At all events, saith the best authority, “pray that your flight be not
in winter;” and it might have added, don't go south if you desire warm
weather. In January, 1869, I had a little experience of hunting after
genial skies; and I will give you the benefit of it in some free running
notes on my journey from Munich to Naples.
It was the middle of January, at eleven o'clock at night, that we left
Munich, on a mixed railway train, choosing that time, and the slowest of
slow trains, that we might make the famous Brenner Pass by daylight. It
was no easy matter, at last, to pull up from the dear old city in which
we had become so firmly planted, and to leave the German friends who
made the place like home to us. One gets to love Germany and the
Germans as he does no other country and people in Europe. There has been
something so simple, honest, genuine, in our Munich life, that we look
back to it with longing eyes from this land of fancy, of hand-organ
music, and squalid splendor. I presume the streets are yet half the day
hid in a mountain fog; but I know the superb military bands are still
playing at noon in the old Marian Platz and in the Loggie by the
Residenz; that at half-past six in the evening our friends are quietly
stepping in to hear the opera at the Hof Theater, where everybody goes
to hear the music, and nobody for display, and that they will be at home
before half-past nine, and have dispatched the servant for the mugs
of foaming beer; I know that they still hear every week the choice
conservatoire orchestral concerts in the Odeon; and, alas that
experience should force me to think of it! I have no doubt that they
sip, every morning, coffee which is as much superior to that of Paris
as that of Paris is to that of London; and that they eat the delicious
rolls, in comparison with which those of Paris are tasteless. I wonder,
in this land of wine,--and yet it must be so,--if the beer-gardens are
still filled nightly; and if it could be that I should sit at a little
table there, a comely lass would, before I could ask for what everybody
is presumed to want, place before me a tall glass full of amber liquid,
crowned with creamy foam. Are the handsome officers still sipping their
coffee in the Cafe Maximilian; and, on sunny days, is the crowd of
fashion still streaming down to the Isar, and the high, sightly walks
and gardens beyond?
As I said, it was eleven o'clock of a clear and not very severe night;
for Munich had had no snow on the ground since November. A deputation of
our friends were at the station to see us off, and the farewells between
the gentlemen were in the hearty fashion of the country. I know there
is a prejudice with us against kissing between men; but it is only a
question of taste: and the experience of anybody will tell him that
the theory that this sort of salutation must necessarily be desirable
between opposite sexes is a delusion. But I suppose it cannot be denied
that kissing between men was invented in Germany before they wore full
beards. Well, our goodbyes said, we climbed into our bare cars. There
is no way of heating the German cars, except by tubes filled with hot
water, which are placed under the feet, and are called foot-warmers. As
we slowly moved out over the plain, we found it was cold; in an hour the
foot-warmers, not hot to start with, were stone cold. You are going to
sunny Italy, our friends had said: as soon as you pass the Brenner you
will have sunshine and delightful weather. This thought consoled us,
but did not warm our feet. The Germans, when they travel by rail, wrap
themselves in furs and carry foot-sacks.
We creaked along, with many stoppings. At two o'clock we were at
Rosenheim. Rosenheim is a windy place, with clear starlight, with a
multitude of cars on a multiplicity of tracks, and a large, lighted
refreshment-room, which has a glowing, jolly stove. We stay there an
hour, toasting by the fire and drinking excellent coffee. Groups of
Germans are seated at tables playing cards, smoking, and taking coffee.
Other trains arrive; and huge men stalk in, from Vienna or Russia, you
would say, enveloped in enormous fur overcoats, reaching to the heels,
and with big fur boots coming above the knees, in which they move like
elephants. Another start, and a cold ride with cooling foot-warmers,
droning on to Kurfstein. It is five o'clock when we reach Kurfstein,
which is also a restaurant, with a hot stove, and more Germans going on
as if it were daytime; but by this time in the morning the coffee had
got to be wretched.
After an hour's waiting, we dream on again, and, before we know it, come
out of our cold doze into the cold dawn. Through the thick frost on
the windows we see the faint outlines of mountains. Scraping away the
incrustation, we find that we are in the Tyrol, high hills on all sides,
no snow in the valley, a bright morning, and the snow-peaks are soon
rosy in the sunrise. It is just as we expected,--little villages under
the hills, and slender church spires with brick-red tops. At nine
o'clock we are in Innsbruck, at the foot of the Brenner. No snow yet. It
must be charming here in the summer.
During the night we have got out of Bavaria. The waiter at the
restaurant wants us to pay him ninety kreuzers for our coffee, which is
only six kreuzers a cup in Munich. Remembering that it takes one hundred
kreuzers to make a gulden in Austria, I launch out a Bavarian gulden,
and expect ten kreuzers in change. I have heard that sixty Bavarian
kreuzers are equal to one hundred Austrian; but this waiter explains
to me that my gulden is only good for ninety kreuzers. I, in my turn,
explain to the waiter that it is better than the coffee; but we come to
no understanding, and I give up, before I begin, trying to understand
the Austrian currency. During the day I get my pockets full of coppers,
which are very convenient to take in change, but appear to have a very
slight purchasing, power in Austria even, and none at all elsewhere, and
the only use for which I have found is to give to Italian beggars. One
of these pieces satisfies a beggar when it drops into his hat; and
then it detains him long enough in the examination of it, so that your
carriage has time to get so far away that his renewed pursuit is usually
unavailing.
The Brenner Pass repaid us for the pains we had taken to see it,
especially as the sun shone and took the frost from our windows, and we
encountered no snow on the track; and, indeed, the fall was not deep,
except on the high peaks about us. Even if the engineering of the road
were not so interesting, it was something to be again amidst mountains
that can boast a height of ten thousand feet. After we passed the
summit, and began the zigzag descent, we were on a sharp lookout for
sunny Italy. I expected to lay aside my heavy overcoat, and sun myself
at the first station among the vineyards. Instead of that, we bade
good-by to bright sky, and plunged into a snowstorm, and, so greeted,
drove down into the narrow gorges, whose steep slopes we could see were
terraced to the top, and planted with vines. We could distinguish enough
to know that, with the old Roman ruins, the churches and convent towers
perched on the crags, and all, the scenery in summer must be finer
than that of the Rhine, especially as the vineyards here are
picturesque,--the vines being trained so as to hide and clothe the
ground with verdure.
It was four o'clock when we reached Trent, and colder than on top of the
Brenner. As the Council, owing to the dead state of its members for now
three centuries, was not in session, we made no long tarry. We went into
the magnificent large refreshment-room to get warm; but it was as cold
as a New England barn. I asked the proprietor if we could not get at a
fire; but he insisted that the room was warm, that it was heated with a
furnace, and that he burned good stove-coal, and pointed to a register
high up in the wall. Seeing that I looked incredulous, he insisted that
I should test it. Accordingly, I climbed upon a table, and reached up my
hand. A faint warmth came out; and I gave it up, and congratulated the
landlord on his furnace. But the register had no effect on the great
hall. You might as well try to heat the dome of St. Peter's with a
lucifer-match. At dark, Allah be praised! we reached Ala, where we went
through the humbug of an Italian custom-house, and had our first glimpse
of Italy in the picturesque-looking idlers in red-tasseled caps, and
the jabber of a strange tongue. The snow turned into a cold rain: the
foot-warmers, we having reached the sunny lands, could no longer be
afforded; and we shivered along till nine o'clock, dark and rainy,
brought us to Verona. We emerged from the station to find a crowd of
omnibuses, carriages, drivers, runners, and people anxious to help us,
all vociferating in the highest key. Amidst the usual Italian clamor
about nothing, we gained our hotel omnibus, and sat there for ten
minutes watching the dispute over our luggage, and serenely listening
to the angry vituperations of policemen and drivers. It sounded like a
revolution, but it was only the ordinary Italian way of doing things;
and we were at last rattling away over the broad pavements.
Of course, we stopped at a palace turned hotel, drove into a court with
double flights of high stone and marble stairways, and were hurried up
to the marble-mosaic landing by an active boy, and, almost before we
could ask for rooms, were shown into a suite of magnificent apartments.
I had a glimpse of a garden in the rear,--flowers and plants, and
a balcony up which I suppose Romeo climbed to hold that immortal
love-prattle with the lovesick Juliet. Boy began to light the candles.
Asked in English the price of such fine rooms. Reply in Italian. Asked
in German. Reply in Italian. Asked in French, with the same result.
Other servants appeared, each with a piece of baggage. Other candles
were lighted. Everybody talked in chorus. The landlady--a woman of
elegant manners and great command of her native tongue--appeared with
a candle, and joined in the melodious confusion. What is the price
of these rooms? More jabber, more servants bearing lights. We seemed
suddenly to have come into an illumination and a private lunatic asylum.
The landlady and her troop grew more and more voluble and excited. Ah,
then, if these rooms do not suit the signor and signoras, there are
others; and we were whisked off to apartments yet grander, great suites
with high, canopied beds, mirrors, and furniture that was luxurious
a hundred years ago. The price? Again a torrent of Italian; servants
pouring in, lights flashing, our baggage arriving, until, in the tumult,
hopeless of any response to our inquiry for a servant who could speak
anything but Italian, and when we had decided, in despair, to hire the
entire establishment, a waiter appeared who was accomplished in all
languages, the row subsided, and we were left alone in our glory, and
soon in welcome sleep forgot our desperate search for a warm climate.
The next day it was rainy and not warm; but the sun came out
occasionally, and we drove about to see some of the sights. The first
Italian town which the stranger sees he is sure to remember, the outdoor
life of the people is so different from that at the North. It is the
fiction in Italy that it is always summer; and the people sit in the
open market-place, shiver in the open doorways, crowd into corners
where the sun comes, and try to keep up the beautiful pretense. The
picturesque groups of idlers and traffickers were more interesting to us
than the palaces with sculptured fronts and old Roman busts, or tombs
of the Scaligers, and old gates. Perhaps I ought to except the wonderful
and perfect Roman amphitheater, over every foot of which a handsome
boy in rags followed us, looking over every wall that we looked over,
peering into every hole that we peered into, thus showing his fellowship
with us, and at every pause planting himself before us, and throwing a
somerset, and then extending his greasy cap for coppers, as if he
knew that the modern mind ought not to dwell too exclusively on hoary
antiquity without some relief.
Anxious, as I have said, to find the sunny South, we left Verona that
afternoon for Florence, by way of Padua and Bologna. The ride to Padua
was through a plain, at this season dreary enough, were it not, here and
there, for the abrupt little hills and the snowy Alps, which were always
in sight, and towards sundown and between showers transcendently lovely
in a purple and rosy light. But nothing now could be more desolate than
the rows of unending mulberry-trees, pruned down to the stumps, through
which we rode all the afternoon. I suppose they look better when the
branches grow out with the tender leaves for the silk-worms, and when
they are clothed with grapevines. Padua was only to us a name. There we
turned south, lost mountains and the near hills, and had nothing but the
mulberry flats and ditches of water, and chilly rain and mist. It grew
unpleasant as we went south. At dark we were riding slowly, very slowly,
for miles through a country overflowed with water, out of which trees
and houses loomed up in a ghastly show. At all the stations soldiers
were getting on board, shouting and singing discordantly choruses from
the operas; for there was a rising at Padua, and one feared at Bologna
the populace getting up insurrections against the enforcement of the
grist-tax,--a tax which has made the government very unpopular, as it
falls principally upon the poor.
Creeping along at such a slow rate, we reached Bologna too late for the
Florence train, It was eight o'clock, and still raining. The next train
went at two o'clock in the morning, and was the best one for us to take.
We had supper in an inn near by, and a fair attempt at a fire in our
parlor. I sat before it, and kept it as lively as possible, as the
hours wore away, and tried to make believe that I was ruminating on the
ancient greatness of Bologna and its famous university, some of whose
chairs had been occupied by women, and upon the fact that it was on a
little island in the Reno, just below here, that Octavius and Lepidus
and Mark Antony formed the second Triumvirate, which put an end to
what little liberty Rome had left; but in reality I was thinking of the
draught on my back, and the comforts of a sunny clime. But the time came
at length for starting; and in luxurious cars we finished the night very
comfortably, and rode into Florence at eight in the morning to find, as
we had hoped, on the other side of the Apennines, a sunny sky and balmy
air.
As this is strictly a chapter of travel and weather, I may not stop to
say how impressive and beautiful Florence seemed to us; how bewildering
in art treasures, which one sees at a glance in the streets; or scarcely
to hint how lovely were the Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace, the
roses, geraniums etc, in bloom, the birds singing, and all in a soft,
dreamy air. The next day was not so genial; and we sped on, following
our original intention of seeking the summer in winter. In order to
avoid trouble with baggage and passports in Rome, we determined to book
through for Naples, making the trip in about twenty hours. We started
at nine o'clock in the evening, and I do not recall a more thoroughly
uncomfortable journey. It grew colder as the night wore on, and we went
farther south. Late in the morning we were landed at the station outside
of Rome. There was a general appearance of ruin and desolation. The wind
blew fiercely from the hills, and the snowflakes from the flying clouds
added to the general chilliness. There was no chance to get even a cup
of coffee, and we waited an hour in the cold car. If I had not been so
half frozen, the consciousness that I was actually on the outskirts of
the Eternal City, that I saw the Campagna and the aqueducts, that yonder
were the Alban Hills, and that every foot of soil on which I looked was
saturated with history, would have excited me. The sun came out here and
there as we went south, and we caught some exquisite lights on the near
and snowy hills; and there was something almost homelike in the miles
and miles of olive orchards, that recalled the apple-trees, but for
their shining silvered leaves. And yet nothing could be more desolate
than the brown marshy ground, the brown hillocks, with now and then a
shabby stone hut or a bit of ruin, and the flocks of sheep shivering
near their corrals, and their shepherd, clad in sheepskin, as his
ancestor was in the time of Romulus, leaning on his staff, with his back
to the wind. Now and then a white town perched on a hillside, its houses
piled above each other, relieved the eye; and I could imagine that it
might be all the poets have sung of it, in the spring, though the Latin
poets, I am convinced, have wonderfully imposed upon us.
To make my long story short, it happened to be colder next morning at
Naples than it was in Germany. The sun shone; but the northeast wind,
which the natives poetically call the Tramontane, was blowing, and the
white smoke of Vesuvius rolled towards the sea. It would only last three
days, it was very unusual, and all that. The next day it was colder, and
the next colder yet. Snow fell, and blew about unmelted: I saw it in the
streets of Pompeii.
The fountains were frozen, icicles hung from the locks of the marble
statues in the Chiaia. And yet the oranges glowed like gold among their
green leaves; the roses, the heliotrope, the geraniums, bloomed in all
the gardens. It is the most contradictory climate. We lunched one day,
sitting in our open carriage in a lemon grove, and near at hand the
Lucrine Lake was half frozen over. We feasted our eyes on the brilliant
light and color on the sea, and the lovely outlined mountains round the
shore, and waited for a change of wind. The Neapolitans declare that
they have not had such weather in twenty years. It is scarcely one's
ideal of balmy Italy.
Before the weather changed, I began to feel in this great Naples, with
its roaring population of over half a million, very much like the sailor
I saw at the American consul's, who applied for help to be sent home,
claiming to be an American. He was an oratorical bummer, and told his
story with all the dignity and elevated language of an old Roman. He
had been cast away in London. How cast away? Oh! it was all along of a
boarding-house. And then he found himself shipped on an English vessel,
and he had lost his discharge-papers; and “Listen, your honor,” said he,
calmly extending his right hand, “here I am cast away on this desolate
island with nothing before me but wind and weather.”