Europe in the Looking Glass (7 page)

The chief objects of interest in the town are the magnificent fountain by Giovanni di Bologna – a native of Douai – supporting a triumphant Neptune attended by adoring nymphs; and the two towers, one unfinished, the other rising square and unadorned, to the height of 292¾ feet. This is known as the Torre degli Asinelli, having been built by a family of that name, and inclines 3 ft. 4 ins. from the perpendicular. Its neighbour is a dwarf, squat in appearance, being only 130 ft. high and slanting 8 ft. to the south and 3 to the east. The effect of these leaning piles, with scarcely twenty yards between the two, is most extraordinary. The only other tower that we saw that was at all comparable in slenderness and proportion to the higher of them was the machicolated dock tower at Grimsby, built at the entrance to the docks for hydraulic purposes. In this case the architect, perhaps unconsciously, has achieved a unique triumph in a country where the art of building single towers is practically unknown.

Diana, though promised, was not forthcoming that day. We set out that evening therefore in a hired car for Ferrara. The driver seemed unable to distinguish between the accelerator and the brake. It was dark, and the clouds of dust thrown up by the carts caught the light in confusing beams. The intervening
country produced a disgusting stench that lay across the road in waves. On arrival at the sole hotel, we were ushered into the unconverted rooms of an ancient palace. On the walls were inlet canvas portraits of the former owners.
Wooden-looking
men and women cracked and torn and soured, sneered aristocratically upon our slumbers from their settings of painted foliage and painted bas-reliefs.

We dined well, and drank a number of sticky native wines, tasting for the first time Malvasin or Malmsey. A liqueur named Grappé, distilled from the pips of grapes, completed the meal. Then we went for a walk and looked out over the city walls. At twelve o’clock we betook ourselves to bed, and Rossi departed to play poker. We were to take lunch with his family the following day at their country-place, and then go eel-fishing. For the present, goodnight.

The next morning he was gone. So, also, was David’s
snakewood
cane. Let us be charitable and suppose that his losses at poker compelled a retreat. Whatever his intentions, he made practically nothing out of us and spent a good deal. We were sorry to miss the eel-fishing.

Ferrara is a sleepy market town, lying in the midst of flat marshy country. The heat was such that by eleven o’clock the streets were deserted. It was here that Lucrezia Borgia, having at the age of twenty-five married Duke Alfonso d’Este as her third husband, reformed her character, spending ‘the morning in prayer, and in the evening inviting the ladies of Ferrara to embroidery parties, at which accomplishment she was a great proficient’. The cathedral is twelfth century, with a
triple-gabled
façade vaguely reminiscent of Peterborough. Standing about it are a number of red marble lions. The interior is not interesting. A very beautiful building is the Palazzo dei Diamanti, so called from the diamond-cut restications with which the whole of the outside walls are ornamented.

But it is the castle, the old fortress of the d’Estes, that is the pride of the town, being the finest medieval fortress in Italy, and the finest brick building in the world. It is complete and
untouched, never having been damaged or improved. Built entirely of brick, a great towering pile with several inner courts, it stands in the middle of the town surrounded by a broad walled moat. This is crossed on each side by drawbridges, that stretch from massive, square brick gate-houses, resting on spreading bases rising from the water, to tall projecting wings, heavily machicolated and corniced, that stand out a little way from the main building. The drawbridges are still in working order. The beauty of this massive fabric rising from, and reflecting down into, the cool, dark green waters of the moat, a delicate burnt pink against the vivid blue of the sky, is incomparable. The smallness, the perfect workmanship and preservation of the bricks, gives the whole a wonderful texture, the effect of which is completed by gleaming white stone copings and small white buttressed parapets that run round the tops of the towers. To the contemporary architect who favours the use of these small bricks and the maintenance of severe and simple lines, Ferrara Castle must constitute one of the greatest of the ancient masterpieces of architecture. It is the predecessor of such examples of twentieth century architecture as the new town hall at Stockholm, perhaps the finest of the world’s modern buildings.

The disappearance of Rossi had, in a way, tended to raise our spirits. After lunch we hired a car and endured an insufferably hot drive back to Bologna, where we were thankful to sink into the comfort of the Baglioni. The car would really be ready tomorrow at midday.

That evening David and I, foreseeing the abysmal uncertainty of the morning, while waiting for Diana, determined to stay up all night, so that we should be able to sleep all day, until the car was actually at the door. With this end in view, we first visited a cinema. Italian films are usually exasperatingly short. This one, however, a series of glimpses from the life of Ivan the Terrible, was interminable. Italian historical producers understand dresses, but not settings. The long coats and tall fur head-dresses of the Boyars moved about against walls that might have decorated
Edwardian bathrooms. And the women were so virulently ugly, as to appear malformed. The atmosphere in the building thickened. The odour of patent-booted feet intensified. Above us, a wit, surrounded by a crowd of admiring ‘chaps’, found it necessary to Italianise each successive Russian name in that throaty voice that is the inevitable accompaniment of
after-dinner
audiences. In the vicinity lurked a baby. It was midnight before we had sat the performance out; and Simon was so exhausted that he went to bed.

David and I then went from café to café in search of the band that played latest. At length bandless, we sought a restaurant that was open from 4 am until 2 am, twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four. Here, homesick for the Lyons’ all-night, we ordered bacon and eggs, which materialised into hard-boiled lumps of yellow and white bouncing about on sheets of raw ham. However, we ate them, and talked for a long time to the Fascist night-watchman who had joined us. At last, dropping with fatigue, we crawled up our private staircase and went to bed.

HAVING SUCCESSFULLY PASSED
the whole morning asleep, we came down to a late lunch, to be told that the car would not after all be ready that day. This was the final straw, and with a great effort David lost his temper. He told the hotel what he thought of them and accused them of being in league with the garage. He repeated himself to the mechanics in German and French. He then made the hotel ring up the garage and telephone his feelings to the manager in Italian, adding that if the car was not forthcoming that evening, it would be removed without a farthing’s payment for the week’s work. That afternoon we spent in the workshop. And at tea-time, just as a slight shower of rain was beginning to disperse the heat, we were able to indulge a triumphant tour of the town in Diana’s lap, proudly stopping before all the cafés where we had become known. We dined for the last time at our comfortable table in the corner, off newly-shot partridges, and left Bologna about eleven o’clock next morning, the combined staffs of the hotel and the garage bidding us goodbye and Godspeed, as we drove off with our pyramid of trunks and suitcases once more behind us. The sense of freedom as we mounted the outlying spurs of the Apennines and eventually became enveloped in wet masses of cloud, was ecstatic after the hot confinement of the arcades, and the company of disreputable Fascisti. The Lombardy plain behind us, we were now entering the hill country.

Since the Apennines run in a south-easterly direction and the Bologna-Florence road in a south-westerly, the curves and hairpin bends which the crossing of the mountains necessitated were more than usually alarming. The villages became plain
and gloomy, with high, narrow streets of dull, grey, stone houses, the eaves of which began to project in the manner of all mountain dwellings. The cloud, which covered everything, was followed by a rainstorm, which left Simon in a rage and David huddled beneath an overcoat, from which only a nose and a pair of gloves protruded. Then, as we descended, the sun came out and the tiled and faceted egg of the
duomo
of Florence, rising from the distant white patches of town in the valley beneath, swung into view round a bend of hewn cliff. On the left, the white villas of Fiesole and the black points of their attendant cypresses spattered the irregular contours of a long purple brown face of hill. We passed the gilded gates of San Donato, the actual possession of which, like that of Arundel, confers a title, now borne by the family of Demidoff, who purchased it from the Pope. And eventually drew up outside the commanding gateposts, surmounted by lions, of the Villa Sassetti, the home of the Edens, whom we had come to see, and whose address we had suddenly remembered was in the Via Bolognese, down which we were freewheeling as fast as its surface would allow. The gates were shut. Through them, at the end of a long embanked avenue of cypresses that bridged an intervening valley like an aqueduct, the golden white face of the villa, with its green shutters, rose sedately from the surrounding vineyards against a background of Ilexes, and hill, and sky. I rang the bell; a motherly woman emerged from the lodge and looked suspiciously at us and our piles of luggage. She said that she would telephone to the house. Then she reappeared and asked me to come through a side-gate and telephone also. The lodge was full of sleeping forms. My efforts were of little use, as the footman at the other end could only speak Italian. But eventually the gates were opened, and we drove up the avenue, dirty and dishevelled, to the front door. The hall, through which we passed, was small and round and very high, being lighted by a skylight at the top; while below, a fountain was playing in a marble basin on a pedestal, at the bottom of which were goldfish drowsing on aquatic mosses.
The staircase was circular, and on a level with the landing at the top the wall was adorned with a series of frescoes by Tiepolo, lately removed from a palace in Venice, and slightly curved to fit their new position. We were greeted by Edward Eden, who came trotting down the stairs in a bottle-green suit, followed by his brother, Martin, in light grey. Martin is a poet. He writes finished verses, of intricate construction and polished rhythm. Just as the modern Hungarians have now begun to paint on what they call a ‘cultural basis’, relegating post-impressionism and its attendant realisms to a passing phase of anti-Victorian revolt – a revolt none the less Victorian for that – so the English writers, of whom Martin is one, are in process of discarding the fragmentary style of atmospheres and passing emotions that has characterized what is popularly termed ‘modern poetry.’ Martin has been termed a follower of the Sitwells. In reality, borne on the wings of a tireless vocabulary and an irresistible sense of verbal form, he has outstripped them. Both Edward and he seemed pleased to see us, finding August in Florence necessarily hot and dull.

We pottered round the terraced garden, admiring the baroque giants and dwarfs standing amid walls and niches of cut yew, fat stone plumes waving from their helmets and large armour-clad bellies hanging to their knees. Then we plucked and ate some yellow tomatoes, as big as grapefruit, imported from California. Returning to the house, we encountered Mr Eden, whom, despite his middle-age, has lately been the hero of all Florence, for having worsted in a duel a young Fascista who had picked a quarrel with him at a reception. They had fought with rapiers. He was most hospitable and begged us to ‘take our meals at the villa’.

We drove down to Florence for tea, and in deference to David’s passion for ‘the best’ took rooms overlooking the Arno at the Grand Hotel. Beneath sat a number of people fishing from the walled parapet of the roadway. The Arno is converted into a river by means of a municipal dam at one end of the town in order to give the various bridges with which
it is spanned an air of sanity during the summer months. Beyond the dam was a large expanse of slime and shingle, upon which the youth of the town, shameless as God made them, were disporting themselves. Our rooms were exorbitantly expensive. We decided for once to have our money’s worth. The hot water in the bath was not running as fast as might have been expected; within five minutes the plumbers had been summoned – and arrived. We then demanded two extra carpets; they were brought, and with them a writing table. The beds were moved and the mattresses changed. After that we contented ourselves with plucking shiny plaster fruits from the cheffonier and rearranging the scheme of a neighbouring Louis Quinze (Lancaster Gate period) boudoir, with the superfluous toilet ware from our bedrooms.

Having been separated from all news for three weeks, it was pleasant to receive our first letters, to learn that the family bulldog had unfortunately maimed a goat and that the bracken had, in places, grown to the height of nine feet. A firm of solicitors also wrote to demand the sum of six and sixpence owed to a client in bankruptcy; and an inhabitant of Wantage intimated that he would appreciate a recognition of his having picked up a box of my collars that had fallen out of the dickey of a two-seater seven weeks ago. He had ridden, he said, thirty miles one precious Saturday afternoon to return them. If I did not answer he threatened to expose me in the local press. I sent him a vulgar postcard.

Having changed, we drove up to dinner at the Villa, where we spent a delightful evening. Mrs Eden mixed us cocktails of her own invention. After dinner we went round the house. The bedrooms seemed to contain more of the collection than the rooms downstairs. Mr Eden had made several additions since I had been to lunch two years before. We ended up the evening, unforgivably late, on the roof of a grotto overlooking the lights of the town.

The next morning at 9.30 Martin and Edward arrived with unfailing punctuality, to take us out to see the sights. I alone
went with them, and having visited the galleries and churches with great thoroughness on a previous visit, made no particular effort at formal sightseeing. There is nothing so pleasant as revisiting a town like Florence, when the monuments of the place are no longer weighing on the conscience. We wandered into the Bargello and stood before the Donatellos, the greatest portrait sculptures of European civilization; of which, beneath the rough-hewn corrugations which he mistakes for patine, Epstein is, of contemporary artists, the most direct follower.

We then visited the Palazzo Vecchio and wallowed in the titanic curves of Vasari’s battlepieces. Here one can almost agree with Vasari’s own opinion that he was the last of the great masters. A sixteenth-century map of England, frescoed on the wall of one of the apartments, was marked with the name of our local market-town, a place that has been of complete unimportance since the reign of John. After a fleeting glance at what Baedeker terms the ‘vitreous paste of the Orsanmichele’, we returned and as David and Simon were awake, went out and had lunch on the pavement of the Via Tornabuoni. The meal was prolonged by two cavernous flasks of
chianti
.

About three o’clock, having borrowed a cushion for the back seat, we set out to see the Certosa, a monastery on a hill outside the town, noted as the scene of the imprisonment of Pius VII by Napoleon. The rooms occupied by him are kept empty in sacred memory of the event, and adorned with badly-painted portraits of the martyr. The monastery, as a whole, possesses a beautiful atmosphere, aloof from the world, the embodiment of Tuscan peace and permanence. The sloping arcading, at the side of the broad shallow steps that lead up from the entrance gate, stood out creamy white against the hot pewter-blue of the sky. Oddly detached panoramas presented themselves through each successive arch: white villas perched on little hummocks; black points of cypresses, like the teeth of a broken comb; terraced rows of salad-green vines; and the ethereal grey of the round olives on their stunted trunks climbing the hills in dotted patches; all stood out against the inevitable range of
solid mountains. A monk led us round; a fresco, half worn away, presented the same airy unreality as the olive leaves. In the middle of a spacious, cloistered courtyard, open to nothing but the turquoise imminence of the sky, stood a wellhead designed by Michael Angelo. Mounting the steps to it, the monk posed, white-robed and brown-bearded, and asked us to photograph him. The last visitors who had done so were from Copenhagen, and when they had reached home, they had sent him some snapshots of himself. We regretted that we had no camera. He, therefore, led us to what is apparently the
raison
d’être
of the establishment. In a small room, furnished from floor to ceiling with shelves, there confronted us row upon row of bottles of every shape, substance and capacity, containing an unending variety of intoxicating liqueurs. Simon and Edward were unable to resist the guile of the reverend brother behind the counter. David purchased a large majolica flask to store away behind Diana’s cushions in case of emergency. Martin, eyeing Edward disapprovingly, gulped down a miniature bottle holding rather less than a thimble; and I, who dislike liqueurs, asked for a glass of soda-water: at which, it is no exaggeration to say, the monk was genuinely shocked. Such was the lining of our Tuscan cloud.

After a further ten miles’ driving, we came to Monte Gufoni, the home of the Sitwells, a fortified castle on a hummock. This low rambling collection of dilapidated courtyards and periods, surmounted by a medieval tower, is tenanted not only by that distinguished family, but a number of others, which they are unable to evict. The porter refused to let us enter the living-rooms with their Severini frescoes, despite all Martin’s protestations of intimacy with the owners; but we were able to admire the shell and gold mosaic grotto and the terraced garden covered with flowers. The castle commands a magnificent view on all sides, but is so entirely surrounded by roads that any sense of privacy is lacking.

On our return, in the attempt to find the key to a palace that was shut, we drove round the town twice at high speed, each
time inadvertently disregarding the upraised arms of the police. We arrived at the hotel and were leisurely dismounting, when a whole fleet of them, mounted on bicycles, arrived panting with rage and excitement and fined David a pound on the spot.

We then went to dinner at the Villa. Mrs Eden’s cocktails, on top of the holy monk’s liqueur, produced an explosive effect, and no sooner was the meal finished, than the whole party launched into a loud and acrimonious political discussion, in which Simon tried wildly to explain why the Birmingham group of the Labour Party, led by Oswald Mosley, must needs adopt the name of the most impregnable Conservative stronghold in the country. As people always regard Simon’s advanced theories as either childish or unbalanced, he becomes not unnaturally annoyed. Mrs Eden and I laughed together in a corner.

The next day was Saturday. After finding that our bill was, for once, less than we expected, we drove off to Siena.