CHAPTER XIV

BY ADRIATIC'S SHORE

The Italian shore of the Adriatic is a terra incognita to most travellers in Italy, save those who take ship for the east at Brindisi, and even they arrive from Calais, Paris or Ostende by express train without break of journey en route.

The following table gives the kilometric distances of this shore road by the Adriatic, through the coast towns from Otranto in Pouilles to Chioggia in Venetia. The itinerary has, perhaps, never been made in its entirety by any stranger automobilist, but the writer has seen enough to make him want to cover its entire length.

Population Kilometres Otranto 22,266 0 Lecce 2,333 40.4 Brindisi 16,719 80 Monopoli 7,620 151 Bari 58,266 193.3 Barletta 31,194 248.2 Manfredonia 8,324 330 Foggia 14,067 368.4

Here the road leaves the coast but joins again at Ortona.

Isernia 7,687 526.7 Ortona 6,366 673.5 Pescara 2,612 694.3 Ancona 28,577 849.7 Pesaro 12,547 909.7 Rimini 10,838 945.3 Ravenna 18,571 995.3 Ferrara 28,814 1,068.7 Chioggia 20,381 1,160.5

The above are the cold figures as worked out from the Road Books, Maps and Profiles of the Touring Club Italiano. The whole forms a rather lengthy itinerary but, in part, it is within the power of every automobilist in Italy to make, as he crosses Umbria from Rome to the Adriatic, by including that portion of the route between Ancona and Chioggia. This cuts the distance to the more reasonable figure of a little more than three hundred kilometres.

Taranto, Otranto and Bari are mere place names for which most do not even know where to look on the map. Conditions of life were not easy or luxurious here in the outposts of the western empire, and the influx of alien Greek and Turk and Jew has ever tended to change the Italian colouring to one almost Oriental in tone and brilliance.

Brindisi has usually been considered a mere way station on the traveller's itinerary, where he changes train for boat. But it is more than that. It was the ancient Brentesion of the Greeks, indeed it was the gateway of all intercourse between the peninsula and the Greece of the mainland and the islands of Ægina.

Virgil died here on his return from Greece in 19 B.C., and for that reason alone it at once takes rank as one of the world's great literary shrines. But who ever heard of a literary pilgrim coming here!

Brindisi's Castello, built by Ferdinand II and Charles V, still overlooks the harbour and, though it performs no more the functions of a fortress, it is an imposing and admirable mediæval monument.

Near the harbour is a svelt Greek column with a highly sculptured capital and an inscription to the memory of a Byzantine ruler who built up the city anew in the tenth century, after it had fallen prey to the Saracens. This column, too, supposedly marks the termination of the Appian Way, which started from Rome's Forum and wandered across the Campagna and on to this eastern outpost.

Bari, like Brindisi, was an ancient seaport. Horace sang its praises, or rather the praises of its fish, as did Petrarch of the carp at Vaucluse, and the town was one of the most ancient bishoprics in Italy.

From the tenth to the fourteenth century the fate of the town was ever in the balance, changing its allegiance from one seigneur to another, who, for the moment, happened to be the more masterful. In the fourteenth century it became an independent Duchy, and in 1558 was united with the kingdom of Naples.

Bari's Castello was built in 1160 and, like that at Brindisi, is of that grim militant aspect which bespeaks, if not deeds of romance, at least those of valour.

In the Piazza Mercanto is a great bronze lion wearing an exaggerated dog-collar on which is inscribed the "Custos Justitiæ," the heraldic motto and device of the city.

Manfredonia, Termoli, Ortona and Pescara are all of them charming Adriatic towns, each and all possessed of vivid reminders of the days of the corsairs, adventurers and pirate Saracen hordes. Their battlemented walls and castles still exist in the real, and little of twentieth century progress has, as yet, made its mark upon them. Mythology, history and romance have here combined.

Ancona is not included in every one's Italian itinerary. This is the more to be regretted in that it is very accessible, not only by road but by rail from Ravenna or Perugia, or by sea, in eight or ten hours, from Venice. The city of fifty thousand inhabitants, with a Ghetto of six thousand Jews, is beautifully situated on an amphitheatre of hills overlooking the Adriatic. The mole which encloses its harbour supports two triumphal arches, making a sort of monumental water-gate unequalled by anything similar in all the world. One of these arches was erected by the Roman Senate in 122, to the honour of Trajan, and the other in honour of Pope Clement XII in 1740.

Trajan undoubtedly deserved the honour. It was he who was the first to hold that "it was better a thousand guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned." When he appointed Subarranus Captain of the Guard, he presented him, according to custom, with a drawn sword, saying, as he handed it, these memorable words: "_Pro me, si merear, in me_" ("Use this sword for me: If I deserve it, against me"). It is good to know that men like these may have memorial arches as well as mere cut-throat conquerors.

Every student of Italian architecture knows Piranesi's drawing of the famous Trajan arch at Ancona. It was more truthful than many of his drawings of Roman antiquities, and might indeed have been made in these latter years, for little is changed on Ancona's seafront.

There is at Ancona a memory of Filippo Lippi, a monkish draughtsman of great ability, a contemporary of the better known Fra Angelico.

Once he set out on the blue waters of the Adriatic, from the very steps below the Arch of Trajan where the waves lap to-day, for a little sail. Like many people who make excursions in boats, he was unskilful, and worse, for, drifting out to sea, he was in due time picked up by a Barbary pirate and next put foot on shore in Africa. He drew the pirate chief's portrait on the wall of his prison, and in spite of the interdiction of the Koran, the Moor was pleased and gave the Fra his liberty forthwith, taking him back to within sight of Trajan's arch, when he was precipitately put over side and made to swim ashore, the pirate returning from whence he came.

Senegallia, between Ancona and Pesaro, was an appanage of the Dukes of Urbino. It is an enchanting, unworldly little town, even to-day, its great protecting walls pierced by six gateways, the same through which a whole hierarchy of conquerors passed in the long ago. It is a place of dreams, if one is given to that sort of thing. The Mediæval Palazzo Communal is still in evidence, and the little creek-like harbour is full of wobbly little boats with painted masts and sails, all most quaint. Behind are the gentle slopes of vine-clad hills shutting out the western world beyond.

Pesaro, the ancient Pisaurum, is the capital of the united provinces of Pesaro and Urbino. The Malatesta, the Sforza and the Rovere families all ruled its destinies in their time, and the little capital came to be a literary and art centre which, in a small way, rivalled its more opulent compeers.

Pesaro's ducal palace is, in a way, a monument to the Queen Lucrezia Borgia, as is the rude fortress of the walls a memory of Giovanni Sforza, her first husband. At the age of twenty-six, Giovanni married the daughter of Alessandro Borgia, who was but thirteen, and brought his bride forthwith, blessed with the Papal benediction, to this bijou of a palace where fêtes and merrymakings of a most prodigal sort went on for many nights and days.

Back to the coast and one comes to Rimini, the southern terminus of the Via Æmilia. Rimini's Arco d'Augusto was erected as a memorial to the great Augustus in 27 B. C. The Ponte d'Augusto, too, is a monument of the times, which date back nearly nineteen centuries. It was begun in the last year of the life of Augustus.

The Palazzo del Comune contains the municipal picture-gallery, and before it stands a bronze statue of Pope Paul V, but the greatest interest lies in the contemplation of the now ruined and dilapidated Castel Malatesta. Its walls are grim and sturdy still, but it is nothing but a hollow mockery of a castle to-day, as it has been relegated to use as a prison and stripped of all its luxurious belongings of the days of the Malatesta. The family arms in cut stone still appear above the portal.

The chief figure of Rimini's old time portrait gallery was the famous Lord of Rimini, Sigismondo Malatesta, a man of exquisite taste, a patron of the arts, a sincere lover of beauty.

From Rimini to Ravenna, still within sight of the Adriatic's waves, is some fifty kilometres by road or rail, through a low, marshy, unwholesome-looking region, half aquatic, half terrestrial.

La Pineta, or the Pine Forest, the same whose praises were sung by Dante, Boccaccio, Dryden and Byron, and which supplied the timber for the Venetian ships of the Republic's heyday is in full view from Ravenna's walls.

Boccaccio made the Pineta the scene of his singular tale, "Nostagio degli Onesti"; the incidents of which, ending in the amorous conversion of the ladies of Ravenna, have been made familiar to the English reader by Dryden's adoption of them in his "Theodore and Honoria."

"Where the last Cæsarean fortress stood, Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore And Dryden's lay made haunted ground."

Ravenna sits grim and proud in the very midst of wide, flat, marshy plains across which straight arrow-like roads roll out seemingly interminable kilometres to the joy of the automobilist and the despair of the traveller with a hired hack. The region between Ravenna and the sea is literally half land, half water, marshes partitioned off by canals and pools stretching away in every direction. It is lone and strange, but it is not sad and above all is most impressive. Turn out of any of Ravenna's great gates and the aspect is invariably the same. Great ox-carts, peasants in the fields and, far away, the brown sails of the Adriatic fishing boats are the only punctuating notes of a landscape which is anything but gay and lively. It is as Holland under a mediæval sun, for mostly the sun shines brilliantly here, which it does not in the Low Countries. Ravenna was the ancient capital of the Occidental Roman Empire, but to-day, in its marshy site, the city is in anything but the proud estate it once occupied. The aspect of the whole city is as weird and strange as that of its site. It is of far too great an area for the few thousand pallid mortals who live there. It has ever been a theatre of crime, disaster and disappointment, but its very walls and gateways echo a mysterious and penetrating charm. It possesses, even to-day, though more or less in fragments it is true, many structures dating from the fifth to the eighth centuries, though of its old Palace of the Cæsars but a few crumbled stones remain. Ravenna is the home of the classic typical Christian architecture which went out broadcast through Europe in the middle ages. The Palace of Theodoric hardly exists as a ruin, but some poor ugly stone piers are commonly granted the dignity of once having belonged to it, as well as an ancient wall of brick.

Theodoric's tomb is in La Rotonda, a kilometre or more from Ravenna in the midst of a vineyard. The earliest portrait in Ravenna's great gallery of notables is that of Theodoric, an art-loving ruler, an enlightened administrator, with simple, devout ideas, and a habit of nightly vigils. Ravenna was to him a world, a rich golden world, polished yet primitive.

Aside from its magnificent churches, Ravenna's monuments are not many or great.

There is Theodoric's Palace before mentioned, the Archiepiscopal Palace, a restored work of the sixteenth century, and the Palazzo Governativo built in the eighteenth century, with many splendid fragments--columns and the like--of an earlier period incorporated therein.

On the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele are two great granite columns, erected in 1484 by the Venetians, and some fragments of a colonnade or loggia which may be a part of the Hall of Justice of Theodoric's time.

The tomb of Dante is near the church of San Francesco. It is an uncouth shrine which covers the poet's remains, but it ranks high among those of its class from more sincere motives than those which usually induce one to rave over more pompous and more splendid charms.

"_Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar_,"

sang Byron.

Northward from Ravenna, but in roundabout fashion whether one goes by road or rail is Comacchio. Comacchio is four kilometres from the Adriatic and forty-four from Ferrara. Ariosto called the inhabitants:--

".... _gente desiosa Che il mar si turbi e sieno i venti atroci_,"

but this need not deter the seeker after new sensations from going there to see them catch eels on a wholesale plan, and handle them afterwards in a manner of cleanliness and with a rapidity which is truly marvellous.

They are caught by wholesale, and a _tagliatore_ armed with a useful-looking hatchet called a _manarino_ chops them into pieces called _morelli_. After this the eels are cooked on a great open-fire spit and finally packed in boiling oil, like the little fishes of the Breton coast, and ultimately sold and served as _hors d'oeuvres_ in Italian restaurants the world over. North of Comacchio on the shore of a Venetian lagoon is Chioggia.

Chioggia has no great architectural or historical monuments, but is as paintable as Venice itself; indeed, it is a little brother to Venice, but lacking its splendour and great palaces. Its quay-side Madonna is venerated by all the fishing folk round about.

Venice early conquered Chioggia and in turn the Genoese came along and took it from their rival in 1379, though the Venetians within the year got it back again. With such a fate ever hanging over it, Chioggia had not great encouragement to build great palaces and so its inhabitants turned to fishing and have always kept at it.

Unless one is crossing direct from Florence to Venice, by the Futa Pass and Bologna, Ferrara, as a stopping place on one's Italian itinerary, is best reached from Ravenna. The road is flat, generally well-conditioned and covers a matter of seventy kilometres, mostly within sight of the sea or lagoons, more like Holland even than the country through which one has recently passed.

Of all the romantic Renaissance shrines of Italy none have a more potent attraction than Ferrara.

The Ferrara of the Middle Ages, like the Ferrara of to-day, is a paradox. No Italian State of similar power and magnificence ever exerted such disproportionate influence upon mediæval Italy; no city in United Italy in which are so combined the fascinating treasures of the past and modern political and industrial enterprise is so ignored by the casual traveller. Once the strongest post on the frontier of the Papal States, the seat of the House of Este, the abiding place of Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto, and the final marital home of Lucrezia Borgia, the golden period of its sixteenth century magnificence has sunk into an isolation unheeded by contingent development, and its inhabitants have shrunken to a bare third of their former numbers.

The ducal family of Este lived the life of the times to the limit of their powers. They, one and all, inherited a taste for crimes of various shades, just as they inherited the love of art. Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, had no profound moral sense in spite of his finer instincts, and was so "liberal minded" that he shocked Bayard, the "_chevalier sans peur et sans reproche_," into crossing himself "more than ten times" as an antidote, when he first came into the ducal presence.

Ferrara's castello or castel vecchio, which is better known as its ducal château, is a remarkable specimen of military architecture. On Saint Michael's Day, 1385, its first stones were put in place by Bartolina di Novara, and the ardour of the workmen was so great that at the end of sixteen months the work was completed as it is to-day, with its towers, its doubly thick walls, and all its brutal force.

A fosse surrounds the edifice, and two gateways only give access to the interior. Under Alphonso I certain embellishments were added to the old castle, bringing it up to the times in luxurious decorative details and the like. The rude feudal castle now became virtually a residential château. The crenelated battlements were transformed into mere parapets, the _chemins de ronde_ into terraces and hanging gardens.

Pictures and frescoes were at this time added liberally, and, though to-day many of these have been dispersed to the four corners of Europe, enough remain to indicate the importance of these new embellishments.

The cachots or dungeon cells still exist, and are regarded--by the guardian--as one of the chief "sights." Some others may think differently.

The house of Ariosto is one of Ferrara's most popular attractions, though indeed it is not remarkable architecturally. Ariosto was one of the brilliant figures of the Ferrara court, but his house was modest and bare, as is remarked by a tablet which it bore in the poet's time, and on which was carved in Latin: "My house is small but was built for my own convenience and entirely with my own money." How many householders of to-day can say the same?

In the hospital in the southern quarter of the town is still to be seen the prison cell commonly assigned to Tasso. On the walls are scribbled the names of Lord Byron and Casimir Delavigne and Lamartine's verses on Tasso, and over the door runs the inscription--

+---------------------------------------------+ | "INGRESSO ALLA PRIGIONE DI TORQUATO TASSO." | +---------------------------------------------+

For seven years and more Tasso lived within these four narrow walls.

"Ferrara! in thy wide and grass-grown streets Whose symmetry was not for solitude, There seems as 'twere a curse upon the seats Of former sovereigns, and the antique brood Of Este....

* * * * *

And Tasso is their glory and their shame." "_Childe Harold._"

Closely bound with Ferrara and the fortunes of the family of Este is the town of that name midway between Ferrara and Padua at the foot of the Euganean Hills. The ancestral residence of the family of Este is here, but in a more or less ruinous state to-day.

The "Rocca" or Castle of Este was erected in 1343 by Ulbertino Carrara, and repaired by the Scaligers during their temporary possession of it. It is a noble dungeon tower, with frowning embrasures and battlements, and stands at least upon the site of the original fortress. Alberto Azzo (born 996) was the more immediate founder of the house here on the death of the Emperor Henry III. The ancestry of Alberto may be traced in history to Bonifazio, Duke or Marquis of Tuscany, in 811. Poetry carries it much higher. The magician, in the vision of the enchanted shield, enables Rinaldo to behold Caius Attius as his remote ancestor:--

"Mostragli Caio allor, ch'a strane genti Va prima in preda il gia inclinato Impero, Prendere il fren de' popoli volenti, E farsi d'Este il Principe primiero; E a lui ricoverarsi i men potenti Vicini, a cui Rettor facea mestiero, Poscia, quando ripassi il varco noto, A gli inviti d'Honorio il fero Goto." --_Orlando Furioso._

Guelph, Duke of Bavaria (succeeded 1071), from whom all the branches of the House of Brunswick are descended, was the son of Alberto Azzo, Marquis of Este, by his first wife, Cunegunda, a princess of the Suabian line.

Fulco I, Marquis of Italy and Lord of Este, the son of Alberto Azzo by his second wife, Garisenda, daughter of Herbert, Count of Maine, was the founder of the Italian branch from which the Dukes of Ferrara and Modena descended, the male line of which became extinct at the end of the last century. The Duke of Modena, who was deposed in the mid-nineteenth century, represented the house of Este in the female line,--his grandmother, Maria Beatrix, having been the last descendant of the Italian branch. Este continued in the possession of the descendants of Alberto until 1294, when it fell an easy conquest to the Carraras. Successively a dependency of Padua and of the Verona Scaligers, it passed to Venice in 1405, retaining its local government and municipal institutions.

Near Este is Arqua, where Petrarch died in 1374. It has been a literary shrine since 1650, for a chronicler of that time remarks it as one of the things to come to Italy to see. The house is still to be seen, and the sarcophagus containing his remains and an inscription beginning--

"_Frigida Francisci lopis hic tegit ossa Petrarce_"

is before the tiny church of this little frequented and little exploited village.