Europe in the Looking Glass

by Morris, Jan, Byron, Robert

  The referee, a very plump man, received a good deal of abuse. But all minor excitements were drowned in the ear-splitting enthusiasm that greeted the first goal, shot by the Bologna captain after twenty minutes’ hard play. His team fell about his neck and kissed him – an unpleasant spectacle in view of the physical conditions resulting from exertion in the extreme heat.

  Half-time found the score 1–0 in Bologna’s favour. Alba, at the beginning of the second half, showed more dash, and began to press. In the last quarter of an hour, however, the side went completely to pieces and eventually lost by five goals to none. The players showed no ability to dribble, though at difficult kicks, and at heading the ball, they were unusually apt. Any attempt at a barge evoked volleys of protest, and was invariably given as a foul. At every opportunity the crowd shouted ‘OFF SIDE!’ and ‘’ANDS’. The winners, we were glad to think, had been trained by an Englishman.

  After it was over, it was utterly impossible to find a taxi. The trams were invisible beneath the struggling humanity that clung to their outsides like swarms of bees. And we had walked half-way back before we found a cab. We returned to the hotel and washed. Then we went to dine at a small restaurant, embowered with oleanders, recommended by our companion, who paid for the dinner. The conversation was in French.

  Our new friend belonged to that familiar type who live on their wits, and whose conversation, though containing a sub-stratum of truth, is embellished with the fiction necessary to their own glorification and the making of a good story. His name was Alfredo Rossi, and he produced a visiting card belonging to his brother, who was apparently a commercial chemist engaged in the artificial manure trade. In appearance he was thinly made and bony, standing about six foot one in height. His lips were slightly pursed, the upper lip forming a point in the middle, which rested on the lower. Sinister, staring eyes moved inquisitively about beneath his hanging brows. His face was dark, golden brown, and his hair was black. His long body was clothed entirely in black; black shirt, black tie, black handkerchief, black suit, and black buttoned boots. His garments clung. In manner he was most friendly.

  During the war he had fought on the Italian front and learned to hate the French, having been at one time liaison officer where one line ended and the other began. His particular company had been dependent on the French commissariat and as a result had almost starved. We were told later, that in Rome, after the war, the waiters refused to serve French people in the restaurants, so hated were they. This feeling has not disappeared.

  On demobilisation, Rossi had joined d’Annunzio at Fiume. Then, when that venture had been brought to its end, he had become one of the first Fascisti, in the days when Fascisti were openly murdered in the streets, and had fought, dislodged and drowned in the moat the communists who had obtained possession of the castle at Ferrara. He now represented himself as Chief of the Ferrara Fascisti. Money flowed from his pockets. He regretted, however, that he was unable to keep a mistress as well as a wife. In the same breath he said that he would show us round the town on the morning of the morrow; and in the afternoon, if the car was still delaying us, would we come out and see Ferrara with him, where he hinted vaguely at a country house.

  He arrived on Monday, as he said he would, at ten o’clock. I was the only one dressed or even awake. His arm linked in mine, we set out together, talking halting French. He displayed the genuine love of good buildings and historical association that is innate in nearly all Italians. First we visited the old university. The walls were frescoed from wainscoat to ceiling with the heraldic bearings of former professors and distinguished students; amongst them were the names of several Englishmen. Over a door was a bust of Cardinal Mezzofanti, who received Metternich on one of his northern Italian tours and spoke forty-two languages with fluency. We were shown, also, the room fitted with carved stalls and a sort of canopied throne at one end, in which human dissection was first practised, with a papal inquisitor looking through a hole in the wall, and Mass being celebrated underneath. Some students, studying law, regarded us aghast. Napoleon, during his short rule, had considered the old buildings inadequate and transformed them into a library, moving the seat of learning to others more capacious – an isolated example of the beneficial thoroughness which characterised his administrations. Thence we walked to a theatre, designed in the form of a horseshoe with splayed ends by Bibiena, and decorated in green and gold. This is one of the few eighteenth century theatres still intact. In general appearance, its balustradings are bolder and rather earlier than the delicate gold filigree work that covers the inside of the Fenice Theatre, at Venice. The morning finished with the picture gallery, containing a depressing collection of the less interesting seicento masters, and, as David remarked, more square feet of Guido Reni than all the rest of the world put together.

  The chief objects of interest in the town are the magnificent fountain by Giovanni di Bologna – a native of Douai – supporting a triumphant Neptune attended by adoring nymphs; and the two towers, one unfinished, the other rising square and unadorned, to the height of 292¾ feet. This is known as the Torre degli Asinelli, having been built by a family of that name, and inclines 3 ft. 4 ins. from the perpendicular. Its neighbour is a dwarf, squat in appearance, being only 130 ft. high and slanting 8 ft. to the south and 3 to the east. The effect of these leaning piles, with scarcely twenty yards between the two, is most extraordinary. The only other tower that we saw that was at all comparable in slenderness and proportion to the higher of them was the machicolated dock tower at Grimsby, built at the entrance to the docks for hydraulic purposes. In this case the architect, perhaps unconsciously, has achieved a unique triumph in a country where the art of building single towers is practically unknown.

  Diana, though promised, was not forthcoming that day. We set out that evening therefore in a hired car for Ferrara. The driver seemed unable to distinguish between the accelerator and the brake. It was dark, and the clouds of dust thrown up by the carts caught the light in confusing beams. The intervening country produced a disgusting stench that lay across the road in waves. On arrival at the sole hotel, we were ushered into the unconverted rooms of an ancient palace. On the walls were inlet canvas portraits of the former owners. Wooden-looking men and women cracked and torn and soured, sneered aristocratically upon our slumbers from their settings of painted foliage and painted bas-reliefs.

  We dined well, and drank a number of sticky native wines, tasting for the first time Malvasin or Malmsey. A liqueur named Grappé, distilled from the pips of grapes, completed the meal. Then we went for a walk and looked out over the city walls. At twelve o’clock we betook ourselves to bed, and Rossi departed to play poker. We were to take lunch with his family the following day at their country-place, and then go eel-fishing. For the present, goodnight.

  The next morning he was gone. So, also, was David’s snakewood cane. Let us be charitable and suppose that his losses at poker compelled a retreat. Whatever his intentions, he made practically nothing out of us and spent a good deal. We were sorry to miss the eel-fishing.

  Ferrara is a sleepy market town, lying in the midst of flat marshy country. The heat was such that by eleven o’clock the streets were deserted. It was here that Lucrezia Borgia, having at the age of twenty-five married Duke Alfonso d’Este as her third husband, reformed her character, spending ‘the morning in prayer, and in the evening inviting the ladies of Ferrara to embroidery parties, at which accomplishment she was a great proficient’. The cathedral is twelfth century, with a triple-gabled façade vaguely reminiscent of Peterborough. Standing about it are a number of red marble lions. The interior is not interesting. A very beautiful building is the Palazzo dei Diamanti, so called from the diamond-cut restications with which the whole of the outside walls are ornamented.

  But it is the castle, the old fortress of the d’Estes, that is the pride of the town, being the finest medieval fortress in Italy, and the finest brick building in the world. It is complete and untouched, never having been damaged
or improved. Built entirely of brick, a great towering pile with several inner courts, it stands in the middle of the town surrounded by a broad walled moat. This is crossed on each side by drawbridges, that stretch from massive, square brick gate-houses, resting on spreading bases rising from the water, to tall projecting wings, heavily machicolated and corniced, that stand out a little way from the main building. The drawbridges are still in working order. The beauty of this massive fabric rising from, and reflecting down into, the cool, dark green waters of the moat, a delicate burnt pink against the vivid blue of the sky, is incomparable. The smallness, the perfect workmanship and preservation of the bricks, gives the whole a wonderful texture, the effect of which is completed by gleaming white stone copings and small white buttressed parapets that run round the tops of the towers. To the contemporary architect who favours the use of these small bricks and the maintenance of severe and simple lines, Ferrara Castle must constitute one of the greatest of the ancient masterpieces of architecture. It is the predecessor of such examples of twentieth century architecture as the new town hall at Stockholm, perhaps the finest of the world’s modern buildings.

  The disappearance of Rossi had, in a way, tended to raise our spirits. After lunch we hired a car and endured an insufferably hot drive back to Bologna, where we were thankful to sink into the comfort of the Baglioni. The car would really be ready tomorrow at midday.

  That evening David and I, foreseeing the abysmal uncertainty of the morning, while waiting for Diana, determined to stay up all night, so that we should be able to sleep all day, until the car was actually at the door. With this end in view, we first visited a cinema. Italian films are usually exasperatingly short. This one, however, a series of glimpses from the life of Ivan the Terrible, was interminable. Italian historical producers understand dresses, but not settings. The long coats and tall fur head-dresses of the Boyars moved about against walls that might have decorated Edwardian bathrooms. And the women were so virulently ugly, as to appear malformed. The atmosphere in the building thickened. The odour of patent-booted feet intensified. Above us, a wit, surrounded by a crowd of admiring ‘chaps’, found it necessary to Italianise each successive Russian name in that throaty voice that is the inevitable accompaniment of after-dinner audiences. In the vicinity lurked a baby. It was midnight before we had sat the performance out; and Simon was so exhausted that he went to bed.

  David and I then went from café to café in search of the band that played latest. At length bandless, we sought a restaurant that was open from 4 am until 2 am, twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four. Here, homesick for the Lyons’ all-night, we ordered bacon and eggs, which materialised into hard-boiled lumps of yellow and white bouncing about on sheets of raw ham. However, we ate them, and talked for a long time to the Fascist night-watchman who had joined us. At last, dropping with fatigue, we crawled up our private staircase and went to bed.

  CHAPTER X

  HAVING SUCCESSFULLY PASSED the whole morning asleep, we came down to a late lunch, to be told that the car would not after all be ready that day. This was the final straw, and with a great effort David lost his temper. He told the hotel what he thought of them and accused them of being in league with the garage. He repeated himself to the mechanics in German and French. He then made the hotel ring up the garage and telephone his feelings to the manager in Italian, adding that if the car was not forthcoming that evening, it would be removed without a farthing’s payment for the week’s work. That afternoon we spent in the workshop. And at tea-time, just as a slight shower of rain was beginning to disperse the heat, we were able to indulge a triumphant tour of the town in Diana’s lap, proudly stopping before all the cafés where we had become known. We dined for the last time at our comfortable table in the corner, off newly-shot partridges, and left Bologna about eleven o’clock next morning, the combined staffs of the hotel and the garage bidding us goodbye and Godspeed, as we drove off with our pyramid of trunks and suitcases once more behind us. The sense of freedom as we mounted the outlying spurs of the Apennines and eventually became enveloped in wet masses of cloud, was ecstatic after the hot confinement of the arcades, and the company of disreputable Fascisti. The Lombardy plain behind us, we were now entering the hill country.

  Since the Apennines run in a south-easterly direction and the Bologna-Florence road in a south-westerly, the curves and hairpin bends which the crossing of the mountains necessitated were more than usually alarming. The villages became plain and gloomy, with high, narrow streets of dull, grey, stone houses, the eaves of which began to project in the manner of all mountain dwellings. The cloud, which covered everything, was followed by a rainstorm, which left Simon in a rage and David huddled beneath an overcoat, from which only a nose and a pair of gloves protruded. Then, as we descended, the sun came out and the tiled and faceted egg of the duomo of Florence, rising from the distant white patches of town in the valley beneath, swung into view round a bend of hewn cliff. On the left, the white villas of Fiesole and the black points of their attendant cypresses spattered the irregular contours of a long purple brown face of hill. We passed the gilded gates of San Donato, the actual possession of which, like that of Arundel, confers a title, now borne by the family of Demidoff, who purchased it from the Pope. And eventually drew up outside the commanding gateposts, surmounted by lions, of the Villa Sassetti, the home of the Edens, whom we had come to see, and whose address we had suddenly remembered was in the Via Bolognese, down which we were freewheeling as fast as its surface would allow. The gates were shut. Through them, at the end of a long embanked avenue of cypresses that bridged an intervening valley like an aqueduct, the golden white face of the villa, with its green shutters, rose sedately from the surrounding vineyards against a background of Ilexes, and hill, and sky. I rang the bell; a motherly woman emerged from the lodge and looked suspiciously at us and our piles of luggage. She said that she would telephone to the house. Then she reappeared and asked me to come through a side-gate and telephone also. The lodge was full of sleeping forms. My efforts were of little use, as the footman at the other end could only speak Italian. But eventually the gates were opened, and we drove up the avenue, dirty and dishevelled, to the front door. The hall, through which we passed, was small and round and very high, being lighted by a skylight at the top; while below, a fountain was playing in a marble basin on a pedestal, at the bottom of which were goldfish drowsing on aquatic mosses. The staircase was circular, and on a level with the landing at the top the wall was adorned with a series of frescoes by Tiepolo, lately removed from a palace in Venice, and slightly curved to fit their new position. We were greeted by Edward Eden, who came trotting down the stairs in a bottle-green suit, followed by his brother, Martin, in light grey. Martin is a poet. He writes finished verses, of intricate construction and polished rhythm. Just as the modern Hungarians have now begun to paint on what they call a ‘cultural basis’, relegating post-impressionism and its attendant realisms to a passing phase of anti-Victorian revolt – a revolt none the less Victorian for that – so the English writers, of whom Martin is one, are in process of discarding the fragmentary style of atmospheres and passing emotions that has characterized what is popularly termed ‘modern poetry.’ Martin has been termed a follower of the Sitwells. In reality, borne on the wings of a tireless vocabulary and an irresistible sense of verbal form, he has outstripped them. Both Edward and he seemed pleased to see us, finding August in Florence necessarily hot and dull.

  We pottered round the terraced garden, admiring the baroque giants and dwarfs standing amid walls and niches of cut yew, fat stone plumes waving from their helmets and large armour-clad bellies hanging to their knees. Then we plucked and ate some yellow tomatoes, as big as grapefruit, imported from California. Returning to the house, we encountered Mr Eden, whom, despite his middle-age, has lately been the hero of all Florence, for having worsted in a duel a young Fascista who had picked a quarrel with him at a reception. They had fought with rapiers. He was most hospitable and begged
us to ‘take our meals at the villa’.

  We drove down to Florence for tea, and in deference to David’s passion for ‘the best’ took rooms overlooking the Arno at the Grand Hotel. Beneath sat a number of people fishing from the walled parapet of the roadway. The Arno is converted into a river by means of a municipal dam at one end of the town in order to give the various bridges with which it is spanned an air of sanity during the summer months. Beyond the dam was a large expanse of slime and shingle, upon which the youth of the town, shameless as God made them, were disporting themselves. Our rooms were exorbitantly expensive. We decided for once to have our money’s worth. The hot water in the bath was not running as fast as might have been expected; within five minutes the plumbers had been summoned – and arrived. We then demanded two extra carpets; they were brought, and with them a writing table. The beds were moved and the mattresses changed. After that we contented ourselves with plucking shiny plaster fruits from the cheffonier and rearranging the scheme of a neighbouring Louis Quinze (Lancaster Gate period) boudoir, with the superfluous toilet ware from our bedrooms.

  Having been separated from all news for three weeks, it was pleasant to receive our first letters, to learn that the family bulldog had unfortunately maimed a goat and that the bracken had, in places, grown to the height of nine feet. A firm of solicitors also wrote to demand the sum of six and sixpence owed to a client in bankruptcy; and an inhabitant of Wantage intimated that he would appreciate a recognition of his having picked up a box of my collars that had fallen out of the dickey of a two-seater seven weeks ago. He had ridden, he said, thirty miles one precious Saturday afternoon to return them. If I did not answer he threatened to expose me in the local press. I sent him a vulgar postcard.