AS WE WALKED BACK FROM THE OPERA, David said that we ought to start for Florence at 10 o’clock the next morning. Supposing that, as usual, he meant twelve, I lay in bed until the porter suddenly came up for my luggage. My toilet was therefore necessarily hurried, and I started the day in a state of disorder.
Motoring down the plain of Lombardy is not interesting. The roads are passably smooth and wide, but so dusty that even a horse and cart throws up a cloud that obscures the view for ten to twenty yards; while a preceding motor vehicle makes it impossible to see for half-a-mile. One is seldom out of sight of a house. Villas large and small, former homes of the Medici and residences of local bank managers, lie always a quarter-of-a-mile, or not so far, off the road, visible at the end of perfectly straight avenues, through pairs of elaborate and pompous gate-posts. Every vineyard can boast an entrance which in England would denote a substantial mansion of the Georgian period. The country is entirely cultivated in strips, that are, like everything else, at right angles to the road. Though the plain is completely flat, it is impossible to see anything in the late summer owing to tall crops of maize and other unfamiliar growths, and the festoons of vines hanging from the rows of little pollarded trees. The loads of hay are even bigger than in Germany, being piled right on to the horse’s back so that only the ears of the animal remain visible. As David is never intimidated into removing his foot from the accelerator by any substance so fragile as grass, we generally carried off about a third of a rick from each load that we passed. Simon, seated on the left outside, was apt to receive most of it on his head. For a person who prides himself on his manners, he was in a false position.
We passed through Villafranca, interesting only for its strip of tarred road, and crossed the Po, entering Mantua by a covered bridge. The pandemonium in this narrow, darkened tunnel was indescribable. Long lines of carts and droves of unmanageable cattle, panic-stricken by the reverberating echoes, jostled from side to side in angry confusion. We reached Bologna about midday, and, after driving three times round the town in search of the Restaurant Grande Italia, lunched at the Hotel Baglioni. Italian food at its best can compare with any in the world; and the Grande Italia had had the reputation of being the finest restaurant in Italy. Though now closed, its mantle seemed to have fallen on the Baglioni, which also contained an excellent American Bar, run by a waiter trained at the Savoy.
It was four o’clock before we eventually started out for Florence again, feeling very lazy and looking forward to arriving there. Five hours later we made an ignominious re-entry into Bologna, attached to the end of a rope.
Our first misfortune was to take the wrong road out of the town, which, after about five miles, lured us without warning into the midst of a group of smaller Apennines, mountains which in reality are just as preposterous as they appear in Perugino backgrounds, and not, therefore, as a rule, frequented by motorists. Up and up we twisted round these amusement-park peaks by a track not an inch wider than the wheel-base of the car, and so steep that the luggage nearly fell out of the back; round corners that Diana’s huge body could scarcely negotiate without her hind wheels flying into mid-air three hundred feet above some smiling farmstead; down valleys so narrow that she bridged them; and up humps so sharp that they threatened to harpoon her undercarriage; all this far up in the heavens with a view of fifty miles on either side. Having forced a passage through a cemetery, we felt, when the road threatened to pass through the front door of a farm, that the moment had arrived to turn round. And we had at least on the way back, the satisfaction of finding that another car had followed us and was now stuck in the cemetery, its occupants goggled and hooded, gesticulating among the tombs. We left them silhouetted against the skyline, looking like a party of divers stranded on a mountain peak.
Turning a corner we suddenly found ourselves sliding down a precipice, tilted so far forward that it was necessary to hold ourselves back with our hands pressed against the dashboard as half-a-dozen Apennine valleys beckoned invitingly below. Ramming the gears to the lowest and putting on both brakes, David could just hold the car as we slithered down what was little better than a goat-run. Once at the bottom we hurried along to rejoin the main road and landed in a dried river-bed. Backing, we fell into a ditch. Luckily a large stone caught the rear off-wheel. Eventually we shot out of it, dragging with us the stone and about a hundredweight of earth. When at last we did attain the main road, we had not gone a hundred yards along it, when for no conceivable reason, Diana came to a sudden and irrevocable standstill.
David thought that the root of the trouble must be the carburettor. So did I. Simon did not venture an opinion. After unloading our combined luggage in an effort to find the book of instructions which all the time was safely in the front locker where it should have been, we set about the carburettor with spanners and pincers; and after an hour’s hard work succeeded in getting it in pieces. There seemed nothing the matter; we blew the jets at either end until our cheeks ached; then put it together again. After that we changed the plugs, because they ‘wanted doing anyhow’. This made no difference. It was useless. We gave up in despair and decided to stop a car and ask for help. Every five minutes for the last two hours we had been so enveloped in dust by mechanically driven transport, as to be scarcely able to breathe. But now, in the natural course of things, another hour elapsed before anything appeared at all.
At last, from round the corner of the bridge down the road, came the rumble of a lorry. With arms outstretched, like the little girl on the railway line, we stopped it, and two beneficent and filthy human beings, with immensely round stomachs concealed beneath white aprons, emerged from the front. They fastened on Diana’s inside with the ecstasy of starving leeches. In a moment the engine was emitting sheets of flame. David reached between the licking tongues and turned off the petrol; Simon and I scooped the refuse of the gutter into Diana’s most delicate intestines; and, while one of the men thrust his enormous torso bodily on top of the carburettor, the other fetched a piece of sacking from the lorry, with which he eventually quenched the conflagration.
Laughing loudly, the men then embarked on a second attempt, this time wrapping the sacking round the carburettor in the first instance. We remained more collected, with one eye on the luggage at the back, as the flames shot up in the air. Finally they tried a third time. But it was not a success. They decided to tow us.
I sat in front off the lorry with the larger of the two. He started off with a bound that snapped the rope like a piece of thread. We retied it and tried again. The lorry was delivering Bolzano beer, with the result that we stopped at every public house on the road proving a refreshing object of ridicule to the parties of drinkers seated barefooted and half hidden in the dust. My companion told me that he had a son who spoke German and English. He also made a great deal of other conversation which I did not understand, occasionally almost stopping to apostrophise the landscape. The other man danced about the back of the lorry, asking David and Simon if he could introduce them to any ladies.
Our progress was slow, and it was nearly dark by the time we reached the tram terminus, which lay some distance out in the country. The lorry could delay no longer. Explaining our plight to the occupant of the Bologna Tramways Office, our two benefactors left us, they to deliver the remainder of their beer, we to telephone to the Baglioni for assistance. Though not easy, we succeeded in getting through. Another car would arrive in about half-an-hour.
During the interval we entered a wineshop. Two Wandervögel were eating bread and milk at a neighbouring table. A kitten with a dislocated shoulder proved an object of interest and affection to David. The car arrived, accompanied by an interpreter, who resembled Harold Lloyd in mind and face, confusing every issue that he was called upon to solve. The rope broke again. We mended it and reached the hotel about nine, three ghoulish figures, unrecognisable beneath a livid coating of clotted, white dust. Baths and dinner revived us. The waiter expressed himself willing, if necessary, to introduce us to some ladies. Instead we went out and entered the first café that we came to.
Being rather tired we sat for some time in silence. The waiter behind the counter showed great interest in us. Eventually, handing me a confidential vermouth, he suggested that we might care to meet some ladies. Meanwhile his mother, a plump and elderly woman behind a pay desk, with clay-white skin and a wicked gleam in her eyes that belied her benevolent smile, was whispering in David’s ear that she did, as a matter of fact, know of some ladies who would not be unwilling to make our acquaintance. As an alternative she produced with furtive secrecy one of those packs of ‘greasy’ playing cards that one had imagined existed only among gold-diggers and pirates, and with these she tried to wave us into the back premises. Other people seemed to be coming and going in a mysterious way. The atmosphere became so disreputable that we began to feel uncomfortable.
Meanwhile we had made friends with a small Fascista, who spoke French. He was extremely communicative. He was a private – as opposed to an official – policeman; that is to say, a night-watchman. Despite this he was always about in the day. That morning, in fact, his father, who was a policeman proper, had been taken ill; and he had himself donned the livery and cocked hat of the House of Savoy and gone out to do duty instead. Bologna was a charming town. Yes, he thought it might be possible for us to join the local Fascisti. If we would come with him tomorrow morning he would see what could be done. Meanwhile, if we would like the meet any ladies, there would be no difficulty. And he and the waiter and the waiter’s mother all fell into an earnest and unintelligible conversation. We thought it time to escape.
In order to spare the reader the suspense and irritation, aggravated by the intense heat and airlessness of the town, that we ourselves endured, it may be as well to admit that our stay in Bologna was prolonged to the extent of six days. On the morning after the disaster, it was discovered that one of the cog-wheels in the magneto had been stripped of its teeth. The car would be ready on Saturday. But the peculiarities of the ‘distribution’ made it impossible to fit a foreign magneto. It was therefore necessary to remake the inside of the old one. Saturday was a holiday, on which the mechanics could not work; Sunday was a Sunday, on which they could. The presence in the town of a ‘State Magneto Works’ facilitated matters to a certain extent. The car would be ready on Monday night. Meanwhile, if we were lonely, the mechanic would be delighted to effect a meeting between ourselves and some ladies who were friends of his.
To cut a long story short, the car was not in fact in running order until Wednesday evening. As David had particularly enquired, before leaving England whether it would be advisable to take a spare magneto, and had been met with a distinct negative from the firm from whom he had purchased the car, we felt that our annoyance was justifiable. At the same time we obtained an insight into certain aspects of Italian provincial life that is not vouchsafed to everyone.