Part 2

Now, as the whole of the south of Italy, as far as the country of the Marsians, again formed an almost compact Sabellian country (except that in the greater part of Apulia the Sabellians had not made any conquests, but the Opicans maintained their dominion over the ancient Italians), and as the inhabitants of this country called themselves Italicans, it became customary with the Greeks also to call them Italicans, and the southern country Ausonia or Italia—the latter in the language of ordinary life, the former only in poetry;—but the people were rarely or never called Ἰταλοί, nor did the earlier Greeks apply to them the name Ἰταλικοί, but called them Ὀπικοί. This leads me to make a philological observation. It is well known that Juvenal uses the expression _opici mures_, which is commonly rendered in the dictionaries by “old-fashioned,” “rude,” “stupid,” or “barbarous;” but no further explanation is given. The fact is this. The Greeks viewed the Opicans in a very unfortunate light, as the destroyers of the prosperity of southern Italy, and as men that served as hired mercenaries in the southern armies (e.g. the Mamertines in Sicily); but those who remained at home were by no means contemptible; they appear in a very different light, as the leading men among the Samnites, Lucanians, and others; traits are found among them which inspire great respect, and there are undoubted traces of their having devoted themselves, at an early period, to the study of Greek literature. But those of them with whom the Greeks came most frequently in contact, were people pretty much of the same character as the Thracians and Scythians in the comedies of Aristophanes. The name Opicans was extended by them in a contemptuous sense to all the Italicans, and even to the Romans, as we see from one of the fragments of Cato. The Greeks in general distinguished themselves from all non-Greeks in a harsh and coarse manner; but the designations which they applied to foreigners differ according to the different nations with which they came in contact. The term βάρβαροι was originally no doubt applied only to nations of the Carian race, Carians, Lydians, and Mysians; Ὀπικοί, in the same sense, to the inhabitants of Italy; and Κάρβανοι in the “Supplices” of Aeschylus apparently a Cyrenaic term, seems to have been applied to the Egyptians and Libyans. I do not understand Coptic, nor do I possess any books or dictionary of that language, from which I might derive any information; but I am almost certain that the word Κάρβανοι is Coptic, for Aeschylus uses it in speaking of the Egyptians. Its original meaning is unknown to me. We thus see, how the general contrast between Greeks and foreigners presents itself in different shades.

About the time of Pyrrhus, the name Italy, in its whole extent, was applied to the peninsula as far as the frontiers of Etruria and the river Tiber. In this sense the name was used by the Greeks throughout the sixth century, and probably by the Romans also, for both strictly separate the rest of Italy from Etruria. There is a remarkable passage in Clemens Alexandrinus, who, in his “Stromata,” says, “Italy which borders on Etruria.” I do not quote Clemens as I would any other ancient Alexandrian author, for he did absolutely nothing but copy from the writers of the sixth century, that is, from those who lived about the time of Aristarchus; and he stops short there, because the authors from whose works he made his compilations, belonged to that period alone. Clemens is generally viewed in too favourable a light; still, however, he contains abundant materials, and no philologer ought to neglect him. When Etruria became more and more Romanised, though there were no Roman colonies in the interior of the country, and when the idea of other states existing in Italy by the side of Rome, vanished, another step was made in advance, and the name Italy was applied to the whole peninsula as far as the foot of the Alps; and in this sense Italy is spoken of by Polybius. Another question cannot, perhaps, be answered; it is this: did he include Liguria under the name of Italy?—did he employ the term Alps in such a manner as to comprise the Ligurian mountains between the coast of Genoa as far as the Po?—or did he extend the boundaries of Italy and Gaul from the Macra as far as the territory of Modena about the Po, then continuing them south of the Po, near Placentia and Parma, beyond the river, so as to make them run west of the Ticinus as far as the mountains? The last is the more probable, as it is the more natural line. In the official language of the Romans, the Rubicon formed the boundary of Italy, so that even Ravenna and the three Legations, which were otherwise not Gallic, were included in Cisalpine Gaul. Augustus was the first to add Cisalpine Gaul to Italy, so as to make the river Varus the frontier towards Gaul, and the town of Pola towards Istria. People may think of Augustus as they please; I do not praise him, nor do I blame him; his arrangements were great, and have exercised an influence upon the history of the world; his divisions of Rome and Italy became permanent. His division of Italy remained in force for a period of a thousand years, that is, down to the time of the Ottos, the Saxon emperors; and this durability shows that the divisions were based upon a necessary and natural foundation, whence, with the exception of slight changes, they remained during subsequent periods. On the side of Istria, the boundary has become somewhat narrower, in consequence of the change of the population, which in Istria became Slavonian. Under the emperors after Maximinian it became customary to call Lombardy, including Istria, Italy; what was then the name of the southern countries, I know not; hence the Lombard kings call themselves _reges Italiae_, and this Italy is termed by Gregorius Turonensis _parva Italia_.

We shall use the name Italy in the sense in which it is now generally done, excluding Savoy, which, like the French parts of Switzerland and Belgium, belongs to France. The country about the Adige, however, from Roveredo as far as Botzen, ought to be regarded as part of Italy. When you arrive there from Germany by way of Meran, you feel that you are quite in the south, the air and everything else reminds you of it; some of the people indeed speak German, but they are not Germans, and their countenances are ugly; the country, on the other hand, is very beautiful, and in the neighbourhood of Botzen it is like a Paradise. You feel that you are in the south and in Italy, whereas in Savoy you are in France, for it has none of the peculiarities of Italy. If you pay attention to everything, the physiognomy and the dialects, you will be astonished to find how clearly the different tribes of antiquity can still be distinguished. My friend Arndt first directed my attention to this. “When you go to Italy,” said he, “notice the difference of the tribes on the borders of Tuscany.” That was the boundary between the Etruscans and Ligurians. I was quite surprised still to find among the Tuscans the same fat, round faces, which are seen in ancient works of art. The Etruscans can still be distinguished from the Umbrians, and the latter again from the Cisalpine Gauls, at least in masses. In Lombardy you may, notwithstanding the strong mixture, still distinguish the dialects, and through them the parts which were inhabited by Gauls from those of the Veneti. It is a mistake to believe that the Italians are very unlike their ancestors; the actual difference arises from the strong admixture of Slavonians, and not from the immigrations, though the Goths were very numerous; but the Lombards were not; the former came with their women and children, and amounted, according to Procopius, to nearly a million of souls.

The three islands which are now considered as parts of Italy, and in which Italian is spoken, do not belong to it, and must be treated of separately.

Italy proper, as defined by Augustus, commenced at the _Alpes Maritimae_; the Alps are then further divided into the Cottian, Graian, Pennine, Raetian, Carnian, and Julian Alps. I shall explain to you each of these names, so as to enable you to find your way among, and to become familiar with, those mountains. From the Alps, then, which form the boundary, the APENNINES branch off in the north of Piedmont in two ranges; on the one side from the two St. Bernards near Aosta and Ivrea, and on the other from the Maritime Alps, and the two uniting in the territory of Montferrat run through Liguria close to the coast, so that in many parts of the territory of Genoa roads for vehicles along the sea have had to be made by blowing up the rocks, and horses often still find it difficult to pass along the sea-coast. They then turn east from the sea into Tuscany, where the mountains, properly speaking, first receive the name of Apennines. Afterwards they spread and extend in a south-eastern direction towards the Adriatic; then proceeding through the middle of the kingdom of Naples they fill, in many, though not parallel ranges, the whole of Lucania and Bruttium; but there the mountains all at once disappear, though in the Abruzzi, where the isthmus separates the southern from the northern country, they in some parts reach a height of 8,000 feet. For a distance of many miles nothing but small hills are visible. If that country were inhabited by an enterprising people, such as the French or English, the isthmus would long since have been broken through, for nothing would be easier than to make a canal there and to connect the two seas.

The Alps, as is well known, are primary mountains; and their ramifications in the territory of Genoa, which proceed from mount St. Bernard and the Maritime Alps, are of the same character; but the Apennines assume a different nature, and appear throughout Italy as rocks of limestone; in the Majella they may be of a different character, for Alpine productions are found there. In the southernmost part of Italy, facing Sicily, another range of mountains rises of quite a different character, being a continuation of the Sicilian mountains, of which Aetna is the central knot. The country near Rhegium is evidently torn off, as is indicated even by its name.

It is only the middle portion of the western coast of Italy, about a hundred miles from Rome, that is volcanic; the volcanic character always appears south of the Apennines, and prevails in a portion of Latium, as is evident from the soil and the lakes, as e.g., the Alban hills and the Alban lake; the lake of Nemi is a crater. The territory of Campania in its ancient sense (Terra di Lavoro) is of the same character, but it does not extend very far into the interior, for it is visible only in the Phlegraean plains as far as the Liris, and in the country about the gulf of Naples as far as the range of mountains, which terminates between Sorrento and Amalfi; this mountain forms the southern boundary of the volcanic ground. All the rest of Italy is essentially non-volcanic; Lombardy contains indeed a few springs to which one might be inclined to ascribe a volcanic origin, but at any rate only in an improper sense; the coast of the kingdom of Naples on the Adriatic, the whole of Apulia and Iapygia is altogether a limestone country. This stone, in its noblest form, as marble, appears especially in Tuscany on the frontier of Liguria, where the Apennines begin to form a distinct range; it is there that it appears most perfectly crystallised. In the south-eastern countries, on the other hand, it gradually changes into chalk, and forms natural saltpetre by an _affinité disposée_.

Although Italy is called a unique country, although we think of it as the fair and charming Hesperia, and as the country of oranges described by the poets, still it presents the very greatest variety of climate; the differences are as great, and perhaps even greater than in Germany. We may divide the whole country into three natural parts; we might perhaps make four, but there are in reality only three great divisions. The first may be termed _Greek Italy_, comprising very little more than the country occupied by Greek settlements, that is, the country of the ancient Itali from the neighbourhood of Terracina exclusive of Latium. Imagine a line running from Terracina across the mountains, the Liris and Vulturnus, down to Beneventum, through the valley of the Calor as far as the Garganus: the country south of this line is what I term Greek Italy, because its vegetation and its climate are Greek; the difference between this part and the countries north of it is greater than that existing between the latter and Germany. All the plants and trees which are seen at Rome only here and there, and are kept up with great labour and difficulty, grow there naturally and almost wild, as, for example, the cactus and aloe, which are really southern plants; the pine-tree is rare, and firs scarcely occur at all, while the dwarf-palm already grows between the rocks. Everything not only ripens earlier, as olives and figs, but the fruit is altogether of a different, a southern character; the vegetation is so mighty and gigantic that we in the north can scarcely form an idea of it. At Rome oranges may be destroyed by frost, but in Greek Italy this is impossible; and things which grow at Rome only in favourable years, are there quite common. This is the case with all plants; in short, a man there finds himself in quite a different country. When at Rome I felt as much at home as a foreigner who has not renounced his own country can possibly feel, and I entered the country free from the prejudices of a native; I visited southern Italy with the physical feeling of a Roman (the Roman climate is still very vividly before my mind), but I had not imagined that every thing could be so different at Terracina. I felt the same when I went from Germany to Italy, though it was then rather the feeling that I was entering a foreign land. The neighbourhood of Terracina is a particularly excellent country. All the wines from the districts of the Liris have a Greek character, whereas those of central Italy stand in the middle between French and Greek wines, and are in reality bad; the sky is of quite a different colour, and the air has something magic and elastic, something elevating and delicious, in comparison with which the atmosphere at Rome is heavy and oppressive. The farther south you go, the more beautiful everything becomes; I never was in the extreme south, but I still hope one day to visit it. However, I have been assured by travellers who had been there, that the charms constantly increase, the farther south you go; you perceive them even at Formiae, still more in the neighbourhood of Naples, and they appear in a still higher degree at Amalfi; in Calabria nature is said to be quite as delightful as on the south coast of Sicily. The physiognomy and the muscles of men also are different.

The second natural division consists of _central Italy_, which, however, has very different boundaries from those marked in our maps. The southern frontier has already been fixed by what I said before; but the northern runs along the Aesis from the borders of Marca Ancona, the ancient Picenum, across the ridge of the Apennines, so that the sources of the Tiber still belong to central Italy; it then passes along the Apennines on the frontiers of the territory of Bologna to the point where the Apennines unite with the Alps, so that even the coast of Genoa belongs to this part of Italy. This division is likewise based upon the vegetation. Its high mountainous parts have of course a lower temperature than the valleys, though they are by no means thoroughly different; they belong as parts to the whole, as every whole consists of several and diverse parts. Their character, on the other hand, is quite different from that of the opposite heights, which, under the same degree of latitude, descend into Lombardy. This division, then, with the exception of its highest mountain regions, is the country of the olive-tree, whence the excellent olive plantations in the territories of Lucca and Genoa, and also in Marca Ancona. In the south-western parts of Italy, as, for example, at Naples, the olives are not of equal value, though they are still excellent. The race of men in central Italy has less of the southern character; they still share with the southern people the development of the muscular fibres, though they have it in a less degree; but their features are less harsh, the forms being more round and fleshy; yet these features differ according to the different districts and races.

_Northern Italy_ does not at all follow the parallels of latitude; it commences on the frontiers between the Marca Ancona and the duchy of Urbino, and runs along the northern slope of the Apennines up to the Alps: accordingly it encloses the large basin of the Po, extending beyond the Ticino and Doria, where the boundary line rises up to the heights. This part presents a great difference in temperature and vegetation from the southern countries: the winters are severe, and at the foot of the Alps hard frosts are not uncommon; the olive-tree no longer thrives, but is more like a shrub resembling a crippled willow, and all the southern plants which still occur in central Italy, such as oranges and lemons, are raised only by artificial means and with difficulty as in Germany; the cactus, aloe, and the like, are quite out of the question. The winters are of a northern character and commence early; the atmosphere is heavy and unpleasant, and the whole country has this character more or less. A person coming from the south, e.g. from Florence or Ancona, feels that he is in a northern country: in the Tyrol and in the Raetian districts, near Trent and Botzen, the climate is far more southerly than there, although in northern Italy the heat in summer is very great; but the cold in winter is equally great, and, in addition to this, the air is generally moist and warm.

These divisions are also traceable in history: northern Italy was the country of the Gauls, and was but gradually incorporated by the Romans with Italy. The Romans not unjustly speak of the _pingue caelum_ of those countries; and the Milanese are to this day taunted by the southern Italians with their _aër crassus_. For this reason the inhabitants are on the whole ugly and awkward figures, with the exception of those of Venice, which has a very peculiar and beautiful race of men. The Ligurians also are handsome, the Piedmontese are strikingly fair and almost too delicate, while otherwise the northern Italians have uncommonly coarse skins. The Genoese approach more closely the peculiar Italian race, and the Milanese have vulgar features, and no appearance of refinement and freshness. The Piedmontese, as I have already remarked, show a high degree of refinement, and when, in addition to this, they are blooming, they are most handsome, especially the women; but such a combination is rarely seen, they are generally too fair. The Tuscans are rather a handsome race, with round faces, and the Florentines have even something German in their countenances. The development of the muscles, which we find in southern and to some extent also in central Italy, is wanting in the northern Italians. It has for long time been a matter of doubt, as to whether the ancients studied anatomy; but if a person carefully examines an ordinary Italian model, he will be convinced, that they did not require to study anatomy: the muscles are so perfectly developed, that they can be easily and completely distinguished on a naked arm; the whole play of the muscles can be seen without anatomical operation. This was probably the case to a still greater extent among the Greeks, but this is not so in the bodies of northern nations; and the muscles of a northern Italian are as much concealed under the skin as they are in our own bodies.

The dialects do not quite coincide with this division; in the north of Italy they vary greatly, although the Genoese and Ligurian predominate.

After this account of the division of Italy into three parts, I shall continue the description of its physical features. I shall first speak of the Alps. To describe them is beyond my powers; if you want to form an idea of them, you must read the excellent description of Strabo; I have seen only those of the Tyrol. The Alps with the ancients are much more extensive than in our maps; not because the nations dwelling near them applied the name to a greater range of mountains; but they are too far distant from us, and we, having a different mode of speaking, are not inclined to apply the name to the same extent of mountains; the whole range, however, forms one mass. The southernmost Alps are those known by the name of _Alpes Maritimae_, which afterwards formed a distinct region in the north of Nice. This city is, properly speaking, situated beyond the natural boundaries of Italy, but strangely enough, belongs to Piedmont, although it is situated beyond the mountains. It is very possible that, if Augustus had not made the Varus the boundary, Nice would now be a town of Provence. The Alps there rise to a mighty height, although they do not belong to the highest; the road from Nice to Coni is a difficult mountain road. It is not quite certain as to whether the ancients had a clear notion of the boundary lines. The Alps, near Briançon, are not distinguished by the ancients by a separate name; the ancient road there ran from the Rhone to Turin; that over Mount Cenis was not made till a later period. These Alps are joined by the _Alpes Cottiae_, where, until the time of Nero, there existed a small Gallic principality under the supremacy of Rome. Next come the _Alpes Graiae_ with the two St. Bernards, the great and the little; the latter is the mountain passed by Hannibal, according to General Melville and De Luc’s incontrovertible arguments. This fact ought to be beyond all doubt, and it is insufferable to see the old questions on this point raised again and again. The French army in 1800 crossed the great St. Bernard. The _Alpes Graiae_ are said to have received their name from Hercules, who was believed to have crossed them on his expedition into Spain: but the name must have had a different origin. After them follow the _Alpes Penninae_, the Simplon as far as the Furca; the _Alpes Nepontiae_, the St. Gothard, Splügen, etc. After this the names are obscure until we reach the _Alpes Raeticae_, which extend in the Tyrol from Graubündten to the Puster valley. The _Alpes Juliae_, next to these, appear under this name without any reason being assigned for it; but it was no doubt derived from Julius Caesar, to whose province they belonged, but why they were named after him, is unknown. They are also called _Alpes Noricae_; they are the Alps of Carniola, and one branch of them extends into Istria, while another runs round the gulf of the Adriatic into Dalmatia.