Books: Pictures from Italy
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Charles Dickens >> Pictures from Italy
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But, as there is nothing else of a public nature at which they are
allowed to express the least disapprobation, perhaps they are
resolved to make the most of this opportunity.
There are a great number of Piedmontese officers too, who are
allowed the privilege of kicking their heels in the pit, for next
to nothing: gratuitous, or cheap accommodation for these gentlemen
being insisted on, by the Governor, in all public or semi-public
entertainments. They are lofty critics in consequence, and
infinitely more exacting than if they made the unhappy manager's
fortune.
The TEATRO DIURNO, or Day Theatre, is a covered stage in the open
air, where the performances take place by daylight, in the cool of
the afternoon; commencing at four or five o'clock, and lasting,
some three hours. It is curious, sitting among the audience, to
have a fine view of the neighbouring hills and houses, and to see
the neighbours at their windows looking on, and to hear the bells
of the churches and convents ringing at most complete cross-
purposes with the scene. Beyond this, and the novelty of seeing a
play in the fresh pleasant air, with the darkening evening closing
in, there is nothing very exciting or characteristic in the
performances. The actors are indifferent; and though they
sometimes represent one of Goldoni's comedies, the staple of the
Drama is French. Anything like nationality is dangerous to
despotic governments, and Jesuit-beleaguered kings.
The Theatre of Puppets, or Marionetti--a famous company from Milan-
-is, without any exception, the drollest exhibition I ever beheld
in my life. I never saw anything so exquisitely ridiculous. They
LOOK between four and five feet high, but are really much smaller;
for when a musician in the orchestra happens to put his hat on the
stage, it becomes alarmingly gigantic, and almost blots out an
actor. They usually play a comedy, and a ballet. The comic man in
the comedy I saw one summer night, is a waiter in an hotel. There
never was such a locomotive actor, since the world began. Great
pains are taken with him. He has extra joints in his legs: and a
practical eye, with which he winks at the pit, in a manner that is
absolutely insupportable to a stranger, but which the initiated
audience, mainly composed of the common people, receive (so they do
everything else) quite as a matter of course, and as if he were a
man. His spirits are prodigious. He continually shakes his legs,
and winks his eye. And there is a heavy father with grey hair, who
sits down on the regular conventional stage-bank, and blesses his
daughter in the regular conventional way, who is tremendous. No
one would suppose it possible that anything short of a real man
could be so tedious. It is the triumph of art.
In the ballet, an Enchanter runs away with the Bride, in the very
hour of her nuptials, He brings her to his cave, and tries to
soothe her. They sit down on a sofa (the regular sofa! in the
regular place, O. P. Second Entrance!) and a procession of
musicians enters; one creature playing a drum, and knocking himself
off his legs at every blow. These failing to delight her, dancers
appear. Four first; then two; THE two; the flesh-coloured two.
The way in which they dance; the height to which they spring; the
impossible and inhuman extent to which they pirouette; the
revelation of their preposterous legs; the coming down with a
pause, on the very tips of their toes, when the music requires it;
the gentleman's retiring up, when it is the lady's turn; and the
lady's retiring up, when it is the gentleman's turn; the final
passion of a pas-de-deux; and the going off with a bound!--I shall
never see a real ballet, with a composed countenance again.
I went, another night, to see these Puppets act a play called 'St.
Helena, or the Death of Napoleon.' It began by the disclosure of
Napoleon, with an immense head, seated on a sofa in his chamber at
St. Helena; to whom his valet entered with this obscure
announcement:
'Sir Yew ud se on Low?' (the ow, as in cow).
Sir Hudson (that you could have seen his regimentals!) was a
perfect mammoth of a man, to Napoleon; hideously ugly, with a
monstrously disproportionate face, and a great clump for the lower-
jaw, to express his tyrannical and obdurate nature. He began his
system of persecution, by calling his prisoner 'General
Buonaparte;' to which the latter replied, with the deepest tragedy,
'Sir Yew ud se on Low, call me not thus. Repeat that phrase and
leave me! I am Napoleon, Emperor of France!' Sir Yew ud se on,
nothing daunted, proceeded to entertain him with an ordinance of
the British Government, regulating the state he should preserve,
and the furniture of his rooms: and limiting his attendants to
four or five persons. 'Four or five for ME!' said Napoleon. 'Me!
One hundred thousand men were lately at my sole command; and this
English officer talks of four or five for ME!' Throughout the
piece, Napoleon (who talked very like the real Napoleon, and was,
for ever, having small soliloquies by himself) was very bitter on
'these English officers,' and 'these English soldiers;' to the
great satisfaction of the audience, who were perfectly delighted to
have Low bullied; and who, whenever Low said 'General Buonaparte'
(which he always did: always receiving the same correction), quite
execrated him. It would be hard to say why; for Italians have
little cause to sympathise with Napoleon, Heaven knows.
There was no plot at all, except that a French officer, disguised
as an Englishman, came to propound a plan of escape; and being
discovered, but not before Napoleon had magnanimously refused to
steal his freedom, was immediately ordered off by Low to be hanged.
In two very long speeches, which Low made memorable, by winding up
with 'Yas!'--to show that he was English--which brought down
thunders of applause. Napoleon was so affected by this
catastrophe, that he fainted away on the spot, and was carried out
by two other puppets. Judging from what followed, it would appear
that he never recovered the shock; for the next act showed him, in
a clean shirt, in his bed (curtains crimson and white), where a
lady, prematurely dressed in mourning, brought two little children,
who kneeled down by the bedside, while he made a decent end; the
last word on his lips being 'Vatterlo.'
It was unspeakably ludicrous. Buonaparte's boots were so
wonderfully beyond control, and did such marvellous things of their
own accord: doubling themselves up, and getting under tables, and
dangling in the air, and sometimes skating away with him, out of
all human knowledge, when he was in full speech--mischances which
were not rendered the less absurd, by a settled melancholy depicted
in his face. To put an end to one conference with Low, he had to
go to a table, and read a book: when it was the finest spectacle I
ever beheld, to see his body bending over the volume, like a boot-
jack, and his sentimental eyes glaring obstinately into the pit.
He was prodigiously good, in bed, with an immense collar to his
shirt, and his little hands outside the coverlet. So was Dr.
Antommarchi, represented by a puppet with long lank hair, like
Mawworm's, who, in consequence of some derangement of his wires,
hovered about the couch like a vulture, and gave medical opinions
in the air. He was almost as good as Low, though the latter was
great at all times--a decided brute and villain, beyond all
possibility of mistake. Low was especially fine at the last, when,
hearing the doctor and the valet say, 'The Emperor is dead!' he
pulled out his watch, and wound up the piece (not the watch) by
exclaiming, with characteristic brutality, 'Ha! ha! Eleven minutes
to six! The General dead! and the spy hanged!' This brought the
curtain down, triumphantly.
There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a lovelier
residence than the Palazzo Peschiere, or Palace of the Fishponds,
whither we removed as soon as our three months' tenancy of the Pink
Jail at Albaro had ceased and determined.
It stands on a height within the walls of Genoa, but aloof from the
town: surrounded by beautiful gardens of its own, adorned with
statues, vases, fountains, marble basins, terraces, walks of
orange-trees and lemon-trees, groves of roses and camellias. All
its apartments are beautiful in their proportions and decorations;
but the great hall, some fifty feet in height, with three large
windows at the end, overlooking the whole town of Genoa, the
harbour, and the neighbouring sea, affords one of the most
fascinating and delightful prospects in the world. Any house more
cheerful and habitable than the great rooms are, within, it would
be difficult to conceive; and certainly nothing more delicious than
the scene without, in sunshine or in moonlight, could be imagined.
It is more like an enchanted place in an Eastern story than a grave
and sober lodging.
How you may wander on, from room to room, and never tire of the
wild fancies on the walls and ceilings, as bright in their fresh
colouring as if they had been painted yesterday; or how one floor,
or even the great hall which opens on eight other rooms, is a
spacious promenade; or how there are corridors and bed-chambers
above, which we never use and rarely visit, and scarcely know the
way through; or how there is a view of a perfectly different
character on each of the four sides of the building; matters
little. But that prospect from the hall is like a vision to me. I
go back to it, in fancy, as I have done in calm reality a hundred
times a day; and stand there, looking out, with the sweet scents
from the garden rising up about me, in a perfect dream of
happiness.
There lies all Genoa, in beautiful confusion, with its many
churches, monasteries, and convents, pointing up into the sunny
sky; and down below me, just where the roofs begin, a solitary
convent parapet, fashioned like a gallery, with an iron across at
the end, where sometimes early in the morning, I have seen a little
group of dark-veiled nuns gliding sorrowfully to and fro, and
stopping now and then to peep down upon the waking world in which
they have no part. Old Monte Faccio, brightest of hills in good
weather, but sulkiest when storms are coming on, is here, upon the
left. The Fort within the walls (the good King built it to command
the town, and beat the houses of the Genoese about their ears, in
case they should be discontented) commands that height upon the
right. The broad sea lies beyond, in front there; and that line of
coast, beginning by the light-house, and tapering away, a mere
speck in the rosy distance, is the beautiful coast road that leads
to Nice. The garden near at hand, among the roofs and houses: all
red with roses and fresh with little fountains: is the Acqua Sola-
-a public promenade, where the military band plays gaily, and the
white veils cluster thick, and the Genoese nobility ride round, and
round, and round, in state-clothes and coaches at least, if not in
absolute wisdom. Within a stone's-throw, as it seems, the audience
of the Day Theatre sit: their faces turned this way. But as the
stage is hidden, it is very odd, without a knowledge of the cause,
to see their faces changed so suddenly from earnestness to
laughter; and odder still, to hear the rounds upon rounds of
applause, rattling in the evening air, to which the curtain falls.
But, being Sunday night, they act their best and most attractive
play. And now, the sun is going down, in such magnificent array of
red, and green, and golden light, as neither pen nor pencil could
depict; and to the ringing of the vesper bells, darkness sets in at
once, without a twilight. Then, lights begin to shine in Genoa,
and on the country road; and the revolving lanthorn out at sea
there, flashing, for an instant, on this palace front and portico,
illuminates it as if there were a bright moon bursting from behind
a cloud; then, merges it in deep obscurity. And this, so far as I
know, is the only reason why the Genoese avoid it after dark, and
think it haunted.
My memory will haunt it, many nights, in time to come; but nothing
worse, I will engage. The same Ghost will occasionally sail away,
as I did one pleasant autumn evening, into the bright prospect, and
sniff the morning air at Marseilles.
The corpulent hairdresser was still sitting in his slippers outside
his shop-door there, but the twirling ladies in the window, with
the natural inconstancy of their sex, had ceased to twirl, and were
languishing, stock still, with their beautiful faces addressed to
blind corners of the establishment, where it was impossible for
admirers to penetrate.
The steamer had come from Genoa in a delicious run of eighteen
hours, and we were going to run back again by the Cornice road from
Nice: not being satisfied to have seen only the outsides of the
beautiful towns that rise in picturesque white clusters from among
the olive woods, and rocks, and hills, upon the margin of the Sea.
The Boat which started for Nice that night, at eight o'clock, was
very small, and so crowded with goods that there was scarcely room
to move; neither was there anything to cat on board, except bread;
nor to drink, except coffee. But being due at Nice at about eight
or so in the morning, this was of no consequence; so when we began
to wink at the bright stars, in involuntary acknowledgment of their
winking at us, we turned into our berths, in a crowded, but cool
little cabin, and slept soundly till morning.
The Boat, being as dull and dogged a little boat as ever was built,
it was within an hour of noon when we turned into Nice Harbour,
where we very little expected anything but breakfast. But we were
laden with wool. Wool must not remain in the Custom-house at
Marseilles more than twelve months at a stretch, without paying
duty. It is the custom to make fictitious removals of unsold wool
to evade this law; to take it somewhere when the twelve months are
nearly out; bring it straight back again; and warehouse it, as a
new cargo, for nearly twelve months longer. This wool of ours, had
come originally from some place in the East. It was recognised as
Eastern produce, the moment we entered the harbour. Accordingly,
the gay little Sunday boats, full of holiday people, which had come
off to greet us, were warned away by the authorities; we were
declared in quarantine; and a great flag was solemnly run up to the
mast-head on the wharf, to make it known to all the town.
It was a very hot day indeed. We were unshaved, unwashed,
undressed, unfed, and could hardly enjoy the absurdity of lying
blistering in a lazy harbour, with the town looking on from a
respectful distance, all manner of whiskered men in cocked hats
discussing our fate at a remote guard-house, with gestures (we
looked very hard at them through telescopes) expressive of a week's
detention at least: and nothing whatever the matter all the time.
But even in this crisis the brave Courier achieved a triumph. He
telegraphed somebody (_I_ saw nobody) either naturally connected
with the hotel, or put en rapport with the establishment for that
occasion only. The telegraph was answered, and in half an hour or
less, there came a loud shout from the guard-house. The captain
was wanted. Everybody helped the captain into his boat. Everybody
got his luggage, and said we were going. The captain rowed away,
and disappeared behind a little jutting corner of the Galley-
slaves' Prison: and presently came back with something, very
sulkily. The brave Courier met him at the side, and received the
something as its rightful owner. It was a wicker basket, folded in
a linen cloth; and in it were two great bottles of wine, a roast
fowl, some salt fish chopped with garlic, a great loaf of bread, a
dozen or so of peaches, and a few other trifles. When we had
selected our own breakfast, the brave Courier invited a chosen
party to partake of these refreshments, and assured them that they
need not be deterred by motives of delicacy, as he would order a
second basket to be furnished at their expense. Which he did--no
one knew how--and by-and-by, the captain being again summoned,
again sulkily returned with another something; over which my
popular attendant presided as before: carving with a clasp-knife,
his own personal property, something smaller than a Roman sword.
The whole party on board were made merry by these unexpected
supplies; but none more so than a loquacious little Frenchman, who
got drunk in five minutes, and a sturdy Cappuccino Friar, who had
taken everybody's fancy mightily, and was one of the best friars in
the world, I verily believe.
He had a free, open countenance; and a rich brown, flowing beard;
and was a remarkably handsome man, of about fifty. He had come up
to us, early in the morning, and inquired whether we were sure to
be at Nice by eleven; saying that he particularly wanted to know,
because if we reached it by that time he would have to perform
Mass, and must deal with the consecrated wafer, fasting; whereas,
if there were no chance of his being in time, he would immediately
breakfast. He made this communication, under the idea that the
brave Courier was the captain; and indeed he looked much more like
it than anybody else on board. Being assured that we should arrive
in good time, he fasted, and talked, fasting, to everybody, with
the most charming good humour; answering jokes at the expense of
friars, with other jokes at the expense of laymen, and saying that,
friar as he was, he would engage to take up the two strongest men
on board, one after the other, with his teeth, and carry them along
the deck. Nobody gave him the opportunity, but I dare say he could
have done it; for he was a gallant, noble figure of a man, even in
the Cappuccino dress, which is the ugliest and most ungainly that
can well be.
All this had given great delight to the loquacious Frenchman, who
gradually patronised the Friar very much, and seemed to commiserate
him as one who might have been born a Frenchman himself, but for an
unfortunate destiny. Although his patronage was such as a mouse
might bestow upon a lion, he had a vast opinion of its
condescension; and in the warmth of that sentiment, occasionally
rose on tiptoe, to slap the Friar on the back.
When the baskets arrived: it being then too late for Mass: the
Friar went to work bravely: eating prodigiously of the cold meat
and bread, drinking deep draughts of the wine, smoking cigars,
taking snuff, sustaining an uninterrupted conversation with all
hands, and occasionally running to the boat's side and hailing
somebody on shore with the intelligence that we MUST be got out of
this quarantine somehow or other, as he had to take part in a great
religious procession in the afternoon. After this, he would come
back, laughing lustily from pure good humour: while the Frenchman
wrinkled his small face into ten thousand creases, and said how
droll it was, and what a brave boy was that Friar! At length the
heat of the sun without, and the wine within, made the Frenchman
sleepy. So, in the noontide of his patronage of his gigantic
protege, he lay down among the wool, and began to snore.
It was four o'clock before we were released; and the Frenchman,
dirty and woolly, and snuffy, was still sleeping when the Friar
went ashore. As soon as we were free, we all hurried away, to wash
and dress, that we might make a decent appearance at the
procession; and I saw no more of the Frenchman until we took up our
station in the main street to see it pass, when he squeezed himself
into a front place, elaborately renovated; threw back his little
coat, to show a broad-barred velvet waistcoat, sprinkled all over
with stars; then adjusted himself and his cane so as utterly to
bewilder and transfix the Friar, when he should appear.
The procession was a very long one, and included an immense number
of people divided into small parties; each party chanting nasally,
on its own account, without reference to any other, and producing a
most dismal result. There were angels, crosses, Virgins carried on
flat boards surrounded by Cupids, crowns, saints, missals,
infantry, tapers, monks, nuns, relics, dignitaries of the church in
green hats, walking under crimson parasols: and, here and there, a
species of sacred street-lamp hoisted on a pole. We looked out
anxiously for the Cappuccini, and presently their brown robes and
corded girdles were seen coming on, in a body.
I observed the little Frenchman chuckle over the idea that when the
Friar saw him in the broad-barred waistcoat, he would mentally
exclaim, 'Is that my Patron! THAT distinguished man!' and would be
covered with confusion. Ah! never was the Frenchman so deceived.
As our friend the Cappuccino advanced, with folded arms, he looked
straight into the visage of the little Frenchman, with a bland,
serene, composed abstraction, not to be described. There was not
the faintest trace of recognition or amusement on his features; not
the smallest consciousness of bread and meat, wine, snuff, or
cigars. 'C'est lui-meme,' I heard the little Frenchman say, in
some doubt. Oh yes, it was himself. It was not his brother or his
nephew, very like him. It was he. He walked in great state:
being one of the Superiors of the Order: and looked his part to
admiration. There never was anything so perfect of its kind as the
contemplative way in which he allowed his placid gaze to rest on
us, his late companions, as if he had never seen us in his life and
didn't see us then. The Frenchman, quite humbled, took off his hat
at last, but the Friar still passed on, with the same imperturbable
serenity; and the broad-barred waistcoat, fading into the crowd,
was seen no more.
The procession wound up with a discharge of musketry that shook all
the windows in the town. Next afternoon we started for Genoa, by
the famed Cornice road.
The half-French, half-Italian Vetturino, who undertook, with his
little rattling carriage and pair, to convey us thither in three
days, was a careless, good-looking fellow, whose light-heartedness
and singing propensities knew no bounds as long as we went on
smoothly. So long, he had a word and a smile, and a flick of his
whip, for all the peasant girls, and odds and ends of the
Sonnambula for all the echoes. So long, he went jingling through
every little village, with bells on his horses and rings in his
ears: a very meteor of gallantry and cheerfulness. But, it was
highly characteristic to see him under a slight reverse of
circumstances, when, in one part of the journey, we came to a
narrow place where a waggon had broken down and stopped up the
road. His hands were twined in his hair immediately, as if a
combination of all the direst accidents in life had suddenly fallen
on his devoted head. He swore in French, prayed in Italian, and
went up and down, beating his feet on the ground in a very ecstasy
of despair. There were various carters and mule-drivers assembled
round the broken waggon, and at last some man of an original turn
of mind, proposed that a general and joint effort should be made to
get things to-rights again, and clear the way--an idea which I
verily believe would never have presented itself to our friend,
though we had remained there until now. It was done at no great
cost of labour; but at every pause in the doing, his hands were
wound in his hair again, as if there were no ray of hope to lighten
his misery. The moment he was on his box once more, and clattering
briskly down hill, he returned to the Sonnambula and the peasant
girls, as if it were not in the power of misfortune to depress him.
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.
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