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ITALIAN DAYS AND WAYS

[THIRD EDITION]


      *      *      *      *      *      *

_By Anne Hollingsworth Wharton_


     Italian Days and Ways. Decorated title and 8 illustrations.
     Crown, 8vo. Cloth, extra, $1.50 _net_.

     Social Life in the Early Republic. Profusely illustrated.
     8vo. Buckram, gilt top, uncut edges, $3.00 _net_; half levant,
     $6.00 _net_.

     Salons, Colonial and Republican. Profusely illustrated. 8vo.
     Buckram, $3.00; three-quarters levant, $6.00.

     Heirlooms in Miniatures. Profusely illustrated. 8vo. Buckram,
     $3.00; three-quarters levant, $6.00.

     Through Colonial Doorways. Illustrated. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25.

     Colonial Days and Dames. Illustrated. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25.

     A Last Century Maid. Illustrated. 4to. Cloth, $1.25.

      *      *      *      *      *      *


  [Illustration: Castello Sant' Angelo]




ITALIAN DAYS AND WAYS

by

ANNE HOLLINGSWORTH WHARTON

With Illustrations


[Illustration: Church of S. Damian, Assisi]







Philadelphia and London
J. B. Lippincott Company
MCMVII

Copyright, 1906 By J. B. Lippincott Company

Published, November, 1906




CONTENTS


                                                   PAGE

      I LA SUPERBA IN THE CLOUDS                      9

     II ALONG THE RIVIERA                            27

    III CAPTURED BY A CABMAN                         39

     IV AN EXCITING DRIVE                            53

      V BELLA ROMA                                   76

     VI A POET'S CORNER                              93

    VII ANTIQUITIES AND ORANGE-BLOSSOMS             102

   VIII VIA APPIA                                   116

     IX TU ES PETRUS                                129

      X VALE ROMA                                   145

     XI SHORT JOURNEYS                              158

    XII AN UMBRIAN IDYL                             173

   XIII A SUNDAY IN ASSISI                          192

    XIV THE CITY OF FLOWERS                         211

     XV AN EARTHLY PARADISE                         232

    XVI FIESOLE                                     253

   XVII HAPS AND HAPPENINGS                         272

  XVIII ANGELA'S LETTER                             295




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  CASTELLO SANT' ANGELO                                 _Frontispiece_
  THE BAY OF NAPLES. _Photographed by Dr. Bertha Lewis_             41
  ON THE ROAD TO PAESTUM. _Photographed by Dr. Bertha Lewis_        59
  AN AMAZONIAN TRIBUTE, CAPRI. _Photographed by Dr. Bertha Lewis_   71
  CYPRESS WALK, HADRIAN'S VILLA                                     87
  A STREET IN FLORENCE                                             212
  THE MICHAEL ANGELO WELL AT THE CERTOSA, FLORENCE                 269
  PALAZZO REZZONICO                                                277




ITALIAN DAYS AND WAYS




I

LA SUPERBA IN THE CLOUDS


                                                   GENOA, February 19th.

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 encyclopaedia 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.

As we passed window after window, some with their display of exquisite
gold and silver filigree and others containing lofty pyramids of the
most delicious-looking candied fruit, Angela said that after a few
hours' stay in Genoa she was quite sure of two characteristics of the
Genoese: a passion for jewelry, especially of the filigree sort, and an
inordinate appetite for sweets. The pretty, delicate ornaments, I am
inclined to think, are only spread forth to tempt the unwary tourist;
but the Italian taste for sweets is proverbial, whetted, doubtless,
by the high price of sugar and the exquisiteness of the native
confections.

Strolling along the fine, wide Via Vittorio Emanuele, eating our dates
like true Bohemians and gazing about us upon the sights of the strange
city, we turned, almost involuntarily, into the busy thoroughfare of
the Via San Lorenzo, where we were confronted by the great facade of
the cathedral of the same name, with huge stone lions standing guard
at the door. Above the entrance--grewsome and realistic spectacle--is
poor St. Lawrence broiling away on his stone gridiron! We shall
doubtless behold many such spectacles during our travels, and may, like
Mark Twain, become quite hardened to the sight of St. Sebastian stuck
full of arrows, and of lovely young St. Anastasia and of many others,
of whom the world was not worthy, smiling amid the flames; but this
realistic thrusting of St. Lawrence and his gridiron into the life
of to-day, as an ornament to a church, impressed us as unworthy of a
people credited with a sense of beauty and fitness.

We were thankful to turn from the cathedral, whose interior we may
explore to-morrow, and, like good Americans, wend our way along the
Via Balbi, with its many palaces and handsome university buildings,
to a lovely little square called Acquaverde, where there is a handsome
modern statue of Columbus. Beside the really fine figure of the Genoese
navigator is a woman who represents either Columbia or an Italianized
American Indian, we were not sure which, to whom Columbus is offering
the Catholic religion and other blessings of civilization. From the
benevolent expression of the donor it is evident that he is making
the presentation in good faith, although the lady appears singularly
indifferent to the gifts offered her.

Some children with large, dark eyes and round, rosy cheeks, beautiful
enough to serve as models for the Holy Child and St. John, were playing
in the little green square some rhymed game in which their high, clear
voices rang out joyously. It was probably an Italian equivalent for
"ring-around-the-rosy" or "hot butter-beans." We longed to know just
what the words meant. Zelphine bribed the singers with soldi to an
encore; but, alas! the song fell upon ears dull of understanding. This
was the merriest scene that we have found in Genoa, which does not
impress us as a gay city at all; but what mature and sane community
could be merry under skies as leaden as these?

We are lodged in an old palace, which opens out on those most
disappointing arcades of which we have read such fascinating
descriptions. We see no pretty young Genoese women in thin muslin veils
nor handsome matrons in veils of flowered chintz; probably the rain
keeps them and their finery indoors. We remind ourselves, from time
to time, that we are dwelling in marble halls for the first time in
our lives, and yet some of the appointments of this rather expensive
_albergo_ are not equal to those of a second or third class hotel in
America. My room is spacious, with windows opening to the floor and
commanding a fine view of the harbor, where many ships lie at anchor,
among them the floating city