The Expanding Eye

The Expanding Eye
A First Journey to the Mediterranean
Peter M. Green
First published in United States of America
by Abelard-Schman Limited, 1957
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER : 57 : 5567

Contents
Preface 8
1 Journey to Italy 10
2 Florence 44
3 Naples and Capri 89
4 Sicily: Segesta and Selinunte 143
5 Sicily: Agrigento and Syracuse 180
6
For Anna
Una giornata come stammatina,
Senti, è un gran pezzo che nun s’è piu data.
Ah bene-mio! te senti artifatata;
Te s’òpre er core a num sta piu in cantina!
Tutta la vorta der celo turchina;

L’aria orora che pare imbarismata;
Che dilizzia! che bella matinata!
Propio te dice: cammina-cammina.
G. G. Belli
l’ardore
Ch’i’ ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto,
e degli vizii umani e del valore.
Dante, Inferno xxvi
Preface
T HIS IS THE STORY of a journey that I made

four years ago, and of which I have only recently
come to realise the full meaning. It traces not only my
progress through Italy and Sicily, but also the integral
change in my own outlook on life that resulted from it:
the awareness not only of the permanent immanence of
the past in the present, but also of the unifying force
and significance of a land itself lying behind those who
live in it, and shaping them to its own pattern. It is a
pilgrimage of the heart from insular naivety to a final
surrender to what still remains for me the only true
reality: the reality of the land, which determines all
history and every creed.
This awakening was a gradual process, and not com-
pleted as simply as my narrative might suggest. But
I have tried to portray in these chapters the basic
change of attitude that I underwent; and for this some
telescoping of events, and the transference of certain
experiences that occurred on other later journeys was
necessary. In particular, the reader should be warned
that the attitude set out in the first two chapters rep-
resents not so much the writer’s present views as an
attempt to capture the outlook on life with which he
left this country; the raw material, wretchedly un-
orientated, which is the common heritage of the mass
of people in these lands, and on which the south worked
a metamorphosis in the fullness of time.
This is why I have written about my travels in lands
9
Which are better known to a great number of people
than they are to me, and which have been described
many times before by men whom, as T. S. Eliot says,
one cannot hope

To emulate - but there is no competition-
There is only the flight to recover what has
been lost
And found and lost again and again: and
now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious.
If my discovery of Italy and Sicily has been less - as

it must be - than that made by others, at least it is
my own: in that sense these pages represent a unique
experience.
I would like to record my gratitude to Mr. James
Gordon, for persuading me to begin this book; to
Mr. R. L. Banks, Signor Fosco Maraini, and the Ital-
ian State Tourist Department for the load of their
superb photographs; and to Messrs Faber and Faber
Ltd. for the quotations from East Coker, The Waste
Land, and Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot. I
should particularly like to thank Signor Mariani for
reading my MS, and thus saving me from many el-
ementary errors of fact. For any that remain I am
entirely responsible.
Peter Green
Cambridge, October 1952
10
10
CHAPTER 1. JOURNEY TO ITALY 11
Chapter 1
Journey to Italy
IT COULD NOT have been a better day. Even the

most timorous of Channel passengers - the sort of
people who are sick if they go out for an hour’s sea fish-
ing - were cheerful and active. The bar teemed with
customers. For the home-coming, French cognac at
1/6 a glass and cigarettes at half a crown for twenty
must have seemed outrageous, yet another example
of the tyranous British Government’s inroads into the
pockets of the oppressed individual. I heard a swarthy
Provençal arguing furiously with the bartender, who
shrugged his shoulders, whistled between his teeth,
and put more insulting gesture into swabbing down
his bar than I would have thought possible. But for us
who were outward bound it was a symbol of incipient
freedom. It was only eleven o’clock: but we downed
our whiskies and fingered out cigarettes (wrapped–in-
credible pre-war luxury-in shining tinfoil) with loving
exhilaration. Two obvious undergraduates bought a
bottle of brandy, and the wife of a radio comedian
began to flirt loudly and outrageously with a wearily
impervious purser.
I eased my pack off my shoulders and went up on
deck. The air was cool, but there was hardly a breath
of wind stirring. Behind us the grey cliffs of Newhaven
were fading into the haze. Smudged on the hori-

zon was the smoke of an ocean-going liner making for
Southampton. The sea was slate-grey, flecked here and
there with a touch of the opaque cobalt, as thickly
blue as a bowl of washing-dye, that was to become
a commonplace in the Mediterranean. The deck vi-
brated gently above the engine-room, and a faint smell
of Diesel oil pervaded the air.
At first the passengers had swarmed about the deck
in aimless excitement, like ants disturbed, or children
let out to play. Now they settled down together into
small chattering groups. Snatches of conversation came
floating across to my ears. ’Of course, it’s too late to
see Paris as you really should ... I remember the plane
trees in the Champs-Elysées in spring last year ... and
those wonderful pavement artists ...’ ‘Rogers said you
can’t beat the A.A. Fixed up the triptych and every-
thing, and they say they’ll pick you up in any country
in Europe if you have a breakdown ...’ ‘Funny crowd,
the Froggies. Why, they ask for tips ...’ ‘It’s all non-
sense about French girls being all right. They’ve all
got mothers like Zeppelins ...’ ‘Good God, no. Not the
Riviera. There’s a little place near Ventimiglia ... no
trippers there last year, but you never know ...’ Sweet
wrappings on the deck. A plump mother looking for
her children. Two young men in denims poring over
a tattered map. A French steward walking round in-
toning in a high expressionless voice, ‘ Messieurs et
mesdames ! Take your place for the first sitting now,
please. Take your place . . .’ I saw a face I knew
wandering uncertainly towards me across the deck. It
belonged to a thin, whining, highly harassed woman
of about forty, with three horrible children, who had

buttonholed me in the boat-train, and succeeded in
telling me all about herself between Victoria and
Newhaven. She was going to stay with an Italian who
had been billeted on her as a prison of war. ’1E was
a funny chap. All dark and secretive. Not like us at
all. But ’e was clever with ’ands! Wonderful, it was.
Made toys for the kiddies and all. And sing! Regular
canary, when ’e was feeling ’appy.’ I asked where he
lived. It was somewhere south of Rome: she couldn’t
remember the name. ‘But we got to get there quick: I
only brought four pounds in travellers’ cheques.’
‘What?’
‘Well, no point in bringing any more, was there?
Mean to say. ’E’s seeing us through it all.’
I asked her if he spoke good English.
‘Oh yes, wonderful, ’e was. Picked it up in no time.
Clever, these foreigners.’
‘Did he teach you any Italian?’
‘Me? Learn Eye-tye? Not blooming likely. Let them
learn English, that’s what I say.’
I made a mental note to keep clear of her at frontiers
(or anywhere, for that matter) and retired into a paper.
As things turned out, I was not to be lucky.
At the bar a smooth young Parisian smiled at me.
‘You are English, yes?’
I admitted it.
‘You are coming to Paris?’
I said I was, but only passing through to Italy. He
sighed gently, spread a well-manicured hand over the
counter, and ordered two cognacs. As we drank he
launched into a long eulogy of the English, especially
of English young men. He invited me to dinner with

him in his Paris flat. There would be plenty of time
before I caught the Milan express. As we went up to
the deck he slipped his hand gently into mine. I ex-
cused myself rapidly, and vanished in the direction of
the W.C.; then doubling on my tracks, came up on the
other side of the deck. The coast of France was just
visible on the horizon.
An hour later we steered slowly up a narrow channel
to the Dieppe dockside, through smashed lock-gates,
rusting broken gear, and ruined houses. I saw bombed
cranes leaning drunkenly over the jetty, and piles of
abandoned scrap-iron showed above the greasy water
as it lapped round the piles. It was somehow typi-
cally French: the harbour was in full working order,
but nobody could be bothered to tidy it up. The town
itself was busy enough, but it looked as if it could do
with a good clean-up and a fresh coat of paint. The
Paris express was waiting at the dockside, curving away
round the harbour so sharply that it looked as if it
would jump the rails if it so much as moved. A crowd
of porters in their blue jeans stood on the quayside,
yelling hugely and competitively in an entirely incom-
prehensible argot. A rail-crane fussed backwards and
forwards in front of them, manoeuvring cannily for an
opening. Half the passengers found that they had for-
gotten to get their landing-cards, and an interminable
queue, weighed down with luggage, formed dismally
round the promenade deck. The heat and confusion
and general ill-will was tremendous.
Out of this maelstrom, to my surprise, order was
restored in an incredibly short. As soon as tied
up alongside two wide gang-planks were let down, and

we were all off the boat in under five minutes. No
bother, no red tape, and no Customs. The French be-
gan to rise in my estimation. The boat-train was nearly
twice as long as its English equivalent, and there was
plenty of room for everybody. I found to my great de-
light that French third-class compartments are nearly
as good as English firsts, and that the luggage-racks
were built to take large articles. Travelling down from
London I had been in perpetual fear of killing the
harmless-looking individual opposite. Headlines. Bank
Clerk on Spree Brained With Rucksack. Now I stowed
it away deeply behind a suitcase, and collapsed into
my seat with a sigh of relief.
Half the passengers seemed determined not to
board the train till the last minutes, but stood around
in groups on the quayside arguing with officials, or
chased unide=ntifiable porters from luggage-van, to
consigne and back again. A grubby child stuffed its
thirteenth chocolate into its mouth and was cheerfully
sick on a buffer. Then somewhere to the rear a whistle
shrilled, and the whole scene dissolved as if by magic.
Everybody was on board in thirty seconds, and dead
to the minute the train pulled out. Despite the ca-
sualness, the muddle and the je m’en foutisme things
seemed to get done efficiently enough.
Several people crowed into the compartment. An
enormously rotund Frenchman in a black suit, with
large moustaches and a watch-chain. He looked like
a caricature of all the Parisian Civil Servants one had
ever seen, and it was almost a relief when he carefully
unrolled a parcel of sausage and bread and proceeded
to paralyse the atmosphere with raw garlic. Three

rather dowdy English women, with suitcases and yes,
shopping-bags, who retired defensively into one corner
and put up an impenetrable barrier against the world.
No one showed much inclination to break it down.
They conversed in rapid embarrassed breathy whispers
for a while, and then lapsed into a grating silence. At
the last minute the door burst open and a young boy
of about eighteen flung himself into the compartment,
falling over the fat Frenchman as he did so. The latter,
caught in the middle of a mouthful of sausage, mut-
tered ’Assassin!’ amiably enough and returned to his
meal. The boy sat down next to me and began to read
that afternoon’s Paris-Soir. I noticed one of the head-
lines: it read, ’De Polyphème à Salvatore Giuliano’. I
tried to picture the reaction of the news editor of a
London evening paper to a caption-writer serving up
its equivalent in English.
Slowly we negotiated that tremendous curve, at
a less-than-walking pace. Then, gathering speed, but
still moving sedately, we passed through the grey mud-
dle of Dieppe town. It was a bleak prospect. The
French have reduced functionalism to its lowest pos-
sible denominator. The exteriors of their houses look
appalling: square and uncompromising, undecorated
and uncared for, their sole function to be lived in with-
out regard to the eye. French provincial towns at first
sight seem to be suffering from a depressing kind of
spiritual mange. I felt the same about their railways.
The matter-of-fact way they invade the streets, the
prevalence of level crossings, and especially the ab-
sence of platforms. I don’t know why this distressed
me so much. Probably because the English have always

regarded their railways and the land they occupy as a
thing apart. The track is carefully fenced in, the train
is somehow immeasurably apart from the platform.
When you board an English train you enter an odd
sort of separate existence. This may account for the
strange railway myth that is so sedulously cultivated
in this country. The French patronise their railways.
They have no formidable ticket-barriers, no gradual
admission to a holy of holies. They swarm unthinkingly
across the forbidden no-man’s land rather than go by
subway; and cheerfully urinate on the bogy of the car-
riage they travel in.
I sat in an abstraction watching the flat green
countryside of the Pas de Calais slip past. It was
rather like Hertfordshire to look at: mainly lush green
pasture, with little land under the plough. In the af-
ternoon light the fields showed bright and peaceful,
striped with sunlight and shadow. I saw hardly any
people abroad at all; and it seemed to me that the
grass was an indefinable shade darker than in Eng-
land; as a result the landscape had a permanent faintly
threatening quality, as if an unseen storm were about
to break somewhere on the rather uncanny stillness.
The restaurant-car attendant came down the cor-
ridor ringing a bell. I remembered that I hadn’t eaten
since early that morning. With some difficulty I got
out of the compartment and made for the dining-car,
past notices proclaiming in four different languages the
perils attendant on leaning out of the window. As I sat
down I noticed someone hovering undecidedly at
my table. The car was very full. I looked up: it was

the young French boy from my compartment. I invited
him to join me, and he sat down smiling. He spoke
English with a slight hesitant slur. He told me that
he had been staying with an English family au pair in
Greenford. They had been very kind. But ... I looked
interrogative. He laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
‘I do not think I understand the English very well
yet,’ he said carefully. He opened a packet of Gauloise
cigarettes and handed me one. The coarse full flavour
was pleasant if overpowering. I have never been near
an autumn bonfire since without thinking of Gauloise:
the strong clean astringent smell is identical.
‘They do not talk about things that matter,’ he went
on, wrinkling his forehead in puzzlement.
‘Sometimes that’s a relief,’ I said.
‘Yes, but ... and it is true, the joke about weather
talk ... and there is no wine. But it is a beautiful place
to live in. ...’
He chattered on, perfectly at ease, alert, quick and
interested. At seventeen he was a master of the art of
conversation. I was tired and rather sleepy: I let him
steer the conversation where he would. He sounded me
gently in English politics and women, told me about
his home in Haute-Savoie by the Lac d’Annecy, en-
quired about my trip, and finally asked me to come
and stay with him on my way back through France.
At the time I was sceptical: looking back I am sure
the offer was a genuine one. Meanwhile I ate, in an
incredulous way. It was my first unrationed meal since
the war. The waiter came round with hot scones, with
real butter–about half a pound of it, with dark-cured
ham that melted as soon as one put it in one’s mouth.

Full and happy, I leaned back, lulled by the rhythm of
the train, talking gently to the boy, whose name was
Pierre, and watching with half an eye the gradually
increasing industrialisation of the countryside as we
neared Paris.
My first sight of Paris was the most pleasant I was
ever to have. I have never been there in the spring: but
it has always seemed to me the most unfriendly and
unrewarding of European capitals. The surface gaiety
above the blank stare of unrecognition that only recog-
nises the franc. The cynicism and je m’en foutisme.
The cruelty, symbolised in the grotesque sardonic gar-
goyles that grin from the heights of Notre Dame. The
hectic shabbiness of it all. Now, however, I had it
at arm’s length: the sunset falling in a splendour of
red and grey, like the Sunday best of an Irish peasant
woman, on miles of roofs, with an absurdly picture-
postcard Eiffel Tower rising above it all. Sur le toits
de Paris. I craned out of the window watching it. With
a hollow rumble of girders we thundered over the Seine,
flowing grey and flat and shallow round its eroded but-
tresses; then the train swung into a tunnel with the
shriek, as Pierre delicately put it, of a molested virgin.
(That, by the way, is another oddity of the French
railways: their engines, which are massive creations
about twice the size of their English counterparts, and
covered with a most impressive system of what look
like water pipes., have a shrill ineffectual eunuch-like
whistle that immediately and for ever picks the bubble
of their potent dignity.)
The Gare du Nord is a puzzling place on first
acquaintance. It is rather larger than Waterloo, and is

intolerably complicated by an intricate system of levels
(I think there are three of them). Most of the station
doesn’t seem to be connected with trains at all. There
are literally hundreds of offices of all sizes and descrip-
tions: the main hall looks like an arcade in the Ideal
Home Exhibition. There are offices to buy tickets, return
tickets, collect luggage, deposit it, register it, insure it,
and for all I know to seel it. There are tobacconists, cafés,
bookstalls, chemists, bureaux de change, hairdressers and
fashion-displays. The general atmosphere resembles that
of the approaches to a large Hindu temple. I had mo-
mentary feeling that at some point I would be requested
to take off my shoes.
Pierre steered me perfectly through the crowd. He
asked when my train for Milan left. I told him about
9.15, from the Gare du Lyon. ’Bon,’ he said. ‘We Will
take Your Christian’s burden to the consigne at Lyon and
abandon it. I then invite you to supper with me, and we
can talk a little more.’ I accepted gratefully. By this time
we had emerged, breathless, but triumphant, outside the
main entrance. My first impression of Paris at close quar-
ters was of violent movement. People walked fast, faster
than in England, all talking cheerfully at the tops of their
voices. Endless streams of taxis and the ancient green
one-decker Paris buses, with their Daliesque trafficators
and oddly projecting bonnets, honked and braked their
way through the confusion. About twenty newsvendors
were shouting hoarsely at once. I surveyed the maelstrom
and blinked. ‘How do we go?’ I asked doubtfully. Pierre
squared his shoulders. ‘Nous allons par Métro,’ he

announced, in the voice of a general taking a major
strategical decision; and gripping my arm he dived
like a rabbit down a subway entrance that looked as
if it led to a public lavatory.
The Paris Métro is a unique institution. If the
confusion above ground had been great, that below
was unbelievable. The atmosphere became hysteri-
cal, claustrophobic. Five or six different subways, all
crowded with workers returning home, led away in
varying directions. To add to the warren-like atmo-
sphere, they went up-and down-hill in a completely
arbitrary fashion: I would not have been in the least
surprised if we had been suddenly precipitated down a
vertical shaft. The walls were covered with bewilder-
ing maps, the routes outlined in a tangle of red sur-
rounded by a forest of black names; they looked rather
like plans of the human arterial system. We studied
the nearest. The name of the station at which we were
had been nearly rubbed away by fingers tracing their
way through the labyrinth, and coming to rest on the
one sure point in it. I have heard people complaining
of the London Underground, and lamenting that they
can never find their way around it. They should try
Paris. The Underground is at least a reasonably or-
ganic growth: one can trace its development by look-
ing at a plan of it, and the system makes some kind of
logical sense. The Métro might have been designed by
a drunken artist from a ball of wool that had unrav-
elled itself all over the floor. Like Topsy, it just grew.
Whereas the Underground lines seem on the whole to
be co-operative, and one can trace a clear line with a
reasonable minimum of changes from start to destina-

tion, the Métro was clearly produced by about twenty
rival companies all starting work at once, and all trying
to provide a cut-throat service for the whole of Paris.
One can picture them enacting a sort of Klondike
gold-rush in their anxiety to stake claims of land, and
being forced to take the most curious out-of-the-way
routes when they found that a rival had beaten them
to buying up the direct right of way. These lines run
over, through and round each other: they duplicate
routes in one place and leave inexplicable total gaps
in another.
To get to the Gare du Lyon was comparatively easy:
we only had to make one change, at Concorde. There
now remained the finding of the right subway. To
complicate matter even further, the authorities of the
Métro have decreed that each line shall be known by
the name of its terminus: accordingly one has to trace
through all the tangle with a patient finger till one
emerges in the comparative clarity of the outer sub-
urbs. At the third shot we got it right, and plunged
into an irresistible flow of ouviers all storming down
a steep tunnel with the self-immolatory intentness of
Gadarene swine. It was as if someone had pulled the
plug out of a bath. We were carried through a series
of snapping, clanging iron swing-gates that seemed to
serve no useful purpose whatsoever, and into immense
stretches of subway. Eventually a minatory rumble
heralded the presence of an actual train. I had be-
gun to suspect that the whole thing was an elaborate
practical joke, and that we should emerge, still on foot,
somewhere near Etoile or Madeleine. I got a brief
glimpse of a row of lights moving across my line of

vision, and then a green metal door began o close,
with all the weighty inevitability of the great stone
in King Solomon’s Mines. Pierre explained that they
had to let passengers on to the platform little by little,
otherwise the crowd got so thick that those in front
were pushed under the trains. I decided, for once,
that these things were ordered better in England.
The crowd pressed more and more closely behind
us. I tried to light a cigarette, only to find that both
my arms were imprisoned at my side. the smell of gar-
lic and cheap scent was appalling. Pierre was explain-
ing that to get on a French Métro train one could not
behave as on the so polite Underground. I said I could
well believe it. It was, he went on, a matter of perse-
verance and elbows, a ruthless suppression of higher
instincts for la politesse. At that moment another
train roared out of the tunnel, and the green door
grudgingly swung open again. We surged forward, and
a wonderful rugger scrum took place round the open
train doorway. For once, it was not vocal. We pushed
and strained and sweated in an oppressive silence. I
found that my pack made an admirable weapon of of-
fence: all I had to do was to swing sharply from side to
side, and the ranks divided as promptly as Macaulay
would have wished. Eventually we found ourselves
standing inside: nobody seemed to be sitting, and in
the circumstances this was probably just as well. I
found myself wedged between a mountainous Madame
in black bombazine and an incredibly bony clerk. The
train roared and swayed. At Concorde the whole des-
perate operation was repeated in reverse. I felt I
had never sweated so violently in my life. My shirt

clung to my body in damp patches, and my hair fell
wetly into my eyes. Much later I was to learn that
the simplest way to go between these two stations is
by bus: there is a shuttle service that leaves every
ten minutes. Meanwhile Pierre and I struggled up the
last subway and emerged, breathless but triumphant,
outside the Gare du Lyon, which looked to me an
exact replica of the Gare du Nord. This resemblance
applies to all the big Paris stations. There is none of
the sharply marked individuality that distinguishes,
say, Paddington from Victoria.
We found the consigne and I gratefully relieved my-
self of my pack. It was 7 o’clock. ‘Now,’ said Pierre,
wiping his forehead, ‘we will have a drink.’ We left the
station and turned down a small side street that led
away from it. Half-way down it was a cheerful looking
bistro with a red and white awning. The name read,
‘Café des Allobroges’. It occurred to me as amus-
ing but by no means extraordinary that a Paris café
should be named after one of Caesar’s Gallic tribes.
We went in. The bartender broke off from arguing
loudly with an enormous navvy and greeted Pierre as
and old friend. They looked at my sweat-stained shirt
and generally bedraggled appearance and conferred
for a moment. Then the bartender said, with all the
solemnity of a doctor dispensing a prescription, ‘He
will have a Suze.’ Pierre nodded. ‘Indeed, yes.’ he
said. ‘A Suze is the only thing.’ The bartender busied
himself with bottles. I spotted Italian vermouth and
bitters, but the rest eluded me. I tasted the resultant
mixture. It was a light straw colour and very dry,
and had the questionable value of killing thirst

stone-dead. We all sat down and became very friendly.
Jacques, the bartender, told us and interminable story
about an aunt or cousin–I never managed to make out
which–who had suffered incredible indignities at the
hands of the Germans. His bald head shook, his whole
portly body vibrated with elderly indignation. I think
it must have been his cousin. We all had another Suze.
Then a party of young men came in demanding blondes,
and we made our escape.
We walked through the streets to the Palace de la
Bastille, and found another bistro. This time we sat
outside on the pavement. There was a beautiful sunset,
scarlet and sooty in the Paris haze, and for a time
we sat in silence, sipping our drinks and admiring it.
Then, as suddenly as in the tropics, it was dark, and
all the lights sprang out, twinkling and gyrating in the
night. From far away came the hoot and whistle of
trains, and far below us a faint rumble showed where
the Métro burrowed its blind way under the pavement.
Pierre finished his drink and ordered another. He was
watching the couples walking past, chattering animat-
edly, with the light quick confident step of the Parisian.
He sighed with a deep note of relief. ‘I am glad to be
back,’ he said. ’The English have many qualities that
I admire greatly, but a sense of joy is not one of them.’
I protested. ‘No: it is true. I have sat in a café in
Piccadilly Circus at such a time as this, and watched
the crowds pass. They were shut in on themselves:
they were not happy or open. They walked fast to
escape from their worries.’ A boy and a girl paused on
the pavement and embraced gently. No one took the
least notice. Somewhere a little further down the pave-

ment a gramophone was playing an Italian love lyrics.
I quoted:
‘Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each one held his eyes before his feet’.
Pierre’s eyes gleamed. ‘Ah! Eliot,’ he said. ‘I think
he understands the English very well. Perhaps because
he is an American ...’ I said: ‘What subject have you
specialised in at school?’ ‘Chemistry,’ said Pierre. ‘I
will go to a technical college after I have done my mil-
itary service. ‘In England,’ I said, ‘scientists do not
often read Eliot.’ ‘Why not?’ asked Pierre: ‘do they
not like his religious views?’ I hesitated. ‘No: I don’t
think it’s that. They have very little time for litera-
ture at all.’ Pierre looked shocked. ‘But are they not
civilised?’ I made no answer. Civilised. Civilisé. It
is a peculiarly French quality, and difficult to define. I
felt myself being drawn into a complicated argument.
There was a short silence. Then Pierre said: ‘And you?
What do you do?’ I said, diffidently: ‘I read classics at
Cambridge.’ ‘Ah. La philologie ancienne. Do you read
Homer?’ I fished a small book out of my pocket and
handed it to him. It was Paul Mazon’s Introduction à
l’Iliade. Pierre flicked over the pages, made some brief
comments. Suddenly we heard a clock strike nearby,
and looked at our watches. It was half-past eight. Panic
ensued. ‘I have promised you supper,’ said Pierre: ‘and
supper you shall have. We will return near the Gare du
lyon.’ We departed in some haste. In our hurry we left
Mazon behind. Over a month later, when I returned to
England, I found a parcel waiting for me.
Inside it was the book. Pierre had gone back to the

bistro in case I had left anything there: and had for-
warded it to the home address I had given him, to-
gether with some amusing notes on the argument.
In the end we found a little restaurant near our
original bistro. The proprietress, an enormous and
affectionate sexagenarian, who seemed to be another
life-ling friend of Pierre’s, on hearing about the time
crisis waddled away into the kitchen with all the speed
compatible with her build and dignity. A moment
later there came sounds of breaking eggs and hissing
fat. Someone unseen said ‘Merde!’ with fervent
emotion. A pleasant smell drifted out on the night
air. Pierre vanished into the kitchen himself and re-
appeared a moment later with an enormous bottle of
rough ordinaire. He sat down, tilted back his head,
and shot a long stream of it down his throat. A smile
of peace lit up his face. ‘I have missed it too long,’ he
observed simply. ‘Beer is for wind-bellies and farmers.
I mean no offence to your country, Peter. But this ...’
Back went his head again. He poured out two large
glassfuls. An aged waiter laid the table. Great crisp
thick slices of fresh bread. A vast china pot of mustard.
We ordered steaks after our omelettes: I felt a little
incredulous, there was a sneaking feeling at the back
of my mind that they would turn out to be Viennese
hash. We finished the first bottle of wine just as they
appeared: and they were real steaks, thick and tender,
with a faint aroma of charcoal about them. We called
for another bottle. Madame re-appeared and hovered
benevolently over us while we ate, interrogating Pierre
with delightful frankness about his love-life
abroad. Pierre said something incomprehensible and

slipped his arm around her enormous waist. She
crowed with delight.
More bread and fresh butter. Demi-sels. Black cof-
fee. The second bottle was long finished. And then,
carelessly, I looked at my watch again. Eight minutes
past nine. In a vinous flurry we paid our bill, and ran
up the long ramp of the Gare du Lyon with the best
part of a litre of red wine each to carry, as well as a
Gargantuan supper. The studs on my walking shoes
slipped on the stones. At the consigne we found a
long queue waiting. Pierre, with a cheerful disregard
of queue etiquette, rushed to the front of it with my
ticket, and poured out some blistering remarks to the
porter. My pack appeared as if by magic. Pierre re-
turned panting. ‘What platform?’ he asked. I didn’t
know. We vanished rapidly on to the main-line depar-
ture level. ‘Le Simplon-Orient?’ cried Pierre with a
grand flourish to the world at large. Another porter
yelled incomprehensible instructions. We pelted down
the ramp again and on to another level: and found it
at last. The train was just beginning to move. Pierre
brushed past an expostulating inspector. I made a
jump for the last carriage and clambered triumphantly
aboard. Even then that wretched pack stuck in the
doorway. Everyone inside was convulsed with laughter,
and no one made a movement to help me. Somehow I
squeezed inside, turned panting, and waved to Pierre
as the train gathered speed, Then we swung round a
curve in the darkness, and he was out of sight. I fell
back wearily into the compartment, only to discover
that it was a first. I pressed through the
tangle of feet to the corridor, still pursued by affluent

laughter, and made my way down to the end of car-
riage. The door was locked. I wandered back. All the
seats were reserved, and in any case I had no wish to
argue with an inflexible French ticket collector. In the
end I went back to the end of the carriage, put down
my pack and sat on that. It was not uncomfortable:
and it was to be by no means the last time that I trav-
elled in such a fashion. But I had made it. I was on a
train bound for Italy. I was going to Florence. And af-
terwards, wherever the fancy took me. I looked out of
the window, and watched the suburbs of Paris flashing
past in the dark. And then I fell asleep.
When I woke it was to a chill night air that made
me wish I had brought a sweater, and to porters croak-
ing ‘Dijon!’ in a mournful voice. I got out on to the
platform and made my way up the train to a third-
class carriage. Surprisingly enough I found one that
was half-empty: dumped my pack in the darkness,
put up my feet and went to sleep again. I found to
my pleasant surprise that I was capable of sleeping in
the most difficult situations: I have since spent a very
pleasant night in a Sicilian train in the corridor, with
people perpetually walking over my shoulder and de-
manded my passport. We had arrived at Vallorbe, the
small French town on the French-Swiss frontier. I sat
up and rubbed my eyes. My passport was stamped
and returned to me. A monotonous voice ran on in
my ear asking if I had brought with me any spirituous
liquors, silks, tobaccos. ... I laughed sardonically. ‘Je
suis Anglais,’ I said, and the voice receded. A moment
later
it all started again. I thought I was dreaming, then

realised that it was the turn of the Swiss. Eventually
the noise dried away down the corridor: with a jerk
the train began to move again. The atmosphere in the
compartment was mephitic. I opened a window and
looked out.
Dawn was breaking over the Swiss mountains. I saw
a changing vista of rugged slopes and tumbling valleys,
with tiny chalets and farms clinging to the slopes like
dolls’ houses. Every foot of arable land was under cul-
tivation, stepped down in terraces from the snowline.
The line curved continuously through rocky gorges and
round the sides of mountains, with the result that the
sun shone now on one side, now on the other, staining
the snow a delicate rose colour, as if a bottle of wine
had been emptied into it from the sky. We were trav-
elling at an enormous speed. I put my head out of the
window, and the clear cold air hit me in the face. I
saw that we had shed our steam locomotive, and now
had an enormous electric one, grey and powerful, that
tore round the curves with a cheerful disregard for cen-
trifugal force. The scene was barbaric and magnificent:
and yet, oddly, the signs of man’s cultivation did not,
as they do in many other places, seem an impertinence
under the great granite bastions of the mountains: the
Swiss have somehow contrived to blend their cultiva-
tion organically with the land in which they live: they
are an integral part of it. As we approached Lausanne
the mountains thinned away till they were no more
than a gleaming white reminder of the power of nature
on the near horizon, and trim meadows and villages
took their place.
Somewhere round about eight o’clock we reached

Brig. Brig is surrounded on almost every side with
gigantic towers of rock, soaring up vertically for hun-
dreds of feet, which overshadow the station with an
immense stony gloom. It is at once one of the most
exhilarating and claustrophobic places I have ever
seen. There is a flourish about these rocks: they are
a heraldic annunciation of what is to come.
We passed through the Simplon tunnel, and were
in Italy. There was nearly an hour to wait before
the Customs formalities were completed. I shaved
and washed in the toilet, which made me feel immea-
surably better, and went out in search of food. The
morning air was cold and clean, and the sun was now
completely up.
Beyond us lay the Lombard plain, and the whole
of Italy. I was conscious of a growing excitement. For
the English lowlander, who has seldom seen a rock-
formation more impressive than the Cornish coast,
the first sight of mountains like the Alps or the
Himalayas is an unforgettable experience.
I had travelled in the Himalayas during the war, on
leave from Burma, and had felt a cold shock at the
immensity of them, an incredulous awareness of the
violent cataclysmic upheaval that had thrown them
up so many thousand years ago and frozen them into
a dominant brooding stillness. Their latent power
was too huge for man to comprehend: they kept their
distance, impressive in the master of every step one
look. Not so the Italian Alps. They were closer, more
personal: powerful beyond belief, and yet measurable
in human
terms. Their suddennes came as a peculiar shock. In

England one has warning of hills. The ground swells,
throws out spurs and slopes, and rises gently, giving
one plenty of warning, making a gradual transition
from the negative folds of level downland to the po-
lite assertion of ridge of fell: and in general the grass
covers it to the very summit. Here the naked rock
burst vertically from the soil, springing up and away
in great craggy precipices where scarcely a goat could
gain a foothold. I suddenly saw why Dr Johnson called
a mountain an uncouth object. His cultured sense
was shocked by the sudden fierce re-assertion of all the
primeval power of nature.
So I watched the sun rise in splendour over these
gigantic bastions, and made my peace with them. My
destination lay before me, and I had a curious sensation
of coming home. Far away sounded the faint tinkle of
cow-bells as herds moved about the foor of the rocks.
An electric locomotive hummed gently to itself in a sid-
ing. I boarded the train again, and almost immediately
we began to move.
So preoccupied was I with my reflections that I failed
to notice whom I had sat down next to. Then a queru-
lous voice shattered the morning air. ‘I’m so glad
you’re’ere,’ it said. ‘I’ve’ad such a job arguing with
that blooming foreign ticket collector ...’ It was the
woman I had met on the boat. I asked what the trou-
ble was.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘seems as ’ow I came on the wrong
train. Seems I oughtn’t to ’ave come through Switzer-
land at all. But they told me this was the train in Paris.
Stupid foreigners ...’ I repressed an urge to tell her that
this was probably exactly what they were saying
of her. She clearly ought to have gone by Lyons and

Modena. One of her children began to snivel. I said:
‘Well, you’ve got so far all right: what’s going to hap-
pen now?’
She shook her head doubtfully. ‘That ticket-collector
was proper furious, ’e was. Said ’e was going to stay on
the train, and I ’ad to pay the difference for the Swiss
fare. But I can’t, can I? Mean to say, I ’aven’t got
any money ...’ Her voice died away indeterminately. I
wondered who had interpreted all this for her. He had
my sincere sympathy. And sure enough, at that mo-
ment the Swiss conducteur stuck his head wearily into
the compartment and started a long tirade. I smiled
at him, with the ghost of a wink.
‘Ecoutez,’ I said. ‘That poor one is a little wanting.
She has no money. She is being cared for by friends
in Italy. You cannot get money where it is not.’ The
conducteur looked doubtful. ‘But all the English have
money,’ he said, with the air of one repeating an infal-
lible oracle. I laughed rather bitterly, and decided the
only thing to do was to lay it on thick. It was rather
amusing watching her face while I slandered her sanity:
she clearly thought I was doing my best to champion
her. And so, in a sense, I was. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘she is
loco, une imbécile simple. The train is not full. The fare
is only a matter of formality. No one will be harmed by
her presence here. I shall remain here with her till we
reach Milan. After that no one will know which train
she has come by. It is hard for the poor little ones to
travel in such care. They deserve kindness even if she
does not.’ And so on. I felt a frightful fool, but it
seemed to work. The conducteur shrugged broad
Shoulders, grinned, and tapped his forehead sugges-

tively. I hoped she didn’t see it. ‘Alors. he said, ‘ça
s’arrange ... I will leave her in your care. ... But I do
not envy you. Mon Dieu, quel type ...’ He vanished,
muttering good-humouredly about the imbecilities of
the English women who travelled in such a criminal
state of unpreparedness. The woman thanked me
effusively. One of the children said it felt sick. I
escorted it to the W.C. and back. The air was be-
ginning to get very hot.
Throughout the morning we travelled through the
Italian lake district. From the train it had an unreal
and breathtaking beauty. After crossing the border we
had begun the long descent through the foothills of the
Pennine Alps. Far away to the west rose the fifteen
thousand foot crags of Monte Rosa. To the east the
bastions of Switzerland were still visible on the hori-
zon. The earth began to turn to the rich warm brown
of the Lombard Plain, and vineyards and olive groves
appeared from time to time, with their dwarfed and
twisted trees running in orderly rows to the very edge
of the line. Once the rocks closed in again, and I saw
a thin silvery waterfall cascading down for a thousand
feet, glittering silver in the morning sun and casting up
a fine cloud of spray from the river far below. For about
half an hour we skirted the western shores of Lake Mag-
giore. Its waters were blue with that outrageous and
unbelievable colour that one normally associates only
with travel posters, except where here and there the
sun caught its surface, and flakes of gold flickered and
darted about like fireflies. Tiny islands clustered off-
shore, thickly covered with cypress and bougainvillea,
and on them one could see pink and white villas glis-
tening with their clean cut stone. Sun and sea had
brought out the devil in the architects: every period
and style mingled there, and yet there was no incon-
gruity in it at all. Far out in the haze snips of white on
the blue showed where yachts were sailing. It looked
like Paradise. And so, as I found out later, it was: but
a playboys’ Paradise. Lake Maggiore, and Lake Como
further to the east, are reserved for foreign millionaires
and the trippers who have followed in their wake. It
is hard to find Italian spoken there at all: English is
the universal languages. The local inhabitants have
turned this lovely resort into the worst kind of tourist
are, comparable only to the sophisticated horrors of
the French Riviera.
But of all this I was ignorant at the time: I only
knew that I was at last in Italy, and that it was
exceeding my wildest expectations. Occasionally we
halted at little wayside stations, often with only a
few small white houses and a trattoria between it
and the open fields beyond. The train would stand
shimmering in the morning heat while a crowd of
peasants and business-men fought for places in the
third-class compartments. Young boys went slowly up
and down the low platforms wheeling trolleys loaded
with rainbow-coloured sweets, Technicolor periodicals,
and straw-covered flasks of Chianti, or with trays cov-
ered with huge rolls filled with slices of salami. Notices
announced that it was expressly forbidden to cross the
tracks. No one took the slightest notice. Someone was
always washing a great bunch of grapes at the fountain.
As we drew slowly out the air would fill with
good-byes and the flutter of waving handkerchiefs. It

may not be true to say that all roads lead to Rome,
but all railways in Italy certainly do: travelling seems
to be the national pastime, judging by the eternally-
crowded trains. The capital seems to have as great a
lure for provincials now as ever it did in the days of
the early Empire. I wondered what bread and circuses
drew them. Probably the illusory attraction of good
jobs: unemployment in Italy is a chronic problem to-
day; but this centripetal movement has made it worse
in Rome than anywhere else. Yet still people pour in
hopefully. Rome must today be one of the most over-
populated cities in the world: what it was like in Holy
Year I hate to think.
Gradually we drew nearer to Milan. We crossed
slowly over the triple-span bridge that crosses the
sluggish stream of the Ticino, and passed through Gal-
larate and an intriguingly named town called Busto.
The country rapidly became flatter, and soon a level
expanse of plain stretched out for miles on either side,
broken only by great vineyards with their fruit, ready
for picking, loading down the trees in dark abundance,
and the silvery-grey gleam of olives, glinting darkly
under a merciless sun. The soil was dry and dusty,
and the first signs of irrigation began to appear, soar-
ing dark channels through the dun-coloured fields. It
was difficult to believe that we were entering the most
industrial area of Italy. Somewhere away to the west
were the steel foundries of Turin: ahead lay all the
factories of Po Valley. But little sign of this crept
into the countryside. The Black Country in England
heralds itself from miles away with rearing slagheaps
and gaunt chimneys: but Italy is agricultural even in

her industry. I never remember seeing anything so dis-
figuring in my travels through that country as even the
approaches to Manchester or Reading.
We reached Milan at about midday. My train to
Florence was not due to leave till half-past two, and
I snatched the opportunity to stretch my legs and get
a decent lunch. Milan station was my first introduc-
tion to modern Italian architecture. It was enormous
and pretentious, with a hideous blend of Greco-Roman
pillars and the worst excesses of Victorian Gothicism.
An enormous flight of steps led down to the street. I
could imagine a white garlanded bull being led up it to
sacrifice. As I took the first step down it the studs in
my shoes slipped on the polished marble, and I com-
pleted the descent with more speed than dignity, my
pack bumping after me. A large bag of tomatoes I
had bought as a thirst-quencher burst and scattered
its contents far and wide. As if by magic, half the pop-
ulation of Milan seemed to spring up from nowhere and
begin to laugh, with a Homeric chest-aching abandon
that made me laugh too. A woman in a black shawl
helped me up and helped me recover my tomatoes. At
this moment a policeman came up. There are about
four different uniforms and carry enormous automat-
ics. Also, they very seldom shave. This one was in
khaki, which is the most harmless variety, and mostly
concerned with traffic problems. I suppose I countered
as traffic. He began a long tirade about my desecrating
the artistic integrity of this so beautiful flight of steps
which was the glory of Milan’s municipal authorities.
I thought I must have misheard or that he was pulling

my leg; and asked him to repeat his remarks. He did,
with additions. He said I was a vandal, an artistic
iconoclast. I just saved myself from the unpardonable
sin of laughing in his face; and entering into the spirit
of the thing, made a flowery apology to the munic-
ipal authorities, his outraged aesthetic feelings, and
the memory of all the great past figures of Italy in
general and Milan in particular, ending triumphantly
with a quotation from Leopardi, which he promptly
corrected. Honour seemed to be satisfied. He saluted,
shook hands with me, and marched off with some dig-
nity. The bag of tomatoes burst for the second time,
and I picked them up hurriedly, with visions of my
tour beginning with a period of segregation in an Ital-
ian jail. Looking back, I think this incident told me
more about the Italian attitude to life (which I find
refreshingly sane in its values) than anything which I
have experienced there since.
The heat was blistering. I looked round the
Piazza Duca d’Aosta, which lies immediately outside
the station, for somewhere to eat. It was hardly
an inspiring sight: high official-looking ferro-concrete
buildings, a bewildering multiplicity of streets leading
away from them, and not a restaurant in sight. But
round the corner in the little Piazza Caiazzo I found
what I wanted: with relief I put down my pack and sat
down at a gaily-striped table on the pavement. It wa a
simple meal: pasta asciutta with Parmesan, bread and
cheese, and a half-litre of Chianti: but I had seldom
enjoyed one more. Afterwards I bought a packet of
Nazionale cigarettes from a nearby kiosk. They looked
rather like Gauloises, but tasted even stronger.

I was determined to see Milan Cathedral, if nothing
else, before I caught my train: and as soon as I had
finished lunch, I set off down the Via Pisani. To those
who arrive by train, Milan is not an inspiring city. The
building in this quarter is entirely modern: high blocks
of flats, white and uncompromising, that line the road
for hundreds of yards without any break or variation.
The total effect is of competent and efficient design,
but presents very little character. The road is wide
and beautifully surfaced: the whole effect is rather of
a prizewinning entry in an architectural competition.
Every blank patch of wall below shoulder level was cov-
ered with lurid posters and advertisements, and where
there were no advertisements there were roughly daubed
slogans: Long live the King and the Monarchy: Long
live Communism: Long live the Italian People. They
rubbed shoulders amicably enough: one Communist slo-
gan had been carefully written round a Monarchical one
so as not to deface it. (The Italians have a passion for
advertisements: every bypass is lined with them, and
as one drives along they shriek aloud in every colour
and hammer themselves insidiously into one’s mind.)
Everything was very quiet: the afternoon siesta was be-
ginning. I walked past the Public Gardens, dusty and
dejected in the heat, and turned into the Via Alessandro
Manzoni: a darker, dingier street, with solid Victorian
buildings that looked as if they had known Garibaldi
personally. An unobtrusive and rather shabby façade
on he right marked the La Scala theatre. I passed
under a colonnade and emerged into the Piazza del

Dunomo, the Cathedral Square.
It was very still. A few pigeons picked their way
across the open expanse: otherwise there were no signs
of life. Dominating the square, the gigantic façade
of the Cathedral reared itself in Gothic complexity to
the blinding sky. Milan Cathedral obstinately eludes
analysis, cannot be comprehended with a single eye.
Perhaps this is because of the multiplicity of artists
engaged on it through the centuries. Begun in 1386
by an unknown architect, it passed, between the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries, into the hands of Ital-
ian, French, and the German designers. Tibaldi and
Buzzi began, in 1616, the façade that Napoleon was
to have finished nearly two hundred years later. Dur-
ing the centuries the fabric collected—no one seems
to know quite how—over two thousand statues of one
kind and another. And yet the total effect is of a com-
plete and organic whole: but a whole that splits and
divides before one’s eyes, like a mad kaleidoscope.
I passed inside, through the great west door. Here
for the first time, as so often later in Italian cathedrals,
I was impressed by the sense of vast spaciousness. This
was partly because of the bareness of the floor: there
were no pews, no chairs, nothing to distract from the
great massive pillars rising up for sixty feet and more
to the dim vaulting of the roof. I suddenly felt an im-
mense humility. In a side chapel, out of sight, came a
faint sound of chanting. A woman in black genuflected
and knelt in silent prayer before an image of the Vir-
gin. Two priests walked quietly across in front of me
and vanished in the gloom. There was no incongruity
here, no breakage between past and present: here the

past was accepted unquestioningly, and each new event
imperceptibly altered the pattern of the unbreakable
whole. Through the stained glass above the alter the
light filtered richly on to the floor, blurring it with a
faint pattern of red and yellow and blue. Time stopped,
and distance became immeasurable. The pillars stood
like so many reaffirmations of a universal faith. From
outside came the fragmented hum of traffic, the stresses
and counterstresses of temporal existence: but every
few moments someone would slip in through the doors,
and refresh their strength in this place where all strug-
gles had long since been resolved. When I finally came
out again, blinking, into the sunlight, I was amazed to
find that I had been there nearly an hour. I had almost
to run back to the station.
The Florence train was very different from the
Simplon-Orient. For the first time I learnt the mean-
ing of Italian third-class carriages, with their open
compartments, their slatted wooden seats, their ripe
and luxuriant overcrowding. There were only five
minutes to go before we were due to leave. Somehow
I forced my way in, pushing past perspiring soldiers
and huge bosomy matrons, till I found about a square
foot of space in the aisle and planted my pack in it.
My shirt, which had dried once, became sodden again.
A babel of voices nearly deafened me. Two youths in
front of me were having a violent political argument.
A woman propped against a stanchion undid her dress,
dragged out a huge breast the size of a watermelon, and
plugged the nipple firmly into the mouth of a crooning
infant who could have posed as the infant Christ in a
primitive: where it remained for most of the journey.

Just as the whistle went, there was an upheaval by
the doorway, and a slim blond youth, also with a pack,
forced his way down to where I was standing. The train
began to move. He flicked a cigarette into his mouth
from a rather battered pack and grinned at me. ‘Mak-
ing for Florence?’ he enquired. Oh God, I thought, do I
look all that English? Aloud I said, ‘Yes: isn’t this heat
hell?’ He looked at me more closely. ‘Aren’t you from
Cambridge?’ he asked. I admitted it. It would have to
be someone from Cambridge, I thought. Quite suddenly
I felt completely alien, an interloper, with TURISMO
written in large capitals all over me. He introduced
himself. ‘By the way,’ he asked, ‘where are you staying
in Florence?’ This was a question that simply hadn’t
occurred to me. I said so. He looked at me rather
oddly, and then said, ‘You’d better come along to Fab-
briocotti: they make a business of collecting tramps like
us.’
I said, ‘What or who is Fabricotti?’
‘It’s a villa up in the north part of the city. Used
to belong to a rich family, but they sold out. Now the
I.S.S. have taken it over for students.’
I said I was’t sure if I liked the sound of this: I
had a vision of being ordered around on compulsory
sightseeing tours, or to improving lectures. I had come
to Italy to enjoy myself: and my enjoyment was not of
the politically academic variety.
‘Good God, no: it’s not like that at all: you can do
more or less as you like. Do you speak Italian?’
‘Yes, enough to go by.’
‘Anything else?’
‘French and some modern Greek.’
‘That’ll do. They like you to have an air of being
cosmopolitan. Not very fond of the English because of
that.’
My opinion of the place rose considerably.
* * * *
The journey from Milan to Florence falls sharply

into two halves. From Milan as far as Bologna the
line runs through the Po valley, crossing the river at
Piacenza, and skirting the eastern side of the Apen-
nines for the best part of the way. At Bologna it turns
sharply south, and for the whole of the way to Florence
fights a grim and unremitting battle with the Apen-
nines themselves: at least half the distance is spent
in tunnels, including the famous Elbow Tunnel, which
is one of the longest in Europe. These tunnels are not
the neat dark brick affairs to which we are used in Eng-
land: they are cut clear out of these solid rock, and the
marks of the pick are still visible on their walls. Af-
ter the flat boredom of the Po Valley, with its mile
upon mile of vines and olives, interspersed with huge
rank growths which I took to be giant sunflowers, the
run from Bologna to Florence tests one’s nerves to the
uttermost. The windows are glassless: and the con-
tinuous hammering roar of penned-in echoes deadens
your eardrums and frays your temper. For a moment
one flashes into a bright valley, hemmed in with dark
red rocks: there is a glimpse of houses, perhaps sheep
in a field or a cart by the roadside: and then the
ominous mouth swallows you up again, and the insen-

sate metal roar opens up again. After an hour of it
I was convinced that the whole mad chorus was ema-
nating from my own head; that there was a vast and
cacophonus dynamo lodged deep in my brain.
It was late in the evening when we emerged from our
last tunnel into the valley which is closed at one end by
Pistoia and at the other by Florence. The dusk was
closing in with that eery suddenness that one comes
to expect in the tropics. The last streaks of red were
dying away in the western sky towards Empoli, and
there was an odd greenish tinge in the air, heightened
now and again by vivid purple flashes from our loco-
motive. We swung round a bend; and there was the
Arno below us, flowing thin and dark and sluggish in
its ancient bed. I had a brief glimpse of red roofs and
chequered walls in the fading light, and then, with a
rattle of points, we were moving slowly into Florence
station. The tracks reticulated, diverged in all direc-
tions. Rows of bright lights swam past us: crowds of
people were waiting on the platform. I felt a quite
ridiculously triumphant emotion. All I had done was
to sit in train for two days: and yet in this moment
I felt that somewhere, far up in the darkening sky,
trumpets were sounding. The tired porter who took
my ticket at the barrier saw only a dog-eared brown
slip of paper; yet for me it was a second Golden Bough;
my passport to another world. My journey was over:
and yet the real journey was only now beginning.
44
CHAPTER 2. FLORENCE 45
Chapter 2
Florence
THE FIRST THING one noticed was the smell.

Jostling through the crowd in the entrance to the
station I caught a sudden whiff of it, blown off the
hillside from vine and olive and mimosa, and carried
in the fine dust that hazes the air of the Arno valley
to the streets of the city. Here it mingled with many
others: the smell of fruit laid out on stalls under naph-
tha flares, of hot metal and electricity, the faint scent of
incense from the open, curtained doors of churches, the
surging smell of people, the apocalyptic, all-enveloping
smell of a warm star-lit night. It was new and exciting,
yet unaccountably familiar: and then I remembered.
It was the smell of Calcutta. For a moment, as I stood
in the piazza to get my bearings, with the church of S.
Maria Novella looming uncertainly out of the darkness
opposite, I felt myself back in India. Even the trams
were the same. Wherever I have travelled I have al-
ways met the same make of British tram: small, green,
solid as Lancashire, grinding its way through scenes
of beauty or romance without paying the least atten-
tion to them; till in the end, like the stream train in
the English countryside, it became absorbed into the
landscape.
Violent contrasts of light and darkness. Floodlights,
hissing carbon arcs, spurts of fire from the overhead

trolley-wires, a dazzling pattern of blinding white
points over a background of shifting indigo. The curv-
ing tramlines gleamed momentarily, their clean steel
ripping as if under water. People moved more slowly
here, in paries or groups of three or four, talking, not
loudly, but with an intensity that pinpointed each
group as the center of a subtly Dantean microcosm.
White and grey were the prevailing tones for the men;
but the women were in dresses of vivid primary colours,
yellow or blue: the fragmentated unpredictable move-
ments of butterflies under a kaleidoscope. Many of
them had dyed their hair a startling red: they looked
unreal, like ghosts from a settecento brothel. There
were no street-cries, no shopkeepers bawling their
wares: only this ceaseless flow of soft urgent Italian,
theme after theme crossing and interweaving into a
bright tapestry of sound.
After some enquiry we found a tram that would
take us nearly to our destination in the Via Vittorio
Emanuele. (The Italians, and the Greeks even more,
have developed the habit of naming their streets after
contemporary notables. In order to preserve political
decorum, these names are frequently being changed,
which is amusing but bewildering. On the other hand,
I felt a certain sadness for the obliteration of the House
of Savoy’s royal monogram on every pillar-box with a
daubed cross of blue paint.) The tram was alarmingly
full: it would be more than an Italian conductor’s life
was worth to suggest to the milling crowd at the door-
way that there was no room inside; and to do them
credit, I don’t think the idea ever occurs to them. This
one sat inside a little cubby-hole in the body of the

tram, and did business with whoever was in reach,
which saved a good deal of trouble at the expense of
numerous fares.
We jolted and ground our way through the north-
ern streets of the city. The main impression (not al-
tered by covering the same route in daylight) was one
of unrelieved monotony. The houses were grey, secre-
tive and shuttered: only here and there slivers of light
shone through the slats, or tables with checked table-
cloths, and dwarf cypresses in huge green tubs marked
a restaurant. As we passed these a burst of bel canto
would come to our ears; sometimes from a gramophone,
more often from an American superhet radio.
The tramlines stopped at the end of a long road; there
seemed something desolate and inconclusive about such
a terminus. The driver got down from his perch with a
long hook, detached the pole from the wires, and slewed
it round for the return journey. My companion and I
watched the tram vanish again into the distance. Then
we shouldered our packs and turned into the Via Vit-
torio Emanuele, which ran at right- angles to the tram-
lines. We passed over two level- crossings, and stopped
at a huge iron grille gate in a high wall. This must be it.
We rang. After a moment’s pause an ancient and wrin-
kled janitor, smelling wonderfully of garlic, hobbled out
of a small lodge and let us in. He seemed neither sur-
prised nor inquisitive, though by this time we were both
like tramps: unshaved and filthy. The dust had settled
on to our sweating faces, and fresh sweat had ploughed
grimy channels down our cheeks. We asked, tentatively,
’Villa Fabbricotti?’ and he nodded, grinning. We

climbed the long, winding stone promenade up to the
forecourt of the Villa, and walked in. No one took any
notice of us. In the first room two girls were playing
table-tennis; beyond, in a sort of central hall, people sat
reading. We looked about, puzzled. At this moment
the door of what looked like an office opened, and a
young man in a suit of green denims came out. He was
tall and thin and aquiline, with searching grey eyes.
He had a faint suggestion of a moustache and looked
generally like a very young version of Anton Walbrook.
He took us in at a glance, and beckoned us into the
office. Here he plied us with a few sharp questions.
What were we in Florence for? What university were
we from? What did we do there? Which languages
did we know? He switched rapidly into Italian, then
French. Later I heard him conducting an animated
conversation in German. I never found out anything
else about him. The fact that we were English seemed
to amuse and annoy him simultaneously. Eventually
he gave us a printed form each to complete, and told
us we could stay as long as we liked. If we stayed for
more than a week, the rates would be reduced. Having
said all this, he scribbled a couple of numbers on our
cards, called out for one of the Italian maids to show
us to our rooms, and left us to our own devices.
I was somewhat anxious (rather ungratefully, to be
sure) to shake off my companion as soon as possible,
and was therefore relieved to find we had been given
separate rooms, or rather dormitories. The one in
which I found myself was pleasant in the extreme:
high and airy, with five beds and a friendly multiplic-

ity of cupboards. At the moment it was empty; the
maid explained that everyone was downstairs having
dinner, and suggested I should do likewise. My shirt
was clinging grimily to my back. If I don’t get a wash
soon—, I thought. I asked.
’Alas, signore, there is no water tonight. It is the
drought, you understand. We are rationed. For an
hour in the morning and evening only. But now—’
she spread her hands out expressively.
I said: ’Can I get drinking water, anyway?’
’But certainly, signore.’
’Where from?’
’The janitor’s lodge by the gate; I will give you a
bottle. But I would advise you, signore, to dine while
you may.’ She gave the ghost of a curtsey and with-
drew.
The thought of climbing those steps again made me
rather less enthusiastic for cleanliness. I found I had
about a pint left in my own flask. This goes quite a
long way when spread on a flannel; especially when
you take off the worst with the shirt you have been
wearing. I set my teeth and shaved with a dry razor,
and put on a clean change of clothes. In the end I
looked quite respectable. I rolled up everything I had
taken off and left the bundle at the foot of my bed, in
the pious hope that someone would remove and deal
with it without being asked.
I found the dining-room without much difficulty; if I
had kept my eyes shut it would have been just as easy.
A roomful of people all talking at the tops of their
voices in the same language—say evening hall in a
Cambridge college—is bad enough; this was the Tower

of Babel itself. I traced French, Italian, German, and
Spanish; and decided that the rest must be Central
European—a convenient phrase which always reminds
me of Osbert Lancaster’s cartoons. I slipped into an
empty place, and addressed myself with some gusto.
The food at Fabbricotti is among the best I have had
in Italy; and tonight was no exception. I thought I was
ravenous; after a piled plate of pasta asciutta and an
enormous steak I revised my opinion. Wine, I found
to my regret, was not included; I bought half a litre
from the maid (the same one who had shown me my
room) and set about it in a leisurely fashion. I began
to feel that curious excited opulence, both of mind and
body, which sooner or later affects every traveller in
Italy.
There are many people, including myself, who shy
away very hard from the word ’tourist’. I always called
myself a student, which invariably won me more sym-
pathy; though it was very doubtful whether I had any-
thing in common with either the mediaeval or modern
adherents of Bologna or Salerno. All the same, we
say indignantly if we take the trouble to learn the lan-
guage, and have an intelligent interest in not only the
antiquities but also the people and their lives and the
modern problems of the country, surely that isn’t the
same thing? Not the same thing, certainly: but a dif-
ference of degree rather than kind. It is a hard thing
to realise that, with the best will in the world, the vis-
itor to a country, whether he stays three days or three
months, is going to carry away a completely idealised
picture. In the first place, he is not, and cannot be,
part of it himself. He doesn’t depend on the coun-

try for his livelihood. This immediately puts a fence
round him; his pocketful of money and lack of obliga-
tion suspend time—and judgement—for him. He un-
consciously assumes the role of detached observer, wan-
dering (if he is lucky) through an enchanted land; in
his relations with local inhabitants an uneasy blend of
newspaper reporter, anthropologist, and small boy at
the Zoo. We have all heard the joke about the French-
man who knows London better than the Londoner, and
shows his host round his own city; but it took me some
time to accept the fact that few Italians had gone out
of their way to visit Florence or Siena or Sicily. In fact
the joke (like most perennial ones) contains a strong
element of truth. When you are assimilated, when you
are part of a civilisation, you see with its eyes; you
do not so much take it for granted as identify yourself
with it. It is only the visitor who stares in wonder
and surprise; because he is on the outside looking in,
he is detached enough to be objective. For the past
five years I have walked, on the average, twice a day
through the Great Court of Trinity College, in Cam-
bridge. I am as sensible as anyone of its unique effect;
but I do not feel called upon to stand and goggle at it
with a Leica in one hand and a guidebook in the other.
I have become part of the corporate life that it repre-
sents; and when the summer visitors gather in their
motley groups round the Fountain, it is, in a sense, me
and all my contemporaries and predecessors that they
are including in their lens.
By the time I had reached this point in my thought,
the litre was finished and the dining-room empty
except for a couple of grinning Italian girls waiting to

clear my table. I trailed upstairs to bed determined,
if I had to be an observer, at least to be an intelligent
one. That night I dreamed I was standing on top of the
Leaning Tower of Pisa, in Cook’s uniform, declaiming
at the top of my voice on the beauties and history of
Italy, while a ring of thousands on thousands of Ital-
ians, like a crowd at a football stadium, gathered at
the foot of the tower and gaped up at me. On the
outside looking in.
* * * *
I woke soon after six the next morning. (There may

be some good reason why one always wakes at an un-
earthly hour in a hot climate, but I have never yet
fathomed it.) The light was slanting through the half
open shutters. I got out of bed, threw the window wide,
and stood drawing in the fresh morning air. There was
a hint of vine and dust and olive in it still; but now it
was soft with the dew, cool after gentle summer night.
The sun was already high above the horizon.
Directly below me, on the edge of the terrace, was
a huge ilex tree, its leaves dusty and dappled. The
sky was a melting blue, fading into a brown danc-
ing haze above the distant hills; and all Florence lay
spread out before me, red and yellow in the morning
light: a fantastic contrast to the sombre uniform grey
of London or Paris. Here and there a tall building
stood out above the surrounding houses; I picked out
the cathedral and its great tower; the chapel of the
Medici; the church of S. Maria Novella. Through the

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The Expanding Eye

A First Journey to the Mediterranean

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER : 57 : 5567

3 Naples and Capri 89

4 Sicily: Segesta and Selinunte 143

5 Sicily: Agrigento and Syracuse 180

Tutta la vorta der celo turchina;

T HIS IS THE STORY of a journey that I made

one cannot hope

If my discovery of Italy and Sicily has been less - as

IT COULD NOT have been a better day. Even the

were fading into the haze. Smudged on the hori-

of about forty, with three horrible children, who had

of English young men. He invited me to dinner with

up alongside two wide gang-planks were let down, and

to paralyse the atmosphere with raw garlic. Three

me so much. Probably because the English have always

my table. The car was very full. I looked up: it was

ham that melted as soon as one put it in one’s mouth.

acquaintance. It is rather larger than Waterloo, and is

squared his shoulders. ‘Nous allons par Métro,’ he

reasonable minimum of changes from start to destina-

glimpse of a row of lights moving across my line of

had never sweated so violently in my life. My shirt

and had the questionable value of killing thirst

least notice. Somewhere a little further down the pave-

Inside it was the book. Pierre had gone back to the

abroad. Pierre said something incomprehensible and

tangle of feet to the corridor, still pursued by affluent

it all started again. I thought I was dreaming, then

Somewhere round about eight o’clock we reached

terms. Their suddennes came as a peculiar shock. In

of her. She clearly ought to have gone by Lyons and

Shoulders, grinned, and tapped his forehead sugges-

good-byes and the flutter of waving handkerchiefs. It

and gaunt chimneys: but Italy is agricultural even in

I thought I must have misheard or that he was pulling

rather like Gauloises, but tasted even stronger.

under a colonnade and emerged into the Piazza del

here, no breakage between past and present: here the

primitive: where it remained for most of the journey.

The journey from Milan to Florence falls sharply

ominous mouth swallows you up again, and the insen-

THE FIRST THING one noticed was the smell.

hissing carbon arcs, spurts of fire from the overhead

one sat inside a little cubby-hole in the body of the

’Villa Fabbricotti?’ and he nodded, grinning. We

high and airy, with five beds and a friendly multiplic-

Cambridge college—is bad enough; this was the Tower

part of it himself. He doesn’t depend on the coun-

except for a couple of grinning Italian girls waiting to

I woke soon after six the next morning. (There may

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