One comes to the Adriatic shore at Pesaro, midway on the coast between Ravenna and Ancona. North and south, from the Venetian boundary to the rocky, sparse-populated shores of Calabria, flanking upon the Ionian sea, is a wonderland of little-travelled highroad, all of it a historic itinerary, though indeed the road is none of the best. To the jaded traveller, tired of stock sights and scenes, the covering of this coast road from Venice to Brindisi would be a journey worth the making, but it should not be done hurriedly.
CHAPTER XIV
BY ADRIATIC’S SHORE
THE Italian shore of the Adriatic is a terra incognita to most travellers in Italy, save those who take ship for the east at Brindisi, and even they arrive from Calais, Paris or Ostende by express train without break of journey en route.
The following table gives the kilometric distances of this shore road by the Adriatic, through the coast towns from Otranto in Pouilles to Chioggia in Venetia. The itinerary has, perhaps, never been made in its entirety by any stranger automobilist, but the writer has seen enough to make him want to cover its entire length.
| Population | Kilometres | |
| Otranto | 22,266 | 0 |
| Lecce | 2,333 | 40.4 |
| Brindisi | 16,719 | 80 |
| Monopoli | 7,620 | 151 |
| Bari | 58,266 | 193.3 |
| Barletta | 31,194 | 248.2 |
| Manfredonia | 8,324 | 330 |
| Foggia | 14,067 | 368.4 |
| Here the road leaves the coast but joins again at Ortona. | ||
| Isernia | 7,687 | 526.7 |
| Ortona | 6,366 | 673.5 |
| Pescara | 2,612 | 694.3 |
| Ancona | 28,577 | 849.7 |
| Pesaro | 12,547 | 909.7 |
| Rimini | 10,838 | 945.3 |
| Ravenna | 18,571 | 995.3 |
| Ferrara | 28,814 | 1,068.7 |
| Chioggia | 20,381 | 1,160.5 |
The above are the cold figures as worked out from the Road Books, Maps and Profiles of the Touring Club Italiano. The whole forms a rather lengthy itinerary but, in part, it is within the power of every automobilist in Italy to make, as he crosses Umbria from Rome to the Adriatic, by including that portion of the route between Ancona and Chioggia. This cuts the distance to the more reasonable figure of a little more than three hundred kilometres.
Taranto, Otranto and Bari are mere place names for which most do not even know where to look on the map. Conditions of life were not easy or luxurious here in the outposts of the western empire, and the influx of alien Greek and Turk and Jew has ever tended to change the Italian colouring to one almost Oriental in tone and brilliance.
Brindisi has usually been considered a mere way station on the traveller’s itinerary, where he changes train for boat. But it is more than that. It was the ancient Brentesion of the Greeks, indeed it was the gateway of all intercourse between the peninsula and the Greece of the mainland and the islands of Ægina.
Virgil died here on his return from Greece in 19 B.C., and for that reason alone it at once takes rank as one of the world’s great literary shrines. But who ever heard of a literary pilgrim coming here!