II.
Surely no city in the world queens it over the waves so completely as does Portoferraio. She rides them imperiously, lifting high the turrets that are her crown and defence; she decks herself in the brightest colours, conscious of her beauty; and sets herself boldly on the very head and front of the dark blue waters that wash her feet or leap up in wrath at her pride, yet never injure her. Genoa is called the Superb, but the epithet rises more spontaneously to the mind on view of the capital of the Island of Elba.
Portoferraio was originally one of those headlands, so characteristic of Elba, that grow out from the mainland on a narrow stalk, and then widen and heighten into rocky peninsulas. It is now, however, an island, for Cosimo I., Duke of Tuscany, cut a moat through the stalk, and severed the peninsula from the mainland. The peninsula consists of two heights, on one of which is the fort known as the Falcone, on the other, that of the Stella; and these are bound together by a lofty wall, within the castellations of which sentinels could walk without descending into the town. Immediately below each fort, a bank of concrete, kept in former times very clean and free from growth, formed a water-shed for the rain which streamed down it into a cistern below. At present the concrete, though still railed in, is quite overgrown, for the city boasts a water-supply brought down from the neighbouring hills. Round the forts are spacious granite-paved squares on which considerable bodies of men could manœuvre; and below cluster the red-roofed, green-shuttered houses, whose inhabitants sleep, in Oriental fashion, through the heat of the day, coming out in the evening to walk among the oleanders of Le Ghiaie—a tiny park above a beach of the whitest gravel (ghiaia)—or to dance with the officers in the new bathing establishment, of which they are so proud. Down again, at the foot of the houses, lies the port, a semi-circle pointed at the southern end by the pink-washed tumble-down offices of the sanitary inspector, at the northern end by the octagonal tower of the convict prison. Soldiers, convicts, “society,” trade, all hive on those two little hills, and the only opening through which workers and drones can pass in and out on the landside is a low-browed gateway, bearing the Medici arms, and overlooking a plank bridge spanning the moat of sea-water. Within the gateway is a wide, open space, through which one passes up the first ramparts of the Falcone, to a wonderful winding tunnel, hewn in the solid rock. This brings one out through another gate, into the flaunting little city. The tunnel is known as La Tromba (the trumpet-shaped), and was the work, as usual, of Cosimo’s engineer.
Portoferraio, Ferraio, the iron city, as it was originally called, dates, at any rate, from Roman times. The name would suggest this, and the fact is abundantly proved by Roman walls, pavements of brick and marble, tombs with inscriptions, skeletons, lamps, etc., coins of consuls and emperors, workmen’s tools, that were unearthed from time to time during the seventeenth century, when excavations were being made for the subterranean cisterns, guard-houses, powder-magazines, halls of every kind that honeycomb the ground.
Towards the end of April, 1548, there arrived in the bay below Portoferraio a fleet bearing one thousand soldiers, three hundred sappers and miners, and the architect John Baptist Camerini. Ferraio was at that time a heap of ancient ruins, but Cosimo I., the merchant Duke of Tuscany, whose coasts lay open to the invasion of the Turks, and whose galleys were continually assailed by pirates, concluded that the best possible points of defence against these redoubtable enemies were Ferraio and Piombino. With a large sum of money, and a very great deal of diplomacy, he persuaded Charles V. (who thought that the same points of defence would be as irritating to the French as to the Turks) to grant him the places. The agreement was hardly concluded when the Duke’s men landed on the little peninsula, quarried the blocks, ready squared to their hands from the Roman villas and walls, made a brick kiln on the coast near by where there was suitable clay, obtained excellent mortar from the stones of the neighbouring hills, and in a fortnight had raised the walls breast high. Cosimo made two visits to the island to inspect the works, living not in Ferraio itself, but in a house on the hillside opposite, that is still known as the Casa del Duca (Duke’s house), and bears on its garden wall a defaced, weather-stained marble bust of Duke Cosimo. The Turks, the French, the Genoese, and the rest of Cosimo’s many enemies were beside themselves with rage. Elba was wasted throughout its length and breadth, the new town—no longer Ferraio, but Cosmopolis—was besieged by mighty fleets, intrigues were obstinately kept up to induce the Emperor to revoke his grant, but the Duke (now Grand Duke) made head against force and intrigue; the town remained in his hands, and still, as witness to his might, bears over its gateways the proud inscription:
templa, moenia, domos, arces, portum,
cosmus florentinorum dux II. a fundamentis
erexit an. MDXLVIII
The port, as made by Cosimo, still remains, but the defences and engineering works completed by him and his successors are now deserted, or have been turned into the convict prison, the three white columns of whose water-gate form a striking feature in a view of the port. The convicts are here allowed to work at various trades. Workshops are provided within the prison walls, and a show-room for the sale of their goods. The government exacts a small royalty on objects sold.
A sentimental interest attaches itself to Portoferraio, as being the place which preserved to mankind a sickly puling infant of the name of Victor Hugo. An epigraph by Mario Foresi, on the walls of the town-hall, commemorates the fact.[13]
Along the shore of that part of the gulf, which lies outside the port, the sea looks as though some eccentric gardener had been laying out garden beds in it, with grassy walks between, and white pyramids at irregular intervals. These are the saline, where the government makes salt (not very good salt either) for its subjects. It produces about 1,152 tons a year, which it sells at the rate of 3d. per pound. Truly a government salt monopoly is not a pleasant thing for peasants, who can get salt alone as a condiment for their soup of cabbages and beans, or their mess of maize flour.
Ferraio, then, takes its name from the principal product of the island, but the mines are not near the town; they are on the eastern coast, at Rio and at Cape Calamita (Loadstone Cape).
Rio, like all other villages in this part of the world, consists of two parts: Rio Alto, whose streets are merely a succession of stairs; and Rio Marina, a modern town, where the mines are. The prevailing colour in Rio Marina is red: red are the hills that shut out the fresh north breezes from the town, red is the sea where the steamers lie off to be loaded, red are the four piers where the trucks go up and down, red the houses, with their curtains, stairs, and furniture. This red ochrous ore is associated, as one ascends the mountain, with the massive and micaceous varieties of hæmatite; so that while one sees red cliffs towering on one side, and solid knobs and blocks of iron, almost native, on the other, one walks over roads that glitter and sparkle like running water, and are almost as slippery as ice.
“And Seius, whose eight hundred slaves
Sicken in Ilva’s mines,”
writes Lord Macaulay; thereby showing that he had never been to Rio. For there is no mining properly so-called here; there is no tunnelling, no blasting on a large scale. The men work in the open air, digging away the red earth, blowing away the harder masses with small charges of powder or getting them out with picks. The earth is washed in a large cistern, with a revolving paddle-wheel, that keeps the water in continual motion; and the iron thus separated from the clay is loaded on to the ships without further refining.
At present the mines are farmed out by the Government, and produce about 176,516 tons yearly. The men are paid by piece work, and earn from two francs to four francs a day. Only one set of men is kept. When they are not lading foreign vessels, they dig ore, and make great heaps of it; when they are not digging, they lade. It is evident the place wants development.
At the iron quarries of Cape Calamita, where magnetic iron is obtained, we watched the process of lading. A large English-built steamer had come in, under a Genoese captain, for iron, which it was to exchange for coal at Cardiff. She stood in as near to the shore as was safe, and then anchoring, opened three mouths on each side to receive her food. Come out to her six willing slaves, small boats called laconi, with the most audacious masts and yard-arms one can imagine. They look as though they would rend the clouds and pierce the sky; but it is all bluster; the boats are such helpless creatures that if they are to cross the bay, they must have a steam-tug to pull them. The men in the laconi rest planks on the open lips of the monster that towers above them, and proceed to pour down its six gaping throats an infinite number of small baskets of the red, earthy ore. For four consecutive days they feed her, if the weather be fine, and then she goes off to the northern seas, where laconi are unknown, where the water is rarely motionless, and where steam cranes and puffing engines tell of work done in a hurry. It must be confessed, however, that the Elban method is adorably picturesque. Sea, sky, and hills are glowing in the great calm. The big black ship lies motionless; her crew lounge, her jovial, white-suited captain, so proud of his mahogany-fitted passenger ship that used to go to India, stands watching the ore slide in; the Elbans cluster up the sides of the planks to pass the baskets from one to the other; they talk and laugh, showing glittering white teeth; and they wear hanging red fishermen’s caps, patchwork shirts and bright sashes.
Onward along the coasts from Rio, we come to the ancient town of Portolongone, built along the curve of a fine, natural harbour. Sheer above the town, where the Portolongone women flaunt it along their sea front after mass, in the brightest of dresses, and the most artistic of black or white lace head-veils, rises one of the strongest fortresses of the island. It was built in 1603, to the infinite dismay and disturbance of such small fry as the Florentines, Genoese, and the Pope, by Philip III. of Spain. The approach to it is broad, but very steep; the outer ring of fortifications are a city in themselves; and within, across the inner moat and drawbridge, there are spacious squares, clusters of houses, an interesting church, and the large prisons in which are kept criminals condemned to solitary confinement. The prisons we cannot enter, but let us sit for a while in the chaplain’s cool, brick-paved room, sipping the country wine and breaking the long, curled strips of pastry which his hospitable womenfolk have heaped on the table, and listen to what he has to tell us of his charges.
“No,” he says, “they none of them live long, once they come in here; they go mad or fall into consumption, and so die if they have not succeeded in committing suicide first. We have to look out sharply to prevent that. A man managed to do it, though, about a month ago. He tore his shirt into strips and made a slip-knot for his neck, climbed, no one knows how, to the grate in the middle of the deep window-hole, and tied the end of the noose there, bound his own hands together somehow or other, and then kicked away the stool he had been standing on. When he felt himself strangling, he struggled to get free, but his hands were fast, and he only succeeded in pulling the noose tighter and tighter. He was quite dead when they took him down. Outside the prison are a number of cells open to the air, closed by iron gates. You can see them down there.” We were walking about outside by this time, where the convicts not in solitary confinement are building the new prisons. “Every prisoner has an hour’s turn in one of those open-air cells once a day, guards pacing outside the gates the whole time.
“Their food? Well, yes, as you say, it is clean, savoury, and well-cooked”—we had been peeping into the kitchens as we came along—“but they have a very small allowance; a plate of soup given half at midday and half in the evening (vegetable soup, with pasta in it) and two loaves, not much bigger than rolls, of white bread. It is piteous to see how a stout well-built man dwindles away on this régime. The men who are at work buy extras with their wages. Those who wear chains from ankle to wrist were sentenced under the old penal code. When they go to bed they are chained to the wall. Chains are abolished by the new code.
“The prison consists of two storeys of cells, running down each side of a central corridor that extends up to the roof. Communication with the cells of the upper storey is obtained by an iron balcony which runs the length of the building at the height of the first storey. All the cell doors open towards the inner end of the prison, where an altar has been set up.
“When I say mass, they are all set ajar (there is in every case an iron gate, kept locked, inside the wooden door), and so the prisoners can look at the altar without seeing each other. I go round to them at regular intervals, unless someone calls for me specially, and talk to them from outside the iron gates. No, I am not afraid, but it is the custom. They generally like to have me go, and appear really to appreciate the comforts of religion. Read! Ah, you saw Library printed up near the gate, did you? But there are very few books in it. What can we give them? They must not read novels, and they must not read politics. I give them a religious paper about the miraculous Madonna at Pompeii, and some of them read that. Otherwise they do nothing. All the work of the place, washing, nursing, cooking, building, cleaning, is done by convicts. Even the barbers are convicts, and as they have nearly served their time, and besides get better paid than the others, they are careful of their behaviour; there is no need to be afraid of them. That house down there, with its back against the rock, is the lowest depth of all. The cells are dark, and none but the most refractory prisoners ever go there. It has been empty for some time past.
“Born criminals? No, I don’t much believe in that doctrine; I think that in most cases one whom Lombroso would call a born criminal, may be saved by careful training. Before I came here I knew a man who brutally killed his wife while his little boy looked on. The man was condemned; we looked after the bringing up of the boy. At first but little could be done with him. He would bully his fellows, and then, crossing his arms over his breast, would throw back his head defiantly and say: ‘Do you know who I am? My father was the terror of the village.’ He did not seem to know what pain was. I have seen him undergo an operation in his finger which had been caught in a machine, without a sign of suffering. One day the lads were working at a machine, and one of them grew tired. ‘Who’ll take my place?’ he called out. No answer. ‘Will no one help me?’ Another pause. Then the criminal’s son called out, ‘I will.’ He went to the machine and worked there till he was nearly dropping with fatigue. But from that day he was completely changed, and he has grown up into a quiet, trustworthy, hard-working man.”
By this time our courteous host had accompanied us back to the inner gateway; and so, taking leave of him, we left that terrible artificial world, over which, with a hush still greater than that of the sea and sky and mountain, broods the awful presence of unknown crime terribly expiated.