ends of
the place have crept up into the valley or upon the slopes. There are
pleasure boats at Porto Fino, besides the fishing-smacks: though when
I say pleasure boats I have not in mind those dainty little craft which
are wont so to be called in fashionable watering-places, for these are
rough and dingy, and built, I doubt not, against all rules of modern
invention. Nevertheless, they are safe and comfortable, and swift
enough when pulled by two stalwart fishers. They will beset you as you
come out upon the piazza, these swarthy boatmen, and clamour loudly for
your favour. Then the boat will row you over the dark green waters of
the little bay out into the wide sea without, where the water is bluer
and less transparent; and when you have rounded the promontory and
skirted other little bays you will be back at Santa Margherita.
The Lace Weaver.