by Grant Allen
The drive to the Campo Santo, in addition to affording a view of one of the more perfect parts of the old defensive enclosure of Genoa, of which the Porta Chiappia, one of the smaller gates, may serve as an example, passes within sight, though at some distance below, one of the few relics of classic time which the city has retained. This is the aqueduct which was constructed by the Romans. Some portions of it, so far as can be seen from below, appear to belong to the original structure; but, as it is still in use, it has been in many parts more or less reconstructed and modernized.
The environs of Genoa are pleasant. On both sides, particularly on the eastern, are country houses with gardens. The western for a time is less attractive. The suburb of Sanpierdarena is neither pretty nor interesting; but at Conigliano, and still more at Sestre Ponente, the grimy finger-marks of commerce become less conspicuous, and Nature is not wholly expelled by the two-pronged fork of mechanism. Pegli, still farther west, is a very attractive spot, much frequented in the summer time for sea-bathing. On this part of the coast the hills in places draw near to the sea, and crags rise from the water; the rocks are of interest in more than one respect to the geologist. One knoll of rock rising from the sand in the Bay of Pra is crowned by an old fortress, and at Pegli itself are one or two villas of note. Of these the gardens of the Villa Pallavicini commonly attract visitors. They reward some by stalactite grottoes and “sheets of water with boats, under artificial caverns, a Chinese pagoda, and an Egyptian obelisk;” others will be more attracted by the beauty of the vegetation, for palms and oleanders, myrtles, and camellias, with many semi-tropical plants, flourish in the open air.
We may regard Genoa as the meeting-place of the two Rivieras. The coast to the west — the Riviera di Ponente — what has now, by the cession of Nice, become in part French soil, is the better known; but that to the east, the Riviera di Levante, though less accessible on the whole, and without such an attractive feature as the Corniche road, in the judgment of some is distinctly the more beautiful. There is indeed a road which, for a part of the way, runs near the sea; but the much more indented character of the coast frequently forces it some distance inland, and ultimately it has to cross a rather considerable line of hills in order to reach Spezzia. The outline of the coast, indeed, is perhaps the most marked feature of difference between the two Rivieras. The hills on the eastern side descend far more steeply to the water than they do upon the western. They are much more sharply furrowed with gullies and more deeply indented by inlets of the sea; thus the construction of a railway from Genoa to Spezzia has been a work involving no slight labor. There are, it is stated, nearly fifty tunnels between the two towns, and it is strictly true that for a large part of the distance north of the latter place the train is more frequently under than above ground. Here it is actually an advantage to travel by the slowest train that can be found, for this may serve as an epitome of the journey by an express: “Out of a tunnel; one glance, between rocks and olive-groves, up a ravine, into which a picturesque old village is wedged; another glance down the same to the sea, sparkling in the sunlight below; a shriek from the engine, and another plunge into darkness.” So narrow are some of these gullies, up which, however, a village climbs, that, if I may trust my memory, I have seen a train halted at a station with the engine in the opening of one tunnel and the last car not yet clear of another.
But the coast, when explored, is full of exquisite nooks, and here and there, where by chance the hills slightly recede, or a larger valley than usual comes down to the sea, towns of some size are situated, from which, as halting-places, the district might be easily explored, for trains are fairly frequent, and the distances are not great. For a few miles from Genoa the coast is less hilly than it afterwards becomes; nevertheless, the traveller is prepared for what lies before him by being conducted from the main station, on the west side of Genoa, completely beneath the city to near its eastern wall. Then Nervi is passed, which, like Pegli, attracts not a few summer visitors, and is a bright and sunny town, with pleasant gardens and villas. Recco follows, also bright and cheerful, backed by the finely-outlined hills, which form the long promontory enclosing the western side of the Bay of Rapallo. Tunnels and villages, as the railway now plunges into the rock, now skirts the margin of some little bay, lead first to Rapallo and then to Chiavari, one with its slender campanile, the other with its old castle. The luxuriance of the vegetation in all this district cannot fail to attract notice. The slopes of the hills are grey with olives; oranges replace apples in the orchards, and in the more sheltered nooks we espy the paler gold of the lemon. Here are great spiky aloes, there graceful feathering palms; here pines of southern type, with spreading holm-oaks, and a dozen other evergreen shrubs.
Glimpse after glimpse of exquisite scenery flashes upon us as we proceed to Spezzia, but, as already said, its full beauty can only be appreciated by rambling among the hills or boating along the coast. There is endless variety, but the leading features are similar: steep hills furrowed by ravines, craggy headlands and sheltered coves; villages sometimes perched high on a shoulder, sometimes nestling in a gully; sometimes a campanile, sometimes a watch-tower; slopes, here clothed with olive groves, here with their natural covering of pine and oak scrub, of heath, myrtle, and strawberry-trees. A change also in the nature of the rock diversifies the scenery, for between Framura and Bonasola occurs a huge mass of serpentine, which recalls, in its peculiar structure and tints, the crags near the Lizard in England. This rock is extensively quarried in the neighborhood of Levanto, and from that little port many blocks are shipped.
Spezzia itself has a remarkable situation. A large inlet of the sea runs deep into the land, parallel with the general trend of the hills, and almost with that of the coast-line. The range which shelters it on the west narrows as it falls to the headland of Porto Venere, and is extended yet farther by rocky islands; while on the opposite coast, hills no less, perhaps yet more, lofty, protect the harbor from the eastern blasts. In one direction only is it open to the wind, and against this the comparative narrowness of the inlet renders the construction of artificial defenses possible. At the very head of this deeply embayed sheet of water is a small tract of level ground — the head, as it were, of a valley — encircled by steep hills. On this little plain, and by the waterside, stands Spezzia. Formerly it was a quiet country town, a small seaport with some little commerce; but when Italy ceased to be a geographical expression, and became practically one nation, Spezzia was chosen, wisely it must be admitted, as the site of the chief naval arsenal. A single glance shows its natural advantages for such a purpose. Access from the land must always present difficulties, and every road can be commanded by forts, perched on yet more elevated positions; while a hostile fleet, as it advances up the inlet, must run the gauntlet of as many batteries as the defenders can build. Further, the construction of a breakwater across the middle of the channel at once has been a protection from the storms, and has compelled all who approach to pass through straits commanded by cannon. The distance of the town from its outer defenses and from the open sea seems enough to secure it even from modern ordnance; so that, until the former are crushed, it cannot be reached by projectiles. But it must be confessed that the change has not been without its drawbacks. The Spezzia of to-day may be a more prosperous town than the Spezzia of a quarter of a century since, but it has lost some of its beauty. A twentieth-century fortress adds no charm to the scenery, and does not crown a hill so picturesquely as did a mediæval castle. Houses are being built, roads are being made, land is being reclaimed from the sea for the construction of quays. Thus the place has a generally untidy aspect; there is a kind of ragged selvage to town and sea, which, at present, on a near view, is very unsightly. Moreover, the buildings of an arsenal can hardly be picturesque or magnificent; and great factories, more or less connected with them, have sprung up in the neighborhood, from which rise tall red brick chimneys, the campaniles of the twentieth century. The town itself was never a place of any particular intere
st; it has neither fine churches nor old gateways nor picturesque streets — a ruinous fort among the olive groves overlooking the streets is all that can claim to be ancient — so that its growth has not caused the loss of any distinctive feature — unless it be a grove of old oleanders, which were once a sight to see in summer time. Many of these have now disappeared, perhaps from natural decay; and the survivors are mixed with orange trees. These, during late years, have been largely planted about the town. In one of the chief streets they are growing by the side of the road, like planes or chestnuts in other towns. The golden fruit and the glossy leaves, always a delight to see, appear to possess a double charm by contrast with the arid flags and dusty streets. Ripe oranges in dozens, in hundreds, all along by the pathway, and within two or three yards of the pavement! Are the boys of Spezzia exceptionally virtuous? or are these golden apples of the Hesperides a special pride of the populace, and does “Father Stick” still rule in home and school, and is this immunity the result of physical coercion rather than of moral suasion? Be this as it may, I have with mine own eyes seen golden oranges by hundreds hanging on the trees in the streets of Spezzia, and would be glad to know how long they would remain in a like position in those of an English town, among “the most law-abiding people in the universe!”
But if the vicinity of the town has lost some of its ancient charm, if modern Spezzia reminds us too much, now of Woolwich, now of a “new neighborhood” on the outskirts of London, we have but to pass into the uplands, escaping from the neighborhood of forts, to find the same beauties as the mountains of this coast ever afford. There the sugar-cane and the vine, the fig and the olive cease, though the last so abounds that one might suppose it an indigenous growth; there the broken slopes are covered with scrub oak and dwarf pine; there the myrtle blossoms, hardly ceasing in the winter months; there the strawberry-tree shows its waxen flowers, and is bright in season with its rich crimson berries. Even the villages add a beauty to the landscape — at any rate, when regarded from a distance; some are perched high up on the shoulders of hills, with distant outlooks over land and sea; others lie down by the water’s edge in sheltered coves, beneath some ruined fort, which in olden time protected the fisher-folk from the raids of corsairs. Such are Terenza and Lerici, looking at each other across the waters of the little “Porto;” and many another village, in which grey and white and pink tinted houses blend into one pleasant harmony of color. For all this part of the coast is a series of rocky headlands and tiny bays, one succession of quiet nooks, to which the sea alone forms a natural highway. Not less irregular, not less sequestered, is the western coast of the Bay of Spezzia, which has been already mentioned. Here, at Porto Venere, a little village still carries us back in its name to classic times; and the old church on the rugged headland stands upon a site which was once not unfitly occupied by a temple of the seaborn goddess. The beauty of the scene is enhanced by a rocky wooded island, the Isola Palmeria, which rises steeply across a narrow strait; though the purpose to which it has been devoted — a prison for convicts — neither adds to its charm nor awakens pleasant reflections.
To some minds also the harbor itself, busy and bright as the scene often is, will suggest more painful thoughts than it did in olden days. For it is no preacher of “peace at any price,” and is a daily witness that millennial days are still far away from the present epoch. Here may be seen at anchor the modern devices for naval war: great turret-ships and ironclads, gunboats and torpedo launches — evils, necessary undoubtedly, but evils still; outward and visible signs of the burden of taxation, which is cramping the development of Italy, and is indirectly the heavy price which it has to pay for entering the ranks of the great Powers of Europe. These are less picturesque than the old line-of-battle ships, with their high decks, their tall masts, and their clouds of canvas; still, nothing can entirely spoil the harbor of Spezzia, and even these floating castles group pleasantly in the distance with the varied outline of hills and headlands, which is backed at last, if we look southward, by the grand outline of a group of veritable mountains — the Apuan Alps.
IX. THE TUSCAN COAST
Shelley’s last months at Lerici — Story of his death — Carrara and its marble quarries — Pisa — Its grand group of ecclesiastical buildings — The cloisters of the Campo Santo — Napoleon’s life on Elba — Origin of the Etruscans — The ruins of Tarquinii — Civita Vecchia, the old port of Rome — Ostia.
The Bay of Spezzia is defined sharply enough on its western side by the long, hilly peninsula which parts it from the Mediterranean, but as this makes only a small angle with the general trend of the coast-line, its termination is less strongly marked on the opposite side. Of its beauties we have spoken in an earlier article, but there is a little town at the southern extremity which, in connection with the coast below, has a melancholy interest to every lover of English literature. Here, at Lerici, Shelley spent what proved to be the last months of his life. The town itself, once strongly fortified by its Pisan owners against their foes of Genoa on the one side and Lucca on the other, is a picturesque spot. The old castle crowns a headland, guarding the little harbor and overlooking the small but busy town. At a short distance to the southeast is the Casa Magni, once a Jesuit seminary, which was occupied by Shelley. Looking across the beautiful gulf to the hills on its opposite shore and the island of Porto Venere, but a few miles from the grand group of the Carrara mountains, in the middle of the luxuriant scenery of the Eastern Riviera, the house, though in itself not very attractive, was a fit home for a lover of nature. But Shelley’s residence within its walls was too soon cut short. There are strange tales (like those told with bated breath by old nurses by the fireside) that as the closing hour approached the spirits of the unseen world took bodily form and became visible to the poet’s eye; tales of a dark-robed figure standing by his bedside beckoning him to follow; of a laughing child rising from the sea as he walked by moonlight on the terrace, clapping its hands in glee; and of other warnings that the veil which parted him from the spirit world was vanishing away. Shelley delighted in the sea. On the 1st of July he left Lerici for Leghorn in a small sailing vessel. On the 8th he set out to return, accompanied only by his friend, Mr. Williams, and an English lad. The afternoon was hot and sultry, and as the sun became low a fearful squall burst upon the neighboring sea. What happened no one exactly knows, but they never came back to the shore. Day followed day, and the great sea kept its secret; but at last, on the 22d, the corpse of Shelley was washed up near Viareggio and that of Williams near Bocca Lerici, three miles away. It was not till three weeks afterwards that the body of the sailor lad came ashore. Probably the felucca had either capsized or had been swamped at the first break of the storm; but when it was found, some three months afterwards, men said that it looked as if it had been run down, and even more ugly rumors got abroad that this was no accident, but the work of some Italians, done in the hope of plunder, as it was expected that the party had in charge a considerable sum of money. The bodies were at first buried in the sand with quicklime; but at that time the Tuscan law required “any object then cast ashore to be burned, as a precaution against plague,” so, by the help of friends, the body of Shelley was committed to the flames “with fuel and frankincense, wine, salt, and oil, the accompaniments of a Greek cremation,” in the presence of Byron Leigh Hunt, and Trelawny. The corpse of Williams had been consumed in like fashion on the previous day. “It was a glorious day and a splendid prospect; the cruel and calm sea before, the Appennines behind. A curlew wheeled close to the pyre, screaming, and would not be driven away; the flames arose golden and towering.” The inurned ashes were entombed, as everyone knows, in the Protestant burial ground at Rome by the side of Keats’ grave, near the pyramid of Cestius. Much as there was to regret in Shelley’s life, there was more in his death, for such genius as his is rare, and if the work of springtide was so glorious, what might have been the summer fruitage?
As the Gulf of Spezzia is left behind, the Magra broadens out into
an estuary as it enters the sea, the river which formed in olden days the boundary between Liguria and Etruria. Five miles from the coast, and less than half the distance from the river, is Sarzana, the chief city of the province, once fortified, and still containing a cathedral of some interest. It once gave birth to a Pope, Nicholas V., the founder of the Vatican Library, and in the neighborhood the family of the Buonapartes had their origin, a branch of it having emigrated to Corsica. Sarzana bore formerly the name of Luna Nova, as it had replaced another Luna which stood near to the mouth of the river. This was in ruins even in the days of Lucan, and now the traveller from Saranza to Pisa sees only “a strip of low, grassy land intervening between him and the sea. Here stood the ancient city. There is little enough to see. Beyond a few crumbling tombs and a fragment or two of Roman ruins, nothing remains of Luna. The fairy scene described by Rutilus, so appropriate to the spot which bore the name of the virgin-queen of heaven, the ‘fair white walls’ shaming with their brightness the untrodden snow, the smooth, many-tinted rocks overrun with laughing lilies, if not the pure creation of the poet, have now vanished from the sight. Vestiges of an amphitheater, of a semicircular building which may be a theater, of a circus, a piscina, and fragments of columns, pedestals for statues, blocks of pavement and inscriptions, are all that Luna has now to show.”
