Italian Highways and Byways from a Motor Car

by M. F. Mansfield

The Romans kneaded their flour by means of a stone cylinder called a maccaro. The name macaroni is supposed to have been derived from this origin.

Naples is the centre of the macaroni industry, but it is made all over the world. That made in Brooklyn would be as good as that made in Naples if it was made of Russian wheat instead of that from Dakota. As it is now made it is decidedly inferior to the Italian variety. By contrast, that made in Tunis is as good as the Naples variety. Russian wheat again!

A macaroni factory looks, from the outside, like a place devoted to making rope. Inside it feels like an inferno. It doesn’t pay to get too well acquainted with the process of making macaroni.

The flour paste is run out of little tubes, or rolled out by big rollers, or cut out by little dies, thus taking its desired forms. The long, stringy macaroni is taken outside and hung up to dry like clothes on a line, except that it is hung on poles. The workmen are lightly and innocently clad, and the workshops themselves are kept at as high a temperature as the stoke-room of a liner. Whether this is really necessary or not, the writer does not know, but he feels sure that some genius will, some day, evolve a process which will do away with hand labour in the making of macaroni. It will be mixed by machinery, baked by electricity and loaded up on cars and steamships by the same power.

The street macaroni merchants of Naples sell the long ropy kind to all comers, and at a very small price one can get a “filling” meal. You get it served on a dish, but without knives, forks or chop sticks. You eat it with your fingers and your mouth.

The meat is tough in Italy, often enough. There is no doubt about that. But it is usually a great deal better than it is given credit for being. The day is past, if it ever existed, when the Anglo-Saxon traveller was forced to quit Italy “because he could not live without good meat.” This was the classic complaint of the innocents abroad of other days, whether they hailed from Kensington or Kalamazoo. They should never have left those superlatively excellent places. The food and Mazzini were the sole topics of travel talk once, but to-day it is more a question of whether one can get his railway connection at some hitherto unheard of little junction, or whether the road via this river valley or that mountain pass is as good as the main road. These are the things that really matter to the traveller, not whether he has got to sleep in a four poster in a bedroom with a tile or marble floor, or eat macaroni and ravioli when he might have—if he were at home—his beloved “ham” and blood-red beefsteaks.

The Italian waiter is usually a sunny, confiding person, something after the style of the negro, and, like his dark-skinned brother, often incompetent beyond a certain point. You like him for what he is though, almost as good a thing in his line as the French garçon, in that he is obliging and a great deal better than the mutton-chopped, bewhiskered nonentity who shuffles about behind your chair in England with his expectant palm forever outstretched.

The Italian camerière, or waiter, takes a pride in his profession—as far as he knows it, and quite loses sight of its commercial possibilities in the technicalities of his craft, and his seeming desire only to please. Subito momento is his ever ready phrase, though often it seems as though he might have replied never.

Seated in some roadside or seashore trattoria one pounds on the bare table for the camerière, orders another “Torino,” pays his reckoning and is off again. Nothing extraordinarily amusing has happened the while, but the mere lolling about on a terrace of a café overlooking the lapping Mediterranean waves at one’s feet is one of the things that one comes to Italy for, and one is content for the nonce never to recur to palazzos, villas, cathedrals, or picture galleries. There have been too many travellers in past times—and they exist to-day—who do not seek to fill the gaps between a round of churches and art galleries, save to rush back to some palace hotel and eat the same kind of a dinner that they would in London, Paris or New York—a little worse cooked and served to be sure. It’s the country and its people that impress one most in a land not his own. Why do so many omit these “attractions?”

The buona mano is everywhere in evidence in Italy, but the Italian himself seems to understand how to handle the question better than strangers. The Italian guest at a hotel is fairly lavish with the quantity of his tips, but each is minute, and for a small service he pays a small fee. We who like to impress the waiter—for we all do, though we fancy we don’t—will often pay as much to a waiter for bringing us a drink as the price of the drink. Not so the Italian; and that’s the difference.