Lavagna, near by, has a Palazzo Rosso, in that it is built of a reddish stone, though that is not its official name. It was an appanage of the Fieschi family, who owned to Popes, Cardinals and soldiers in the gallant days of the Genoese Republic. Sestri-Levante, a half a dozen kilometres beyond Chiavari, is the last of the Riviera resorts. It is a mere strip of villa and hotel-lined roadway with a delightful water front and a charming and idyllic background.
Spezia is reached only by climbing a lengthy mountain road up over the Pass of the Bracco; sixty kilometres in all from Sestri to Spezia. The highroad now leaves the coast to wind around inland over the lower slopes of the Apennines. The railway itself follows the shore.
It is a finely graded road with entrancing far-away vistas of the sea, the distant snow-capped summits of the mountains to the north and, off southward, the more gently rising Tuscan hills.
After having climbed some twenty-one hundred feet above the sea, the highroad runs down through the valley of the Vara, until finally at Spezia, Italy’s great marine arsenal, one comes again to the Mediterranean shore.
Just before Spezia is reached, snuggled close in a little bay, is Vernazza—where the wine comes from, at least, the wine the praises of which were sung by Boccaccio “as the paragon of wines.” Wine is still a product of the region, but its quality may not be what it once was.
Spezia is a snug, conservative and exclusive military and naval town. The gold-lace and blue-cloth individuals of the “service” dominate everything, even to the waiters in the hotels and cafés. No one else has a show.
The Hotel Croix de Malte (with a French name be it observed) is the chic hotel of Spezia, with prices on a corresponding scale, and no garage. The Albergo Italia, equally well situated, a typical Italian house of its class, is more modest in its prices and better as to its food. It has no garage either, but under the circumstances, that of itself is no drawback. Across the street, in a vacant store, you may lodge your automobile for two francs a night, or for one franc if you tell the ambitious and obliging little man who runs it that he demands too much. He is really the best thing we found in Spezia. We had run out of gasoline in entering the city, the long run down hill flattened out into a plain just before the town was reached, but he accommodatingly sent out a five gallon tin (“original package” goods from Philadelphia) and would take no increase in price for his trouble. Such a thing in the automobile line ought to be encouraged. We pay “through the nose,” as the French say, often enough as it is.
Spezia’s suburban villas are a natural outcome of its environment, but they are all modern and have, none of them, the flavour of historic romanticism about them.
An ancient castle tower on the hills above Spezia is about the only feudal ruin near by. The viper, the device of the Viscontis, is still graven above its entrance door to recall the fact that the device of the Milanese nobles was a viper, and that their natures, too, took after that of the unlovely thing. The Viper of Milan and the Viscontis is a worthy cage companion to the hedgehog of François I.
Spezia’s gulf is all that Spezia is not; romantic, lovely and varied. It was described in ancient times by Strabo, the geographer, and by Persius. Little of its topographical surroundings or climatic attributes have changed since that day.