For this is a modern town built on a plain of mud and sand, a town of
heartrending monotony, the least picturesque of all cities in the
peninsula, the least Italian. It has not even a central piazza! You may
conjure up visions of Holland and detect something of an old-world
aroma, if you stroll about the canal and harbour where sails are now
flapping furiously in the north wind; you may look up to the
snow-covered peaks and imagine yourself in Switzerland, and then thank
God you are not there; of Italy I perceive little or nothing. The people
are birds of prey; a shallow and rapacious brood who fleece visitors
during those summer weeks and live on the proceeds for the rest of the
year. There is no commerce to liven them up and make them smilingly
polite; no historical tradition to give them self-respect; no
agriculture worth mentioning (the soil is too poor)--in other words, no
peasantry to replenish the gaps in city life and infuse an element of
decency and depth. An inordinate amount of singing and whistling goes on
all day long. Is it not a sign of empty-headedness? I would like the
opinion of schoolmasters on this point, whether, among the children
committed to their charge, the habitual whistlers be not the dullest of
wit.
And so five days have passed. A pension proving uninhabitable, and most
of the better-class hotels being closed for the winter, I threw myself
upon the mercy of an octroi official who stood guarding a forlorn gate
somewhere in the wilderness.
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