Quite twenty per cent. of the population work at the industry, and five hundred men are actually engaged in hewing out and slicing off the great blocks. Ten thousand, at least, find their livelihood dependent upon the industry, and two hundred thousand tons is a normal annual output; in price, valued at from 150 to 1,500 francs the cubic metre.
At Massa one joins the main road again running south by the shore. One never hears of the conventional tourist stopping at Massa; but we found the Hotel Massa and its dinner in the garden worth the taking and agreed that the Château, in base rococo style, (now the public administrative buildings), a curiosity worth seeing. Massa has a Napoleonic memory hanging over it, too, in that it was once the residence of the Little Corporal’s sister. Massa’s Castello, high above all else in the town, is grim, lofty and spectacular though to be viewed only from without. Massa is worth making a note of, even by the hurried traveller.
Since leaving Sarzana the high road has become worse and worse, until in the vicinity of Carrara and Massa it is almost indescribably bad. There is no such stretch of bad road in Europe as this awful fifty kilometres, for it continues all the way to Lucca and Livorno. The vast amount of traffic drawn by ten head of oxen at a time is what does it of course, and as there is no way around one has to go through it, though it’s a heart-breaking job to one that cares anything for his automobile.
Pietrasanta, eight kilometres farther on, was, for us, an undiscovered beauty spot and historic shrine; at least, none of us had ever heard of it till we passed the portals. Now we know that the walls, through which we passed, were the same that the blood-thirsty, battling Lorenzo di Medici besieged in 1482; and that the ancient bronze font in the Baptistery was the work of Donatello. We were glad that Massa and Pietrasanta were counted in, as they should be by everyone passing this way, even though they did take up half a day’s time—all on account of the awful road—part of which time, however, you are eating that excellent lunch in the garden of the Hotel Massa. That time will not be lost anyway, one must eat somewhere.
Eight kilometres beyond Massa is Viareggio, an unlovely, incipient seaside resort for dwellers in the Tuscan towns; but a historic spot nevertheless, and interesting from that viewpoint at any rate.
Viareggio has no villas or palaces of note, and its chief associations for the traveller lie in its memories of Shelley and Ouida, the Marquise de la Ramée. There is a monument, erected to Shelley in 1894, commemorating the fact that he was drowned here, in the Tyrrhenian Sea, and his body consumed by fire, on the shore.
It was in the village of Massarosa, near Viareggio, that that much-abused and very abusive old lady, Ouida, the Marquis de la Ramée, died in January, 1908. Since 1877 she had made Italy her home, and for years she had lived here alone, not in poverty or misery, for she had a “civil pension” which was more than sufficient to keep the wolf from the door. She died miserable and alone however. Ouida was a more real, more charitable person than she was given credit for being. She didn’t like the English, and Americans she liked still less, but she loved the Italians. Whose business was it then if she chose to live among them, with her unkempt and unwholesome-looking dogs and her slatternly maid-of-all-work? Ouida, as she herself said, did not hate humanity; she hated society; and she had more courage than some of the rest of us in that she would have nothing to do with it.
The vineyards lying back of Viareggio may not be the most luxuriant in Italy, but they blossom abundantly enough.
Lucca is thirty-five kilometres from Viareggio and the road still bad—on to Livorno, turning to the right instead of the left at Viareggio, it is worse.
Lucca has a right to its claim as one of the most ancient cities of Tuscany, for it is one of the least up-to-date of Italian cities. When Florence was still sunk in its marsh Lucca was already old, and filled with a commercial importance which to-day finds its echo in the distribution of the Lucca olive oil of trade which one may buy at Vancouver, Johannesburg or Rio. Indeed the label on the bottle of olive oil is the only reminiscence many have of Lucca.