We passed through Villafranca, interesting only for its strip of tarred road, and crossed the Po, entering Mantua by a covered bridge. The pandemonium in this narrow, darkened tunnel was indescribable. Long lines of carts and droves of unmanageable cattle, panic-stricken by the reverberating echoes, jostled from side to side in angry confusion. We reached Bologna about midday, and, after driving three times round the town in search of the Restaurant Grande Italia, lunched at the Hotel Baglioni. Italian food at its best can compare with any in the world; and the Grande Italia had had the reputation of being the finest restaurant in Italy. Though now closed, its mantle seemed to have fallen on the Baglioni, which also contained an excellent American Bar, run by a waiter trained at the Savoy.
It was four o’clock before we eventually started out for Florence again, feeling very lazy and looking forward to arriving there. Five hours later we made an ignominious re-entry into Bologna, attached to the end of a rope.
Our first misfortune was to take the wrong road out of the town, which, after about five miles, lured us without warning into the midst of a group of smaller Apennines, mountains which in reality are just as preposterous as they appear in Perugino backgrounds, and not, therefore, as a rule, frequented by motorists. Up and up we twisted round these amusement-park peaks by a track not an inch wider than the wheel-base of the car, and so steep that the luggage nearly fell out of the back; round corners that Diana’s huge body could scarcely negotiate without her hind wheels flying into mid-air three hundred feet above some smiling farmstead; down valleys so narrow that she bridged them; and up humps so sharp that they threatened to harpoon her undercarriage; all this far up in the heavens with a view of fifty miles on either side. Having forced a passage through a cemetery, we felt, when the road threatened to pass through the front door of a farm, that the moment had arrived to turn round. And we had at least on the way back, the satisfaction of finding that another car had followed us and was now stuck in the cemetery, its occupants goggled and hooded, gesticulating among the tombs. We left them silhouetted against the skyline, looking like a party of divers stranded on a mountain peak.
Turning a corner we suddenly found ourselves sliding down a precipice, tilted so far forward that it was necessary to hold ourselves back with our hands pressed against the dashboard as half-a-dozen Apennine valleys beckoned invitingly below. Ramming the gears to the lowest and putting on both brakes, David could just hold the car as we slithered down what was little better than a goat-run. Once at the bottom we hurried along to rejoin the main road and landed in a dried river-bed. Backing, we fell into a ditch. Luckily a large stone caught the rear off-wheel. Eventually we shot out of it, dragging with us the stone and about a hundredweight of earth. When at last we did attain the main road, we had not gone a hundred yards along it, when for no conceivable reason, Diana came to a sudden and irrevocable standstill.
David thought that the root of the trouble must be the carburettor. So did I. Simon did not venture an opinion. After unloading our combined luggage in an effort to find the book of instructions which all the time was safely in the front locker where it should have been, we set about the carburettor with spanners and pincers; and after an hour’s hard work succeeded in getting it in pieces. There seemed nothing the matter; we blew the jets at either end until our cheeks ached; then put it together again. After that we changed the plugs, because they ‘wanted doing anyhow’. This made no difference. It was useless. We gave up in despair and decided to stop a car and ask for help. Every five minutes for the last two hours we had been so enveloped in dust by mechanically driven transport, as to be scarcely able to breathe. But now, in the natural course of things, another hour elapsed before anything appeared at all.
At last, from round the corner of the bridge down the road, came the rumble of a lorry. With arms outstretched, like the little girl on the railway line, we stopped it, and two beneficent and filthy human beings, with immensely round stomachs concealed beneath white aprons, emerged from the front. They fastened on Diana’s inside with the ecstasy of starving leeches. In a moment the engine was emitting sheets of flame. David reached between the licking tongues and turned off the petrol; Simon and I scooped the refuse of the gutter into Diana’s most delicate intestines; and, while one of the men thrust his enormous torso bodily on top of the carburettor, the other fetched a piece of sacking from the lorry, with which he eventually quenched the conflagration.
Laughing loudly, the men then embarked on a second attempt, this time wrapping the sacking round the carburettor in the first instance. We remained more collected, with one eye on the luggage at the back, as the flames shot up in the air. Finally they tried a third time. But it was not a success. They decided to tow us.
I sat in front off the lorry with the larger of the two. He started off with a bound that snapped the rope like a piece of thread. We retied it and tried again. The lorry was delivering Bolzano beer, with the result that we stopped at every public house on the road proving a refreshing object of ridicule to the parties of drinkers seated barefooted and half hidden in the dust. My companion told me that he had a son who spoke German and English. He also made a great deal of other conversation which I did not understand, occasionally almost stopping to apostrophise the landscape. The other man danced about the back of the lorry, asking David and Simon if he could introduce them to any ladies.
Our progress was slow, and it was nearly dark by the time we reached the tram terminus, which lay some distance out in the country. The lorry could delay no longer. Explaining our plight to the occupant of the Bologna Tramways Office, our two benefactors left us, they to deliver the remainder of their beer, we to telephone to the Baglioni for assistance. Though not easy, we succeeded in getting through. Another car would arrive in about half-an-hour.
During the interval we entered a wineshop. Two Wandervögel were eating bread and milk at a neighbouring table. A kitten with a dislocated shoulder proved an object of interest and affection to David. The car arrived, accompanied by an interpreter, who resembled Harold Lloyd in mind and face, confusing every issue that he was called upon to solve. The rope broke again. We mended it and reached the hotel about nine, three ghoulish figures, unrecognisable beneath a livid coating of clotted, white dust. Baths and dinner revived us. The waiter expressed himself willing, if necessary, to introduce us to some ladies. Instead we went out and entered the first café that we came to.
Being rather tired we sat for some time in silence. The waiter behind the counter showed great interest in us. Eventually, handing me a confidential vermouth, he suggested that we might care to meet some ladies. Meanwhile his mother, a plump and elderly woman behind a pay desk, with clay-white skin and a wicked gleam in her eyes that belied her benevolent smile, was whispering in David’s ear that she did, as a matter of fact, know of some ladies who would not be unwilling to make our acquaintance. As an alternative she produced with furtive secrecy one of those packs of ‘greasy’ playing cards that one had imagined existed only among gold-diggers and pirates, and with these she tried to wave us into the back premises. Other people seemed to be coming and going in a mysterious way. The atmosphere became so disreputable that we began to feel uncomfortable.
Meanwhile we had made friends with a small Fascista, who spoke French. He was extremely communicative. He was a private – as opposed to an official – policeman; that is to say, a night-watchman. Despite this he was always about in the day. That morning, in fact, his father, who was a policeman proper, had been taken ill; and he had himself donned the livery and cocked hat of the House of Savoy and gone out to do duty instead. Bologna was a charming town. Yes, he thought it might be possible for us to join the local Fascisti. If we would come with him tomorrow morning he would see what could be done. Meanwhile, if we would like the meet any ladies, there would be no difficulty. And he and the waiter and the waiter’s mother all fell into an earnest and unintelligible conversation. We thought it time to escape.
In order to spare the reader
the suspense and irritation, aggravated by the intense heat and airlessness of the town, that we ourselves endured, it may be as well to admit that our stay in Bologna was prolonged to the extent of six days. On the morning after the disaster, it was discovered that one of the cog-wheels in the magneto had been stripped of its teeth. The car would be ready on Saturday. But the peculiarities of the ‘distribution’ made it impossible to fit a foreign magneto. It was therefore necessary to remake the inside of the old one. Saturday was a holiday, on which the mechanics could not work; Sunday was a Sunday, on which they could. The presence in the town of a ‘State Magneto Works’ facilitated matters to a certain extent. The car would be ready on Monday night. Meanwhile, if we were lonely, the mechanic would be delighted to effect a meeting between ourselves and some ladies who were friends of his.
To cut a long story short, the car was not in fact in running order until Wednesday evening. As David had particularly enquired, before leaving England whether it would be advisable to take a spare magneto, and had been met with a distinct negative from the firm from whom he had purchased the car, we felt that our annoyance was justifiable. At the same time we obtained an insight into certain aspects of Italian provincial life that is not vouchsafed to everyone.
CHAPTER IX
BOLOGNA IS A LARGE MANUFACTURING TOWN containing 280,000 inhabitants. Famous in the Middle Ages for her resistance to papal encroachment, she has retained this independence of attitude with regard to the puritan elements of Fascismo. In Florence, but a fortnight before our arrival, an American woman had been brought into court for kissing in the street, and had only with difficulty been rescued by her consul from a term of imprisonment. In Bologna there is no need to kiss in the street. Whether or not it is due to the combined excesses of a barracks and a university, the town is famed as a seminary of temptation, a fount of loose-living, whence tributaries flow into all the other cities of Italy. Oddly enough, however, the inhabitants are never in bed. At one in the morning the cafés are as full as at midday. At two, they close. At four they re-open. This is in extreme contrast to most Italian cities, which invariably present, after midnight, an empty and subdued appearance.
But the main feature of Bologna is her arcades. Not only the streets in the centre of the town, but the side streets and the slum streets, are all arcaded. The fronts of the houses rest on every imaginable kind of arch, pillar and capital, Gothic and Classic. Thus it is possible to walk always in the shade and always under cover. The effect is one of strong shadows and bright arcs of light; while at night the pale glimmer of the street lamps flits in long streaks up the everlasting corridors, thick with the undispersed heat of the molten August day. And everywhere the echoes resound as in a huge subdued swimming-bath, to heighten the chatter and hubbub of the cafés, and accentuate the solitary footstep of an errant girl, or the bang of a door and the rattle of a chain.
Though the opinions of others on the subject of hotels are tedious, the Baglioni deserves record as in our opinion the best in Italy. The food, which made no cosmopolitan pretences, showed to what heights Italian food could rise. The staff were attentive and polite, and the management offered to change our English cheques when the banks were shut. Finally our bill was not excessive. The building had been once an old palace, and the frescoed vaulting of the dining-room was still intact. This had been the work of one of the brothers Caracci, natives of the city, executed in that same late Roman style of design adopted by Raphael in the famous loggia at the Vatican.
We ourselves were lodged in an annexe, also a former palace, with a staircase of grandiose proportions adorned with white and gold urns and rams’ heads. At the top was a frescoed ceiling representing some scion of the eighteenth century nobility borne aloft by attendant Graces – many of whom were also burdened with his various armorials. This staircase gave us a private entrance to another street, which, though we were not supposed to know of it, enabled us to forestall the dawn without waking the night-porter. On one occasion, however, the key was lost, the porter to all intents and purposes drugged, and David was obliged to shout Simon and myself awake through a fourth floor window – to the surprise of the neighbouring inhabitants. It was only a vivid dream that he was being murdered in the gutter beneath by the Fascisti that induced me to go to the door and rush quite unnecessarily into the street in my pyjamas. We shared our staircase with the local branch of the Maritime Bank and a number of other residents, whom we used to frighten by prowling up and down it on tiptoe, until the cashiers began to think that they were the victims of a plot.
Next door but one was the Fascist Lodge, where meals were served to the members in an open courtyard. On the pavement of the arcade outside was inlaid the axe of the organization, surrounded by a wreath of laurel leaves. Thither we – or rather David and myself – had gone with our friend the night-watchman, to be enrolled; but it was unfortunately a necessary condition of membership that we should be permanent residents of Bologna. Though at times we began to think that this eventuality must be fulfilled, we never gave up hope of avoiding it. From our bedroom windows we could watch the activities of the local organization. One day three lorry loads of boys arrived back from a camping expedition. They seemed in high spirits. Fascismo is in fact a sort of boy scout regime; but instead of staves it carries revolvers. Italy is the victim not so much of a dictatorship, but of an ochlocracy, the rule of an armed mob, and an immature mob at that. Some slight account of the higher ideals of the party will be found in the last chapter but two.
The days passed in various ways. An up-to-date shop in the main square provided us with English books and papers. It also stocked the life of Henry Ford, translated into Italian. I read a number of the plays of Shaw. That a technique so completely inartistic, that these bare anatomical views of human nature, the bones of which are dried and classified, not always correctly, for the sole purpose of expressing the once rather shocking philosophy of the author, should have received such unanimous acclaim at the hands of the past generation, is an instructive commentary on the Edwardian struggle against Victorian hypocrisy. The antithesis, of course, is to be found in Chekov, whose edifices do not show their girders. For some reason, however, he is frequently described by the London Press as ‘the Russian Shaw’. By the same process of thought we have always regarded EI Greco as ‘the Spanish Millais’.
As we sat about the cafés of the town we made various friends. I discovered Simon one afternoon talking unconcernedly in English to a man who could speak not a word of any language but Italian. He appeared to be a retired engine-driver living on twenty-five lire a day, who would be pleased to start work again if we could get him a job in England. Providence momentarily loosed my tongue to dilate on the prevalence of unemployment in that country, but I was cut short by his remarking that he knew some ladies whom he particularly wanted us to meet that evening. Simon also picked up with an Egyptian commercial traveller in cotton, who wore a red fez. He was much impressed by our acquaintanceship with a former ornament of Balliol College, Oxford, a countryman of his, whose brain after the Gordon legend, is said to be the greatest thing that Egypt has produced of late years. For Bologna, he seemed strangely ignorant of the whereabouts of the other sex. On the other hand, David, sitting by himself in a café, was suddenly joined by one of the Bersaglieri, who spoke a kind of lingua franca. At first they chatted, discussed barrack life and the origin of the cock’s feathers that adorned his hat. He then announced that David must meet a certain lady – with her mother – whom he was entertaining tomorrow, Sunday evening. What the presence of the mother portended, David was unable to fathom.
One of the first things that we had noticed upon our arrival in the town was the quantity of posters on the hoardings displaying in large capitals the words
ALBA
V
BOLOGNA
Upon close inspection this legend, dated for Sunday, August 16th, resolved itself into an announcement for the Cup Final of all Italy. We ordered the hotel to procure us the best
seats that were to be had, and were drinking vermouth prior to setting out for the field in the Via Toscana, when the engine-driver, whom we had re-encountered, hailed a friend of his. The friend was going to the match also. He refused a drink, but stood in a statuesque pose until we had finished ours. He then accompanied us. A party of four, we stepped into a taxi and joined the Derby Day crowd that was streaming out of the town to the scene of the match.
‘Alba v. Bologna’. The affect of those three words upon the Latin temperament can scarcely be exaggerated. Imagine all the football crowds and Cup Final crowds that the world has ever seen; the queues outside the Ring; the downs at Epsom; the stands at Aintree. Multiply the checks, friz the hair, impressionize the neckwear and point the tan and chocolate brogues; accelerate the voices and the movements; cover the whole with a cloud of dust; and that will convey some impression of the voluble multitude with whom we pushed through the gates and into the stands. The field itself was small and, where there were no stands, surrounded by palings over which peeped tin advertisements and villa residences of red brick. For some reason it was marked out as for hockey.
The sun, now half-way down the heavens, seemed to suck away the little air that was left. Five o’clock arrived. The two teams ran sportingly on to the field at a gymnastic double, the captains of each bearing bouquets of tuberoses and pink carnations. The home team was champion of the north, and her captain had skippered Italy’s international team last year. Alba was a Roman team, champion of the south. As the opposing sides lined up, the spectators became almost silent, so great was the tension. Then the ball was kicked off and the shouting began. We found ourselves seated in the midst of the Roman contingent, who were endeavouring, not unsuccessfully, to pit their lungs against the combined voices of Bologna’s thousands. Later they began to take exception to the methods of the northerners, and a fight ensued two rows behind, which was stopped by the police.
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