Anne Wharton - Italian Days and Ways

Your most interesting letter, Sir Philosopher, reached me at Gibraltar, and served to give me a homelike feeling in that alien land of Spain. Any one who can write letters as interesting as yours, from your library, with the mercury at zero outside, and nothing more refreshing to look upon from the window than snow and sleet, does not need to wander in sunny lands and among ancient ruins for an inspiration. No, travel would be absolutely wasted upon you, who require only a cigar and a wood fire to encourage your "reveries of a bachelor."

You wish to know what are my first impressions of Italy, and how we three women get on together? To be perfectly candid with you, we ourselves are not wandering in sunny lands at present, and the cheerful blaze of your library fire would prove most welcome to benumbed fingers and pinched noses.

Our welcome to Genoa was not particularly cheerful. It had been raining for days; the sky was heavy with clouds, and the air chilly and damp. We can well understand why the prudent and all-informing Baedeker advises invalids visiting Genoa at this time to guard against raw winds and abrupt changes of temperature.

We enjoyed coming into the fine harbor, around which Genoa is built upon its hills and terraces in the form of a half-circle, the city widening out toward the ends of the arc. On the hills, we know, are many beautiful villas, seen to-day but dimly through veils of mist, and beyond are the mountains, which in clear weather must add much to the charm of this old fortress as seen from the sea.

Zelphine says that it would be very ungrateful of us if we were to complain of cloudy weather, as the skies might be pouring down upon us instead of only threatening, and, after all, we are having the same good luck that we had in Madeira, Granada, and Algiers in coming after the rain instead of before it.

And how do we get on together? Really, monsieur, you display courage when you ask that question, as I might here and now unburden my mind of a long list of grievances. As it is, however, I have so far no woes to relate, although I know that a sojourn on the Continent has wrecked many a friendship. We three must appear to those who meet us an ill-assorted trio; but because of our individualities we may be the better fitted to stand the crucial test of a tour of indefinite length, whose only object is pleasure.

Zelphine is the encyclopædia of the party, and, as Angela says, her information is always on tap, besides which she is amiable and refreshingly romantic. It is inspiring to travel with a woman, no longer young, to whom the world and its inhabitants still wear "the glory and the dream." On the other hand, when one is suffering from the discomforts of travel to such an extent that it would be a luxury to moan and groan a bit and find fault with the general condition of things, it is a trifle irritating to see Zelphine sailing serenely upon the seas of high content, apparently above such trifling accidents as material comfort. You, being a man and consequently a philosopher of greater or less degree, may not be able to understand this; it is just here that Zelphine and I might quarrel, but we "generally most always" do not.

Angela you have scarcely known since she was a little girl, when she was a prime favorite of yours. In the half-hour in which you saw her, just before we sailed, you must have realized that in appearance she had fulfilled the promise of her beautiful childhood. She is a spirited creature, but with a fine balance of common sense, and with her delicate, spirituelle beauty is astonishingly practical—an up-to-date girl, in fine. Have you ever wondered, among your many ponderings, why the girls of to-day, with the beauty of their great-grandmothers, should be utterly devoid of the sentiment that enhanced the loveliness of those dear ladies as perfume adds to the charm of a flower? This question I leave with you for future solution.

Here in Genoa we meet the narrow, precipitous passages, streets by courtesy, which interested us in the Moorish quarter of Algiers, dating back in both cases to remote antiquity. They are to be found, we are told, in every old Italian town. Many of them answer to Hawthorne's description of the streets of Perugia, which, he says, are "like caverns, being arched all over and plunging down abruptly towards an unknown darkness, which, when you have fathomed its depths, admits you to a daylight that you scarcely hoped to behold again."

Old palaces overshadow these narrow, crooked streets, built many stories high and close together for protection against enemies without and factional feuds at home; such as those between the powerful houses of Doria, Spinola, Fieschi, and the like. The majority of these buildings have fallen from their ancient glory, and look, as Angela says, like tenement houses. This plebeian association is carried out by the squalid appearance of the inhabitants, and by the clothes-lines stretched across the streets from window to window, on which are hung garments of every size, degree, color, and ingenuity of patch, the predominant red and white lending a certain picturesqueness to the motley array.

Turning a corner, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a quarrel, or a violent altercation at the best, between a pretty signora at a fourth-floor window and a vendor of fruits and vegetables on the sidewalk below. The language which the lady used, as she leaned far out of the window, was so vigorous that no interpreter was needed to make her meaning plain: the merchant was a charlatan and a villain; the saints were all called upon as witnesses to his depravity. He, the so-called vendor of over-ripe fruit, pointed to his wares, beating his breast and spreading out his hands in token of his spotless innocence. He sell over-ripe oranges? All his neighbors would testify to his poverty and that of his family because he, honest one, daily sacrificed hundreds of oranges to satisfy his unreasonable customers!

The signora's dark eyes flashed, the Spanish mantilla upon her head shook in sympathy with the violence of her emotions, as she repeated her vocabulary of epithets. We were thankful that four stories separated the combatants, and retiring under the shadow of a doorway we anxiously awaited results. Something happened, we know not what; the fruit may have been reduced the fraction of a penny; whatever it was, a truce was declared, during which the signora's basket, filled with fruit and artichokes, was drawn up to the window by a rope. After the lady had carefully inspected each individual fruit and vegetable, she smiled blandly, lowered some money in her basket, and the pair parted with bows and compliments. Juliet on her balcony could not have been more graceful, nor Romeo on the pavement below more gallant than this shabby venditore , as he swept the ground with his cap, one hand upon his heart!

Feeling that we owed something to somebody for the pleasure that this little drama had afforded us, we crossed the street and bought from the chief actor some fresh dates such as we had first tasted in Algiers. As we paid the asking price without protest, we felt quite sure that the valiant little merchant was making off us anything that he may have lost in his previous transaction; but the dates, of a delicate amber color, as sweet as honey and almost as transparent, were worth whatever price we paid for them.

After much turning and retracing of steps, and laughing over being lost and not having the power to make inquiries with any certainty of being understood, we finally gained wider and more open streets, and on the Piazza Banchi found an exchange, where we were able to get some money on our letters of credit.

After attending to this practical detail we turned into the little old Via Orefici, Jewellers' Street, with its many goldsmiths' shops. Over one of the doors is a Virgin and Child, so beautiful that it cost the artist his life. Pellegrino Piola's master, insanely jealous of this work of his pupil, rose up in wrath and killed him. Even the patron, St. Eloy, was unable to save poor Piola's life, but the guild of smiths, who revere St. Eloy as their patron saint, invoked his aid to preserve this lovely fresco from the ruthless hands of Napoleon when he would have carried it off to France.