[De Amicis, a traveller of Italian birth, has given us a number of highly interesting records of travel, including works on Algeria, Spain, Holland, Paris, Constantinople, etc. Among these, “Holland and its People” is perhaps the most entertaining, and as a specimen of its manner we select from it the description of Rotterdam, as a typical example of a Dutch city. This selection is from the translation by Caroline Tilton, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.]
When we arrived in sight of Rotterdam it rained and was foggy; we could see, as through a veil, only an immense confusion of ships, houses, windmills, towers, trees, and people in motion on the dykes and bridges; there were lights everywhere; a great city with such an aspect as I had never seen before, and which fog and darkness soon hid from me altogether. When I had taken leave of my travelling companions, and had put my luggage in order, it was night. “So much the better,” I thought, as I entered a carriage; “I shall see the first Dutch city by night, which must be a strange spectacle.” And, indeed, when M. Bismarck was at Rotterdam he wrote to his wife that at night he saw spectres on the roofs.
It is difficult to make much of the city of Rotterdam, entering it at night. The carriage passed almost immediately over a bridge that resounded hollowly beneath it; and while I thought myself, and was, in fact, within the city, I saw with amazement on my right and left two rows of ships vanishing in the gloom.
Leaving the bridge, we passed through a street, lighted, and full of people, and found ourselves upon another bridge, and between two rows of vessels as before, and so on from bridge to street, from street to bridge, and, to increase the confusion, an illumination of lamps at the corners of houses, lanterns on masts of ships, light-houses on the bridges, small lights under the houses, and all these lights reflected in the water. All at once the carriage stopped, people crowded about; I looked out and saw a bridge in the air. In answer to my question, some one said that a vessel was passing. We went on again, seeing a perspective of canals and bridges crossing and recrossing each other, until we came to a great square, sparkling with lights, and bristling with masts of ships, and finally we reached our inn in an adjacent street.
My first care on entering my room was to see whether Dutch cleanliness deserved its fame. It did, indeed, and may be called the religion of cleanliness. The linen was snow-white, the windows transparent as the air, the furniture shining like a crystal, the floors so clean that a microscope could not discover a black speck. There was a basket for waste paper, a tablet for scratching matches, a dish for cigar-ashes, a box for cigar-stumps, a spittoon, and a boot-jack; in short, there was no possible pretext for soiling anything.
My room examined, I spread a map of Rotterdam upon the table, and made some preparatory studies for the morrow.
It is a singular thing that the great cities of Holland, although built upon a shifting soil, and amid difficulties of every kind, have all great regularity of form. Amsterdam is a semicircle, the Hague square, Rotterdam an equilateral triangle. The base of the triangle is an immense dyke, which defends the city from the Meuse, and is called the Boompjes, signifying, in Dutch, small trees, from a row of little elms, now very tall, that were planted when it was first constructed.
Another great dyke forms a second bulwark against the river, which divides the city into two almost equal parts, and from the middle of the left side to the opposite angle. That part of Rotterdam which is comprised between the dykes is all canals, islands, and bridges, and is the new city; that which extends beyond the second dyke is the old city. Two great canals extend along the other two sides of the town to the apex, where they meet, and receive the waters of the river Rotte, which, with the affix of dam, or dyke, gives its name to the city.
Having thus fulfilled my conscientious duty as a traveller, and with many precautions not to soil, even by a breath, the purity of that jewel of a chamber, I abandoned myself with humility to my first Dutch bed.
Dutch beds—I speak of those in the hotels—are generally short and wide, and occupied, in a great part, by an immense feather pillow in which a giant’s head would be overwhelmed. I may add that the ordinary light is a copper candlestick, of the size of a dinner-plate, which might sustain a torch, but holds, instead, a tiny candle about the size of a Spanish lady’s finger.