EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ROADS
quires three days on muleback. The road is "either very good or very bad, but much the most of the latter; generally along the brinks of vast high mountains, the path very narrow and very rugged."[1]
Some friends of Smollett were "exposed to a variety of disagreeable adventures from the impracticability of the road. The coach had been several times in the most imminent hazard of being lost with all our baggage; and at two different places it was necessary to hire a dozen of oxen and as many men, to disengage it from the holes into which it had run."[2]
A little off the main routes one might expect almost anything. Here is an account of a drive to Petrarch's last home — Arqua Petrarcha: "A little beyond the village of Cataio, we turned off from the high road, and alighting from the carriage on account of the swampiness of the country, we walked and rowed occasionally through lines of willows, or over tracts of marshy land, for two or three miles, till we began to ascend the mountain. …[3] We passed through the village and descended the hill. Though overturned by a blunder of the drivers, and for some time suspended over the canal with imminent danger of being precipitated into it, yet as the night was bright and warm, and all the party in high spirits, the excursion was extremely pleasant."[4]
As for Tuscany, Bishop Burnet had remarked before the close of the seventeenth century, "All the ways of Tuscany are very rugged, except on the sides of the Arno; but the uneasiness of the road is much qualified by the great care that is had of the highways, which are all in very good case."[5] De La Lande agrees with Burnet: "One travels agreeably in Tuscany, the roads being in general fine, with the exception of those between Siena and the boundary of the Grand Duchy."[6]
But of the much-traveled way between Bologna and Florence Addison says: "The way … runs over several ranges of mountains, and is the worst road, I believe, of any over the Apennines, for this was my third time of
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