Could we telephone to the embassy at Rome, we asked?
Certainly; if he received orders from his finance minister to let us through, he would do so. The Embassy could no doubt make the necessary arrangements. Meanwhile, we must move the car back again behind the barrier.
To this last request David would not accede; and taking Simon, who hates scenes, by the arm, he walked up the road to the chalet, which combined the functions of public house, post-office and barracks, to telephone. I remained in the car.
A crowd of gesticulating little men gathered round, beseeching, commanding, cursing, whining and growling: the car must be taken back. I explained that I could not drive it. That made no difference. They produced a porter with a dropped lower lip who spoke almost less English than I Italian. The babel continued, until at length, bored, and unable to cope with their torrents of prayer and abuse, I produced my sketch-book, sharpened my pencil with an expensive-looking knife, the property of Simon, and with exasperating deliberation proceeded to depict with meticulous care a group of pine trees that sprang from a hillock near the station. This infuriated them and they tried to snatch the book away, with the result that my pencil shot across the sky in a jagged curve that could not even have passed muster as a telegraph wire. My blood boiled in its turn. The porter being the ostensible excuse for using English, I rose to my feet and shouted so that crowds more came running out of the station. I roared that I could not drive the car, and that if I could, I should refuse; that I was not going to fetch my friends; and that I had not come half across Europe in three days to be ordered about by them.
Without understanding a word they fell back, and David and Simon returned to find me in peaceful possession. The post-mistress was at lunch.
Our midday meal we had brought with us in a bag. This we now ate in the post-office. Since the drive to Nuremberg, Simon had become wary and had insisted on the hotels supplying us with ham rolls. In spite of them he was miserable, cowed by the officialdom that David and I delighted to defy: he threatened to take the next train that passed through the station, wherever it went. We suggested that he should go to Rome for help. He said that he did not wish to arrive there in flannel trousers. Eventually, despite the assurances of the post-mistress that it was impossible, we got through on the telephone to the capital, but found that the Embassy was shut; it would not be open until five. Our difficulties were considerable, as I knew only a very little Italian, the others none, and the post-mistress equally little German.
At five we telephoned again, but this time were unable to get through. So, in desperation, we drafted a tear-stained telegraphic appeal to the ambassador, invoking any wife’s-sister’s-mother-in-law’s-cat connections of the foreign office with whom we could claim the smallest acquaintance, begging him to insist on the finance minister’s despatching immediate instructions to the Brenner authorities to let us pass. We settled down to await events.
The inn displayed further evidences of the Italian pride of conquest. The word Gasthof, with which it was originally labelled, had been crossed out and Albergo painted by its side. Similarly, Sala di Pranza had been substituted for Essenzimmer. The soldiers were singing opera in hideous tones from the upper windows, from which their clothes were hanging out to dry. We began to hate the Italians. Everything seemed to irritate. A tablet on the outside wall recording the fact that Goethe had once laid his head upon a pillow in this very building increased our detestation of philosophy.
While we were thus pawing the ground, exacerbated almost beyond endurance, there arrived in this remote corner of Europe a certain officer of the Life Guards who once incensed the cheaper press by striking a policeman with the flat of his sword for not saluting the colours. The Life Guards are, it is said, more amusing than other regiments. The policeman at the time was holding up the traffic with one hand and directing it with the other.
At length David, goaded by the disappearing back view of the interloper, determined to make one more attempt to argue us through. The altercation lasted three hours in as many languages. We became so persistent that we were eventually ushered before the Chief. He pointed to the instructions on the Carnet, printed in every known language; he was helpless. Then David, who does not understand a word of Italian, drew a bow at a venture; he pretended to find a loophole in the Italian version, in the absence of a certain defining phrase that qualified the French and German. This idea seemed to have its effect upon the official. We pressed the point for half an hour; and at last, weary of our pertinacity, which threatened to keep him at his desk all night, he consented to risk his job, his life, his all, and let us pass. After another hour’s wait for a train, during which we drank our rejoicings in thick smoky chianti in the waiting-room, he signed the paper; we filed into the car; and amid torrents of rain, with the clouds obscuring the whole valley, we sped jubilantly down the road into Italy. Darkness fell just in time to prevent our catching a glimpse of the Dolomites.
The tension and worry of the day had left us exhausted. We passed through many villages, in which the headlights flashed on German names above the shop windows, relieved occasionally by the Royal Italian Arms displayed over a post-office or on a flag.
We reached Bolzano at nine o’clock for dinner. The hotels did not look attractive and David drove straight through to Trento, another hour’s run, during which Simon and I slept. There we ate hors d’oeuvres and a ham omelette. David, who, in Germany, had never ceased telling us how he could not touch Italian food, busily licked every platter dry. At eleven o’clock we set out for Verona. At twelve we had a puncture in the narrow and now silent streets of Rovereto, to the astonishment of two old women who were sitting quietly talking at their front doors, when an enormous car drew up, blocking the whole of the street, and began to take itself to pieces at their feet. We reached Verona about half-past one, and had great difficulty in finding the hotel and awakening it.
The heat was intense and the rooms small and stuffy. Each grasping a bottle of mineral water, we fell into bed, scarcely able to undress. The mattresses were made of stone; the beds of tin, on which were painted sprays of roses and landscapes. But we slept the sleep of utter fatigue, and did not wake up until the sun began to pierce the green shutters of our windows late next morning.
CHAPTER VII
IN A BOOK named Up and Down, E.F. Benson, its author, describes the sensation of ‘coming home’ that always assails him on his entry into Italy. What is it that arouses this emotion in English people, in men and women who have not a drop of foreign blood in their veins? An emotion that, far from being the result of habit, can only be stirred to the full by the initial rapture of the first arrival, of the first vision of the cypresses and campaniles, the hummock-borne fortress towns of Umbria, the wild stretches of the Campagna and the ultimate incarnation of Vesuvius and her stone-pine? What is it? Do all nationalities experience this conviction that Italy is their birthright, just as great works of art are the heritage of civilization? Or is there a something akin between the island and the peninsula, a something not similar, but which by reason of its very distinction from the rest of Europe, constitutes an affinity? It may be a quality too subtle for definition. But the fact remains, English people live in Italy because, unlike the Riviera and apart from the artistic monuments, they can love the country as a home. In France the resorts become Anglicised; in Italy the visitors Italianised. The English resident is not liked; but in his sincerity must be sought his absolution from the charge of ‘living cheaply on the natives’. He loves the country.
Thus it was with this inevitable exhilaration that I left the hotel on the morning of my third arrival in Italy and turning a corner, entered the market place of Verona, a large square, flooded with huge flapping white umbrellas, under which stood stalls of fruit and flowers and other necessaries. I drank a cup of coffee and bought myself a buttonhole; Simon then appeared. We decided to stay another night. He was interested, as he had not visited Italy before.
Verona shows strong traces of
the Venetian domination. The windows of the older palaces are built in that form of graceful Gothic arcading, so beautiful in its legitimate setting of delicate unrelieved brick, so repellent as popularised by Ruskin amid the walls of the miniature Chantillys and Rambouillets with which he decorated the cities where his influence was paramount. Weatherbeaten lions of St Mark are to be seen prowling above the doors of the municipal buildings; and the towers are roofed with those foursided cones that are peculiar to the north-east corner of the country.
At the back of the hotel, in a little courtyard attendant on a small and very ancient church, we came upon the tombs of the della Scala family. Of the three most important, each is surmounted by an elaborate Gothic baldochino, some twenty-five feet high, on top of which is perched an equestrian statue. The finest of these, that of Can Grande, is an exceptional work of art that can only be compared with the equestrian fresco in the Palazzo Publico, at Siena, by Simone Martini. The horses in both are draped to the fetlock; and there is something unusual, and at the same time satisfying, in the implied movement of an animal beneath the conventional but now unfamiliar folds of formal drapery. The riders, too, communicate something of their complacency to the beholder.
The courtyard is enclosed by a low wall, on top of which is stretched a kind of gigantic wrought-iron chain mail, introducing into its design the family badge, the ladder. Though dating from the fourteenth century, it is still as flexible as a gold purse. Verona has adopted the ladder as her badge; it appeared in blue and orange on the stained-glass windows of the hotel.
A guide, who spoke French, showed us round the tombs. He then pointed to three windows in an overlooking palace, and said that behind them Danté had composed the Divina Commedia. Moving his podgy forefinger a few degrees further round the compass, he fixed upon a low red-brick shell of a house, the ground-floor of which was occupied by a wheelwright’s shop. This, he said, was the palace of Romeo’s family, where Romeo had actually lived. There is always a certain unreasonable humour about the reverence that foreigners display for Shakespeare. Simon and I burst into unthinking merriment, at which the guide took great offence. He angrily spluttered out long passages of Danté, which were intended to prove that Romeo’s family was not merely an ornament of fiction, and that if it had been, it had existed not only in the imagination of our national poet, but also in that of his.
After lunch we motored to Vicenza, twenty miles east across the Lombardy plain. It was very hot; the white dust was stifling and the road monotonous. Vicenza was the home of Palladio, for whose works, as the founder of English domestic architecture, David had a peculiar reverence. He does not admit the Jacobean and Elizabethan styles to be architecture. The Gothic town hall, re-encased by the master in a light, silver-grey stone that has not lost its freshness, is a lovely building, though it presents the appearance of an inverted galleon. There were one or two other fragments to be seen. Palladio’s sense of proportion was unfailing, and it is this, whether we owe it to him or not, that is the outstanding characteristic of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century English country house.
That evening, after an early dinner, we had the satisfaction of feeling that we had at last been fully compensated for anything that we might have missed at the Mozart Festival. I cannot do better than quote the column that appeared a fortnight later in the Times of August 29th:
ROSSINI’S ‘MOSES’
PERFORMANCE IN THE VERONA ARENA
(From a Correspondent)
…a performance more astounding and grandiose than could have been expected even of Italy. Mozart and M. Reinhardt faded into insignificance. The elements themselves were harnessed to this production.
The opera was Rossini’s ‘Mosé’; the theatre the famous ‘Arena’. This enormous Roman amphitheatre, the most complete of its kind in the world, presented an astonishing appearance. From the further section of the vast arena a row of brilliant electric lamps, so dazzling as to fulfil the functions of a curtain, proclaimed the existence of a stage fifty yards in length. This was flanked by two towering, white obelisks, against which could vaguely be discerned two lesser dark ones. An immense chatter filled the night, as the tiers and tiers of people loomed up to the black roof of sky. To one side, high up above the whole, three ruined arches, outlined faintly light against the firmament, stood symbol of the past. Reminder of the present, a lively overture burst out, to be drowned beneath the storm of hisses with which each member of the audience thought fit to admonish his neighbour to silence. Then suddenly, amid the clash of cymbals the row of electric lights reversed, beams shone from the smaller obelisks, and the twelve tribes of Israel, arrayed with all the picturesqueness of a missionary calendar, were disclosed in a tremendous concourse against a jungle of luxuriant vegetation and a great mass of overhanging rocks and boulders.
Irrelevant as the detail may have been – for instance, two pompous, Renaissance equestrian statues prancing among the palms behind the obelisks – it was an impressive spectacle by reason of its very size and the very sound emitted by this colossal chorus. At length there came a pause – a roll of drums, a crash – and, with a superb gesture, Moses stepped out upon a promontory of rock. He was ‘after Michael Angelo’: a tremendous figure of a man with a far-reaching bass voice; his hair twisted into horns, his beard flowing down in the traditional ringlets of the famous statue, as though each strand were musclebound. Throughout, a pillar of power and strength, he dominated the performance as he dominated the Israelites.
The chronology of the opera is curious. The first act is occupied with the giving of the tables. While Aaron struggled with the people in an acquiescent tenor, darkness fell upon the stage, save for one spot illuminated by a prism of light. The orchestra quickened. Lightning flashed from the wings, to be answered by summer lightning, shot in violet streaks across the sky. The Almighty, a baritone, spake. Then, with a blare of trumpets, the Prophet stood forth bearing the tables. The act ended with a tremendous finale, and the audience shouted for Moses, and shouted again. He eventually reappeared with only his horns emerging from a gargantuan laurel wreath adorned with false berries and upheld by two black-shirted Fascisti. These blandly arrogated to themselves the thunders of applause that greeted the trio.
It lasted from nine till one. The Italians take their national composers very seriously. In the third act, unnerved by the stupendous bad taste with which modern imagination has invested the courts of ancient Egypt, the leading tenor missed his note – and the populace burst into a tumult of loathing and disapprobation. The last scene, however, was superb. The lights reversed, disclosing, as at the beginning, the people of Israel, in a long and sombre line. Behind them, instead of jungle growths, the Red Sea heaved and rolled in a manner ominously uncalm. Led by Moses, a figure scarcely human in the growing twilight, the tribes sang a protracted and mournful farewell song. Above, the summer lightning flashed, accompanied now by distant rumbles of thunder. Then the inevitable followed. Pharaoh and his host were espied in pursuit. With a supreme gesture Moses turned upon the waters, harangued them, hypnotized them, and slowly watched them part. Soon only a diagonal stream of heads was visible between the waves. As the last disappeared, Pharaoh sprang to view, a sinister silhouette perched high upon a rock. A short recitative of hate ensued. The thunder – natural, not orchestral – drew nearer. Followed by his army he rushed in the wake of the fugitives. Like doom the waters bore down upon them, closed and resumed their inexorable rolling, punctuated for a minute by an occasional arm or spear waving in awful despair. The orchestra grew calmer. A great red sun appeared on an infinitely distant black cloth and spread the rays of hope over the waters. Then all was over.
It had been an astonishing performance. The very scale on which it was produced ensured its success. And the advent of real thunder and lightning to synchronise with the wrath of Pharaoh produced a dramatic effect which may never be repeated. During the intervals we drank beer and vermouth and ate composite ices in the vaulted crypt that ran round benea
th the tiers of seats, where formerly lions and Christians had awaited their turn to gratify the frivolity of the public. And now, upon this very site, that in days gone by was wont to parade the pagan orgies of a corrupting empire, a representation of the most treasured of all our Old Testament stories was actually in progress. Such, my brethren, are the miracles that Faith has wrought.
CHAPTER VIII
AS WE WALKED BACK FROM THE OPERA, David said that we ought to start for Florence at 10 o’clock the next morning. Supposing that, as usual, he meant twelve, I lay in bed until the porter suddenly came up for my luggage. My toilet was therefore necessarily hurried, and I started the day in a state of disorder.
Motoring down the plain of Lombardy is not interesting. The roads are passably smooth and wide, but so dusty that even a horse and cart throws up a cloud that obscures the view for ten to twenty yards; while a preceding motor vehicle makes it impossible to see for half-a-mile. One is seldom out of sight of a house. Villas large and small, former homes of the Medici and residences of local bank managers, lie always a quarter-of-a-mile, or not so far, off the road, visible at the end of perfectly straight avenues, through pairs of elaborate and pompous gate-posts. Every vineyard can boast an entrance which in England would denote a substantial mansion of the Georgian period. The country is entirely cultivated in strips, that are, like everything else, at right angles to the road. Though the plain is completely flat, it is impossible to see anything in the late summer owing to tall crops of maize and other unfamiliar growths, and the festoons of vines hanging from the rows of little pollarded trees. The loads of hay are even bigger than in Germany, being piled right on to the horse’s back so that only the ears of the animal remain visible. As David is never intimidated into removing his foot from the accelerator by any substance so fragile as grass, we generally carried off about a third of a rick from each load that we passed. Simon, seated on the left outside, was apt to receive most of it on his head. For a person who prides himself on his manners, he was in a false position.
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