The Italy Not in the Guide-Books

Concerning an Ex-Tourist Who Had Yearned For a Beaker Full of the Warm (Laughter!) South

DEEMS TAYLOR

TRAVELLERS in Europe may be sharply divided into two classes: (a) Tourists; (b) Those in the Know. I must always have suspected this, for in past years some instinct had warned me never to venture a pristine visit to any European country without acquiring at least a stammering acquaintance with its language and enlisting the good offices of some initiated friend to guide my first steps. Consequently, as one who could use a French telephone and get a hair-cut in Germany, I had rather prided myself upon belonging to the second category of European travellers.

This year was different. When it came to deciding where we should go first, I thought hard, then suggested Paris. "Let's go to Paris," I said, "and stay there."

M. received this with a touch of bitterness. Paris, she pointed out, had been my suggestion in 1922,1923,1924,1925,1926, and 1927; and while Paris was all very well, there were other spots in Europe that had been highly spoken of by our friends. Italy, for instance.

Now there was an idea; and the more I thought about it, the more enticing it sounded. Spring in Italy! . . . Blue skies mirrored in the deeper blue of the Mediterranean ... a golden sun casting violet shadows over the piazza ... a fountain tinkling through the lazy afternoon in the cortile of an old palazzo . . . lizards on an old white wall . . . warm brown skins, flashing white teeth, ditto black eyes ... white oxen dragging creaking carts through the vineyards, past grey olive trees and almond groves pinkly a-bloom ... to sit in the trattoria of a village albergo, drinking a fiasco of chianti . .. moonlight over the Campagna . . . the low thrum of a guitar . . . distant laughter .. . a voice . . . O sole mio! . .. Oh, boy!

SO Italy it was—though not without qualms, I must say. The one thing that foreign travel has taught me is that, man being a social animal, the degree of one's enjoyment of a country is directly proportional to one's success in establishing relations of friendship and understanding with its inhabitants. To invade Italy, armed with no knowledge of its language save a fairly complete glossary of musical terms and operatic quotations, no notion of where to go and what to do except such as had been imparted by my more travelled friends, and no understanding of its habits and customs beyond the hints given in the handbooks of the excellent Karl Baedeker, seemed an enterprise not free from peril.

However, I hoped for the best. Concerning my ability to master the customs of the country my friends were, to a man, airily confident. On the same subject Baedeker, if a trifle less reassuring, was at least explicit. "Strangers," his handbooks informed me, "whose persons and property are unknown, have practically nothing to fear from Brigantaggio." That was fair enough: I would go incognito. Following his further advice, I resolved never to become involved in "a war of words," and always to remember that "if the haggling process is carried too far good humour may be lost for the sake of a few sous."

Baedeker did seem a bit upset about beggars, but calmed my fears somewhat by giving detailed directions for repelling them. "A slight backward movement of the head accompanied by a somewhat contemptuous expression," he observed, "is a sign of refusal well understood." To make doubly sure, I practised this gesture for several days previous to our departure. It looked superb in the mirror, but was not entirely successful with the New York taxi-driver upon whom I tried it. He seemed to think that I was trying to flirt with him. However, I reflected, not being Italian, he could not understand.

NOT to prolong the suspense, we did go to Italy—as American tourists, ignorant of the language, ignorant of the life, ignorant of the money; and the experience left us poorer, wiser, and more broadly human in our sympathies. Never again shall I despise an American tourist abroad, for I know what the poor devil is suffering. I know why people go on Cook's tours; I know why they hire couriers and guides; I know why they buy tickets for sight-seeing buses that trundle them solemnly through what is known as "Paris by night";

I know why the typical American in Paris knows nothing of the city beyond the Bronx cocktails and potato chips of the Ritz bar and the ham and eggs and ice cream sodas of Sam's Lunchroom. For I know how it feels, not to know a bargain from an extortion; not to know how to buy a cake of soap or a postage stamp, or send a telegram or argue with a taxi-driver or ask the way to a gallery—or the way back; to be, in short, completely shut out from life as it is lived daily, to be a foreigner, doomed to the companionship of such natives as speak one's own tongue, and speak it only for profit. And when I read a book by some pilgrim who tramped through Southern Albania, reaching the hearts of the people via three gestures and a ready smile, I know what a liar he is.

I know, too, incidentally, what liars my friends are, at least concerning certain subjects, and with what simple credulity even Baedeker passes on their more thumping falsehoods. Take the question of the Italian climate, for instance. Baedeker—poor dear!— says that "spring, from the end of March to June", is the best time for an Italian visit! His only misgivings concern "the zanzare, or mosquitoes", which can be "a source of great annoyance." He warned me that "windows should always be closed before a light is introduced into the room", and went on to discuss "light muslin curtains around the bed, masks for the face, gloves . . . the burning of pastilles ... a rag soaked in petroleum and hung at the head of the bed, and anointing the face with citronella." He never mentioned rain. What my friends had to say is best conveyed by that stuff about blue skies and golden suns, which is a rough consensus of their remarks. Bear with me while I tell a few plain truths.

We left New York on a mild, sunny afternoon in February, a day so ingratiating that I was all for leaving my winter overcoat behind to shift for itself, and was only restrained by M.'s reminder that I might need it on the ship and that I could mail it back as soon as the Italian heat made it burdensome. I still shudder when I think what might have happened if I had left it behind. As the ship touched the pier at Naples the thermometer fell with dizzying speed, and it began to rain. We sailed on to Messina, and saw it in the rain. We disembarked at Trieste in a cloudburst. We climbed into a water-soaked railway carriage and rode in the rain to Florence, where we had eight days of rain and two days of good old hard New England frost. We motored from Florence to Rome in a downpour that did much to explain why Hannibal gave up his Italian invasion as a bad job. We paused in the mountains to admire the fog. In Rome, to make a long story short, it rained. The only mosquito encountered during the entire visit was one that we found frozen to death in our bathtub in Florence.

Italy, I imagine, is something like California and Florida, a land whose partisans have tacitly agreed to pretend that it is never cold and never rainy, and who carry this wishfulfillment to the extent of reducing heating and drying facilities to a minimum. On no other grounds can I explain the unanimous silence on this subject preserved by Baedeker, my friends, and the collected works of Keats, Landor, Shelley, the Brownings, and Carl Van Vechten. As a matter of cold—oh, so cold!— fact, the proper outfit for a spring trip, to Italy, far from compromising masks, citronella, and light muslin curtains, is: fur-lined overcoat, fur cap with earmuffs, mackintosh, umbrella, rubber boots, fur-lined sleeping bag.

PEAKING of travelling in Italy, I should like to discuss a few difficulties for which we, as typical tourists, were unprepared. One of these is candy. All Italian custom-house officials, as we were to learn, are rabid on the subject of candy. Their attitude toward a package of lemon drops that you brought off the ship is very much that of an American coast guard toward a boatload of Scotch. There are two ways of getting past them. One is to open your luggage yourself. This results in a great deal of conversation—in which your part is negligible—and a duty of eight lire on the lemon drops. (Eight lire is forty-four cents, and the lemon drops cost ten.) The other way is to let the runner from your hotel attend to the formality. This results in a duty of eight lire on the lemon drops and a tip of ten lire for saving you all that trouble.

That same luggage is likely to be a fruitful source of expense even after you have got it past the customs; for so far as I could determine, all hand luggage carried by any American tourist in Italy is overweight. The railway officials are very clever about this, for they not only do not have to weigh the luggage to know that it is overweight, but frequently they do not even have to see it. The conductor on the train from Trieste to Florence did look at it. He said it was overweight, and that the excess charge would be thirtyeight lire. As he made out the receipt he remarked that if I had not had the luck to meet him, the charge would have been seventy-five lire. Overcome by gratitude, I finally, after much persuasion, induced him to accept twentyfive lire for himself. He had held out for thirty.

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The baggage-master at Rome, however, announced "troppo di bagaglio" as soon as he heard the porter's handtruck approaching—probably he knew by the creaking of the wheels. For one brief, fleeting moment I thought that he was actually going to weigh it, for he directed the porter—and the Wagon-Lit agent, who had somehow got attached to our little troupe—to the baggage scales. But no. He looked at the baggage, and then at the scales, and then made out a receipt for fortytwo lire. The only extra cost was five lire that the Wagon-Lit man got for seeing me through.

Before I get off the subject of trains, let me beg you, if you travel in Italy, never to let your companion swing her feet. M. did, and touched the cushion of the seat opposite, whereupon the conductor, withdrawing his nose from the glass door of our compartment, rushed in, uttering the characteristic well known Fascisti battle-cry, "Eh-ah, eh-ah, ah-la-LAH!" and fined her twenty lire for violating the law—carefully glazed and framed in an unobtrusive nook of the corridor—that forbids passengers to "damage or soil" the fittings of a railway carriage. This fine is all the rage among American tourists in Italy this year. However, "when ladies are of the party," as Baedeker pensively remarks, "the expenses are generally greater."

Speaking of lire—and who in Italy does not?—reminds me that the Italian monetary unit, in case you hadn't heard, has been stabilized, and is now worth five and one-half cents in American money. The principal coins we tourists encountered were the one lire piece, of nickel, which was virtually identical in size with the silver five lire piece; and the nickel two lire piece, which similarly resembled the silver ten lire piece. We made many laughable mistakes, of course, frequently presenting an astounded native with ten lire, under the delusion that we were giving him a two lire tip. I must say for the native, however, that he generally saved us from confusion and embarrassment by courteously pretending not to notice the error.

According to Baedeker, "the traveller will often find it useful to offer at first a lower sum than he is willing to pay, in order to be able to concede somewhat in the process of bargaining." M. tried that in various shops, with such unvarying and spectacular non-success that she appealed to me for assistance. I naturally assumed that the root of the trouble lay in the fact that M. cannot count above twenty-one in Italian. But some of my best offers were rejected with such violence that I decided to make further investigations. It was then that I discovered that the practice of bargaining ! no longer exists in Italy. Under the old system, the Italian shop-keeper named twice the value of the article as his price, and gradually came down. Now he names the same sum, and sticks to it.

The restaurants, compared with those of France, were a bit unexciting. We discovered only three kinds. First was the buca, or cellar-restaurant, or, to be frank about it, the tourist-restaurant, papered throughout with automobile add champagne posters. If you can't get to Italy, and want to know what a buca is like, go to the Pepper-pot in Greenwich Village. The invariable feature of the buca was its trio, comprising guitar, mandolin, and mandolin, of which the guitar-player sang tenor. After a stirring rendition of O sole mio (they really do sing 0 sole mio in Italy) the hat was passed, and all the Americans present put in five lire each. Thus encouraged, the musicians would sing O sole mio five times, passing the hat after every rendition. Contributions were on a sliding scale, the final one being Baedeker's well known "slight backward movement of the head." In the second category was the Italian French restaurant, which was like the American French restaurant. In the third was the real Italian restaurant, which was like Sardi's in New York including the decorations and excluding the prices, which were higher.

Our struggles with the language were not notably successful. Remembering how W. J. Henderson, the famous music critic, had once persuaded a Venetian gondolier to take him back to his hotel by handily quoting "Ritorno, vincitor" from Aida, I had hoped to make my way with similar quotations. I tried it first while getting my permesso to stay in Italy, a ceremony that entails telling one's name, one's father's name, one's mother's maiden name (no kidding), and one's profession. I tried answering the last question with a simple, "VIssi d'arte, vissi d'amore," but it did not create even amusement. Fascist officials have little humor.

A few of my phrases worked fairly well with taxi-drivers, accelerando poco a poco and presto being the most efficacious. But in general I found that what one most needs, in chatting with Italian taxi-drivers, are the Italian equivalents of "Is that so?", "I'll be damned if I will", "You and who else?", "Extras my eye!", and "You'll take that, and like it, or I call a cop." Vivacious lads, those drivers, and a teeny weeny bit grasping.

I could multiply these hints for tourists, but even these few will, I hope, prove useful. As for me, I am through with being a tourist. The next time I go to Italy I go armed with an Italian vocabulary whose size and fluency will be the delight and despait of the natives. Furthermore, I am going in the summer, when according to the credulous Baedeker, the traveller "will soon experience the enervating effects of exposure to the fierce rays of an Italian sun". No matter. Italy owes me a sunstroke or two.