Europe in the Looking Glass

by Morris, Jan, Byron, Robert

  In the afternoon I felt restless and plunged into the middle of the town. Naples is an alarming place. In the sunlight of the quays it may seem innocuous enough; but amid the dark shadows of the squalid tenement houses, the washing stretched bunting-like from attic window to attic window, the unkempt crowds jostling through the narrow streets and alleyways, some sinister current seems transmitted through the air. The poverty of the slums is no longer happy-go-lucky, basking in the sun. It is terrifying. The ordinary canons of decency are not observed. The day’s toilet and the day’s cooking are alike performed in the gutter. Many of the windows have no glass, some no frames. Children swarm. The whole population seems to suffer from perpetual sores and inflammations. The streets are paved with blocks of stone, fifteen inches square and six deep. Most are missing and the roads are consequently almost impassable, save when the tramlines serve as bridges.

  I wandered on and on at a feverish pace, and at length, as it was growing late, boarded a tram, or rather clung to a handrail, in company with a struggling mass of itinerant humanity. The others thought I had been murdered. We dined at Bertolini’s overlooking the town. During the meal an operatic tenor sang to the homely troughing sound of several families of Germans.

  CHAPTER XV

  THE DISTANCE FROM NAPLES to Brindisi is 270 miles. Beyond the environs of the bay, we were assured that roads did not exist. Conditions were bad; the road from Rome to Naples, though broad and imposing, had been insupportably bumpy, and we could only suppose that those further south would be worse. Moreover, the sun now began to set punctually at seven-thirty, and the darkness, when the dust obscured the lights of the car, made driving as slow as in a London fog. We were obliged to make the most of daylight, and were called at six, dressed at seven, and actually loaded up and ready to start by a quarter past eight. As Simon and I were waiting for David to bring round the motor, a youth passed selling English papers. We bought a Times, and in it found our account of the opera at Verona. This, and a packet of sandwiches thoughtfully provided by the hotel, buoyed our spirits.

  Our way at first lay round the bay, past Pompeii to Salerno – thirty miles of practically continuous town, and if not town, cart-traffic and trams. The slums became revolting. Sunny as the morning was, wide as were many of the streets, the grey, fetid squalor of the houses, nothing but stone shells, the sight of breakfasts cooking in the runnel and the women emerging from the doorless doorways, hair loose and clothes in disarray, seemed to shut out the brilliance of the early morning, to create a sort of false half-light like the soulless glimmer that filters down a shaft with a bend in it. The traffic, streaming into the town as we were trying to go out, was directed neither by police nor by its drivers; carts, their owners either absent or asleep, dribbled in inextricable confusion over the whole breadth of the thoroughfare. Trams, filled to the roof with buzzing passengers, cursed impotently, unable to move backwards or forwards. To add to our difficulties, the surface of the road necessitated perpetual zig-zagging to avoid the incessant holes that threatened to imprison the wheels and smash the springs of the car. Even when the slums were passed it was no better, the roads growing narrower, the traffic thicker, and the holes, un-mended since the landing of Pyrrhus, being now concealed beneath three inches of thick white dust.

  In the neighbourhood of Pompeii we passed rows of beautiful palaces in the restrained baroque manner of Spain – many set back among vineyards off the roads, with fantastic and elaborate entrance arches. Rapacious guides planted themselves across the road at the entrance to the excavated city. We passed on. Then the towns began again. Though to all intents and purposes continuous, each one impeded us with a separate octroi every eight hundred yards, which found it necessary to enquire of us whether we were importing or exporting long and unintelligible lists of provisions. One official at last had the effrontery to insist on searching the car and made an attempt to unload the topmost suitcases. Before he could lift them out, David whipped his foot off the clutch and the car shot forward with a bound that left the official half stunned in the middle of the roadway. Having experienced only too often the inefficiency of the Italian telephone, we decided to drive through the rest without stopping at all. This course, though alarming during a long wait in a traffic block, saved precious minutes.

  By the time we reached Salerno, we had taken two hours to go thirty miles. But then, as we turned inland, the road became easier, narrowing as it ascended the mountains and developing at the same time a smoother surface, by reason of the simple fact that it had never experienced any traffic to disturb it. From now until Brindisi, 240 miles, we met one motor-drawn vehicle.

  Rather than descend the most inoffensive slope direct, our course wound down the smallest gradient in a series of hysterical bends, so that even the carts found it quicker to go straight across country; and we followed suit, skidding gaily down the cultivated fields of dark red earth. When we were obliged to keep to the road, the bends were so sharp that David was unable to negotiate most of them without backing. The extent of our progress may be imagined. Nevertheless our average began to creep up from fifteen to twenty miles per hour.

  About half-past one we reached Potenza – thirty miles short of half-way, a modern-looking town, filled with Fascisti on manoeuvres, and still decorated for a previous visit of the Crown Prince. We drove at a furious pace up the hill into the town, scattering the black-shirted youths; and were then told that our road lay below. The street was narrow, bounded by kerbstones nine inches high. Without hesitation, David backed on to the pavement, crunching the back light to atoms, to the pain of the surrounding crowd. We then descended and stopped at a garage on the hill for petrol. During the delay we opened a bottle of mineral water, hot and nasty from the heat of the sun, and made certain, as we had expected, that the sandwiches from the hotel were rancid and uneatable and also hot. We left them in the hedge.

  That afternoon we drove through the most exquisitely beautiful landscape that it is possible to conceive. The country was not theatrical. There was none of the vulgarity of the sunset or the drama of storm and mountain peak. It was like a work of art, balanced and long premeditated in the soul of a celestial colourist. One felt, when it was past, that one had been vouchsafed an insight not accorded to other men – a vision of some pagan divinity, some all-pervasive spirit of harvest and maturity, of roseate golds and the red, brown, black riches of the earth of the south, the south of Hannibal and Magna Grecia, the cradle of European civilization. The countryside became entirely deserted. Long-drawn, sweeping contours of yellow and brown merging into the red gold of the August sun, that seemed to have communicated some of its own glow to this chosen land, rose and fell into the distance, disclosing here and there a range of glassy, purple, blue mountains on the horizon. There was nothing burnt; it was as though the colours of fire were springing from the earth rather than descending from the sky. The soil, where tilled, showed black and thick, with burnt sienna lights. From time to time a flock of black and brown goats would dot across the curving white road, herded by a dog. An occasional peasant, seated sideways on a donkey, would rein in to watch us pass. Above, the sky shone blue with an unreasoning intensity. Few and far between, the towns, usually on hills, glittered like clustering pyramids, unearthly white and silver. And everywhere the yellows and browns and the blushing golds: nowhere a trace of green.

  We could drive very fast along the small white empty ribbon stretching into the distance, and the faster we went the hotter beat the wind and sun. Faces and hands grew a brownish purple in the burning air. And over all clung the dust.

  Toward evening we reached a flat and inhabited upland plain, the now brilliant red earth of which was entirely ploughed. In every direction stretched interminable groves of olive trees, not the little immature bushes of the north, but trees, old, robust and square, with twisted trunks and great spreading branches of grey leaves. From among them, poking up everywhere in a most unexpected manner, appeared sheaves of round conical roofs like witches’ h
ats, formed of grey stone tiles resting on the tops of spotless whitewashed houses of one storey, with walls that sloped outwards towards the foundations. As the roof was as high again as the house, it could, if it was to retain the proportions of its graceful cone, suffice only to cover the space of approximately one room. Consequently a large and prosperous farmhouse presented a whole crowd of these pointed extinguishers, all varying slightly in height and shape, clumped irregularly together among the olive trees, and each capped by a whitewashed stone ball upon a stalk. The larger country houses were of ordinary design, but invariably surrounded by stables and outhouses with these roofs. One or two villas were adorned with modern Greek vases and urns, displaying burnt yellow figures on a black ground.

  At last we descended into the flat strip along the sea-shore and found ourselves with twenty miles of straight Roman road in front of us. This was fortunate, as we had hitherto experienced some difficulty in finding the way through towns, owing to the inhabitants’ inability to read, and our being unable to pronounce the names of the towns as the natives were accustomed to hear them. The dust was now literally four inches deep upon the road. Men and women ran at the sight of the car and the choking blizzard behind it. Drivers of carts buried their heads in their hands with muffled curses. Even we were not spared. It came up in great clouds through the gear-holes, so that David was obliged to drive with a handkerchief around his nose and mouth.

  As it grew dark we mistook some aeroplane hangars, apparently on fire, for Brindisi. Then we found ourselves the wrong side of the two inlets of the harbour. It was eight o’clock before we reached the town. A Cook’s man, warned of our arrival, and a policeman, incensed at the absence of a back-light, leapt simultaneously on to either step as we passed down the main street. The fine was 25 lire. We had driven for 12 hours, with one stop for petrol, and the Cook’s man was frankly astonished that we had arrived. After much-needed baths, we dined, and went to bed early.

  Brindisi swarmed with mosquitoes, though they spared our faces. The windows of our bedrooms fronted directly on the quay, so that on retiring to sleep that evening, we found that the view had been transformed since dinner into an animate backcloth, punctured by the lighted portholes of a large Lloyd Trestino steamer in process of arrival. In the day seaplanes hovered gracefully above the harbour, noisy but decorative, with their white wings gleaming against the blue of the sea. It was too hot to go sight-seeing; the town seemed noticeable mainly for its smells. The Appian Way ends – or rather ended – here, in two columns, one of which stands intact beneath a luxuriant capital of sea-gods and acanthus leaves. The Greek influence is still predominant. To the left of the hotel ran ‘Dionysus Road’. And the women still carry clay pots with long necks and double handles. As in Athens, reproductions of these in frosted electro-plate might be seen beckoning alluringly from the windows of the local jewellers.

  We had intended to visit Lecce, the capital of Apulia. But it was too hot, and despite the praises of the town sung by our guide, who said that it was clean and that the inhabitants spoke Tuscan, we were so frightened lest some mishap should befall the car on the way and we should miss the boat, that we forbore. Lecce is the chief city of that baroque architecture rediscovered and given to the world by the Sitwells.

  The frequent references to this family scattered through this book, find analogy perhaps in the homage paid by the past generation to Ruskin. But the Sitwell is concerned not merely to point the apostolic finger at Beauty in the abstract – which changes every twenty years with the mode in domestic decoration – but rather to leaven it with that lurking humour, which has always characterized the more exaggerated fashions in art, especially that of the baroque. The serious art-lover, the seeker after aesthetic truths, is blind to humour. And this fact, this unlikelihood of a wide popularity, will perhaps save the Sitwells from that tittering execration which is always accorded by the next generation to the favourite preachers of the last. For no humour can appeal as did the earnestness of Ruskin – can appeal at all – to an intellectual public that gollops greedily at the trowels of Bernard Shaw and Medici prints that are dispensed at moderate prices by the commercial disseminators of our national culture; that is content to hear its every problem, social, political, and religious, dissolve beneath the succulent paradoxes of the playwright; and that teaches its children ‘art in the home’ from tortuous representations of Peter de Hooch, just sufficiently expensive to add a substantial as well as an aesthetic value to the drawing-room walls. In the domiciles of the Brindisians, however, we were glad to note, each parlour has maintained its artistic traditions in the form of a tower of artificial vegetation under a glass shade not less than four feet high. We also enjoyed the vast plates of muscatel grapes with which the hotel provided us.

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE COUNTRY OF SOCRATES has no convention with the Royal Automobile Club. Under ordinary circumstances, therefore, it is impossible to land a car upon upon her shores without depositing a sum of money equivalent to its full value. David, foreseeing this inconvenience, had, early in July, ventured into the presence of M. Caclamanos, the Minister in London, to ask his assistance in this matter. Did we, the Minister enquired, wish to disembark at Patras or Piraeus? David, thinking the former name less commonplace, replied Patras; to the customs officials of which port M. Caclamanos was kind enough to give him a letter. It then transpired that Patras was situated on the south-west corner of the Gulf of Corinth; and that only ships small enough to sail through the canal that severs the isthmus make it a port of call. On Thursday morning we awoke to find two steamers moored to the quay at Brindisi; one a large and inviting Lloyd Trestino, the other diminutive and dirty, with a repelling expression about it, like that of a small governess bent on a sartorial errand. This latter, the Iperoke, was to be our lot. While the Lloyd Trestino, with six hours’ start, sailed sedately round the Peloponnese to Athens, leaving us to battle with three days’ danger and privation on land and sea, in the effort to follow in her wake.

  In the afternoon we paid a visit to the local Greek consul. To avoid repeated self-advertisement I may admit at the outset that all Greeks feel a personal pride in meeting a person bearing my name. David, who had gone originally by himself, was having difficulty over some minor point relating to the car. He sent hurriedly for me. Rousing myself from an afternoon dose beneath the mosquito nets, I arrived in the consulate untidy and half-asleep.

  ‘Permettez-moi vous presenter M. Byron,’ said David.

  The outburst of enthusiasm that ensued, the honour conferred on the consul, the blushes that sprang to cheeks as yet unhardened to such eulogies, are all too painful to recall. Every difficulty melted. Anecdotes of infinite length followed, relating to his adventures in a Ford car during a term of governorship in a northern province under Venizelos. Our parting was painful. Each step necessitated a lower bow and a wider smile, until at length the door was reached, and we stepped backwards out of his presence into the dazzling sunlight of the street.

  It was now half-past three, at which hour Diana was timed to embark. With David at the wheel we drove sedately up to the side of the Iperoke, the deck of which was about eight feet above the level of the quay. The moments that followed were harassing beyond description. It was a holiday, and the whole of Brindisi was free to assist the operations. An hour’s argument between us, the population, the Cook’s man and the crew of the Iperoke inspired everyone with a thirst for activity. There was no wooden platform to which the ropes could be fastened, so that the Cook’s man and the head stevedore insisted on tying them round the very delicate wire spokes of the wheels. No sooner had we by main force disentangled one knot, than another was being surreptitiously re-attached. Simon retired to the hotel embarrassed. David and I defended the wheels until a wooden platform was brought – or more accurately a rotting door.

  This, however, the captain of the ship refused to take on board. The derrick, he gesticulated, would bear no more weight. Judging by the size of it, this statement
was true. At length, roped round the body in a manner calculated to tear every vestige of paint from her chaste, grey torso, Diana creaked, heaved, and rose, one wheel at a time, into the air. The whole ship seemed to list beneath the strain. Streams of agitated perspiration poured from the man in charge of the derrick, which was of that primitive type that can only be guided by hand. Even when raised to the requisite level, nothing could persuade the car on board, until the whole of Brindisi had clambered to the deck and flung its weight on the directing ropes.

  Meanwhile, from the balcony of the hotel, the local notables looked on. In the centre of the town an agricultural exhibition was in progress, representative of Apulia. Along the circular kerbstones of the main piazza had been erected curving wooden booths, in the Taj Mahal style of decoration. These contained a succession of grapes and ploughs. A minister in a top hat was honouring the occasion, attended by a large concourse in morning coats and straw boaters. The navy was fully represented. And the Governor, a dignified bishop in slate grey robes, arrived in a motor attended by a tonsured monk with delicious pink feet. Three mounted carabinieri, plumed in red and blue for the occasion, sat like doubled bolsters on their horses at the entrance to the hotel. The lunch for forty, next door to the bathroom, smelt strongly of garlic.