From a Tourist's Notebook

ALDOUS HUXLEY

Random Notes and Jottings from the Travel Journals of a Famous English Novelist

ON the way south. It was just eight in the morning, and we had drawn into Aix les Bains. The porters proclaimed a fiveminute halt, but the platforms were empty; the buffet was closed; and there was not a sign of breakfast. The lady sitting opposite me would not be comforted. She was perhaps forty-five, with a face somewhat prematurely ravaged, but still retaining, one could see, certain pretensions. She was from Naples, she told me, and had two brothers in Rome, both of whom were Lieutenant Generals; and though we found ourselves sitting face to face in a second-class compartment of the ordinary express, she was accustomed to the Train de Luxe and, had there been room, would have taken it this time. I heard it all several times.

"No coffee? No coffee?" With her lorgnette she swept the desolate platforms. Then, sinking back into her seat, she exclaimed on a note of abstract and almost disinterested despair (like a leading article in the Nation, if you catch my meaning): " It's the war. The war. It spoiled everything that was beautiful in the world. Tutto che era bello." She accompanied her words with wide romantic gestures, with the most pathetical grimaces, beating time to her phrases with her golden lorgnon or dropping it to clasp her hands in an agony of emotion over her heart, cocking her head on one side as she did so with a smile of lachrymose sweetness.

"Before the war", she went on, "they would have been here—dozens of them—waiting for us, with rolls and coffee, with flowers even. But now they care about nothing; they don't care if we're uncomfortable or hungry; there's no humanity left in them; they don't even care about money. There's nothing left but anarchy and cynicism and scepticism. Anarchismo, cinismo, scetticismo . . ." She clasped her hands almost with frenzy. " And this is what we fought the war for!" She indicated with her golden starers the empty platforms. "I said so all the time, from the first. I said so even to my brothers, who are Tenenti Generali. The declaration of war upset me so, I went to bed for eleven months. Undid mesi", she repeated emphatically. "But it's life, it's life. The world would be beautiful if it wasn't for humanity. Humanity spoils everything. E fatta per guastare tutto. Ma c'è la vita, c'è la vita ..."

At Chambery, luckily, the coffee was hot and the rolls, if not absolutely fresh, were at any rate quite eatable.

GENOA. Rain, and the worst restaurant in Italy, rendered even more unsympathetic than it actually is, this disagreeable town. But even the downpour, even the recollection of garlic-flavored spinach and dubious fish could not depress my admiration for Bianco's noble Palace of the University. The succession of arcaded courts and mounting staircases, the vistas, the glimpses between pillars, under graceful arches—this palace is the most spectacular and at the same time the most refined piece of theatrical decoration that can be imagined.

Feeling a need for distraction, I went to the variety show at the Eden theater. I felt glad, when the show began, that the lights were left on in the auditorium and that I had brought the evening paper. For the Eden was exactly like any other small music-hall in any town in Italy. The program consisted of six female singers, a pair of dancers and a masculine comedian. Each singer sang about five songs, and at the close of each she would leave the stage. There would be a tedious wait. The audience would turn to its evening papers; everyone had come forearmed against the inevitable boredom. Several of my neighbors hardly raised their eyes from their paper the whole evening. I wondered why they didn't read in greater comfort at home. If the singer came back without changing her frock the audience hooted, hissed and made derisive remarks. The Stars were those who changed most often and into the most startling and expensive costumes. As for talent—that doesn't seem to be so much as thought of. And the Eden of Genoa is typical.

PISA. In my old age, when I retire from the world, it is in a Pisan palace on the Lungarno that I shall make my retreat. It is a place one likes more, admires more, with every visit. Its melancholy, its quiet dignity, its grand air of having come down in the world— these aristocratic characteristics make it profoundly sympathetic. And the cathedral, huge and white, in the midst of its wide meadow—how quiet and remote it is, even in the noonday; and when, in Dante's strange phrase, "the sun is silent", how portentous, how strange and beautiful its lunar pallor! And there are piazzas with curving sides; and wide, silent streets of palaces and arcades with admirable shops and bridges and a green river. And beyond the walls a plain with ditches full of the noise of nocturnal frogs; and beyond the plain rise the mountains, and to the west is the sea.

One would be bored there, of course. (One thinks of poor Byron riding out every afternoon—the same way to the same spot in the plain—planting a stick in the ground and drearily shooting, shooting at it with his long pistols. That was all he found to do at Pisa.) One would be bored, yes; but then, perhaps it is rather good for one to be bored. Or at any rate, it is good for one to learn hownot to be bored in a boring place.

On this occasion, however, Pisa was far from boring. At the Teatro Rossi they were giving Puccini's Bohème; giving it better than I have ever heard it given in any capital of Europe: with gusto, with passion and, at the same time, with a beautiful precision. Having taken the preliminary precaution of leaving all fastidiousness, all superfluous intelligence, in the cloak-room along with my hat and umbrella, I found the opera genuinely moving.

After the opera, the leaning tower and the cathedral by moonlight, the most moving, things in Pisa, for me were the S-shaped flutings on the Roman sarcophagi in the Campo Santo. They have always given me a peculiarly intense satisfaction. They seem in some queer way absolutely beautiful and right. I have been in the Campo Santo four or five times, and I would go back fifty times more merely to look at those strangely fluted tombs. And I should not so much as lift my eyes to look at the frescoes. For the nineteenth century tombs, however, I should certainly spare a glance. There are some that will be starred, a hundred years hence, in every Baedeker. One in particular—it is fixed to the wall in the north-eastern corner—is particularly enchanting. It is a little bas-relief representing an orator of Risorgimento days making a speech, presumably about United Italy. There are banners and an urban landscape in the background; in the foreground a crowd of men, women and children in the costumes of 1860, charmingly grouped and carved with a wonderful spirit. Someone has written in the corner of this relief a signature in indelible pencil: MANET. I take off my hat to him.

LUCCA. If I had not already settled to pass my old age in Pisa, it would certainly be to Lucca that I should retire. For Lucca is, if possible, a more exquisite place than Pisa. It is also the cheapest town in northern Italy: what Gargantuan meals I have eaten there for eighteen-pence! drunk how much wine for next to nothing at all! And there are marvelous shops. It is the land of Cockayne.

I could write, if I chose, a whole book about Lucca: about its walls a la Vauban, its arcaded churches, its tall, square towers, its patch of Napoleonic splendor (for the Emperor's sister Elisa Bacciochi, was once Princesse de Lucques, and built a stately palace here and lived in it imperially, with some difficulty, on an income of about three thousand a year), its rich country, its villas, its hills, its excellent tramways, its frightful motor omnibuses and finally, its Holy Face. "By the Holy Face of Lucca!"—it was William Rufus's favorite oath. The thing was already ancient, famous and miraculous in his day. Save for a single day of the year, it is kept shut up in a little domed tabernacle in the cathedral: a huge cross, and nailed to it a long-robed Byzantine Christ made of a dark wood that might be aged cedar, and having eyes of glittering crystal. They are terrifying, those eyes (for I have been at Lucca on the feast day and seen the crucifix exposed); they stare menacingly from the dark carved wood. To see them is to understand why this whole great crucifix is called simply the Holy Face; there is nothing that matters but the face, the face and its shining precious eyes.

FLORENCE. Patriotic English and Americans should not walk too much in the streets of Florence. If they do, they will find themselves ready, twenty times an hour, to deny their nationality, their race, their creed. No one visiting Florence can look at his fellow tourists and still be proud of his birth. So, at any rate, I generalize from my own experience.

At home, I am vastly proud of being an Anglo-Saxon. I could make out a well-reasoned and convincing case to support this prejudice in favor of myself and my fellows. At home I could prove in almost mathematical fashion that the Anglo-Saxons are, on the whole, the most sensible, decent, get-on-with-able people in the world. But here in Florence, no. Confronted by the specimens of Anglo-Saxon humanity who tread these streets, I should not have the impudence to try.

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The decay of the orthodox religions has been the source, in our modem world, of many inconveniences. The instinct or rather the complex of instincts, which has always made religion a necessary feature of human life, still demands satisfaction. That satisfaction was offered in the old days by the churches. Now there are many who find a substitute for churchgoing among the antiquities and national monuments of this blessed country of Italy.

Look at them trapesing round the Uffizi, solemn-faced, earnest, conscientious, dutifully admiring every dreary Botticelli in the place. See them with inspired Baedeker in their hands, peering up at the dull Masaccios in the Carmine, at the all but invisible Benozzos in the Pisan Campo Santo. Admire them as they walk through the sacred rubbish heaps of the Forum, as they gaze up from their gondolas (or public steamers, more likely, in these days when every Christian gondolier in Venice is more rapacious than ever Shylock was) at the frivolous and ill-proportioned architecture of the Gothic palazzi. Look at them, earnest, conscientious and, alas! secretly bored and at heart unsatisfied. They are so many good Anglicans manqués.

The number of people who get any real satisfaction out of a work of visual art is certainly extremely small. I should guess that there were probably more music-lovers in the world than picture lovers; that more people are moved by Beethoven's Mass in D or Mozart's Quintet in G minor (for I am referring only to real music and real pictures) than are moved, shall we say, by Piero della Francesca's Resurrection or Raphael's School of Athens. I have known many fine musicians, excellent judges of poetry, to whom the most lovely work of visual art signified nothing at all; who could look unmoved at Mantegna's St. Sebastian, could stand indifferent among the Medicean tombs or under the vault of Alberti's church at Mantua. Most tourists in Italy seem to belong to this class. Otherwise, they would hardly look so profoundly bored as they do; they would not stare at the beauties about them with such a glassy inattention, would not dwell so lovingly on trivialities, oddities, curiosities, historical associations, and all the things that have nothing to do with beauty.

AREZZO. Setting outfrom Florenceon the trail of Piero della Francesca,one halts first at Arezzo. It is a town pleasant enough in its way and agreeably placed; but when you have seen the one incomparable chapel, you have seen all that is worth seeing.

I looked in vain for any monument to the Divine Aretino. His ungrateful birthplace had left him uncommemorated. And his most famous book—what has become of that? Of the original edition, with the engravings of Giulio Romano, hardly a single copy, I imagine, exists today. But the later editions, illustrated, as some French bibliographer contemptuously puts it, "par quelque Carrache" —I have never seen a copy even of one of these. And yet, in Casanova's day, the book would seem to have been in the hands of every young girl.

San Sepolcro. The finest Piero, a charming little town full of palaces, a cheap and admirable inn. Why not stay here for ever? The innkeeper compared Mussolini to Jesus Christ and Napoleon. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Urbino. Seven hours in a motor bus; up a huge bleak ridge and down again; then up, up, up till finally one is at Urbino, which is at the top of everything. It is an interesting, but not a comfortable journey. Motor cars in other countries are a luxury; in Italy they are a necessity. The expense of spirit involved in moving about a country where the trains are rare, uncertainly punctual (though the Fascists are improving that) and very slow, where the buses are horribly uncomfortable and the cab-drivers rapacious, is so enormous, the loss of temper and energy so vast, that a thirty-thousandlira car pays for itself easily in a few months.

I have no desire to live in Urbino; it is too high and cold and remote. But it is a place to be often visited. Duke Frederick's palace on the mountain is surely the most beautiful house in the world. Its perfection is the more extraordinary when you think of its date. It was one of the first great houses of the Renaissance. It stands there, a lesson to all mediaevalists, to lovers of quaintness, of cottagey ingle nooks and peasantish barbarism. To the apostles of extravagance and violence it teaches the beauty of restraint; to the lovers of inordinate novelty, the virtues of tradition. Alas, until the motor buses are better, not many of these people will go to Urbino for these salutary lessons.

RIMINI. What would poor Sigismondo Malatesta have said? The temple which he dedicated to pagan beauty and the liberal arts, to the greater glory of his mistress and himself, his sedulously deconsecrated church is redolent today of all the vulgar superstitions from which he had taken such pains to purge it. Inefficient sterilization! The catholic germ seemed as vigorously alive as ever when we entered. The church was thronged, the high altar spangled with lights. An ineffectively policed multitude was filing up in joyous disorder to kiss the thaumaturgical arm of St. Francis Xavier, encased—the mummified remains of a cannibal banquet—in a reliquary of gold and crystal. A collection of cripples and cretins hung about on the fringes of the crowd awaiting thaumaturgical manifestations. And round the doors of the temple and within it a hundred hawkers were-, offering picture postcards of the Arm, biographies of the saint and copies, at six soldi apiece, of the true prayer of St. Francis Xavier, "renowned throughout the whole world".

During the lunch hour, the thaumaturgical arm was -taken for an airing through the streets of Rimini. We saw it two or three times, passing and repassing, in a large, very dirty and more than ordinarily noisy Fiat, in the company of half a dozen smartly dressed young men who looked like Fascists. In the poorer quarters of the town they gave it a great reception; some clapped when the Fiat passed, some devoutly knelt, some did both.

I do not know where the Arm went in its dusty motor car that evening. This relic of the great missionary is not a native of Rimini; it had only come for the day, or at longest for a brief villegiature. The Arm is a touring relic; it performs its miracles and collects for foreign missions here, there and 'everywhere. Who knows? we may meet it again tomorrow at Ravenna, or the day after at Mantua, or a week hence at Vicenza. A seller of picture postcards and true prayers, with whom I got into conversation, told me that he made his living by accompanying the Arm on all its travels, vending these holy souvenirs in every town it visited.

RAVENNA. There are two kinds of hotel in Italy: the hotels for Italians and the hotels for foreigners. Go to a reasonably good Italian hotel, and you get cleanliness, a fair degree of comfort, good service and good food, all at a low price. Go to the foreigners' hotels; you will get no more cleanliness or comfort, the service will be grudging, the food bad, and the prices fantastically high. The Royal San Marco at Ravenna is a foreigners' hotel. Once bitten, twice shy; the next time I shall go to the Centrale.

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FERRARA. Caviare at two shillings a pound: that was my best memory of the city of the Este.

MODEN A. There are certain towns in Italy where everything is planned on an enormous scale. No doorway in Turin, for example, is less than twentyfive feet high; and in Modena one walks from the station between houses that steadily grow larger and larger, until suddenly one finds oneself in a great piazza confronted by nothing less than the royal palace of Brobdingnag. This baroque passion for pretending that human beings are larger and grander than they really are—the result of it is to make one feel actually smaller in comparison with the resultant architecture of giants.

At Modena I missed by a few days the Concorso Nazionale Pompieristico. I wish I could have stayed to witness it; but alas, it was impossible.

MANTUA. "It is called the Palazzo del Te", said the waitress, "because the Gonzagas used to go and have tea there". "And did they take lunch in the Ducal Palace?" She nodded. "That's it". How richly, poignantly romantic are these ruins of splendor and grandeur!

And then there is Alberti's church. It is perfect. I can think of no building that has made a greater impression on my mind. What passion and strength and exuberant life express themselves in these restrained and simple forms! It is good to be reminded of the grandeur of the human spirit. With its feeblenesses and imbecilities we have too intimate and daily an acquaintance.

FERONA. The amphitheater here is more impressive than the Coliseum; Sammicheli was an excellent architect; but the town as a whole is a muddled, undigested sort of place. I was in Verona on the day of the English Football Cup Final. While I was pottering about the Roman ruin, three hundred thousand Englishmen were trying to fight their way into the brand new amphitheater at Wembley. There were only a thousand casualties. Who says that the old Roman spirit is dead?

Sometimes, indeed, I think that we today are almost more Roman than the Romans; I suspect that imbecility is actually on the increase. No Roman mothers, for instance, competed in fiftymile perambulator races; no young men and maidens of the classic age tried to set up world records in non-stop dancing or non-stop piano playing. . . .