EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ROADS
III
Italy
We occasionally detect in the tourist in Italy an apparent lack of interest in notable places only a short distance off the beaten track. As a partial explanation we must observe that large districts in Italy had either no roads at all or at best mere tracks that in wet weather were sloughs and in dry weather were troughs of dust. The best roads were bad enough. In Piedmont, says Tivaroni,[1] "travel was difficult for all. On going out from many towns and from many villages one was compelled to proceed on foot or to ride on asses, mules, or horses along narrow roads that were in wretched repair or crossed by streams of water lacking bridges.… The bad state of the roads was and remained one of the greatest obstacles to the progress of internal commerce, the maintenance of the thoroughfares — even the royal highways — being entrusted to the communes."
This general statement about the roads of Piedmont may easily be paralleled for the greater part of Italy[2] in contemporary books of travel dating from the beginning to the end of the century, Most significant are the accounts of those travelers who write late in the eighteenth century or early in the nineteenth, for one has a right by that time to expect some improvement.
We may single out a few specimen comments, beginning with the northern districts. James Edward Smith said that the country about Genoa was so extremely hilly that the only way of traveling into the interior parts was in sedan chairs.[3] Writing in May of 1766, Sharp notes: "We are arrived at Turin; but the journey from Alexandria has been unpleasant; one night's rain has made the road almost impassable, so muddy and clayey is the soil."[4]
An earlier traveler, very fair-minded, says that the journey of ninety miles between San Remo and Genoa re-
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- ↑ Tivaroni, Storia Critica del Risorgimento Italiano, i, 157.
- ↑ Concerning Sardinia, Tivaroni observes: "In 1720 there was not a post-office in the entire island, there were no roads, no easy means of communication, not even between the principal cities." Ibid., i, 183.
- ↑ Tour on the Continent, iii, 89.
- ↑ Letters from Italy, p. 266.
