Piacenza was founded by the Gauls and was afterwards by the Romans named Placentia. It has ever prospered, though its career has been fraught more than once with danger of extinction. By the tenth century its great trading fair was famous throughout Europe.
Piacenza is full of palaces, statues and monuments which merit the consideration of all serious minded persons, but the automobilist who has made the last fifty kilometres of the Via Æmilia in the rain—and how much it does rain in Italy only one who has travelled there by road for weeks really appreciates—is first concerned as to where he may lay his head and house his car free from harm.
The Grand Hotel San Marco answers his needs well enough and has the endorsement of the Touring Club de France as well as that of the Italian Touring Club, but it is ridiculous that one is obliged to pay in a smug little Italian town of thirty-five thousand inhabitants five francs a night for housing his automobile.
Piacenza is on the direct road to the Italian Lakes via Milan, from which it is distant seventy kilometres.
CHAPTER XVI
IN VENETIA
THE mainland background of Venice, in its most comprehensive sense the region lying north of the Po and south and west of the Austrian frontier, is not a much-travelled region by any class of tourists in Italy. The traveller by rail usually comes up from Bologna and Florence and, with a stop at Padua, makes for Venice forthwith and leaves for the Italian lake region, stopping en route at Verona. The automobilist too often does the thing even more precipitately, by taking Padua and Verona flying, or at least while he is stopping to replenish the inner man or the inner claims of his automobile. Certain readers of this book who may perhaps have done the thing a little more thoroughly may claim that this is an exaggeration, and so far as it applies to their particular case it may be, but the writer honestly believes that it fits astonishingly well with the majority of Italian itineraries in these parts. He bases this on the fact that he has seen tourists in droves in Padua and Verona, and he has not seen one in Este, Monselice, Battaglia, or even in Vicenza, Treviso, Asolo or Udine.