A Book of the Riviera

by S. Baring-Gould

The visitor from the north of Europe is perplexed how to determine approximately the dates of the domestic buildings in every one of these Ligurian towns and villages. The architecture has a modern look, and yet the houses are decrepit, ruinous, and shabby. The windows and doors are square-headed, with scarce a moulding to differentiate them, and the pointed arch is only seen in the bridges that tie the houses together. Rarely, only in some palace or town hall, does the swallow-tail crenelation, or a feeble imitation of Gothic cornice, speak of the Middle Ages. The fact is that the streets are so narrow that there is no room for display of street architecture in these lanes, culs de sac, and thoroughfares, that allow no wheeled conveyance to pass up and down. The houses set their noses against each other and stare into each other’s eyes. There is no privacy there, not even in smells. If a man eats garlic, every one sniffs it in the house opposite. If a woman administers a curtain lecture, all the occupants of the houses vis-à-vis prick up their ears, listen to every word, and mark every intonation of voice. Into no single room has the sun looked for a thousand years, and air has been but grudgingly admitted, and never allowed to circulate. The houses run up five, six, even seven storeys, and are tenanted by many families. Those nearest the pavement partake of the first whiff of the garbage of the street, the dejections of the tenants in the tenements above; and those in the topmost storey inhale the flavour of stale humanity ascending from all the flats below.

But to revert to the architecture. I do not suppose that it has altered since classic times. We know how it was in Rome among the insulæ, blocks of dwellings crowding the densely occupied lower parts of the town, running up to great heights, and swarming with people living on the several stages. The palaces of the nobility, where facing the street, looked like the fronts of modern factories. Happily, in Rome one such remains, in the wall of the church of SS. John and Paul, on the Monte Clivo. It is a lofty red-brick front, without an ornament, pierced formerly with square-headed windows or windows very slightly arched with bricks, precisely such a face as may be seen to a factory in a side lane of Manchester, Birmingham, or Leeds.

The Roman noble kept all his decoration for the inside of his house; his colonnade was towards his enclosed garden, his marbles about his atrium; externally his mansion was a barrack. Pointed architecture never was assimilated by the Italian. He endured it; he used it for churches, always with a difference. But for his home he would have none of it. He was surrounded by remains of the period of Roman domination over the world, vast structures, solid and enduring. Temples fell and were despoiled to decorate churches, but private dwellings, though they might be gutted, could not be defaced, when they had no face to be mutilated. Vandal, Lombard, Saracen, swept over the land, burnt and pillaged, but left the solid walls standing to be re-roofed and re-occupied after they were gone. Nothing but the recurrent earthquake affected these structures. And when a house was shaken down it was rebuilt on the same lines. If a bit of ornament were desired it was copied, and badly copied, from some relic of classic times. Consequently there has been incessant reproduction of one type. Thus all these old Ligurian towns and villages appear as if built at one and the same time, in one and the same style, and all to have fallen simultaneously into the same disorder, dirt, and raggedness.

BUSSANA

Near to S. Syro is a hospital for leprosy, a disease which long lingered on in San Remo. Happily it has disappeared—at all events from this town—and in 1883 the building became the Civic Hospital. But leprosy is by no means extinct on the Ligurian coast;

“it is hopelessly incurable, the limbs and the faces of the lepers being gradually eaten away, so that with several, while you look upon one side of the face, and see it apparently in the bloom of health and youth, the other has already fallen away and ceased to exist. The disease is hereditary, having remained in certain families of this district almost from time immemorial. The members of these families are prohibited from intermarrying with those of others, or indeed from marrying at all, unless it is believed that they are free from any seeds of the fatal inheritance. Sometimes the marriages, when sanctioned by magistrates and clergy, are contracted in safety, but often, after a year or two of wedded life, the terrible enemy appears again, and existence becomes a curse; thus the fearful legacy is handed on.”—Hare.

The marvel is that plague, leprosy, and typhoid fever are not endemic in these Ligurian towns. But the winter visitor to San Remo may be at ease, he will see no lepers in the place now. Should a case occur, it would at once be removed out of sight.

As already said, San Remo takes its name from S. Romulus, a bishop, whose festival is on October 13th. Almost nothing is certainly known of this Bishop of Genoa, who is thought to have died in the year 350. The story goes that in old age he retired from his charge to a cave or Barma in the mountains, about five miles from San Remo. Here formerly was a Benedictine convent, now the very modern building is occupied by sisters, and the cave of S. Romolo has been converted into a church with an ugly façade. On the fête day plenty of Sanremois visit the shrine, some out of devotion, some for the sake of a picnic, and many from mixed motives.