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Charles Dickens - Pictures from Italy
Much of the romance of the beautiful towns and villages on this beautiful road, disappears when they are
entered, for many of them are very miserable. The streets are narrow, dark, and dirty; the inhabitants
lean and squalid; and the withered old women, with their wiry grey hair twisted up into a knot on the top
of the head, like a pad to carry loads on, are so intensely ugly, both along the Riviera, and in Genoa, too,
that, seen straggling about in dim doorways with their spindles, or crooning together in by-corners, they
are like a population of Witches - except that they certainly are not to be suspected of brooms or any
other instrument of cleanliness. Neither are the pig-skins, in common use to hold wine, and hung out in
the sun in all directions, by any means ornamental, as they always preserve the form of very bloated pigs,
with their heads and legs cut off, dangling upside-down by their own tails.
These towns, as they are seen in the approach, however: nestling, with their clustering roofs and towers,
among trees on steep hill-sides, or built upon the brink of noble bays: are charming. The vegetation is,
everywhere, luxuriant and beautiful, and the Palm-tree makes a novel feature in the novel scenery. In
one town, San Remo - a most extraordinary place, built on gloomy open arches, so that one might ramble
underneath the whole town - there are pretty terrace gardens; in other towns, there is the clang of
shipwrights' hammers, and the building of small vessels on the beach. In some of the broad bays, the
fleets of Europe might ride at anchor. In every case, each little group of houses presents, in the distance,
some enchanting confusion of picturesque and fanciful shapes.
The road itself - now high above the glittering sea, which breaks against the foot of the precipice: now
turning inland to sweep the shore of a bay: now crossing the stony bed of a mountain stream: now low
down on the beach: now winding among riven rocks of many forms and colours: now chequered by a
solitary ruined tower, one of a chain of towers built, in old time, to protect the coast from the invasions of
the Barbary Corsairs - presents new beauties every moment. When its own striking scenery is passed,
and it trails on through a long line of suburb, lying on the flat sea-shore, to Genoa, then, the changing
glimpses of that noble city and its harbour, awaken a new source of interest; freshened by every huge,
unwieldy, half-inhabited old house in its outskirts: and coming to its climax when the city gate is
reached, and all Genoa with its beautiful harbour, and neighbouring hills, bursts proudly on the view.
CHAPTER V - TO PARMA, MODENA, AND BOLOGNA
I strolled away from Genoa on the 6th of November, bound for a good many places (England among
them), but first for Piacenza; for which town I started in the coupé of a machine something like a
travelling caravan, in company with the brave Courier, and a lady with a large dog, who howled
dolefully, at intervals, all night. It was very wet, and very cold; very dark, and very dismal; we travelled
at the rate of barely four miles an hour, and stopped nowhere for refreshment. At ten o'clock next
morning, we changed coaches at Alessandria, where we were packed up in another coach (the body
whereof would have been small for a fly), in company with a very old priest; a young Jesuit, his
companion - who carried their breviaries and other books, and who, in the exertion of getting into the
coach, had made a gash of pink leg between his black stocking and his black knee-shorts, that reminded
one of Hamlet in Ophelia's closet, only it was visible on both legs - a provincial Avvocáto; and a
gentleman with a red nose that had an uncommon and singular sheen upon it, which I never observed in
the human subject before. In this way we travelled on, until four o'clock in the afternoon; the roads being
still very heavy, and the coach very slow. To mend the matter, the old priest was troubled with cramps in
his legs, so that he had to give a terrible yell every ten minutes or so, and be hoisted out by the united
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