I imagine that Grossetto is not a town much known to travel, for it is
absent from all the guide-books I have looked at. However, it is chief
in the Maremma, where sweet Pia de' Tolommei languished and perished
of the poisonous air and her love's cruelty, and where, so many mute
centuries since, the Etrurian cities flourished and fell. Further, one
may say that Grossetto is on the diligence road from Civita Vecchia
to Leghorn, and that in the very heart of the place there is a lovely
palm-tree, rare, if not sole, in that latitude. This palm stands in a
well-sheltered, dull little court, out of every thing's way, and turns
tenderly toward the wall that shields it on the north. It has no other
company but a beautiful young girl, who leans out of a window high
over its head, and I have no doubt talks with it. At the moment we
discovered the friends, the maiden was looking pathetically to the
northward, while the palm softly stirred and opened its plumes, as a
bird does when his song is finished; and there is very little question
but it had just been singing to her that song of which the palms are
so fond,--
"Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf kahler Höh'."
Grossetto does her utmost to hide the secret of this tree's
existence, as if a hard, matter-of-fact place ought to be ashamed of
a sentimentality of the kind. It pretended to be a very worldly town,
and tried to keep us in the neighborhood of its cathedral, where the
caffè and shops are, and where, in the evening, four or five officers
of the garrison clinked their sabres on the stones, and promenaded up
and down, and as many ladies shopped for gloves; and as many citizens
sat at the principal caffè and drank black coffee. This was lively
enough; and we knew that the citizens were talking of the last week's
news and the Roman question; that the ladies were really looking for
loves, not gloves; that such of the officers as had no local intrigue
to keep their hearts at rest were terribly bored, and longed for
Florence or Milan or Turin.
Besides the social charms of her piazza, Grossetto put forth others
of an artistic nature. The cathedral was very old and very
beautiful,--built of alternate lines of red and white marble, and
lately restored in the best spirit of fidelity and reverence. But
it was not open, and we were obliged to turn from it to the group of
statuary in the middle of the piazza, representative of the Maremma
and Family returning thanks to the Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany
for his goodness in causing her swamps to be drained. The Maremma and
her children are arrayed in the scant draperies of Allegory, but
the Grand Duke is fully dressed, and is shown looking down with some
surprise at their figures, and with a visible doubt of the propriety
of their public appearance in that state.
There was also a Museum at Grossetto, and I wonder what was in it?
The wall of the town was perfect yet, though the moat at its feet had
been so long dry that it was only to be known from the adjacent fields
by the richness of its soil. The top of the wall had been leveled, and
planted with shade, and turned into a peaceful promenade, like most of
such mediæval defenses in Italy; though I am not sure that a little
military life did not still linger about a bastion here and there.
From somewhere, when we strolled out early in the morning, to walk
upon the wall, there came to us a throb of drums; but I believe that
the only armed men we saw, beside the officers in the piazza, were
the numerous sportsmen resorting at that season to Grossetto for
the excellent shooting in the marshes. All the way to Florence we
continued to meet them and their dogs; and our inn at Grossetto
overflowed with abundance of game. On the kitchen floor and in the
court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, and beccafichi, at which
a troop of scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from which the great,
noble, beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed, broiled,
and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these generous birds during our
sojourn, and found, when we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that
the very genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas beyond
them. He was part of the repairs and improvements which that
hostelry had recently undergone, and had evidently come in with
the four-pronged forks, the chromo-lithographs of Victor Emanuel,
Garibaldi, Solferino, and Magenta in the large dining-room, and the
iron stove in the small one. He had nothing, evidently, in common with
the brick floors of the bed-chambers, and the ancient rooms with
great fire-places. He strove to give a Florentine blandishment to the
rusticity of life in the Maremma; and we felt sure that he must know
what beefsteak was. When we ordered it, he assumed to be perfectly
conversant with it, started to bring it, paused, turned, and, with a
great sacrifice of personal dignity, demanded, "_Bifsteca di manzo, o
bifsteca di motone_?"--"Beefsteak of beef, or beefsteak of mutton?"
Of Grossetto proper, this is all I remember, if I except a boy whom I
heard singing after dark in the streets,--
"Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi!"
The cause of our sojourn there was an instance of _forza maggiore_, as
the agent of the diligence company defiantly expressed it, in refusing
us damages for our overturn into the river. It was in the early
part of the winter when we started from Rome for Venice, and we were
travelling northward by diligence because the railways were still more
or less interrupted by the storms and floods predicted of Matthieu
de la Drôme,--the only reliable prophet France has produced since
Voltaire;--and if our accident was caused by an overruling Providence,
the company, according to the very law of its existence, was not
responsible. To be sure, we did not see how an overruling Providence
was to blame for loading upon our diligence the baggage of two
diligences, or for the clumsiness of our driver; but on the other
hand, it is certain that the company did not make it rain or cause
the inundation. And, in fine, although we could not have travelled
by railway, we were masters to have taken the steamer instead of the
diligence at Civita Vecchia.
The choice of either of these means of travel had presented itself in
vivid hues of disadvantage all the way from Rome to the Papal port,
where the French steamer for Leghorn lay dancing a hornpipe upon the
short, chopping waves, while we approached by railway. We had
leisure enough to make the decision, if that was all we wanted. Our
engine-driver had derived his ideas of progress from an Encyclical
Letter, and the train gave every promise of arriving at Civita Vecchia
five hundred years behind time. But such was the desolating and
depressing influence of the weather and the landscape, that we reached
Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had left Rome. On the one hand,
there had been the land, soaked and sodden,--wild, shagged with
scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and
visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at
an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable
dejection, with their legs wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like
satyrs that had been converted, and were trying to do right; turning
dim faces to us, they warned us with every mute appeal against the
land, as a waste of mud from one end of Italy to the other. On
the other hand, there was the sea-wind raving about our train and
threatening to blow it over, and whenever we drew near the coast,
heaping the waves upon the beach in thundering menace.
We weakly and fearfully remembered our former journeys by diligence
over broken railway routes; we recalled our cruel voyage from Genoa to
Naples by sea; and in a state of pitiable dismay we ate five francs'
worth at the restaurant of the Civita Vecchia station before we knew
it, and long before we had made up our minds. Still we might have
lingered and hesitated, and perhaps returned to Rome at last, but for
the dramatic resolution of the old man who solicited passengers for
the diligence, and carried their passports for a final Papal _visa_
at the police-office. By the account he gave of himself, he was one of
the best men in the world, and unique in those parts for honesty and
truthfulness; and he besought us, out of that affectionate interest
with which our very aspect had inspired him, not to go by steamer, but
to go by diligence, which in nineteen hours would land us safe,
and absolutely refreshed by the journey, at the railway station in
Follonica. And now, once, would we go by diligence? twice, would we
go? three times, would we go?
"Signore," said our benefactor, angrily, "I lose my time with you;"
and ran away, to be called back in the course of destiny, as he knew
well enough, and besought to take us as a special favor.
From the passports he learned that there was official dignity among
us, and addressed the unworthy bearer of public honors as Eccellenza,
and, at parting bequeathed his advantage to the conductor, commending
us all in set terms to his courtesy. He hovered caressingly about us
as long as we remained, straining politeness to do us some last little
service; and when the diligence rolled away, he did all that one man
could to give us a round of applause.
We laughed together at this silly old man, when out of sight; but we
confessed that, if travel in our own country ever came, with advancing
corruption, to be treated with the small deceits practiced upon it in
Italy, it was not likely to be treated with the small civilities also
there attendant on it,--and so tried to console ourselves.
At the moment of departure, we were surprised to have enter the
diligence a fellow-countryman, whom we had first seen on the road from
Naples to Rome. He had since crossed our path with that iteration of
travel which brings you again and again in view of the same trunks
and the same tourists in the round of Europe, and finally at Civita
Vecchia he had turned up, a silent spectator of our scene with the
agent of the diligence, and had gone off apparently a confirmed
passenger by steamer. Perhaps a nearer view of the sailor's hornpipe,
as danced by that vessel in the harbor, shook his resolution. At
any rate, here he was again, and with his ticket for Follonica,--a
bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked man, and we will say a citizen of Portland,
though he was not. For the first time in our long acquaintance with
one another's faces, we entered into conversation, and wondered
whether we should find brigands or any thing to eat on the road,
without expectation of finding either. In respect of robbers, we were
not disappointed; but shortly after nightfall we stopped at a lonely
post-house to change horses, and found that the landlord had so far
counted on our appearance as to have, just roasted and fragrantly
fuming, a leg of lamb, with certain small fried fish, and a
sufficiency of bread. It was a very lonely place as I say; the sky was
gloomy overhead; and the wildness of the landscape all about us gave
our provision quite a gamy flavor; and brigands could have added
nothing to our sense of solitude.
The road creeps along the coast for some distance from Civita Vecchia,
within hearing of the sea, and nowhere widely forsakes it, I believe,
all the way to Follonica. The country is hilly, and we stopped every
two hours to change horses; at which times we looked out, and, seeing
that it was a gray and windy night, though not rainy, exulted that we
had not taken the steamer. With very little change, the wisdom of
our decision in favor of the diligence formed the burden of our talk
during the whole night; and to think of eluded sea-sickness requited
us in the agony of our break-neck efforts to catch a little sleep, as,
mounted upon our nightmares, we rode steeple-chases up and down the
highways and by-ways of horror. Any thing that absolutely awakened us
was accounted a blessing; and I remember few things in life with so
keen a pleasure as the summons that came to us to descend from our
places and cross a river in one boat, while the two diligences of
our train followed in another. Here we had time to see our
fellow-passengers, as the pulsating light of their cigars illumined
their faces, and to discover among them that Italian, common to all
large companies, who speaks English, and is very eager to practice
it with you,--who is such a benefactor if you do not know his own
language, and such a bore if you do. After this, being landed, it was
rapture to stroll up and down the good road, and feel it hard and real
under our feet, and not an abysmal impalpability, while all the
grim shapes of our dreams fled to the spectral line of small boats
sustaining the ferry-barge, and swaying slowly from it as the drowned
men at their keels tugged them against the tide.
"_S' accommodino, Signori_!" cries the cheerful voice of the
conductor, and we ascend to our places in the diligence. The
nightmares are brought out again; we mount, and renew the
steeple-chase as before.
Suddenly, it all comes to an end, and we sit wide awake in the
diligence, amid a silence only broken by the hiss of rain against the
windows, and the sweep of gusts upon the roof. The diligence stands
still; there is no rattle of harness, nor other sound to prove that we
have arrived at the spot by other means than dropping from the clouds.
The idea that we are passengers in the last diligence destroyed
before the Deluge, and are now waiting our fate on the highest ground
accessible to wheels, fades away as the day dimly breaks, and we find
ourselves planted, as the Italians say, on the banks of another
river. There is no longer any visible conductor, the horses have been
spirited away, the driver has vanished.
The rain beats and beats upon the roof, and begins to drop through
upon us in great, wrathful tears, while the river before us rushes
away with a momently swelling flood. Enter now from the depths of
the storm a number of rainy peasants, with our conductor and driver
perfectly waterlogged, and group themselves on the low, muddy shore,
near a flat ferry-barge, evidently wanting but a hint of _forza
maggiore_ to go down with any thing put into it. A moment they
dispute in pantomime, sending now and then a windy tone of protest
and expostulation to our ears, and then they drop into a motionless
silence, and stand there in the tempest, not braving it, but enduring
it with the pathetic resignation of their race, as if it were some
form of hopeless political oppression. At last comes the conductor to
us and says, It is impossible for our diligences to cross in the
boat, and he has sent for others to meet us on the opposite shore.
He expected them long before this, but we see! They are not come.
Patience and malediction!
Remaining planted in these unfriendly circumstances from four o'clock
till ten, we have still the effrontery to be glad that we did not
take the steamer. What a storm that must be at sea! When at last
our connecting diligences appear on the other shore, we are almost
light-hearted, and make a jest of the Ombrone, as we perilously pass
it in the ferry-boat too weak for our diligences. Between the landing
and the vehicles there is a space of heavy mud to cross, and when we
reach them we find the _coupé_ appointed us occupied by three young
Englishmen, who insist that they shall be driven to the boat. With
that graceful superiority which endears their nation to the world, and
makes the travelling Englishman a universal favorite, they keep
the seats to which they have no longer any right, while the tempest
drenches the ladies to whom the places belong; and it is only by the
_forza maggiore_ of our conductor that they can be dislodged. In
the mean time the Portland man exchanges with them the assurances of
personal and national esteem, which that mighty bond of friendship,
the language of Shakespeare and Milton, enables us to offer so
idiomatically to our transatlantic cousins.
What Grossetto was like, as we first rode through it, we scarcely
looked to see. In four or five hours we should strike the railroad at
Follonica; and we merely asked of intermediate places that they
should not detain us. We dined in Grossetto at an inn of the Larthian
period,--a cold inn and a damp, which seemed never to have been
swept since the broom dropped from the grasp of the last Etrurian
chambermaid,--and we ate with the two-pronged iron forks of an extinct
civilization. All the while we dined, a boy tried to kindle a fire
to warm us, and beguiled his incessant failures with stories of
inundation on the road ahead of us. But we believed him so little,
that when he said a certain stream near Grossetto was impassable, our
company all but hissed him.
When we left the town and hurried into the open country, we perceived
that he had only too great reason to be an alarmist. Every little
rill was risen, and boiling over with the pride of harm, and the broad
fields lay hid under the yellow waters that here and there washed over
the road. Yet the freshet only presented itself to us as a pleasant
excitement; and even when we came to a place where the road itself
was covered for a quarter of a mile, we scarcely looked outside the
diligence to see how deep the water was. We were surprised when our
horses were brought to a stand on a rising ground, and the conductor,
cap in hand, appeared at the door. He was a fat, well-natured man,
full of a smiling goodwill; and he stood before us in a radiant
desperation.
Would Eccellenza descend, look at the water in front, and decide
whether to go on? The conductor desired to content; it displeased him
to delay,--_ma, in somma_!--the rest was confided to the conductor's
eloquent shoulders and eyebrows.
Eccellenza, descending, beheld but a disheartening prospect. On every
hand the country was under water. The two diligences stood on a stone
bridge spanning the stream, that, now swollen to an angry torrent,
brawled over a hundred yards of the road before us. Beyond, the ground
rose, and on its slope stood a farm-house up to its second story in
water. Without the slightest hope in his purpose and merely as an
experiment, Eccellenza suggested that a man should be sent in on
horseback; which being done, man and horse in a moment floundered into
swimming depths.
The conductor, vigilantly regarding Eccellenza, gave a great shrug of
desolation.
Eccellenza replied with a foreigner's broken shrug,--a shrug of
sufficiently correct construction, but wanting the tonic accent,
as one may say, though expressing, however imperfectly, an equal
desolation.
It appeared to be the part of wisdom not to go ahead, but to go back
if we could; and we reëntered the water we had just crossed. It had
risen a little meanwhile, and the road could now be traced only by the
telegraph-poles. The diligence before us went safely through; but our
driver, trusting rather to inspiration than precedent, did not follow
it carefully, and directly drove us over the side of a small viaduct.
All the baggage of the train having been lodged upon the roof of our
diligence, the unwieldy vehicle now lurched heavily, hesitated, as if
preparing, like Cæsar, to fall decently, and went over on its side
with a stately deliberation that gave us ample time to arrange our
plans for getting out.
The torrent was only some three feet deep, but it was swift and muddy,
and it was with a fine sense of shipwreck that Eccellenza felt his
boots filling with water, while a conviction that it would have been
better, after all, to have taken the steamer, struck coldly home to
him. We opened the window in the top side of the diligence, and
lifted the ladies through it and the conductor, in the character of
life-boat, bore them ashore; while the driver cursed his horses in
a sullen whisper, and could with difficulty be diverted from that
employment to cut the lines and save one of them from drowning.
Here our compatriot, whose conversation with the Englishman at the
Ombrone we had lately admired, showed traits of strict and severe
method which afterward came into even bolder relief. The ladies being
rescued, he applied himself to the rescue of their hats, cloaks,
rubbers, muffs, books, and bags, and handed them up through the window
with tireless perseverance, making an effort to wring or dry each
article in turn. The other gentleman on top received them all rather
grimly, and had not perhaps been amused by the situation but for the
exploit of his hat. It was of the sort called in Italian as in English
slang a stove-pipe (_canna_), and having been made in Italy, it was
of course too large for its wearer. It had never been any thing but a
horror and reproach to him, and he was now inexpressibly delighted
to see it steal out of the diligence in company with one of the
red-leather cushions, and glide darkly down the flood. It nodded and
nodded to the cushion with a superhuman tenderness and elegance, and
had a preposterous air of whispering, as it drifted out of sight,--
"It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,--
It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down."
The romantic interest of this episode had hardly died away, when our
adventure acquired an idyllic flavor from the appearance on the scene
of four peasants in an ox-cart. These the conductor tried to engage to
bring out the baggage and right the fallen diligence; and they, after
making him a little speech upon the value of their health, which
might be injured, asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs for
the service. The simple incident enforced the fact already known to
us,--that, if Italians sometimes take advantage of strangers, they
are equally willing to prey upon each other; but I doubt if any thing
could have taught a foreigner the sweetness with which our conductor
bore the enormity, and turned quietly from those brigands to carry the
Portland man from the wreck, on which he lingered, to the shore.
Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of both diligences
grouped themselves, and made merry over the common disaster. As the
conductor and the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose
with the arrival of each trunk, and we were pleased or not as we found
it soaked or dry. We applauded and admired the greater sufferers among
us: a lady who opened a dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a
pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces
and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as
a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to these witty passages
was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty
rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples,--copies of Pompeian
frescos more ruinous than the originals; photographs floating loose
from their cards; little earthen busts reduced to the lumpishness of
common clay; Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of all memory of
their recent hues; Roman pearls clinging together in clammy masses.
We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all crowded into one
diligence and returned to Grossetto. Arrived there, our party, knowing
that a public conveyance in Italy--and everywhere else--always stops
at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek another, and found it
without ado, though the person who undertook to show it spoke of it
mysteriously and as of difficult access, and tried to make the simple
affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could.
We took one of the ancient rooms in which there was a vast fire-place,
as already mentioned, and we there kindled such a fire as could not
have been known in that fuel-sparing land for ages. The drying of the
clothes was an affair that drew out all the energy and method of our
compatriot, and at a late hour we left him moving about among the
garments that dangled and dripped from pegs and hooks and lines,
dealing with them as a physician with his sick, and tenderly nursing
his dress-coat, which he wrung and shook and smoothed and pulled this
way and that with a never-satisfied anxiety. At midnight, he hired
a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the steaming raiment, and,
returning at four o'clock, found his watcher dead asleep before the
empty fire-place. But I rather applaud than blame the watcher for
this. He must have been a man of iron nerve to fall asleep amid all
that phantasmal show of masks and disguises. What if those reeking
silks had forsaken their nails, and, decking themselves with the
blotted Roman scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, had invited the
dress-coats to look over the dripping photographs? Or if all those
drowned garments had assumed the characters of the people whom they
had grown to resemble, and had sat down to hear the shade of Pia de'
Tolommei rehearse the story of her sad fate in the Maremma? I say, if
a watcher could sleep in such company, he was right to do so.
* * * * *
On the third day after our return to Grossetto, we gathered together
our damaged effects, and packed them into refractory trunks. Then
we held the customary discussion with the landlord concerning the
effrontery of his account, and drove off once more toward Follonica.
We could scarcely recognize the route for the one we had recently
passed over; and it was not until we came to the scene of our wreck,
and found the diligence stranded high and dry upon the roadside, that
we could believe the whole landscape about us had been flooded three
days before. The offending stream had shrunk back to its channel, and
now seemed to feign an unconsciousness of its late excess, and had
a virtuous air of not knowing how in the world to account for that
upturned diligence. The waters, we learned, had begun to subside the
night after our disaster; and the vehicle might have been righted
and drawn off--for it was not in the least injured--forty-eight hours
previously; but I suppose it was not _en règle_ to touch it without
orders from Rome. I picture it to myself still lying there, in the
heart of the marshes, and thrilling sympathetic travel with the
spectacle of its ultimate ruin:
"Disfecemi Maremma."
We reached Follonica at last, and then the cars hurried us to Leghorn.
We were thoroughly humbled in spirit, and had no longer any doubt
that we did ill to take the diligence at Civita Vecchia instead of
the steamer; for we had been, not nineteen hours, but four days on the
road, and we had suffered as aforementioned.
But we were destined to be partially restored to our self-esteem, if
not entirely comforted for our losses, when we sat down to dinner in
the Hotel Washington, and the urbane head-waiter, catching the drift
of our English discourse, asked us,--
"Have the signori heard that the French steamer, which left Civita
Vecchia the same day with their diligence, had to put back and lie in
port more than two days on account of the storm? She is but now come
into Leghorn, after a very dangerous passage."