A Book of The Riviera

Certain prominent and prevailing features pertain to this portion of the Ligurian seaboard. The towns, even the villages, are planted in spots as inaccessible as could be obtained; they were all walled about in the rocks whereon they stood, and were so crowded within their walls that the “high street” does not attain to a width beyond nine feet, and every lateral street is six feet and even less in width. The houses run to a great height, and hold themselves up mutually by throwing out buttresses, arched beneath, for their stay one against another. The inhabitants of the seaboard were driven to this by fear of the Moorish pirates.

These little communities organised themselves as republics, with their consuls, freely elected. But the nobles, living in their castles, looked upon them with jealous eyes. They had their serfs under them, and they saw that these villages and towns were growing in consequence and in wealth. Unhappily every town was at enmity with every other town – each was jealous of the other; and the nobles offered their services, generally to a distant town against that nearest at hand. When they had served against the rival place, they asked for, and were allowed, a town residence. Then the palace of the noble in the walled city, or even village, became a centre of intrigue. Parties were formed in every town, and the nobles and wealthy burghers arrogated to themselves supreme control over the affairs of the place. This led to revolts and fighting in the streets. On the Ligurian coast, the Republic of Genoa stepped in, took advantage of these civic broils, and, by plausible assurances of good government under her strong hand, managed to get nearly the whole seaboard, with its towns, under her protection. The protection Genoa afforded soon turned to exaction and interference with the liberties of the towns she protected. Thenceforth ensued a series of revolts.

Ventimiglia, which was a place under the rule of its count, was taken and sacked by the Genoese in 1140, and its count constrained to make submission. The mouth of the Roya, with its harbour, excited the jealousy and ambition of Genoa, as did in like manner Nice and Villefranche; for Genoa desired to monopolise the whole of the trade of the Mediterranean along the Ligurian coast and Corsica. Allies and friendly towns could traffic freely with Genoa; but the ships of independent states were taxed, and their freights almost crushed by onerous duties, before they could enter the port. The sea-coast towns like Ventimiglia and Villefranche, not under Genoese control, were a hindrance to the control and monopoly of the entire trade by the grasping Republic, consequently the Genoese were persistent in their attempts to force them to submission.

In 1196 the count and the Genoese combined against the city of Ventimiglia, and failing, in spite of a siege of two months, to capture the town, they organised a league of the whole of Liguria against the gallant and resolute place. The allies established their camp on the Cape of S. Ampelio and ravaged the country, but could not reduce Ventimiglia. Then the Genoese spread a report that a large Ventimiglian galley which had been cruising off the Spanish coast had been captured, and that all the crew would be hung unless the town surrendered. The Ventimiglians, in great alarm for their kinsmen, submitted, and the Genoese entered and took possession of the town.

In the year 1238 ensued a general rising in places of importance along the coast occasioned by the intolerable exactions of Genoa, and its interference with the liberties of the towns. The governor of Ventimiglia took refuge in the castle and sent a messenger to Genoa for help.

Fourteen Genoese galleys were despatched to his aid, and hovered about the mouth of the Roya. After a severe conflict, the Genoese succeeded in landing and taking the city. At this time a number of the citizens migrated and founded a colony at Bordighera, but of this the Genoese disapproved, and they sent a fleet in 1239 and destroyed the little settlement. The contests of Guelfs and Ghibellines broke out, to aggravate the disorder and misery of the country.

Some clear-headed men saw that Italy was, like ancient Greece, a congeries of conflicting atoms with no bond, no consistence, and no chance of becoming a nation, a power, that no chance existed of domestic strife being stayed unless there were some strong central government to hold all the jarring elements in compulsory quietude. They looked back to the grand days of Rome, and hoped, under an emperor, to make of Italy once again what she had been, a dominant power in the world, and one in which, within her Italian borders, peace would be maintained. This was the Ghibelline dream and policy. But the opposed faction was for the maintenance of the present disintegration, the continuance of the independence of every little town, or rather of its own party in the town. The Pope naturally was zealous on this side. He dreaded an united and strong Italy, which would control him. His only chance of occupying the most prominent place and exerting the greatest power in the Peninsula lay in fomenting disorder, in setting every princeling and every town by the ears. Accordingly, whilst posturing as champion of the liberties of the republics, he was actuated solely by self-interest, which lay in keeping all powers in Italy weak by periodical blood-letting. The Papacy was the great and persistent enemy to national unity. The party of independence was that of the Guelfs.

Frederick II. united the empire and the kingdom of the Two Sicilies under one sceptre. Master of the South, he sought to recover the lost prerogatives of the empire in Lombardy and Tuscany, and it is probable that he would have succeeded and consolidated Italy into one kingdom but for the bitter hostility of the Papacy, which carried on an implacable war of extermination against the house of Hohenstaufen. The struggle was for an united Italy, a strong Italy, a peaceful Italy, and this was precisely what the Popes would not endure to have. They dreaded the formation of a single kingdom in Italy, with, as a consequence, the presence there of a rival and predominant power. But this purpose of the Popes was not seen clearly at the time. Dante saw it; he knew that the future of Italy was involved in the contest, and he could not understand aloofness in the strife. He terms those who did not feel the pangs and ecstasies of partisanship in this mortal strife, “wretches who never lived,” and he consigned them to wander homeless on the skirts of limbo, among the off-scourings of creation.

Banners, ensigns, heraldic colours, followed the divisions of faction. Ghibellines wore the feathers in their caps on one side, Guelfs on the other. Ghibellines cut up their fruit at table crosswise, Guelfs straight down; Ghibellines sported white roses, Guelfs affected those that were red. Yawning, throwing of dice, gestures in speaking, and swearing, served as pretexts for distinguishing the one half of Italy from the other. So late as the middle of the fifteenth century, the Ghibellines of Milan pulled down the figure of Christ from the high altar of Crema, and burnt it, because the face was turned towards the Guelf shoulder.[19 - J. A. Symonds, Age of the Despots.] The Grimaldi were strong Guelfs; the county of Nice was so as well, but the town was Ghibelline. The Lascaris of Tende and Ventimiglia, the Dorias of Dolceacqua and Oneglia were Ghibelline.

The county of Ventimiglia had been formed in 778 by Charlemagne, and given by him to a Genoese noble, Guido Guerra, with the title of Marquess of the Maritime Alps, on condition that he should maintain at his own cost a company of soldiers to defend the littoral within his Marquisate. The county passed in the thirteenth century to William, son of the Greek Emperor Lascaris II., of Nicæa, who married the heiress and descendant of the Guido Guerra family. But William Lascaris soon after ceded the county to Charles of Anjou, in exchange for diverse other fiefs in the interior of Provence, amongst others that of Tourvès, between Brignoles and S. Maximin, where may be seen the ruins of the noble castle of the Lascaris. In 1266, Charles of Anjou, in his turn, ceded the county of Ventimiglia to the Grimaldi and Fieschi, consuls of the Republic of Genoa, on the condition that they should furnish provisions and munitions to the Provençal troops occupying the kingdom of Naples.

The county of Tende was founded by Charles of Anjou for the Princess Irene, daughter of Theodore Lascaris, and sister of the above-mentioned William, when she married Robert Guerra of the family of the Counts of Ventimiglia, and Robert then abandoned his patronymic of Guerra and assumed that of Lascaris. The county of Tende subsisted till 1579, and was then ceded by Henrietta, Duchess of Maine, last descendant of the Lascaris-Guerra to Emmanuel-Philibert, Duke of Savoy.

Theodore Lascaris I. had married Anna, daughter of Alexis III., and he was chosen Emperor of Constantinople at the time when the Crusaders occupied Byzantium and founded there a Latin empire, under Baldwin of Flanders, 1204. Theodore was constrained to fly into Anatolia and make of Nicæa the capital of the Greek empire; so it remained till the expulsion of the Latins in 1261. The only daughter of Theodore Lascaris I. married John Ducas, who succeeded to the Empire of Nicæa. Ducas died in 1255, leaving a son, Theodore Lascaris II., who died in 1259, and his eight-year-old son John remained to be the victim of the unscrupulous Michael Palæologus, who had his eyes torn out. This John had, however, five sisters, and one of these, Eudoxia, in 1263 married William, Count of Ventimiglia; and another, Irene, became, as already said, the mother and ancestress of the Lascaris Counts of Tende. The Lascaris arms are: gules, a two-headed eagle displayed, or.

Paul Louis Lascaris, who entered the Order of Malta, belonged to the Ventimiglian branch of the family. He was born in Provence in 1774. He was on the isle when Napoleon appeared before Malta in 1798. Hompesch was Grand Master, a weak old man; the knights of the Order might easily have defended the island till the English fleet under Nelson came to its aid, but French gold and promises had created a party of traitors within; of these Lascaris was chief, and on June 11th La Valetta capitulated. “On my word,” said General Caffarelli, “it is well that there was someone inside to unlock the gates to us, for otherwise we should never have got in.”

After his treason Lascaris did not venture to remain in Malta, but attended Bonaparte to Egypt. Upon the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens in 1803, Napoleon, having resolved on attacking the English in India, commissioned Lascaris to go to the East, there make the necessary studies for the execution of his plan, and explore the frontiers, map down roads, wells, etc. Whilst Lascaris was in the East he married a beautiful Georgian akin to Soliman Pacha. In 1810 he visited in succession the Arab tribes in Mesopotamia, and turned his face homewards in 1814. On reaching Constantinople he heard of the fall of Bonaparte, and departed for Cairo, where he died shortly after, and all his notes and maps fell into the hands of the British consul there. All known of his adventures in the East comes from a narrative given to the world by his dragoman Fatalba.

Ventimiglia is not only in itself a marvel of picturesqueness, occupying a ridge above the Roya, but its situation, with the sea before and the snow-clad Alps behind, is exquisitely beautiful.

The streets are narrow, as space was precious, but the Strada Grande is lined with quaint old houses of the city nobility and well-to-do citizens, and have marble balconies, their sculptured entrances, and heraldic decorations. The cathedral occupies a terrace, with the palace of the Lascaris having an open loggia and staircase on one side of the piazza. The cathedral, dedicated to S. Barnabas, fondly deemed to have founded it, is a fine church of the thirteenth century, vaulted without groining ribs. Beneath it, at the east end, is the very early baptistery, unhappily remodelled in the seventeenth century. This contains a huge stone baptismal basin, with stage inside on which children could stand, whereas it is deep in the middle for adults. Two recesses are at the sides; one of these is for the priest performing the ceremony. In the vestries are portraits of the bishops, several in surplice and rochet, looking very much like English prelates.

But more interesting even than the cathedral is S. Michaele, at the farther end of the town, a church of the twelfth century, with a rich west doorway, having on the capitals a range of quaint carving of human beings. The church is vaulted in the same manner as the cathedral. Beneath the choir is a crypt, one pillar of which is a milestone from the Via Aurelia, of the time of the Emperor Antoninus. A slab in the floor bears rich early interlaced work.

The side aisles of this church had fallen into ruin, but have been judiciously restored, along with the body of the church.

Outside the walls of the town, towering above it, are the remains of a castle, which is held to date from Roman times, but which was enlarged, altered, and mainly rebuilt in mediæval days.

At Camporosso, up the Nervia, is a little church of the early part of the twelfth century, now serving as chapel to the cemetery. It has apse and tower of this period; the rest has been rebuilt. It is constructed of rolled stones from the river-bed. The roof consists of slabs of nummulite limestone.

Above Camporosso on the Nervia is Dolceacqua.

“After winding through woods of olives, carpeted in spring by young corn and bright green flax, Dolceacqua suddenly bursts upon the view, stretching across a valley, whose sides are covered with forests of olives and chestnuts, and which is backed by fine snow mountains. Through the town winds the deep blue stream of the Nervia, flowing under a tall bridge of one wide arch, and above frowns the huge palatial castle, perched upon a perpendicular cliff, with sunlight streaming through its long lines of glassless windows. The streets are almost closed in with archways, which give them the look of gloomy crypts, only opening here and there to let in a ray of sunlight and a strip of blue sky. They lead up the steep ascent to the castle where the Doria once reigned as sovereign princes.”[20 - Hare, Cities of Northern Italy, i. p. 34.]

An electric tram connects Ventimiglia with Bordighera. This latter place is unceremoniously dismissed by Hare in these words: “The town contains nothing worth seeing.” The statement is certainly incorrect. Old Bordighera contains a good deal that is worth seeing – the quaint town gates, the steep and picturesque streets, and the glorious view from the little piazza before the church. There also by the seaside is the chapel of S. Ampelio with its cave, in which the apostle of the district lived and died.

Little authentic is known of S. Ampelio, for there is no early life of him extant. Tradition says that he was a blacksmith from the Thebaid, who left Egypt and settled here. His bones were carried off in the twelfth century to San Remo, and thence later to Genoa. The fête of S. Ampelio is on May 14th. The chapel was enlarged and restored in 1852.

The transfer of the relics of S. Ampelio to San Remo exhibits a curious feature of mediæval enthusiasm. In 1140 the citizens of San Remo, at war with Ventimiglia, took a number of the townsmen prisoners. They would release them on one condition only, that they should reveal where were secreted the bones of S. Ampelio. The Ventimiglians, to obtain their liberty, betrayed the secret; the old hermit had been laid in the grotto he had inhabited during his life. Thereupon the people of San Remo carried off his body.

What is the peculiar fancy for possessing a few pounds of phosphate of lime? Whence comes the devotion to relics?

S. Chrysostom tells us of pilgrims travelling from the ends of the earth to Arabia to see Job’s dunghill, and he says that they drew “much profit and philosophy” from the sight.

One can understand how that certain churches should be greedy to possess relics, and steal, or even invent them, because the possession brought money into their coffers; but the money would not have come had there not been, deep-seated in the hearts of the people, a conviction that there was something supernatural, a divine power surrounding and emanating from these relics.

For my own part I think it is a survival of the worship of ancestors that existed among the prehistoric races of Europe. We know that to them the sepulchre, the dolmen, the kistvaen, the cairn, were the most holy spots in the world, the centres of their common life, the tie that bound a clan together. When these primeval people became absorbed in conquering races, and adopted other religions, they carried along with them the cult of old bones and ashes. The ancestor was forgotten, and the spiritual father, the saint, took his place, and the worship of the dead was transferred from the ancestor of the tribe to the apostle of the new religion in the district.

Bordighera was founded in 1470 by thirty-two families, who migrated to it from Ventimiglia. There was, however, at the time some portion of walls standing, and these new settlers completed the enclosure, and squatted within.

At one time, perhaps even then, the sea came up to the foot of the rock, where are now orange and lemon orchards, but the current that sets from west to east along this coast filled it up. On digging, the old sea-shore is found, and the name Bordighera signifies a creek provided with stakes and nets for catching fish.

Bordighera is happy in having had an exhaustive historian, Mr. F. F. Hamilton (Bordighera and the Western Riviera, London, 1883), and this work is supplemented by Mr. W. Scott’s Rock Villages of the Riviera, London, 1898, by which he means the villages built upon rocky heights. He describes only such, however, as are near Bordighera. This book will be a help to such as desire to make excursions from that winter resort, and these two works together render it unnecessary for me to enter more fully into the history of Ventimiglia and its offspring Bordighera, and into minute description of them and their neighbourhood.

CHAPTER XVII

SAN REMO

Two San Remos – The Pinecone – Earthquakes – Matuta – Sold to the Genoese – Church of S. Syro – Domestic architecture unchanging – Narrow streets – Leprosy – San Romolo – Lampedusa – River names – Taggia – Doctor Antonio – Home of Ruffini – The Bresca family – Raising of the obelisk in the piazza of S. Peter – Palms – How bleached – The date-palm

THERE are two San Remos, that of to-day, with its pretentious villas rivalling each other in ugliness, and the old San Remo. The former is clean with open spaces, a broad main street, and is dotted about with palms and agaves in sub-tropical gardens. The old San Remo is a network, a labyrinth of narrow, tortuous lanes. This old portion goes by the name of la Pigna, the Pinecone, because of the manner in which the ancient houses are grouped, pressed together one on another, rising towards a culminating conical point.

The old town is built upon a hill that descends gently to the sea, and whose summit is crowned by a sanctuary. The streets twist about, are steep, with steps, and paved with bricks or rolled stones. The old houses elbow one another away to get a little breath, or sustain themselves from falling by stretching out a flying buttress, each against its vis-à-vis, like tipsy men with linked arms hoping to keep their feet by mutual support. For all this coast is liable to be shaken by earthquakes. Diano Marina was the central point of one in February, 1887, that shook down half the village. Baiardo was completely ruined, and church and houses have all been rebuilt. Numerous lives were lost on this occasion. This portion of the Riviera, though more sheltered than the French Côte d’Azur, cannot boast the beauty of mountain outline. It is only when a river comes down from the Alps that a view of the snowy peaks is obtained up its course. The rock is all limestone and conglomerate, and the slopes are terraced and studded with olives. The general tints have a sameness and dulness that is not found on the French Riviera. The hills seem to have been enveloped in sail-cloth and rolled in powdered sage-leaves. San Remo lies in the lap of a crescent bay, of which Cap Verde on the West and Cap Nera on the East are the two horns. It faces the South, and a double reef of mountains to the North arrests the winds from that cold quarter of the heavens. The shelter thus afforded, the focussing of the sun’s rays on this spot, and the fertility of the soil, unite to make the vegetation luxuriant and varied.

By the shore we have orange and lemon groves, the delicious mandarin orange, and the pomegranate, tropic palms, agaves, and cactus mingled with cedars. Higher up are olive gardens, chestnuts. “Tenens media omnia silvæ,” the pine woods stretch to the top of the hills that engirdle San Remo.

M. Reclus observes: —

“Strange to say, trees do not ascend to the same height on these slopes of the Apennines as on the Alps, though the mean temperature is far higher; and at an altitude at which the beech still attains noble proportions in Switzerland we find it here stunted in growth. Larches are hardly ever seen. The sea is as sterile as the land. There are neither shallows, islands, nor seaweed, affording shelter for fish. The cliffs descend precipitously to the sea, and the narrow strips of beach, extending from promontory to promontory, consist of sand only, without the admixture of a single shell.”

The ancient name of the place was Matuta, but it had been destroyed again and again by the Saracens till the year 1038, when the Count of Ventimiglia made the place over to the Archbishop of Genoa; he disposed of it to two nobles, Doria and Mari. But the Dorias were Ghibelline and the Maris belonged to the opposed faction, leading to terrible broils. Finally, in 1361 the Genoese Republic became sole possessors. The town took the name of S. Romulus, as possessing the bones of that saint, and the old name of Matuta fell into desuetude. Saint Romulus has been altered and corrupted into San Remo. Doubtless whilst under the rule of the Archbishop of Genoa the interesting church of S. Syro was built. The style is Lombardic Romanesque. It was frightfully mutilated in or about 1620, when the apse was altered and lengthened, and a hideous baroque façade was erected, like the canvas-painted frontage to a show in a fair. At the same time the interior features were disguised under plaster and paint. In 1745 an English fleet bombarded San Remo, and the spire was knocked to pieces and replaced by a hideous structure. But recently a complete restoration has been effected; the façade has been pulled down, revealing the original features, and the whole, externally and internally, treated with such scrupulous fidelity to what was the original style, that the result is that the church of S. Syro is now one of the finest monuments of Christian art on the Riviera.

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.

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.

But the most delightful excursion that may be made from San Remo is to Lampedusa, above the Taggia. For that no better guide can be had than Ruffini’s delightful novel, Dr. Antonio: —

“A broad, smooth road, opening from Castellaro northwards, and stretching over the side of the steep mountains in capricious zig-zags, now conceals, now gives to view, the front of the sanctuary, shaded by two oaks of enormous dimensions. The Castellini, who made this road in the sweat of their brows, point it out with pride, and well they may. They tell you with infinite complacency how every one of the pebbles with which it is paved was brought from the sea-shore, those who had mules using them for that purpose, those who had none bringing up loads on their own backs; how every one, gentleman and peasant, young and old, women and boys, worked day and night with no other inducement than the love of the Madonna. The Madonna of Lampedusa is their creed, their occupation, their pride, their carroccio, their fixed idea.