They arrived late at the little inn of Poggibonzi, and found it by no means uncomfortable; as interesting, in fact, as many posadas in Spain still were in the 1950s, especially at remote places inland: ‘To be sure, it smokes so incessantly that we are compelled to sit with open windows, though the air is extremely cold; but this is no uncommon occurrence. The house is tolerably clean, and the room I am writing in is very tastefully ornamented with some elegant angels painted in fresco, the beauties of which must beguile the time while we are waiting for the repast …’
Dinner finally comes, the waiter ‘placing on the table the minestra, or soup, in a huge tureen, containing plenty of hot water, with some half-boiled macaroni in it. If you don’t like this kind of soup, you may have bread boiled in water; it is all the same. There is always a plate of grated parmesan cheese, to mix with the minestra, of whatever sort it may be, without which even Italian palates could never tolerate such a potion. This is generally followed by a frittura, which consists of liver, brains, or something of that sort, fried in oil. Then comes the rosto, which to-day appears in the shape of half a starved turkey, attended by some other indescribable dish, smelling strong of garlic.’
Our authoress-traveller and her companions found Siena to have a somewhat antiquated appearance, though later guidebooks were to see it in a better light. ‘Its streets, or rather lanes, are lined with high gloomy old-fashioned houses, looking like jails, and called, or rather miscalled, palaces, which have fallen into decay like their possessors, who are too proud to resign, and too poor to inhabit them.’
She duly visits all the sites, including the library, ‘which contains a great quantity of books, though I would not answer for their value’, concluding that ‘Siena is a very dull place. Some English friends of ours who spent a winter there found a great want of cultivated society. There is no theatre, nor opera, nor public amusement of any kind. Life stagnates here; for its active pursuits, its interests, its honours, its pleasures, and its hopes, can have no place. No happy Briton can see and know what Siena is, without looking back with a swelling heart to his own country.’
After leaving Siena, ‘night closed in upon us long before we reached our destined place of rest, the wretched Osterìa of the still more wretched village of Buon Convento. Thither, when a wearisome pilgrimage of four mortal hours had at last conducted us, its half-starved looking denizens would not admit us into the horrible pig-stye in which they wallowed themselves, but conducted us to a lone uninhabited house on the other side of the way, in which there was not a human being. We were ushered up an old ghastly staircase, along which the wind whistled mournfully, into an open hall, the raftered roof of which was overhung with cobwebs, and the stone floor was deep in filth. Four doors entered into this forlorn-looking place, two of which led to the chill, dirty, miserable holes which were our destined places of repose; and the other two, to rooms that the people said did not belong to them, one old woman assuring us they were inhabited by nobody, while the other maintained they were occupied by very honest people. In the meantime, it was certain that the frail doors of our dormitories would yield on the slightest push; that the door of the hall itself, leading upon the stairs, had no fastening at all; that the stairs were open to the road in front, and to the fields behind, the house itself having no door whatever; and thus, that whoever chose to pay us a nocturnal visit, might do so without the smallest inconvenience or difficulty to himself.’
Worse than anything was that ‘the wind blew about us, and we could get no fire. But there was no remedy for these grievances, and we resigned ourselves to fate and to bed. The two hideous old beldames who had brought us our wretched supper, had left us for the night, and no human being was near us, when we heard the sound of a heavy foot on the creaking staircase, and a man wrapped in a cloak, and armed with a sword and musket, stalked into the hall.
‘If we had been heroines, what terrors might have agitated, and what adventures might not have befallen us! But as we were not heroical, we neither screamed nor fainted, we only looked at him; and notwithstanding his formidable appearance, and that he had long black moustachios and bushy eye-brows, he did us no mischief, though he might have cut our throats with all the ease in the world; indeed, he had still abundance of leisure for the exploit, for he informed us that he had the honour of lodging in the house, that he was the only person who had that honour, and that he should have the honour of sleeping in the room next to ours.’
Whoever he was, Charlotte treated him like a gentleman and, after several formal good-nights, ‘our whiskered neighbour retreated into his apartment, the key of which he had in his pocket, and we contented ourselves with barricading our door with the only table and chair that our desolate chamber contained; then, in uncurtained and uncoverleted wretchedness, upon flock beds, the prey of innumerable fleas, and shaking with cold, if not with fear, we lay the live-long night; not even having wherewithall to cover us, for the potent smell of the filthy rug, which performed the double duties of blanket and quilt, obliged us to discard it, and our carriage cloaks were but an inadequate defence against the blasts that whistled through the manifold chinks of the room.’ They got up at four o’clock the next morning and ‘began in the dark to wend our weary way from this miserable Osterìa’.
After several hours on the road they stopped at a solitary house called La Scala. ‘It was the filthiest place I ever beheld, and the smell was so intolerable, that nothing but the excessive cold out of doors could have induced us to have remained a single moment within it. Two hours, however, did we stay, cowering over the smoke of a wet wood fire, waiting till the mules were fed — for they could get something to eat, but for us there was nothing; neither bread, coffee, eggs, milk, meat, vegetables, nor even macaroni, were to be had; so that we might have starved, or breakfasted upon salt dried fish in oil, had not our Vetturino, more provident than ourselves, produced a store of stale loaves and hard boiled eggs, that he had laid in at Siena.’
After La Scala they toiled up apparently interminable hills: ‘The countrymen were all clothed in shaggy sheep-skins, with the wool outside, rudely stitched together to serve as a covering to their bodies, and pieces of the same were tied about their thighs, partially concealing the ragged vestments they wore beneath. Their legs and feet were bare; and this savage attire gave a strange, wild effect to the dark eyes that glared at us from beneath their bushy and matted locks. Indeed their whole appearance reminded us literally of wolves in sheep’s clothing.’
It was late when they stopped for the night at a lone house by the wayside and, after the usual description of its filth and squalor, she goes on: ‘The Vetturino had providentially brought with him our supper, or else we should have got none; and it was cooked and sent up on coarse brown earthenware. Wretched as this house was, it seemed to contain a number of inmates; and the wild, ferocious appearance of those we saw, and the hoarse voices of the men whom we did not see, which frequently met our ear in loud altercation, conspired, with the appearance of the place, and the nature of the country, to make it seem fit for the resort of banditti, and the perpetration of robbery and murder.’
The doors to their rooms having neither bolts nor locks, they again barricaded themselves in, and went to bed in fear of their lives, to be awakened in the middle of the night by the fall of one of the chairs. ‘Starting up in sudden trepidation, I flew to the door, stumbling in the dark over the empty dishes of the supper, and extinguished lamps, which rolled about with a horrible clatter; and assuming a courage I did not feel, I authoritatively demanded to know who was there, as I hastily attempted to repair my outworks. I was answered by a gruff voice, demanding admittance. In my fright and confusion, it was some time before I understood that it was for the purpose of lighting the fire, and that it was four o’clock. To us it seemed that the night had only just begun, but it was clear our repose was at an end; so, wrapping myself in my dressing-gown, and guided by the light that streamed through the numerous crevices of the door, I began to demolish the pile of chairs and tables I had raised. When the door was opened, there came in a woman with long, dishevelled hair, a dim lamp burning in her withered, skinny hand, followed by a man clad in sheep-skins, and bending beneath a burden of sticks. His face was half hid with black, bushy hair, and his eyes were overhung with shaggy eyebrows; he had shoes, but his legs were bare, and by his side was fastened a huge knife or axe, much resembling one formerly in use for cutting off people’s heads, but which I suspect he had applied to the less obnoxious purpose of cutting the wood he was carrying.’