Europe

by Jan Morris

  4

  THE INTERNET

  *

  Trieste exists as a city only because it is on the way to somewhere else. From any vantage point in the surrounding hills you can see its raison d’être. Here roads out of the European interior reach the Mediterranean; here they meet highways running to Italy one way, to the Slav countries the other; and here ships sail away down the Adriatic to the world outside. Trieste is the very epitome of a port, standing at the point where essential trade routes converge upon a deep harbour. It has been a great entrepôt in its time, and a great exchange, an emporium free of customs duties, a permanent trade fair. Fond Trieste tradition claims that the Argonauts, having sailed up the Danube from the Black Sea, carried their ship across the hills and came down to Trieste on their way home with the Golden Fleece. Certainly the Romans founded the port of Tergeste here, and nineteenth-century Trieste historians loved to say that it was depicted on Trajan’s Column in Rome (a hypothesis, declares one more recent scholar, ‘without the least appearance of probability’). An oil pipeline still runs from the port of Trieste to Ingolstadt in Germany, following more or less the route the medieval traders followed, when they carried earlier products of the East to the marts of Augsburg and Ulm.

  The city reached its apogee with the railway age, when trains linked Vienna directly with its waterfront, and made it. the chief outlet for all the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so that its interests extended far into central and eastern Europe. The first modern port of Trieste, in fact, was built by a railway company under the patronage of the Emperor Franz Josef II, who graciously came down from Vienna to inspect its progress, and eventually three separate railway lines connected it with its hinterland. I can remember when steam trains still puffed along these quays (keeping Gustav Mahler irritably awake at the Grand Hôtel de la Ville), and sometimes, in the blazing Adriatic sun, they had snow on their wagons – snow of the North, snow of the mountains! Nothing could have exemplified more clearly the shape and meaning of Europe, ranging from the subtropical to the Arctic, and pulled together down the centuries (when it was not tearing itself apart) by a myriad highroads and waterways, along the great river valleys, through and under the mountains, up the coasts from the balmy to the ice-bound.

  These were bonds, as often as not, that had existed before history, ways followed for so long that they had become matters of instinct, like the tracks of animals through forests. They formed an immemorial internet. In the days soon after the Second World War when the new Communist Yugoslav federation was all but closed to the West, and lay beyond Trieste’s hills like a menacing and forbidden limbo, a small steamer sailed regularly from the Maritime Station down the Istrian coast to Dalmatia. I can see it still in my mind’s eyes, the straggle of its black smoke petering out across the bay as it chugged off into the South. It pottered humbly down the coast, heedless of ideology, almost without thinking, or so I fancied. I used to watch it go with sympathy, as one might watch a ferry crossing the Styx, but it invariably came safely back again a day or two later. It had always sailed that way, it was part of the pattern of life and history.

  Now the bonds are tighter still. Each year trade, finance, transport, tourism, communications and mass travel make Europe more familiar with itself, and nearer a whole. Trieste was the first city I knew with an Internet Café, where unengaged customers, between their cappuccinos, could idly surf the Web.

  1 On the roads

  For me one of the excitements of Europe is the immense cavalcade of trucks which perpetually criss-crosses the continent, night and day – growing from a tentative trickle at the end of the 1940s almost to saturation fifty years later. I love to watch the passage of the leviathans at one of the great continental crossroads. The very names on their canopies carry a thrill for me, and the varied majesty of the vehicles themselves is marvellous to see – trucks from Madrid with sun-visors over their windscreens, mighty trailer-trucks out of Germany, weather-beaten Irish trucks, Italian trucks in racy colours, English lorries travelling in brotherly pairs, on their way to Sofia or Bucharest, Hungarian trucks en route to Portugal, Polish trucks bound for Holland, or Lithuania, or Liechtenstein: and when, in the truck park of some motorway café, they pull in with roaring engines for the night, it is like seeing a great caravan in laager, surrounded if the weather is warm by a thin shimmer of heat, and bivouacked all about.

  2 Truncations

  I cherish this euphemistic view (which is certainly not shared by Europe’s environmentalists) because I see the trucks as fulfilling historical schedules. The roads they take nowadays are mostly freeways, but often enough they keep to the tracks of ancient trade routes, along the same valleys, over the same passes, between the same centres of commerce and industry, crossing the same rivers high above the passages of prehistoric fords or ferries – as long ago as the fourteenth century couriers established a daily overland service between Bruges and Venice. Sometimes they follow roads that are holy, like the roads through Brittany which once led cultists to the mysteries of Carnac, or the grand route that for centuries took pilgrims across France and northern Spain to the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela. Sometimes they are following still older footsteps: the famous parabola of Oxford’s High Street, in England, along which the occasional skulking juggernaut still finds its way, is said to reproduce precisely the curve a man naturally follows when he walks across a meadow.

  They frequently drive along Roman roads. If they are taking a load through southern Italy to Brindisi they are following the route of the Appian Way, the most famous of them all. If they then take a ship over the Adriatic to Durrës in Albania, and rumble away towards Tirana, they are on the Via Egnatia, which once connected Rome with Constantinople itself. On the old road from Bad Ragaz to Zurich, in Switzerland, they pass through villages whose very names remember the numbered Roman way-stations along the highway – Prümsch, Siguns, Terzan, Quarten, Quinten. We all think we know a Roman road, even the children in the back seat, when the wandering European country road suddenly turns for a few miles into a dead straight military highway, clinical and commanding. Actually it is often not Roman at all, but a former railway track, perhaps, or just an abnormally easy stretch of modern construction. But sometimes it really is a work of the Romans, the first builders of modern roads in Europe, and then there is a legitimate historical frisson in travelling upon it. Over most of Europe, every now and then, these ghosts of an old order greet one with a special promise of efficiency and punctuality. Where there are no Roman roads at all – notably in Ireland – to this day I still feel an extra suggestion of anarchy. Where they exist, I think of them as a measured pattern of Europe, linking not just Rome with its old colonies, but Romania with Portugal, Sicily with Germany, Poland with Wales, where one of the westernmost Roman highways of all came to an end among my recalcitrant tribal predecessors at the village called Caersws.

  South from Caersws, in the lee of the Brecon mountains, there is a stretch of Roman road along which the wagon-trains of the legions carried loads of lead and gold out of the hills. Its original paving-stones are unimproved and unsurfaced, and along it one can still drive a car. The road leads nowhere nowadays, and a modern highway runs nearby, taking the trucks towards Ireland, but progressing bumpily over those ancient slabs in a state-of-the-art automobile seems to me to truncate the centuries wonderfully.

  3 Toutes Directions

  It is in France, though, that I feel myself most gratefully in the presence of the road-building Romans. The country roads there are so long and straight, bounded so neatly by avenues of poplars, that back-seat children assume they are Roman every one: half of them are – until the eighteenth century nearly all proper French roads were Roman. The road numbering of France, introduced by Napoleon, seems positively Caesarean. All the clarity supposed to characterize the Roman mind, all the logic of the Latin language, is expressed in those brilliantly straightforward Toutes Directions signs which, welcoming you as you enter the purlieus of any French town, eng
aging your entire trust, guide you so infallibly through the backstreets, around the squares, over the flyovers, towards – well, very likely towards Théâtre Romain.

  4 From ‘A Song of French Roads’, 1923, by Rudyard Kipling

  Now praise the Gods of Time and Chance

  That bring a heart’s desire,

  And lay the joyous roads of France

  Once more beneath the tyre –

  So numbered by Napoleon,

  The veriest ass can spy

  How Twenty takes to Bourg-Madame

  And Ten is for Hendaye.

  5 The dogs

  Long ago, on a cold day when I was young, so long ago and so cold that my memories have become rather dream-like or hallucinatory, I drove a car over the Great St Bernard Pass. It had just been opened to traffic after the long winter, snow was still intermittently falling, and I was all alone as I wound my difficult slippery way out of Switzerland towards Italy. I was buoyed up by the significance of the journey. The greatest of all European barriers has always been the line of the Alps, extending in a great arc from France to Yugoslavia, separating the Mediterranean from inner Europe, the Latins from the Teutons, the bitter North from the warm South – Cisalpine, in fact, from Transalpine. The Great St Bernard was the most famous and fateful of the passes which pierced them. The Romans made the first paved road over it, building a temple to Jupiter at the top, and countless pilgrims, traders and conquerors had passed that way before me.

  Up and up I went, then, through the still-shuttered villages in the lee of the pass, until at last I reached the Hospice of St Bernard at the top, two massive blocks beside a frozen lake, with a cross on a protruding rock in the middle of it. These were then said to be the highest occupied buildings in Europe. They looked forbidding, but for centuries they were the most fervently welcomed buildings in Europe too, in the days when foot-travellers struggling over this pass, in the terrible stormy weather of the high Alps, were often saved from death itself by the Augustinian monks of the hospice and their St Bernard dogs, brandy-flasks at their collars – dogs that were all meekness and gentleness, thought the poet Samuel Rogers in 1842, ‘though large of limb’. Hardly a traveller crossing the pass can fail to have stopped at the hospice, and when I myself went inside out of the now driving snow, and was shown around by an obliging monk, I found its rooms full of ex votos and tributes – touching little messages from medieval wayfarers, books in the library presented by monarchs and dignitaries. ‘And of course,’ said my cicerone, ‘we still have the dogs.’ The dogs! After 900 years, after all those multitudes of passers-by, they still had the dogs! Around the back he took me, and there luxuriating in what I remember as a kind of stable, sweet-smelling of straw and warmth, there were two of the noble dogs, looking up at me kindly with soft grey eyes out of the half-light.

  Nearly fifty years passed before I drove over the pass again, in high summer this time, and I was not surprised to find it very different. Scores of tourist buses were lined up by the hospice. Hundreds of people swarmed all around, in and out of souvenir shops, drinking pop at café tables, wandering around the lake. A large sign said, ‘TO THE DOGS’, but they were no longer in the straw-fragrant kennels of my memory, but on display, whole families of them, in big wire cages like breeders’ showcases. The dogs themselves, though, had not changed: they were meek and gentle still, and at least as large of limb.

  6 The most exciting pass

  The most exciting of all Europe’s mountain highways, in my experience, is the road over the Lombardy Pass, one of the highest motor-roads in the continent, running from the Italian town of Vinádio over an outlying ridge of the Maritime Alps into the valley of the Tinée in France. It has never been of much significance except to pilgrims making for a holy place, the Sanctuary of Sant’Anna, which stands in a high lonely site just on the Italian side of the frontier. The road is extremely winding, steep, rock-strewn, potholed, bumpy, with scores of zigzags and hairpin bends to negotiate and sombre rocky cliffs all around, streaked with gold-green lichen. I met no other cars when I went up there one autumn day, saw no sign of human life except the huddled group of buildings that is the sanctuary. At the summit abandoned fortifications mark the frontier, some of them forgotten outliers of the Maginot Line, and among them flocks of grey-white cattle nibble the meagre grass in a distracted way; but what gives the pass its excitement is the legacy of its countless pilgrimages. All the way up the last steep stretches of that road, laboriously put together every few hundred yards, are the cairns of the supplicants and penitents of Santa Anna down the centuries. Sometimes they are quite carefully made, substantial piles of rock with rough crosses on the top; sometimes they are just small mounds of rubble which look as though they have been thrown there by people at the very last extremity of exhaustion. Occasionally groups of cyclists hurtle hilariously down the steep winding road of the Lombardy Pass, and at the French end of it, when you tumble through forest-land towards the Tinée, there is a ritzy ski-resort, built in the 1970s to cater for a different category of palmer.

  7 Through the Alps

  Relatively few travellers labour over the high Alps these days, except for fun. Most of the traffic goes under them, by the tunnels which pierce the range between one country and another. These prodigies of engineering have been built by several States over many generations, and repeatedly updated; but they always suggest to me one immense concerted operation, like the American space programme perhaps. Sometimes birds fly through the tunnels, and in the days before Europe’s frontiers were relaxed long, long lines of trucks used to wait to make their passage, massed there along the approach roads and in the truck parks like so many migrating creatures themselves. It sometimes happens that, entering the Mont Blanc Tunnel in France in drear and drizzly weather, you emerge into Italy in brilliant sunshine, and then the Alpine tunnels seem to be true metaphors for Europe itself, in all its contrasts, contradictions and surprises. Napoleon Bonaparte, having had the first road built over the Simplon (in 1806), thought the pass so special, and so important to his European scheme of things, that he created the Republic of the Simplon around it.

  8 The new Roman roads

  I first set eyes on a freeway, motorway, autoroute, autobahn, autostrada, autoput in Italy at the end of the Second World War. I was driving eastward in a jeep along Route 11 from Milan (I have just looked up the road number in my magnificent old Touring Club Italiano atlas, which is dated XIII E.F. – Year 13 of the Fascist Era). Across the fields of the Brenta valley I saw, striding bizarrely towards the horizon, a series of tall billboards in pairs, every few hundred yards as far as one could see. They were the advertising source of revenue for the Padova–Venezia Autostrada, not only my first motorway, but the first true motorway anywhere – the first road, that is, dedicated expressly to high-speed motor-traffic. It had been one of Mussolini’s earliest and most successful initiatives, started in II E.F. It ran absolutely dead straight for twenty miles, linking up with the causeway which crossed the lagoon to Venice itself, and all the way along it, as I presently discovered, those billboards stood garishly on either side, advertising not (as one might suppose) ideological ideals, but homelier things like washing-powder or cornflakes.

  I don’t know why the Fascists decided on Padua–Venice as the first route for an autostrada. Perhaps it was just a practice run, so to speak, but in the event it was only after the fall of the regime that Italian autostrade were built to the places one would have expected them to be built – to the Alps in the north, to the French frontier in the west, together with the glorious Autostrada del Sole which sweeps nobly from one end of the country to the other. In Germany, conversely, the Autobahnen were conceived specifically as strategic routes, enabling German armies to be moved swiftly to one frontier or another just as the Roman legions marched to their stations along those straight and level roads (although Hitler believed, as a matter of fact, that roads were destined to supersede railways in general). In England, where the movement of forces from o
ne shore to another was seldom a preoccupation, no motorways were built until well after the Second World War, when I remember a Minister of Transport ushering a bus-load of foreign guests along a few miles of undistinguished highway as though it were the start of a new age.

  Nowadays the motorways, reaching as they do most parts of Europe, give the continent their own suggestion of comity – or uniformity, according to your taste. We are all more or less at home on a motorway. We all know our way around the motorway cafés, whatever country they are in. We can ring home from there. We can pay for lunch with a credit card. We can probably put a bit of plastic in a slot and get a few Deutschmarks or a few thousand lire instantly debited to our bank account in Thessalonika, Graz or Bruntingthorpe. One hardly feels abroad anywhere on a motorway in Europe.

  9 A step that wasn’t there

  My prime revelatory moment of European travel, all the same, came not on a road but on a railway – a seminal moment, a moment of historical shock. It occurred when for the first time in my life, for the first time in all the millennia of my paternal forebears’ residence in the isles of Britain, I set foot on the Continent of Europe without having set eyes on the sea. The passenger train through the Channel Tunnel had just started its operations, and welcomed me blue and silver in its custom-built London terminal, attended by multi-ethnic staff with well-instructed smiles. It was all smooth, padded, cosmopolitan, humming. I had booked my passage from that kindly soul on page 219, but I might have been boarding a space module.