Now And Then We Passed A Wretched Hut Which Seemed To Be
The Dwelling Of The Shepherds We Saw Tending
The flocks, and here and
there we came upon a group of farm buildings, all of straw, whether for
man
Or beast, set within a sort of squalid court, with a frowzy
suggestion of old women and children about the doors of the cottages. We
saw no men, though there must have been men off at work in the fields
with the younger women.
As we drew near Civita Vecchia the sea widened on our view, wild with a
wind that seemed to have been blowing ever since the stormy evening in
1865 when, after looking at the tossing ships in the harbor, we decided
to take the diligence for Leghorn, rather than the little steamer we had
meant to take. From our pleasant train we now patronized Civita Vecchia
with a recognition of its picturesqueness, unvexed by the choice that
then insisted on itself, though the harbor was as full of shipping as of
old. There was time to run out for a cup of coffee at the station
buffet, where there had been neither station nor buffet in our young
time: but doubtless then as now there had been the lonely graveyard
outside the town, with its sea-beaten, seaward wall. We buried there the
last of our Roman holidays under a sky that had changed from blue to
gray since our journey began, and mournfully set out faces northward in
the malarial Maremma.
If the Maremma is as malarial as it is famed, it does not look it. There
were stretches of hopeless morass, with wide acreages under water, but
mostly, I should say, it was rather a hilly country. Now and then we ran
by a stony old town on a distant summit like the outcropping of granite
or marble, and there were frequent breadths of woodland, oak and pine
and, I dare say, walnut and chestnut. Evidently there had been efforts
to reclaim the Maremma from its evil air and make it safely habitable,
and the farther we penetrated it the more frequent the evidences were.
There were many new buildings of a good sort, and of wood as well as
stone; when we came to Grosetto, where we had spent a memorable night
after being overturned in the Ombrone, in the attempt of our diligence
to pass its flood, we were aware, in the evening light, of a prosperity
which, if not excessive for the twoscore years that had passed, was
still very noticeable. I should not quite say that the brick wall of the
city had been scraped and scrubbed, but it looked very neat and new,
and there was a pleasant suburb under it where the moat might have been,
and people were coming and going who had almost the effect of commuters;
at least, they seemed to have come out to their homes by trolley. We
resisted an impulse to dismount and go up to the inn in the heart of the
town where we had spent that "night of memory and of sighs."
But we searched the horizon round for the point on the highway where our
diligence had failed of the track between the telegraph-poles and softly
rolled with us in the muddy waters, like an elephant taking a bath, but,
so far from finding it, we could not even find the highway. We began to
have our doubts of what we had always believed had happened, and
remained as snugly as we could in our compartment, where, to tell the
truth, we were not very snug. In too fond a reliance on the almanac, the
Italian government had cut off the steam which ought to have heated it,
and the cold from the hills, on which we saw snow, pierced our rugs and
cushions; but, if we had known what we were coming to in Leghorn, we
should have thought ourselves very enviable.
I do not know exactly how far it is from the station in Leghorn to the
hotel where we had providently engaged rooms with a fire in at least one
of them, but I should say at a rough calculation it was a hundred miles
as we covered the distance in a one-horse omnibus, through long,
straight streets, after ten o'clock at night. The streets and houses
were mostly dark, as houses of good habits should be at that hour, but,
after passing through a wide, lonely piazza, we struck into a street
longer and straighter than the others, and drew up at our hotel door
opposite an hilarious cafe, where there seemed a general rejoicing of
some sort. We were unable to make out just what sort, or to join in it
without knowing, though it lasted well toward morning, and we were up
often during the night to see that the fire did not die out of our one
porcelain stove and leave us to perish of cold.
In Leghorn the good Baedeker says that all the hotels are good, and this
sweeping verdict may be true if taken in the sense that one is as good
as another, but they are of the old Italian type which our winter in
Rome had taught us to think obsolete; now we found that it was only
obsolescent. We had written to bespeak a room with fire in it, and this
was well, for the hotel was otherwise heated only by the bodies of its
frequenters, who, when filled with Chianti, might emit a sensible
warmth; though it was very modern in being lighted with electricity, and
having a lift, in which, after a tepid supper, we were carried to our
apartment. We had our landlord's company at supper, and had learned from
him that the most eminent of American financiers, who shall not
otherwise be identified here, was in the habit, when coming to Leghorn,
of letting him know that he was bringing a party of friends, and
commanding of him a banquet such as he alone knew how to furnish a
millionaire of that princely quality.
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