The road from Genoa to Spezia is one of the most beautiful in Europe. As
the Apennines descend to the sea they form innumerable little bays and
creeks, alongside of which the road winds--now coasting the very shore,
now soaring aloft on high-perched cliffs, and looking down into deep
dells, or to the waving tops of tall pine-trees. Seaward, it is a
succession of yellow-stranded bays, land-locked and narrow; and on the
land side are innumerable valleys, some waving with horse-chestnut and
olive, and others stern and rock-bound, but varying in colour from the
bluish-grey of marble to every shade of porphyry.
For several miles after we left Genoa, the road presented a succession
of handsome villas, which, neglected and uncared for, and in most
part untenanted, were yet so characteristically Italian in all their
vast-ness--their massive style and spacious plan--as to be great
ornaments of the scenery. Their gardens, too--such glorious wildernesses
of rich profusion--where the fig and the oleander, the vine and the
orange, tangle and intertwine--and cactuses, that would form the wonder
of our conservatories, are trained into hedgerows to protect cabbages.
My companion pointed out to me one of these villas on a little jutting
promontory of rock, with a narrow bay on one side, almost hidden by the
overhanging chestnut-trees. “That,” said he, “is the Villa Spinola. It
was from there, after a supper with his friend Vecchi, that Garibaldi
sailed on his expedition to Marsala. A sort of decent secrecy was
maintained as to the departure of the expedition; but the cheers of
those on shore, as the boats pulled off, told that the brave buccaneers
carried with them the heartfelt good wishes of their countrymen.”
Wandering on in his talk from the campaign of Sicily and Calabria,
my companion spoke of the last wild freak of Garibaldi and the day of
Aspromonte, and finally of the hero’s imprisonment at Varignano, in the
Gulf of Spezia.
It appeared from his account that the poor wounded sufferer would have
fared very ill, had it not been for the provident kindness and care of
his friends in England, who supplied him with everything he could want
and a great deal he could by no possibility make use of. Wine of
every kind, for instance, was largely sent to one who was a confirmed
water-drinker, and who, except when obliged by the impure state of the
water, never ventured to taste wine. If now and then the zealous anxiety
to be of service had its ludicrous side--and packages arrived of which
all the ingenuity of the General’s followers failed to detect what the
meaning might be--there was something very noble and very touching in
this spontaneous sympathy of a whole people, and so Garibaldi felt it.
The personal homage of the admirers--the worshippers they might be
called--was, however, an infliction that often pushed the patience of
Garibaldi’s followers to its limit, and would have overcome the gentle
forbearance of any other living creature than Garibaldi himself. They
came in shoals. Steamboats and diligences were crammed with them, and
the boatmen of Spezia plied as thriving a trade that summer as though
Garibaldi were a saint, at whose shrine the devout of all Europe came to
worship. In vain obstacles were multiplied and difficulties to entrance
invented. In vain it was declared that only a certain number of visitors
were daily admitted, and that the number was already complete. In vain
the doctors announced that the General’s condition was prejudiced, and
his feverish state increased, by these continual invasions. Each new
arrival was sure to imagine that there was something special or peculiar
in his case to make him an exception to any rule of exclusion.
“I knew Garibaldi in Monte Video. You have only to tell him it’s
Tomkins; he’ll be overjoyed to see me.” “I travelled with him from
Manchester to Bridgeport; he’ll remember me when he sees me; I lent him
a wrapper in the train.” “I knew his son Menotti when at school.” “I was
in New York when Garibaldi was a chandler, and I was always asking
for his candles;” such and suchlike were the claims which would not
be denied. At last the infliction became insupportable. Some nights
of unusual pain and suffering required that every precaution against
excitement should be taken, and measures were accordingly concerted how
visitors should be totally excluded. There was this difficulty in the
matter, that it might fall at this precise moment some person of real
consequence might have, or some one whose presence Garibaldi would
really have been well pleased to enjoy. All these considerations were,
however, postponed to the patient’s safety, and an order was sent to
the several hotels where strangers usually stopped to announce that
Garibaldi could not be seen.
“There is a story,” said my companion, “which I have heard more than
once of this period, but for whose authenticity I will certainly not
vouch. _Se non vero e’ ben trovato_, as regards the circumstance. It
was said that a party of English ladies had arrived at the chief hotel,
having come as a deputation from some heaven-knows-what association in
England, to see the General, and make their own report on his health,
his appearance, and what they deemed his prospect of perfect recovery.
They had come a very long journey, endured a considerable share of
fatigues and certain police attentions, which are not exactly what
are called amenities. They had come, besides, on an errand which might
warrant a degree of insistance even were they--which they were not--of
an order that patiently puts up with denial. When their demand for
admission was replied to by a reference to the general order excluding
all visitors, they indignantly refused to be classed in such a category.
They were not idle tourists, or sensation-hunting travellers. They were
a deputation! They came from the Associated Brothers and Sisters
of Freedom--from the Branch Committee of the Ear of Crying
Nationalities--they were not to be sent away in this light and
thoughtless manner.
“The correspondence was animated. It lasted the whole day, and the
last-sent epistle of the ladies bore the date of half-past eleven at
night. This was a document of startling import; for, after expressing,
and not always in most measured phrase, the indignant disappointment of
the writers, it went on to throw out, but in a cloud-like misty sort
of way, the terrible consequences that might ensue when they returned to
England with the story of their rejection.
“Perhaps this was a mere chance shot; at all events, it decided the
battle. The Garibaldians read it as a declaration of strict blockade;
and that, from the hour of these ladies’ arrival in England, all
supplies would be stopped. Now, as it happened that, in by far the
greater number of cases, the articles sent out found their way to the
suite of Garibaldi, not to the General himself, and that cambric shirts
and choice hosiery, silk vests, and fur-lined slippers, became the
ordinary wear of people to whom such luxuries were not known even by
description, it was no mean menace that seemed to declare all this was
to have an end.
“One used to sleep in a rich fur dressing-gown; another took a bottle of
Arundel’s port at his breakfast; a third was habituating himself to that
English liqueur called ‘Punch sauce,’ and so on; and they very reasonably
disliked coming back to the dietary supplied by Victor Emmanuel.
“It was in this critical emergency that an inventive genius developed
itself. There was amongst the suite of Garibaldi an old surgeon, Eipari,
one of the most faithful and attached of all his followers, and who bore
that amount of resemblance to Garibaldi which could be imparted by hair,
mustache, and beard of the same yellowish-red colour, and eyes somewhat
closely set. To put the doctor in bed, and make him personate the
General, was the plan--a plan which, as it was meant to save his chief
some annoyance, he would have acceded to were it to cost him far more
than was now intended.
“To the half-darkened room, therefore, where Eipari lay dressed in
his habitual red shirt, propped up by pillows, the deputation was
introduced. The sight of the hero was, however, too much for them. One
dropped, Madonna-wise, with hands clasped across her bosom, at the foot
of his bed; another fainted as she passed the threshold; a third gained
the bedside to grasp his hand, and sank down in an ecstasy of devotion
to water it with her tears; while the strong-minded woman of the party
took out her scissors and cut four several locks off that dear and noble
head. They sobbed over him--they blubbered over him--they compared him
with his photograph, and declared he was libelled--they showered cards
over him to get his autograph; and when, at length, by persuasion,
not unassisted by mild violence, they were induced to withdraw, they
declared that, for those few moments of ecstasy, they’d have willingly
made a pilgrimage to Mecca.
“It is said,” continued my informant, “that Ripari never could be
induced to give another representation; and that he declared the
luxuries that came from England were dear at the cost of being caressed
by a deputation of sympathisers.
“But to Garibaldi himself, the sympathy and the sympathisers went on to
the last; and kind wishes and winter-clothing still find their way, with
occasionally very tiresome visitors, to the lone rock at Caprera.”