EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INNS
turn the stomach of a muleteer; and the victuals cooked in such a manner that even a Hottentot could not have beheld them without loathing."[1]
All this is moving enough. But to some extent the experience of the traveler was shaped by chance. Unfamiliar with the country or the language he was often as likely to get the worst accommodations as the best. The irascible Sharp was as ready to complain as Smollett, but even Sharp, on returning from Rome to Florence, finds endurable inns along the road. He writes from Florence, "We arrived here last night, after a journey of four days from Rome, and found much more agreeable accommodations than we experienced either on the road to Rome from Venice, or to Naples from Rome; indeed, to do justice to the inns, we met with so much cleanliness, and such good beds, that we found ourselves most agreeably disappointed in these articles."[2] And again: "The country from Bologna to this place [Alexandria] is a delightful, fertile plain, and the accommodations so much, better than those we meet with on the road to Rome by the way of Loretto, that I desire you will make the distinction betwixt my journey thither and my return, whenever you give a character of Italy from my letters."[3]
Bad as were the majority of the country inns north of Rome, those between Rome and Naples were worse, and they called forth endless complaints.[4] In general, observes Gorani, "the inns of these kingdoms" — Naples and Sicily — "do not deserve to bear the name. Nothing is to be found there but water, bad wine, and bread still worse."[5] On the road between Rome and Naples "they gave us for supper," says Misson, "cheese made with the milk of buffles; and we were forced to lie upon mattresses, which, I think, were made with stones of peaches."[6] "All the way to Naples," says the querulous Sharp, "we never once crept within the sheets, not daring to encounter the vermin and nastiness of those beds."[7] He elsewhere observes: "Some of the inns on this road exceed in filth and bad accommodations all that I have ever written on that subject
90
- ↑ Ibid., ii, 174.
- ↑ Letters from Italy, p. 223.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 265.
- ↑ That conditions throughout Italy had not greatly improved as late as 1847 we may learn from the following passage in a widely used guide-book. The testimony is the more significant as the makers of guide-books are likely to understate the difficulty of travel in the country they are exploiting:—
"On the road between Florence and Naples I have seldom mentioned the inns, for really they are scarcely deserving the name: besides, each vetturini [!] has his own favourite house to stop at, and it is always better to let him go there.Italian Beds
Will astonish, and no doubt please, married people who have been screwed up in small German and Swiss beds; the first sample, after passing the Alps by the Simplon, is seen at the ancient poste, Domo d'Ossola; and generally throughout Italy they are large enough for a man and his wife and four juveniles — but, notwithstanding their convenient size, they are not particularly soft; one thin mattress of wool is generally placed on the top of a palliasse, composed of dried leaves of Indian com; a really comfortable bed should have two wool mattresses at least; this, by giving a little notice to the chambermaid (i. e., man) will be readily effected. Madame Starke recommended travellers to carry their own sheets: had she also advised people to carry their own pillows, it would have been a wise suggestion; they are even now precious hard and flat, they must have been bullets in her time. Mosquito curtains are made of a fine muslin, which should be drawn tightly down; curtains with openings at the sides are literally of no use, the insinuating tormentors would creep through the eye of a needle." Coghlan, Hand-Book for Italy (1847), p. xx.
- ↑ Tivaroni, Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, i, 340, 341.
- ↑ Misson, New Voyage to Italy, i2, 382.
- ↑ Letters from Italy, p. 63.
