Fresh food and ancient gossip
J.G. Links
ITALY: A GRAND TOUR FOR THE MODERN TRAVELLER by Charles Fitzroy Macmillan, £16.99, pp.313 FLORENCE: A LITERARY COMPANION by Francis King John Murray, £15.95, pp.242 VENICE: A LITERARY COMPANION by Ian Littlewood John Murray, £15.95, pp. 260 Aman to visit Italy and not to write a book?', asked Landor. 'Was ever such a thing heard of?' Well, yes. Every traveller with the right instinct wants to share his delight in reaching his destination, but most are satisfied with sending their friends picture postcards wishing they were there or taking photographs to show and explain to them; a few paint or draw. Only those with a low temptation resistance write books, since books present a problem. Pietro Casola met it in 1494 when he com- plained that so much had been written about Venice that there was nothing left to say. Here are three travellers who, perhaps sharing Pietro's diffidence, present us with the thoughts of their predecessors when confronted by a monument or place. On the whole it is a good solution to the prob- lem; despite Pietro's misgivings, plenty found something to say in the following 500 years. '
Charles Fitzroy goes the whole hog with a guide to all the Italian tourist spots north of Paestum, with a few that are little known. It will hardly serve the Two Cities in Five Days package tourist, but for any- one with a car and a little leisure it turns out to be the ideal guide from the planning stage to the return home. It also makes diverting reading for those who may decide to avoid the hassle and stay put. The author would have us believe that we are travelling in the company of the sightseers of the past, from the 16th-century Grand Tourists to the earnest Victorians and the beginnings of mass tourism. Sometimes he acts as bear-leader, but primarily he is con- cerned with that endlessly fascinating sub- ject, the history of taste. When we enter the Uffizzi (in which we spend little time before making for the best ice-cream shop in Florence close to it) he reminds us that Gibbon in 1764 visited it 12 times before he mentioned a picture. Like most visitors of his time he was influenced by Addison who bypassed the pictures in haste to reach the antique statues. How did it come about that Botticelli, whose works were either completely ignored or condemned as of 'barbarous taste', became so popular that the floorboards have to be strengthened wherever they, or those of the other 'primi- tives' are shown (although they continued to make Aldous Huxley 'almost sick')? When and why did Bologna cease to be the very centre of excellence in painting and become a duty visit, more renowned for the excellence of its food than its Guido Renis?
Charles FitzRoy likes his food and pro- vides a recommendation for each place vis- ited, well-chosen, to judge by those I know. It would have been amusing to follow the changing taste in food as well as in art, but the Grand Tourists seldom ate to their sat- isfaction and if they did it was because they were given the same food as they were used to in England. This is a small cavil about a book which was begun with reser- vations, on account of the huge ground it attempted to cover, and ended with delight, augmented by some atmospheric pen-and- wash illustrations by Caroline Maudoit.
John Murray have entrusted Florence in their attractive 'Literary Companion' series to Francis King and they could not have done better: he knows every house in the city and seems to have read everything written about it. His is essentially a 19th- century Florence, very different from the Harold Acton/Edward Chaney Florence in Constable's 'Travellers' Companion' series reviewed here on 11 October 1986. Their book showed us Florence in the making, when everyone was at each other's throats; amidst all the bloodshed the artists, from Giotto to Raphael, Alberti to Michel- angelo, went on creating the marvellous things the tourists have since taken over.
It is with those of the tourists who stayed on to became expatriate writers that Francis King is concerned and in the first third of his book he introduces them. They range from Montaigne, whom he finds 'much taken up with trivialities about health, diet and the discomforts of travel' (but isn't this just the reason the addicted '"King George takes two turns to become a wise man." Four letters? Search me'. armchair traveller loves his Journal?) to the author himself, an 'ingenuous and timid young man', seated beside Violet Trefusis at dinner ('Do you know who I am?', she demanded, 'I am the illegitimate daughter of Edward VII."Bosh', said Sir Harold Acton later; the dates did not fit.) There is not a great deal of the 'passionate alle- giances and no less passionate rivalries and feuds' we are promised. One of the most stirring episodes concerns Henry James's bowels and this, after some suspense, turns out to be the reverse. But Francis King, as would be expected of him, writes with such wit and penetration in his gossipy way that we are left with a vivid picture of the city and its, mostly English, writing community. Byron compared them to Margate (had he ever been to Margate?) and Henry James turned against the 'vulgar little village', 'the region of chapped lips and chilblains' (few were prepared for the cruel climate) but most of them stayed and all found some- thing to write about. The rest of the book is devoted to their own impressions or those they put into the mouths of their charac- ters, and in each case we are taken to the part of the city they are writing about. You could hardly do better on a fine day than read what they wrote while seated outside the nearest café, if you can find a seat.
One of the reasons the 19th-century expatriate writers favoured Florence, according to Francis King, was that it lacked 'the hedonistic frivolity of Venice'. I doubt whether Ian Littlewood, whose enjoyable Literary Companion mainly con- cerns 19th-century, Austrian, Venice (and to whom I owe the opening quotation of these notes) would agree. Nor would Effie Ruskin, perhaps its best chronicler; she had a struggle to find such frivolity as was going and a harder one to persuade her husband to indulge — although she occasionally succeeded, as we learn from her enchant- ing account of an afternoon on Torcello. Few could have found the Benzoni or Albrizzi salons frivolous. It is hard to judge from the writings of Casanova and the Grand Tourists whether it was as gay a place in their day as the Venetians sought to make it appear. The English spent only a short time in Venice: it lacked the social contacts which were important to them, and their bear-leaders feared too long a contact with the courtesans. According to Addison, the theatres were indifferent and lewd (although, if criticism of Addison is permissable in The Spectator, Dr Johnson thought many parts of his book 'might have been written at home'.) The earlier writers, Tafur, Fabri, Moryson, Coryate, were easily shocked and anyway play a small part in a Literary Companion.
Ian Littlewood dispenses with an intro- duction and embarks at once on six walks which take us to many corners missed by conventional guide books. He is full of information as he chats happily by our side (do you know the only .church in Venice you can walk all the way round?) and
quotes what was said by those whose foot- steps we follow. He wisely leaves out most of their rhapsodic outbursts and chooses his quotations with discrimination. My own favourite is Max Beerbohm's reaction to the Piazza:
I should not envy the soul of one who at first sight of such strange loveliness found any- thing to say.
But, like the rest of us, he could not keep silent.
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