Bathing Time.
The blue Mediterranean with warm and buoyant waters laps and breaks around Italy’s peninsula, and Italy’s people are none the less fond of their fair and treacherous sea than we of our greyer and more boisterous Atlantic, even though theirs leaves them no passage northward into other lands, nor binds them about with her waves. Long ago, even so long ago as in the time of the first great Romans of the Republic, Italians loved the shores of their land, and would flock thither from the middle countries to breathe the stronger, if not always fresher, sea-breeze, and to rest and revel in the clear waters of ebbing waves. Many fashions have changed since then, but that one still holds good. From inland towns people fly to the smooth beach, or the rocky, of their sea’s landmark when hot August days are heavy; scarce a family even of the hindermost nobility—and in Italy, as is well known, this nobility is only the country’s gentry—but has some kind of dwelling, good or bad, upon some portion of the shore. Even seaport town people seek the mountains lessreadily than some village on the coast which they have seen all their lives, for, though briny breezes from off these inland waters can never be invigorating as those that travel across the Atlantic, Italians have none the less fond a belief both in them and in the soft waves wherein they delight to plunge. And of all the sea-loving people of the south the people of Genoa are best at the sport. Crowds seek the Lido at Venice, bathing-houses are built into the waves, music plays and fine water-costumes are there displayed. The rich and pleasure-loving of all nations ply this summer pastime busily at Nice, but none of them know the sea as do they of the quieter Riviera haunts; none of them can leap from sharp rocks to cut the green surface, none can dive and swim, and brave risks of dolphin and cuttle-fish, sometimes even of sharks, as can the dwellers on the rocky coast where no smooth sands help the timid ones.
All along the coast on Genoa’s either side habitations crowd the earth; palaces, time-worn and soiled or new and gaudy, for the rich; tall and thin and straight houses with small rooms and many storeys for the class of thenegoziantiandartisti; everybody must do the ‘Season of the Baths’ somehow. Quarto, Quinto, Nervi, Bogliasco, not to speak of Albaro nearer town, and then Sori, Recco, and best of all, Camogli, where the stone pines grow in a fringe along the hill’s ridge—everywherethere are houses in flats, with apartments to let; everywhere cottages stand beside palaces or behindstabilimenti, so that all classes should have room equally. The proprietors of villa Franchi, villa Crosa, villa Gropallo, and many more, come in elegant summer attire or in economical costumes, to recruit ‘in villeggiatura’ and to bathe and dive and swim in waters that lap the beach of their own domains.La signora Friuli, who has many children, and whose husband is in thePastatrade, comes from the fifth storey of a house in the narrow town street to wear out her own old clothes and to send the children shoeless on to the beach of Camogli, whence one and all dip in the mild blue sea. A terraced hill rises behind Camogli’s picturesque harbour, with its fisher-huts; the hill is cultivated with wheat patches and little potato fields, for it belongs to the old palace that stands below, whose walls, once fresco-painted, are now so weather-stained. But the cultivation is of a desultory nature, and the olives are its best harvest, of which the small, sturdy trees stand over the terraces with gnarled trunks and twisted branches. Following the path that leads up to the flat of a ridge, you can reach pine-plantations, where dark and widely-spreading trees stand in the soft earth on the cliffs’ edge and on the side also where inland scenery comes in sight, with church-steeples and houses dottedover a valley’s expanse. The faint, heavy perfume of tropical vegetation hangs around, pine-dust lies thick and slippery on the ground, paths wind about, laurel bushes grow beside them, and, though the western slope look towards mountains, the hill’s crest rests over against the sea again. Waves lap far below, where cloven rocks and smooth rocks and peaked rocks are sunk in the sand for ramparts; waves swell gently for miles in front, more waves of clouds seem to be in the sky, and fishing smacks sway on the sea’s surface; brown sails and white sails lie against the cloud’s background, and the broken coast-line winds back to where Genoa halts, like a fancy city, between mist and sunshine. This is Camogli, where many a man and woman and lad and lass and child has rejoiced in thestagione dei Bagni. And yet Camogli is not the fashionable one among Riviera bathing-places, and we must turn to the sun-setting side of the Riviera capital for a glimpse of the life that is August life indeed to the professional pleasure-hunter.
A railway has been open for some time now along the eastern Riviera: it has marred the perfection of some fair spots, but it has its conveniences, and it cannot spoil far afield. But in the days that I best remember there was no railroad to eastward, and thePonenteshore had thus an advantage over the other in civilization’s eyes. There was astrada ferratato Nice some timeago, astrada ferratathat some people wondered was ever made: thevetturini, whose trade is marred for instance, and the diligence proprietors, who can no longer count on crowding their vehicles with dust-smothered passengers, or the traveller, who has money to pay for a post-chaise, and can spare time to loiter along the road at his pleasure, enjoying the full fragrance of its loveliness, and providing food for extortion to the innkeepers. The trains never run regularly—some part of the road is always out of repair—you travel in fear of being plunged into the sea, and the carriage route is altogether spoilt. Yet it is a step in civilization. ‘What would you have?’ says the ever obsequious guard to whom one confides one’s wrongs at having been five hours longer on the road than the guide-book stated. ‘Did we go faster, you would be now in the sea: the road is not safe. Patience!’ the invariable ejaculation of an Italian when others but himself are complaining.
To anyone who knows the Cornice from Genoa to Nice the name of Pegli will not be totally strange. It is, or rather used to be, a little fishing village; used to be, for of late years there has been built in the midst of it a grand Stabilimento, whither the town’s inhabitants flock during the months of July and August for the sea-bathing. In summer it is a fashionable place; many of Genoa’s nobles divide their summer between Pegliand some inland foreign baths, whilst thebourgeoiseclass seek their holiday first in quiet mountainous parts of Italy known best to themselves, but do not fail to return fori Bagniwhen the rich have left things cheaper. In winter Pegli is utterly desolate, excepting for some few foreigners, mostly English, who try to make themselves comfortable in the huge marble halls of the Stabilimento, built only for coolness, in the delusion that they are safer from bronchitis because they see the sun and know it is Italy, than they would be, snug and warm, in English homes.
FLIRTATION AT PEGLI.
FLIRTATION AT PEGLI.
Pegli stands straggling along the beach of a sunny bay, almost within the Gulf of Genoa. The village itself is not pretty, but around it on the sea shore, with gardens sloping down into the very waves, and stone loggias and terraces whose feet stand in the water, above it on the hill-side, girt about with woods and vineyards, stand many a grand old palace or cool and pleasant villa. True, there are here, as everywhere else, in Northern Italy, queer examples of modern Italian architecture, in thin, tall houses, painted over with every crude tint of scarlet, orange, blue, and violet, bearing staring frescoes of horses and water-nymphs, and balconies out of perspective. But these defective edifices, though many in number, cannot utterly spoil the place. Though dusty the highway and breathlessthe summer days, the idle, hazy hours are happy that one may spend in the villas or bathing-houses of Pegli. In the Stabilimento for ten francs a day you have (according to the maître d’hôtel) every luxury which human craving may desire. A cool, marble-floored, furnitureless room, with goblin-bedizened ceiling and mosquito-curtained bed, an ample billiard room, an elegant ‘salon,’ a vast dining-room, every convenience for sea or freshwater bathing, even a ball-room, in which to flirt once a week with any one of the pale dark-eyed ladies who invite you to that pastime. Nor is the ball-room the only meet place for this exercise;there is a balcony—two, nay three balconies—and a large marble terrace that you can pace in the cool night air, gently smoking your cigarette in company with an attractive Milanese, Piedmontese, or Tuscan countess. Rising in the morning at five, or even before, you stroll down lightly clad to the shore, where the little waves are washing lazily up and down on the shelving beach, cool and limpid in the dewy dawn; you cross the soft small strip of shingle and parched, wrinkled sand—it is only a strip, for we have no tide—you secure one of those quaint little tents built out into the water and you adorn yourself for the great event of the day. Then issuing forth freely into the soothing water, you meet all the lovely ladies whom you saw last night attable d’hôte, in every variety of fascinating attire. Some are dressed as nymphs, some wear the most elaborately embroidered flannel garments, some have broad-brimmed Leghorn hats, but these are they who fear the spoiling of their complexions, and are few in number. Out of this mass of insinuating loveliness you choose the one to you most sympathetic, you ask her if she swims (but of course she swims, since she is Italian, or at worst Italian by education and customs), you engage her for the morning as you would for a dance, you conduct her out to sea and does she need any assistance you offer it. You talk, you laugh, the hour passes, and you bring her safely to shore.You make your way back to your apartment, return to your couch and smoke. You read the paper, you drink coffee, then you dress, play billiards, and attempt breakfast. You yawn, doze, but not again see the fair water-nymph until dinner at fiveP.M., when she reappears in other guise, as the perfumed, powdered, languid, andbien coifféelady of fashion. After dinner everyone saunters forth to the woods and gardens. Those who can, go in pairs, those who cannot in dreary solos or triplets. It is still hot, but not beyond endurance. The Pallavicini Gardens close by are wonderful; waterworks are there, artificial lakes, grottos with stalactites, Chinese pagodas, Swiss châlets, and English farmhouses, besides arbours, into which the confiding stranger strolls innocently, to be drenched unawares from a secret stream, and whence he darts, less confidingly, only to be met by four or five more conflicting streams on some deceptive bridge or turret. There are many more cunning devices besides, and beyond all—or rather not to be marred by them all—is the subtly seductive beauty of Southern nature: the luxuriant vegetation, the waveless dreamy sea, the tender rose-tinted sky, the trickle of many a tiny rivulet, the hot, pale air rich with harmonious scents of orange blossom, rose, and magnolia; and then later on, when the hours have sped into darkness, the whisper of rising night-breezes amid the foliage, the flittering of fire-flies,the shooting of stars, the hush of waves on the shelving shore below, when the water is gently moved by the touch of the wind. Night grows, everyone goes home. The terraces of hotels and palaces are peopled with gracefully-reclining ladies who smoke cigarettes and flirt fans, with obsequious and attentive cavaliers, flattering and self-conscious; with fat dowagers, wearied and sleepy, who yet will not for the life of them retire to leave the field open to younger and fairer rivals. The cool hours wear away—the only hours in which one lives in summer—a short while of sleep, and the early morning is back again with its delicious water duties and the lazy hours that follow on till night.