Santa Margherita.
Santa Margherita is one of the many little towns which have gradually grown up along the eastern Riviera, gathering themselves together around the country palace of somesignore, which, first, had been built alone upon the shore, or springing up where, for convenience sake, a little fishing hamlet had been set in creek or bay, until now the whole of the coast line from Genoa to La Spezia is studded thickly with the white walls and glistening roofs of human habitations. The little place has had a station since the railroad has come this way—a station of its own, and not one shared with another village, as some of its neighbours, and one, too, at which all the trains must stop which run during the day to Sestri. There was a great palace built up here many years ago. I forget to what family it belongs, but it is a stately pile, whose marble steps creep down to the water’s edge, and on whose battered face the dim colours of ancient frescoes still show quaintly through the dirt which has encrusted them. Thesignoriused to come here for the sea-bathing, and perhaps it was in this wise that thetown of Santa Margherita came to be built. Nevertheless it is in a fair position upon the coast, and it was probably a prosperous little fishing village long before it could boast its stone pavements and its piazza of now-a-days. The coast swerves in gently so as to form a smooth and ample bay just where the town stands, and jutting out on either side into the blue waves stand two promontories guarding the gulf. To the right is Porto Fino, and, within the bay round the point, a little village bears the name. It is so called from the many dolphins which, near to that shore, sport in bevies beneath the clear water quickly to disperse at the approach of a boat. ‘Fino,’ for shortness and convenience sake, apparently can meandelfino.
Hills, graceful and undulating, clothed with many trees and watered by many a cool stream, are set against the sky for background, and Santa Margherita lies within their lap, sending the gayest houses to adorn her front upon the coast. Buildings of any note belonging to the place are but few—only the Campanile, which stands up tall against the hill, and has some pretty colouring in the mosaic of its belfry, and one or two decrepit old mansions belonging to the gentry of the neighbourhood. The great palace of which we have already spoken stands upon a low hill without the town; orange groves gather round and about it, and woods where dark and spreadingpines are set against the tenderer foliage of chestnuts and arbutus: its white loggias and colonnades face the sea, hung richly with creepers and vines. In the town there are many poorer houses—most of them modern—tall and thinly built, with ill-designed proportions, and gaudily coloured paintings nowise resembling the frescoes of olden times. Along the façade of the town houses stand closely wedged together whose windows are thickly studded up and down, and hung with the white linen from which meaner habitations in Italy are rarely unadorned. This is the most populous part of SantaMargherita, and between these houses and the waters of the bay there is only the paved street from whence steps lead to the higher part of the town, the railway station and the fair country beyond. Here roads branch out on all sides; one leads from behind the town, over the hill to more towns and villages inland, another is hemmed by tall rows of ilexes, and others again, less important, creep up the clefts of the valley until they are lost in the woods, and only peep out again on the barren crests of mountains, where pine trees alone stand as fringes against the sky.
VIEW OF SANTA MARGHERITA.
VIEW OF SANTA MARGHERITA.
Santa Margherita is but one of a hundred nooks along the Cornice from Nice to La Spezia; the villages all breathe the same balmy sea air and bask in the same sunshine, and wear the same garb of luxuriant vegetation, of quaint picturesqueness, side by side with gaudy vulgarity; and yet each has its own life, each is home, as no other place can be to its citizens. Santa Margherita, like the rest, has its full sum of incongruity. Squalid habitations that yet have something of the grace of Italy, with their green shutters, large windows, and marble mosaic floors, stand, in dirt and poverty, side by side with stately palaces of olden time or with the pretentious structures of modern architecture. And in the inhabitants is the same apparent discord. Men and women who for years have been used to exact the homage oftheir inferiors, live side by side with the lowest and the poorest of the people, and, even more, with a perfect grace and courtesy; ladies to whom fashion is a necessity, and excitement has become a second nature, take a naïve pleasure in the pursuits and interests of poor fisherwives, ofcontadinecooking the porridge, or lace-weavers at their pillow.
And nature is there to keep all this strange medley in countenance. Down upon the beach, where the fishers stow their craft when the day’s work is over at sea, and where the little dark-eyed children, ragged and dirty, play in and out the nets upon the shingle, the wind blows hot from off the great moving plain of the Mediterranean and the sun shines heavily for many an hour upon the houses and groves and gardens that are on the water’s level. Leave the town a space, and take one of those roads which lead upward among the mountain valleys, and in a little half-hour the face of nature seems subtly to have changed, and her voice tells a different tale, while yet murmuring of the sea which is near. The summer breeze is scarcely cooler or the sun’s rays less powerful where they break between the large-leaved foliage of the chestnuts, yet a sense of freshness creeps silently around, vigour is in the flowers that grow, in the trees, in the water that flows and ripples. Ferns are tall and waving upon the banks of little rillsand beside cascades, or frail and feathery growing between the crevices of loose stone walls. Maiden-hair is there in profusion, and hart’s-tongue and holly fern, besides many others. The ways are rough and stony, sometimes losing themselves in what seems to be but a mere water-course, sometimes steeply climbing the hills in tortuous coils; but even these rough footpaths look upon fair valleys, and the pale sky is spread out above them, till they reach the mountain’s summit and wind round again upon its crown back towards the whispering sea. And now you will enter upon the region of stone pines, and this is the promontory of Porto Fino. The goodly trees rise up from out soft earth, and their straight stems, with the curiously carved bark, stand tall and erect, many feet on high, ere the branches begin gracefully to strike out on the several sides. Then the boughs grow more forked and multiply again, and still there are no leaves yet to be seen, only when you look up from below you see that there is a great shade spread above you, and that all those thickly matted branches are clothed and adorned with the dark and sweet-scented foliage. Then you sit down, perhaps, in the dreamy cool and the twilight of this forest—where the trees do not need to be thickly set that they may throw their shadows densely—and you breathe the heavy-perfumed air from the pines, while you hear from afar the murmur of the sea.These pine trees can grow on the narrowest ledges of soil that have found a place up the face of the cliffs, and can yet stretch their branches far out over the waves, so that the most barren edge of land by them is made beautiful and softened. And all the time, perhaps, that you have been walking you have scarce caught more than a far-off vision of the magic water. As you made a turn in the road or climbed some little knoll on your way there came a sudden picture before you of a brilliant colour, neither blue nor green nor purple, such as you ever saw it before, framed in the stately branches of the dark pines. And the sky is pale, and yet the sky, too, seems pregnant with colour, and fathomless, and so the sea and the sky meet in one. Then you dive down into a little dale again and into a lonely glen, and the sea is away and the memory of it, only still mysteriously its influence seems to be around. The village of Porto Fino lies to your left, but far below upon the sea-shore. You must descend. The pines still fringe the ridge of land, where it overhangs the water, but now the vegetation will change. Little tufts and sprigs of divers shrubs cling to the rock—myrtle—and gracefully twining sarsaparilla; but green things are not abundant here, where strange boulders of rock strike down into the sea, or lift up their great forms from its depths a little way from the shore; and when the cape is rounded, andthe woods begin again, they are no longer pine plantations but sweeping chestnut groves that drape the hill-side. There is a little shrine that has been built upon the farthest point of the Porto Fino promontory. On windy days the ‘Madonetta’ has bidden fair to be cast from her home and hurled into the treacherous Mediterranean, for the gales rise up suddenly on this coast, and I have seen the smiling waters wax dark and livid in one short hour, dashing their waves in mighty billows upon the rocks, and tossing their white foam far aloft. Then the dolphins gather themselves in companies below the surface, and the ships are fain to take refuge in one of the bays which nature has provided along the coast. Of these Porto Fino is by far the best and largest for many miles ahead. The harbour can hold even large ships, and is a constant halting-place for the smaller craft which ply their trade along the coast. Then the little fishing-smacks are forced to be moored upon the beach, for the swell of the sea is heavy even in this sheltered bay.
So the footpath will have brought you down, curling round the cliff’s front till you come where the chestnut woods are growing luxuriantly above the shores of the little harbour. Porto Fino’s church is to the right of the village, and above it. It is on the neck of the peninsula, just where the land is narrowest, so that standing besideit some windy day you can feel, on the one hand, from the turbid billows beneath, the foam that dashes up against the rocks, and on the other you can see the gentle heaving of the calmer waters in the little bay at your left. You must needs pass the church as you make your way down to the village. The way is steep, but it is paved, though the round stones are somewhat hard and slippery. Porto Fino is a small place. There is a piazza upon the shore whence the little pier juts out into the water, and around which the houses are built in a square. They are poor dwellings most of them, though one or two pink and yellow houses, with balconies, suppose themselves to be charming summer residences for strangers. The village is a fishing village, and therefore is pretty well huddled together upon the shore; but there are a few cosier looking cottages in the woods behind, where the lace-makers live; and the odds and ends of the place have crept up into the valley or upon the slopes. There are pleasure boats at Porto Fino, besides the fishing-smacks: though when I say pleasure boats I have not in mind those dainty little craft which are wont so to be called in fashionable watering-places, for these are rough and dingy, and built, I doubt not, against all rules of modern invention. Nevertheless, they are safe and comfortable, and swift enough when pulled by two stalwart fishers. They will beset you as youcome out upon the piazza, these swarthy boatmen, and clamour loudly for your favour. Then the boat will row you over the dark green waters of the little bay out into the wide sea without, where the water is bluer and less transparent; and when you have rounded the promontory and skirted other little bays you will be back at Santa Margherita.