Murray, on the other hand, is not at all happy with the segregational arrangements at the beach, finding that ‘the line of demarcation between the baths of the two sexes is not sufficiently observed to make the bathing pleasant for English ladies, and the authorities ought to interfere’.
On that note we will leave Venice for Verona, where we can let a tear or two fall on the tomb of Juliet, if we can find it. Murray says that ‘it certainly was shown in the last century, before Shakespeare was generally known to the Italians. That tomb, however, has long since been destroyed. The present one — on the garden of the Orfanotrofio, entered (small fee) from a little street running down to the Adige — is of red Verona marble, and before it was promoted to its present honour, was used as a washing-trough.’
Augustus Hare says that the tomb may be visited out of sentiment, but the one ‘which was shown here in the last century was all chopped up long ago by relic hunters, and French and English ladies are wearing it in bracelets’.
The next stop in Pisa, ‘that little nest of singing birds’ (when Shelley and Byron sojourned there in 1821), and where, says Hare, ‘The soft climate has a wonderfully soothing effect upon complaints of the chest, but it is horribly wet.’ During a conducted tour of the famous Leaning Tower he tells us: ‘The sensation of falling over is very curious and unpleasant. Those who ascend must be careful not really to fall over, as the railing at the top is not continuous, and very misguiding.’
A day trip by train to Leghorn would, according to Hare, be a disappointment. Should the traveller land from a steamer, ‘the boatmen and porters are peculiarly fierce and extortionate … There is nothing whatever worth seeing, though … its shops are sometimes amusing. The place is full of galley-slaves who do all the dirty work of the town in red caps, brown vests, and yellow trousers. The Cathedral has a facade by Inigo Jones.’
Murray finds the place more interesting, and remarks on the Protestant cemetery, which was ‘until the present century the only one in Italy, and contains the tomb of Smollett’. He also reminds us that in the sixteenth century Ferdinand I invited people of every nation and creed to Leghorn, ‘seeking to escape the tyranny of their respective governments; Roman Catholics who withdrew from persecution in England; and New Christians, — that is, forcibly converted Moors and Jews, — as well as Jews who adhered to their religion, then driven from Spain and Portugal by the cruelty of Phillip II, animated and assisted by the Inquisition.’
Florence is an hour or so inland by rail from Pisa, and our traveller would find there many of his compatriots studiously referring to Baedeker or Murray on their walks around the town. Murray says that at least a week should be devoted to Florence, though, as elsewhere, mosquitoes were a problem. The large Hôtel de la Paix was well situated, with a lift, but ‘some persons find the noise produced by the weir, just opposite, very objectionable’. If a hotel was inconvenient, or too expensive, there were pensions kept by Mrs Jennings, Miss Hill ‘very comfortable’ and Miss Clark — ‘excellent food and very healthy situation’.
For those who got into trouble there was an English consul; also an English club, ‘the Florence’, an English baker, three English bankers, five English doctors, three English dentists and an English nurse. One could attend the Church of England, or a Presbyterian church; or wander around the studio of the English painter, R. Spencer Stanhope, or join an Artistic Society where ‘classes are held for young ladies three or four times a week’.
An English sculptor was in residence, and whoever bought a piece from him had a choice of not less than four English forwarding agents to get it back to England. The purchaser would have to be careful, in taking the works out himself, not to travel via Chiasso where, says Murray in 1892, the customs officials ‘will detain the goods, and refuse to answer any inquiries by letter as to the means by which they can be released, a course for which they are said to have the authority of their government’.
There were two booksellers in Florence, three English chemists and two English grocers, not to mention a picture dealer and a tailor, so that one could feel quite at home there. Even the uncertain weather seemed imported from the Home Country, for the rainfall was considerable, ‘especially in the autumn and early winter. From the nature of the pavement and improved drainage it soon finds its way into the Arno; there is consequently no stagnant water in any part of the town.’ From a sanitary point of view Florence was much improved since the cholera epidemics of 1854 and 1855, ‘not only as regards drainage, but by the forbidding of intramural interments except in some very few cases’.
Matters of health are gone into in some detail, the city being ‘exempt from specific diseases or epidemics. In October and the beginning of November, as in April and May, the climate of Florence is much less relaxing than that of Rome or Naples. Chronic dyspepsia generally diminishes in intensity after a residence in the Tuscan capital; in fact, all those diseases of a non-inflammatory character requiring a bracing atmosphere appear to be benefitted in Florence. Ague and fevers similar to those of Rome and Naples are unknown, save as the result of importation, the disease having been contracted elsewhere. Measles and scarlatina, like all other eruptive diseases occurring in Tuscany, as a general rule, run a remarkably mild course.’ What all travellers had to beware of was the change from bright sunshine on the banks of the Arno to the ‘dark sunless streets, which form so many funnels for cold air descending from the gorges of the Apennines. To this source may be traced most of the indisposition from which English and American visitors occasionally suffer.’
In the early part of the nineteenth century, before railways had been laid down, one travelled from Florence to Rome by diligence, information about the route being supplied by such books as Rome in the Nineteenth Century by Charlotte A. Eaton (1788–1859), which was a sort of proto-guide in two volumes first published in 1820. The author was an erudite lady whose occasional attempts to be fair with regard to travelling conditions in Italy after the Napoleonic Wars only serve to highlight her frequent blasts of complaint. The work, one of the more popular, went into four editions.
Her 150-mile journey to Rome by vetturino took six days, and at the start she compares Italian scenery favourably to that in the south of France, but the hard conditions of travel soon heighten the tone of her justifiable strictures: ‘Wretched, indeed, is the fate of those who, like us, travel Vetturino! In an evil hour were we persuaded to engage the trio of mules, and the man, or Vetturino, by whose united efforts we are to be dragged along, day by day, at a pace not at all exceeding in velocity that of an English waggon; stopping, for the convenience of these animals, two hours at noon, in some filthy hole, no better than an English pig-stye; getting up in the morning, or rather in the middle of the night, about four hours before day-break; and when, by our labours, we have achieved a distance, often of thirty miles, we are put up for the night in whatever wretched Osterìa our evil destiny may have conducted ourselves and our mules to.’
Nevertheless, she could not deny that ‘the moon does look larger, and shines with far more warmth and brilliancy, in the sky of Italy, than amidst the fogs and vapours of England. The scenery through which we passed was singularly beautiful. Sometimes winding round the sides of the hills, we looked down into peaceful valleys among the mountains, in whose sheltered bosom lay scattered cottages, shaded with olive-trees, and surrounded with fields of the richest fertility.’