IX
THE TUSCAN COAST
Shelley’s last months at Lerici—Story of his death—Carrara and its marble quarries—Pisa—Its grand group of ecclesiastical buildings—The cloisters of the Campo Santo—Napoleon’s life on Elba—Origin of the Etruscans—The ruins of Tarquinii—Civita Vecchia, the old port of Rome—Ostia.
The Bay of Spezzia is defined sharply enough on its western side by the long, hilly peninsula which parts it from the Mediterranean, but as this makes only a small angle with the general trend of the coast-line, its termination is less strongly marked on the opposite side. Of its beauties we have spoken in an earlier article, but there is a little town at the southern extremity which, in connection with the coast below, has a melancholy interest to every lover of English literature. Here, at Lerici, Shelley spent what proved to be the last months of his life. The town itself, once strongly fortified by its Pisan owners against their foes of Genoa on the one side and Lucca on the other, is a picturesque spot. The old castle crowns a headland, guarding the little harbor and overlooking the small but busy town. At a short distance to the southeast is the Casa Magni, once a Jesuit seminary, which was occupied by Shelley. Looking across the beautiful gulf to the hills on its opposite shore and the island of Porto Venere, but a few miles from the grand group of the Carrara mountains, in the middle of the luxuriant scenery of the Eastern Riviera, the house, though in itself not very attractive, was a fit home for a lover of nature. But Shelley’s residence within its walls was too soon cut short. There are strange tales (like those told with bated breath by old nurses by the fireside) that as the closing hour approached the spirits of the unseen world took bodily form and became visible to the poet’s eye; tales of a dark-robed figure standing by his bedside beckoning him to follow; of a laughing child rising from the sea as he walked by moonlight on the terrace, clapping its hands in glee; and of other warnings that the veil which parted him from the spirit world was vanishing away. Shelley delighted in the sea. On the 1st of July he left Lerici for Leghorn in a small sailing vessel. On the 8th he set out to return, accompanied only by his friend, Mr. Williams, and an English lad. The afternoon was hot and sultry, and as the sun became low a fearful squall burst upon the neighboring sea. What happened no one exactly knows, but they never came back to the shore. Day followed day, and the great sea kept its secret; but at last, on the 22d, the corpse of Shelley was washed up near Viareggio and that of Williams near Bocca Lerici, three miles away. It was not till three weeks afterwards that the body of the sailor lad came ashore. Probably the felucca had either capsized or had been swamped at the first break of the storm; but when it was found, some three months afterwards, men said that it looked as if it had been run down, and even more ugly rumors got abroad that this was no accident, but the work of some Italians, done in the hope of plunder, as it was expected that the party had in charge a considerable sum of money. The bodies were at first buried in the sand with quicklime; but at that time the Tuscan law required “any object then cast ashore to be burned, as a precaution against plague,” so, by the help of friends, the body of Shelley was committed to the flames “with fuel and frankincense, wine, salt, and oil, the accompaniments of a Greek cremation,” in the presence of Byron Leigh Hunt, and Trelawny. The corpse of Williams had been consumed in like fashion on the previous day. “It was a glorious day and a splendid prospect; the cruel and calm sea before, the Appennines behind. A curlew wheeled close to the pyre, screaming, and would not be driven away; the flames arose golden and towering.” The inurned ashes were entombed, as everyone knows, in the Protestant burial ground at Rome by the side of Keats’ grave, near the pyramid of Cestius. Much as there was to regret in Shelley’s life, there was more in his death, for such genius as his is rare, and if the work of springtide was so glorious, what might have been the summer fruitage?
As the Gulf of Spezzia is left behind, the Magra broadens out into an estuary as it enters the sea, the river which formed in olden days the boundary between Liguria and Etruria. Five miles from the coast, and less than half the distance from the river, is Sarzana, the chief city of the province, once fortified, and still containing a cathedral of some interest. It once gave birth to a Pope, Nicholas V., the founder of the Vatican Library, and in the neighborhood the family of the Buonapartes had their origin, a branch of it having emigrated to Corsica. Sarzana bore formerly the name of Luna Nova, as it had replaced another Luna which stood near to the mouth of the river. This was in ruins even in the days of Lucan, and now the traveller from Saranza to Pisa sees only “a strip of low, grassy land intervening between him and the sea. Here stood the ancient city. There is little enough to see. Beyond a few crumbling tombs and a fragment or two of Roman ruins, nothing remains of Luna. The fairy scene described by Rutilus, so appropriate to the spot which bore the name of the virgin-queen of heaven, the ‘fair white walls’ shaming with their brightness the untrodden snow, the smooth, many-tinted rocks overrun with laughing lilies, if not the pure creation of the poet, have now vanished from the sight. Vestiges of an amphitheater, of a semicircular building which may be a theater, of a circus, a piscina, and fragments of columns, pedestals for statues, blocks of pavement and inscriptions, are all that Luna has now to show.”
But all the while the grand group of the Carrara hills is in view, towering above a lowland region which rolls down towards the coast. A branch line now leads from Avenza, a small seaport town from which the marble is shipped, to the town of Carrara, through scenery of singular beauty. The shelving banks and winding slopes of the foreground hills are clothed with olives and oaks and other trees; here and there groups of houses, white and grey and pink, cluster around a campanile tower on some coign of vantage, while at the back rises the great mountain wall of the Apuan Alps, with its gleaming crags, scarred, it must be admitted, rather rudely and crudely by its marble quarries, though the long slopes of screes beneath these gashes in the more distant views almost resemble the Alpine snows. The situation of the town is delightful, for it stands at the entrance of a rapidly narrowing valley, in a sufficiently elevated position to command a view of this exquisitely rich lowland as it shelves and rolls down to the gleaming sea. Nor is the place itself devoid of interest. One of its churches at least, S. Andrea, is a really handsome specimen of the architecture of this part of Italy in the thirteenth century, but the quarries dominate, and their products are everywhere. Here are the studios of sculptors and the ateliers of workmen. The fair white marble here, like silver in the days of Solomon, is of little account; it paves the street, builds the houses, serves even for the basest uses, and is to be seen strewn or piled up everywhere to await dispersal by the trains to more distant regions. Beyond the streets of Carrara, in the direction of the mountains, carriage roads no longer exist. Lanes wind up the hills here and there in rather bewildering intricacy, among vines and olive groves, to hamlets and quarries; one, indeed, of rather larger size and more fixity of direction, keeps for a time near the river, if indeed the stream which flows by Carrara be worthy of that name, except when the storms are breaking or the snows are melting upon the mountains. But all these lanes alike terminate in a quarry, are riven with deep ruts, ploughed up like a field by the wheels of the heavy wagons that bring down the great blocks of marble. One meets these grinding and groaning on their way, drawn by yokes of dove-colored oxen (longer than that with which Elisha was ploughing when the older prophet cast his mantle upon his shoulders), big, meek-looking beasts, mild-eyed and melancholy as the lotus-eaters. To meet them is not always an unmixed pleasure, for the lanes are narrow, and there is often no room to spare; how the traffic is regulated in some parts is a problem which I have not yet solved.
Carrara would come near to being an earthly paradise were it not for the mosquitos, which are said to be such that they would have made even the Garden of Eden untenable, especially to its first inhabitants. Of them, however, I cannot speak, for I have never slept in the town, or even visited it at the season when this curse of the earth is at its worst; but I have no hesitation in asserting that the mountains of Carrara are not less beautiful in outline than those of any part of the main chain of the Alps of like elevation, while they are unequalled in color and variety of verdure.
To Avenza succeeds Massa, a considerable town, beautifully situated among olive-clad heights, which are spotted with villas and densely covered with foliage. Like Carrara, it is close to the mountains, and disputes with Carrara for the reputation of its quarries. This town was once the capital of a duchy, Massa-Carrara, and the title was borne by a sister of Napoleon I. Her large palace still remains; her memory should endure, though not precisely in honor, for according to Mr. Hare, she pulled down the old cathedral to improve the view from her windows. But if Massa is beautiful, so is Pietra Santa, a much smaller town enclosed by old walls and singularly picturesque in outline. It has a fine old church, with a picturesque campanile, which, though slightly more modern than the church itself, has seen more than four centuries. The piazza, with the Town Hall, this church and another one, is a very characteristic feature. In the baptistry of one of the churches are some bronzes by Donatello. About half a dozen miles away, reached by a road which passes through beautiful scenery, are the marble quarries of Seravezza, which were first opened by Michael Angelo, and are still in full work. There is only one drawback to travelling by railway in this region; the train goes too fast. Let it be as slow as it will, and it can be very slow, we can never succeed in coming to a decision as to which is the most picturesquely situated place or the most lovely view. Comparisons notoriously are odious, but delightful, as undoubtedly is the Riviera di Ponenta to me, the Riviera di Levante seems even more lovely.
After Pietra Santa, however, the scenery becomes less attractive, the Apuan Alps begin to be left behind, and a wider strip of plain parts the Apennines from the sea. This, which is traversed by the railway, is in itself flat, stale, though perhaps not unprofitable to the husbandman. Viareggio, mentioned on a previous page, nestles among its woods of oaks and pines, a place of some little note as a health resort; and then the railway after emerging from the forest strikes away from the sea, and crosses the marshy plains of the Serchio, towards the banks of the Arno.
