I
_Peccavi._ I have painted Italy, as others use, in sun-colour solely. My
pen has been heliographic. That were worthy of the tourist who knows
Italy only in her halcyon season. ’Tis the obsession of the alliterative
image of the Sunny South, overriding one’s historic memories—stories of
the Po frozen over from November to April, of penitents standing
barefoot in the snow, bitter adventures of mediæval brides brought
tediously to their lords across icy, wind-swept ways in a sort of Irish
honeymoon in the days before trains _de luxe_; nay, this Platonic
concept swamps even the Aristotelian experience. For I have seen
Florence in a London fog and Venice in a Siberian snowfall. I have seen
St. Mark’s Square turned into a steppe, without pigeons, without
pleasure-pilgrims, snow-muffled, immaculate, bleak, given over to
raw-knuckled scrapers and shovellers, knee-deep in crumbling hummocks,
or pushing snow-heaped wheelbarrows towards the providential water-ways,
the snow-crusted Campanile towering over the desolate glacial plain like
the North Pole of childish fancy. Yea, and on the water-ways floated—O
horror of desecration—white gondolas! Nature, like some vulgar
millionaire, had defied the sumptuary edict consecrated by immemorial
tradition, and, amazed as the Australian pioneer who first beheld black
swans, I watched these white gondolas gliding along the swollen canals.
And I recall Bologna in a blizzard—a snowfall so persistent that it
closed the Pinacoteca by the curious method of solidly overlaying the
skylight of the main Gallery and rendering the pictures invisible. It
was a _festa_ for the janitors, a holiday fallen from heaven. In the
Piazza Nettuno the big fountain was snowed over, and the cab-drivers sat
under great hoary umbrellas that had hitherto been green, their cabs
looking like frosted cakes. A white hearse passed still whiter. The snow
slashed its way even under the colonnades, and formed a slippery coating
of ice on their pavements. Bran, scattered copiously in these arcades
and at all the street-crossings, maintained a feeble colour-fight
against the all-pervading white.
There is an icy Italy more boreal than Britain, inasmuch as less
equipped against winter. For the native, too, partakes of the Platonic
fallacy, and because his cold season is briefer than his warm, and oft
infused with a quickening radiance, he shrugs it out of existence,
especially when Carnival invites to _al fresco_ conviviality. The
beggar, indeed, recognises the winter, as becomes a practical
professional man, and squats at the church-porch with his private pan of
burning charcoal; but the more irresponsible burgher, with his stone
floors, and his stoveless, chimneyless rooms, treats winter as an annual
exception, calling for improvised measures. He is an æstival animal that
builds for the summer, though his brigand-cloak, whose left fold is so
sardonically thrown over his right shoulder, betrays to the scientific
observer its prosaic origin as the throat-protector of an Arctic
creature. Of late, under the pressure of foreign finance, the better
hotels have veined themselves with steam-pipes. But the steam rises
late, and the pipes are only hot when the guest has departed.
Never have I seen the pretence of perpetual summer carried further than
at Rimini, where in a blinding snowstorm, when every narrow archaic
street was bordered with four-foot mounds of dirty snow, and the traffic
was limited to donkey-carts dragging snow through the Porta Aurea to
pitch it into the river, the congealing cabmen sat all day on their
powdered boxes cheerfully crying in competitive chorus—every time they
caught a glimpse of me—“To San Marino? To San Marino?” That little
Republic—one of the last political curios left, like a fly in amber, in
modern Europe—is a drive of many hours, even when “the white road to
Rimini” is a shimmering sun-path, yet there was no suspicion of
pleasantry in the cabmen’s eagerness to crawl through the niveous
morass. They seriously expected me to set forth on this summer
expedition, with at most the carriage closed against the driving flakes.
It sorted better with my humour to plough afoot over the muffled
Boulevard to the new Rimini which has grown out of the old rotting
Rimini of Cæsar and the Malatestas.
For there is a sham Rimini as well as a real Rimini—one of those
toadstools of cities which flourish so rankly in our century of comfort.
This is the Lido—an Italian Ostend, sacred to modern villas, mammoth
hotels, bathing establishments, restaurants, the surgy shore tamed into
a Parade for parasols. There is a staring, many-windowed, many-balconied
Grand Hotel, crowned by two baroque domes, with busts on its façade and
vases at its corners tapering up into rods. There is a little
Lawn-Tennis Club-Bar and a big Casino, with a restaurant terrace back
and front. There are pretentious _Palazzini_. There is a huddle of
flaring houses, recalling the grotesque “new architecture” of Madrid,
and a large uncouth hydropathic establishment in terra-cotta, and a long
row of green bathing-huts.
Perhaps the profoundest observation of Dickens in Italy was that the
marvellous quartette of buildings outside the life of Pisa—the
Cathedral, the Campo Santo, the Baptistery, and the leaning Tower—is
like the architectural essence of a rich old city, filtered from its
prosaic necessities. Of the Lido of Rimini (and of its likes) it may be
said that they are the architectural essence of a rich new city,
filtered of all spiritual and poetical values.
But the Lido I saw was purged of all this vulgarity, buried under
stainless snow, which lay deep and virgin over every street and grassy
space, and shrouded every flaunting structure in primeval purity. The
Parade was blotted out, restored to Nature, and deep drifts of snow
defended it from re-invasion. The Casino lay forsaken, wrapped in the
same soft spotless mantle, the dual stone steps leading to its twin
drinking-terraces transformed into frozen cascades, its central gates
uselessly guarded by blanched barbed wire. Desolate was even the great
garage, with its cheap fresco of our modern goddess in the car, her
flamboyant robe turned ermine. Beyond the buried Parade, the Adriatic
rolled in sullenly, scarce visible save by a gleaming line of surf that
lit up a narrow riband of its foreground; all but the breaking wave was
hidden by a wild whirl of flakes that misted sea and sky into a grey
nullity. Throughout the whole pleasure-city not a dog prowled nor a cat
slunk nor a bird fluttered; not a footstep profaned the splendour of its
snow. Its myriad casement-eyes were closed in heavy sleep; not a shutter
open, not a blind raised. It was a city hibernating like some monstrous
Polar animal. Not a few pleasure-cities thus abate their vitality in the
winter, but so absolute a dormitation I have never witnessed. It seemed
incredible that with the Spring it would stir in its sleep, it would
shake the snow off its lubberly limbs, loose its gay swarm of
butterfly-parasols. How could that frost-bound terrace ever ring again
with the clink of glasses and the tinkle of laughter? How could bathers
ever again lie basking on that frigid strand? No, it was a dead city I
saw, a city overwhelmed by a new ice-age. And the seas and lands that
radiated from this snowy centre were freezing too, as science had
foretold; swiftly the deadly chill was spreading through every vein and
artery of the nipped earth, curdling its springs and coagulating its
vast oceans and crusting over even its petty oases of continents with
thick-ribbed ice in which a rare microscopic rotifer alone preserved a
germ of vitality. The Arctic and Antarctic zones expanded towards each
other, like two blind walls closing in on life, and with a clash of
giant icebergs in a biting equatorial blast, the last rift of green
earth and blue water was blotted out. And now the globe was spinning
again in a glacial void, as unconscious of the absence of its
skin-parasites as it had been of their presence. Fated for fresh
adventures and new cosmic combinations, the planet rolled its impassive
whiteness through the dumb heavens. But mortals had put on mortality,
and of all the haughty hopes and splendid dreams of man there remained
zero. Earth, his cradle and his pasture, was become his frigidarium and
his cemetery, and the snow fell silently over the few faint traces of
his passing. His million, million tears had been frozen into a few
icicles.