of her literature is thus the expression of her geographical
peculiarities.

Turn next to the great Plain of the Po. It is built up of
beds more recent than Tertiary, for it owes its origin to the
fact that an arm of the Adriatic was filled up by the tremendous
amount of waste which the glacial torrents of the Ice Age
brought down from the great glaciers of that period. Now,
many of those Alpine torrents are filtered in the lakes which
lie at the foot of the mountains. In earher times all their
transported material was spread out upon the sea floor.
With minor variations, then, the beds of the plain are constant
in character, as well as being soft, unconsolidated, and
generally porous.

Again the incomplete mountain ring here — for it is breached
to the south-east — is built up of recent folded mountains
in which extraordinarily marked erosion is going on. The
rocks of these mountains are highly diverse, and among them
are admirable building and monumental stones, giving rise,
as in the Paris Basin, but more markedly, to a natural tendency
for the people of the plain to speciahse in architecture and
sculpture.

More striking, however, is the contrast in ease of communi-
cation. From peninsular Italy to the south the plain is all



NORTH ITALIAN TOWNS 283

but cut ofT by mountains, thougli these present tolerably
easy passes, and to the north and west — but to a much less
extent to the east — the Alps seem to offer a barrier to free
communication with surrounding lands. South-eastwards
the plain slopes gently to the sea, and at first sight one would
suppose that this would be the direction in which its traffic
would tend to flow, following the hne of the water, A point,
however, which must strike the most unreflective tourist,
is that while in the Basin of Paris, as indeed in plains generally,
running water attracts settlement, here, with some excep-
tions, it repels. The great city of Milan is one of the few
examples of plain cities which have no considerable river
running through them. A row of towns, of which Parma and
Modena are two, he along the slopes of the Apennines, avoid-
ing ahke the proximity of the main stream and of its great
tributaries. Finally, by whatever route one descends from
the Alps towards the south-east coast of the plain, the most
striking feature of the descent is that the river valley which
is utilised near the Alps is left before one travels far over the
plain, and coastal towns — Venice, Ravenna, Rimini — avoid
the vicinity of the rivers. If the traveller has had previously
no very detailed knowledge of the geography of the plain,
this fact offers a complete puzzle, and as one settles down to
the journey, say from Verona to Venice, one suddenly rouseE3
oneself to say — By the way, what became of the Adige ?
The Po itself, the Piave, the Brenta, have the same discon-
certing habit of disappearing from the cognisance of the
tourist, without apparent cause.

Associated with this peculiar character of the routes to
the sea, and the want of connection between the streams
and the towns, we have the further peculiarity that the greater
part of the traffic of the plain does not follow the direct line
to the sea, but rather tends to turn southwards, so that the
most important junctions of the plain are not ports but
Milan, Turin, Bologna, Alessandria. Upon the first two



284 THE NORTH ITALIAN PLAIN

converge routes from the Alps, the latter are nodes towards
which the heavy traffic gravitates before the passage of the
Apennines is effected at the two lowest points. The result
is that though there is apparently an open road to the south-
east, yet the important Unes of communication turn away
from this easy route, in order to attack the southern boundary
chain of the plain. The cause is to be sought in the fact
that the western side of Italy has always predominated in
the history of the country, and the local conditions on the
east are such that the attempts, repeated throughout historical
time, to utihse the low ground near the head of the Adriatic
as a site for important ports have never met with more
than temporary success.
Shelley says of Venice

' Sea-girt city, thou hast been
Ocean's child and then his queen,'

but that is because the poet lives in the present. Ocean, Uke
Time, devours his children — Venice is at once offspring,
queen and victim.

Strive as he will, man here has been driven from one
position of temporary vantage after another, and that
traveller will court inevitable disappointment who visits
Venice without recollecting that its people have been fighting
for centuries a losing battle. One of the great charms of
Ravenna, perhaps the most marvellous city of the plain, is
that with mournful dignity she has long since acknowledged
defeat ; her churches with their gorgeous mosaics, her tombs,
her relics of a moment of splendid Hfe are sinking steadily
and resistlessly into the marshes ; that wonderful mediaeval
monument of Lombardi's which shows a youth in the majesty
of death, the desire to live frozen upon his marble hps, may
well serve as her emblem. Beside her Venice, vnih all its
glories of sky and sea, is little more than a painted hag,
persistently refusing to face the facts. Titian, with the hand



HILLS OF THE PLAIN 285

of an artist and the soul of a huckster, exploiting his talent
almost to the last moment of an extended life, was a true
citizen of the water-penetrated town.

Let us seek to justify some of these statements by a con-
sideration of the physical geography. As already stated,
till the end of Tertiary times at least the present plain of the
Po was an arm of the Adriatic, and, with some minor
exceptions, its floor is now formed entirely of transported
waste, chiefly from the Alps, but partly from the Apennines.
Alpine detritus predominates partly because the Alps are
higher and steeper, partly because, owing to their snow-cap,
their streams flow throughout the year, while those of the
Apennines dwindle in the summer drought ; but especially
because the great glaciers of the Ice Age deployed far down
the present plain, spread a great mass of morainic material
near their snouts (admirably seen at the lower end of Lake
Garda, cf. p. 186, and also near Ivrea), and in addition gave
rise to huge torrents which carried the firter material far out
into the shallowing sea, as do their smaller descendants, the
glacial torrents of to-day.

We have said that there are a few minor exceptions to the
rule that the plain is floored only with alluvial material.
The most notable of these are the beautiful hills called Monti
Berici and Colh Euganei respectively, the latter being well
seen as one approaches Padua. These are of volcanic origin.
Another notable exception is the block of high ground which
rises near Turin, one of whose constituent hills is crowned
by the Superga. This hill country — called Monferrato — is
but a part of the Apennines, advancing into the plain, and
cut ofi from the main chain of the Apennines by the valley
of the Tanaro, the largest right bank tributary of the Po.
In regard to it we shall have a word to say directly.

We shall not discuss in detail the characters of the deposits
of the plain, beyond pointing out that, as we should expect,
the coarser material hes close to the Alps, the finer nearer



286 THE NORTH ITALIAN PLAIN

the river. The regions where the deposits are coarse sufier
from drought, for the water sinks rapidly through the loose
beds. In this region irrigation is carried on by a somewhat
elaborate canal system. Where the beds are finer, they
tend to take on the character of clays, and are thus less
permeable. These relatively impermeable beds seem to be
continued to the north beneath the coarser deposits, with
the result that at the line of junction of the gravels and
the clays copious springs appear. The water of these springs
can be used with great ease for irrigation purposes, without
having recourse to costly canals, and the rice crop of Lombardy
largely depends upon this copious outflow of water, which
appears along a band called the region oi fonianili. Owing
to the possibihty of constant watering here, and the long,
hot, continental summer, it is possible to take off several
crops from the same land, and the hay crops so obtained
help to account for the cheese of the plain (Parmesan,
Gorgonzola).

Let us note next the course of the Po. It is obvious that
it does not, as one might suppose, occupy the centre of its
great valley. Eather does it he close to the Apennines, so
that the southern Apennine streams are mostly short and
rapid. The reason becomes obvious on consideration.
We have spoken (p. 285) of the great steepness of the Itahan
side of the Alps. This makes the Alpine streams very swift,
and they carry much water. As their gradient changes
where they enter the plain, they tend to throw down much
of their load, with the consequence that they build up their
own valleys, and tend, as it were, to run along an embank-
ment of their own making. The presence of these embank-
ments has the effect of preventing the union of the adjacent
streams, for each separate stream builds up a great cone
on the surface of the plain. The result is that the main river
is pushed far to the south. Note a consequence of this at
the western end of the plain. Here, owing to the encircHng



THE RIVERS 'J87

mountains, the southern streams carry much water as well
as the northern ones. When the Po was pushed south in
the vicinity of Alessandria by the cones of the northern
streams, the Tanaro was able to eat its way back through
a projecting part of the Apennines, to such an extent as to
capture tlic headwaters of a stream which formerly ran from
the Ligurian Alps, past Bra, direct to the Po near Turin.
The result was to cut oil from the Apennines that mass of
hilly country spoken of above (p. 285) which forms Mon-
ferrato, and incidentally to give the Plain of Piedmont —
which thus includes an isolated bit of the Apennines — a
more varied and picturesque appearance than those of
Lombardy or Venetia.

With this account of the rivers let us turn to the question
of why settlements in the plain avoid them. They are rapid,
variable, both in their flow and in their course over the plain,
and carry much debris — contrast the slow, constant, clear
Somme (p. 276). Rivers attract when they can be depended
upon ; they repel when they are variable, for the variability
brings with it not only the risk of flooding, but associated
with the flooding the possibility, or rather the probabiUty,
that fertile land will be ruined by stones and mud, that
villages and towns may be swept away or destroyed.

Travel from Cortina down to Venice by Belluno and note
the bed of the Piave, far too wide for its summer stream,
but through all its width piled up with stones which the
might of the foaming flood will transport far down the valley,
with sand and mud which will be carried out seaward to be
again transported by the marine currents, and so to play its
part in silting up some doomed port. Not such are the
rivers by whose banks man seeks to settle. Variable though
the Alpine streams are, however, the ice and snow of the
Alps give at least a summer flow, which the Apennines cannot
give. Thus the Alpine streams, apart from their use for
irrigation purposes, furnish water power, the power which



288 THE NORTH ITALIAN PLAIN

is developing the silk and cotton industry of the northern
part of the plain, an industry which once depended in part
on the peat deposits, themselves a rehc of glacial conditions,
but now largely exhausted.

But if the rivers are uncertain and dangerous, water is
generally abundant, and the inhabitant of the plain has
found by long experience that canals are safer than the
natural waterways. Thus Milan, though in the midst of a
great river plain, is a city which depends for water com-
munication on canals, not on a river. If Turin seems to be
an exception to the rule that the towns of the plain avoid
the rivers, we have to remember that the Po here, before it
has received its most uncertain tributaries, is still manageable.
Piacenza, another exception, is at an easy crossing-place.

We must turn next to the coast to consider why all the
ports of the plain have had the same history of a period of
prosperity and then of permanent eclipse.

The Adriatic has a better marked tide than some other
parts of the Mediterranean, but, on account of the interference
of the tidal waves with each other, there is only one tide per
day. Further, the sea is relatively shallow. The absence
of strong tides, the shallow sea, promote the deposition of
rock waste, and we have seen that with this the rivers are
abundantly loaded. Therefore, as in similar cases elsewhere,
notably in the eastern Baltic, banks of sand and silt tend to
be laid down ofE the coast. Such banks, called Nehrung in
the Baltic, receive the name of lido in the Adriatic, and the
Lido, so famous as a seaside resort, is but a specially well-
developed case of such a bank. The currents of the Adriatic
sweep southwards, and therefore the lidi grow in the southern
direction, and, owing to the transporting power of the waves,
they are not hmited to the immediate vicinity of river mouths,
but tend to form to the south of them. Further, they are riot
continuous, but have gaps to which the Itahans give the
name of porto, the porti being the gates to the harbour beyond.



LAGOON AND SAND-BANK 289

The harbour, laguna in Italian, the equivalent of the Haff
or haven of the Germans, is a stretch of calm water, sheltered
from waves and wind by the lido or bank of sand, rich in
fish because the turbid water is loaded with food material.

Part of the reason for the wealth of fish is that the calm,
silt-floored lagoons are literal sea-meadows. Over their
surface grows the sea-grass or Zostera, found also in suitable
locaUties off our own coasts, and famiUar to the tourist in
Venice because it is extensively used as packing for the glass
of Murano. When, after the trip is over, one unwinds the
long strands from those fragments of precious glass — which
never in the cold hght of England seem so beautiful as one
thought — their slight ' fishy ' smell brings back all the sights
and sounds of the wonderful city, from the insistent ' Murano,
Madama, Murano,' of the gondohers, to the faint plash of
the oars in the city of silence, and the cooing of the pigeons
as they make love in the sunshine, with a true Itahan disre-
gard for the fact that the pigeon population is already
excessive. It brings back also all that jumble of impressions
which Venice gives — the smell of the Grand Canal as the
steamers stir its black noisome depths, the green, slimy
steps, the suffocating odour of chloride of lime in the narrow
calli, the baroque churches with their abuse of ornament,
the diverse loot which decorates St. Mark's Square, and, above
all, that marvellous effect as one returns from the Lido across
the lagoon to Venice in the twihght, and sees all its beauties,
backed by the snowy Alps, with its defects veiled in the
lovely evening hght.

Indeed from those long green fronds the constructive
geographer of the modern type could explain for us the
whole of Venice. In hfe they lodge a myriad population of
tiny sea creatures, which in turn feed the fish, while the
presence of the weed speaks of the steady, ceaseless descent
of fine particles of mud which is slowly but surely raising
the floor of the lagoon. Ultimately the diminution of depth,

T



290 THE NORTH ITALIAN PLAIN

the shift of the shore currents, strive to control them as man
may, will block the seaward entrance to the lagoon, will
prevent the daily access of the purifying tide. With the loss
of the entrance- way the erstwhile haven must lose its function ;
from a living thing (laguna viva) it becomes morta, and the
mosquito larvae, no longer destroyed by the constant access
of salt water, live and thrive, hatch out into mosquitoes, soon
become infected from the blood of some malarial patient,
and begin their work of disseminating disease, of rendering
a once habitable place a void.

This in brief is the history of every town on that changing
shore — shallowed bay ; bay cut off from the sea by a pro-
tecting sandbank, rich in fish, and offering safety aUke from
land and sea, from storm and Goth ; bay too much shallowed,
cut off from the vivifying ocean, with incipient decay of
the once flourishing town ; and — the last stage — the com-
plete separation of the town from the sea, and the de-
velopment around it of what we still call fever-breeding
swamps, though the swamp per se has nothing to do with
the fever.

Forgotten Spina ; Adria, now more than twelve miles
from the sea ; Aquileja, still with much to recall its past
prosperity, but yet dead before the Venetians conquered it ;
Ravenna, now laboriously connected by a canal with the sea
which has left it to its mournful splendour ; Venice, putting
a brave face on the blows of fortune, but reduced from
the condition of a great city to a pleasure town — all have
passed or are passing through the same history, and no
human effort can postpone the inevitable for more than a
brief period.

Even more pathetic perhaps than that advance of the land
upon the sea which is the prime cause of the decay, is a
minor accompaniment of the land-building process. The
land that is formed seawards is loose, unconsolidated, full
of water. As more and more layers are laid down upon the



RAVENNA 291

top of the old a process of compression, of settling, takes
place, with the result that the land seems to sink ; buildings
slowly bury themselves in the earth. Where the sinking
process is unequal and afiects the piles upon which the
buildings stand, the whole may topple bodily, as did the
Campanile at Venice. The buildings of Ravenna, a staider
and more dignified town, subside slowly and steadily into
the earth.

Among the many thrills of that city surely one must rank
high that when custodian after custodian, in each successive
building, raises a covering of planks and shows beneath the
present floor that other which at an earher period was level
with the surface, points out the water which is sapping the
foundations. The gorgeous colouring of the mosaics above,
the rising water below ; the echoes of that fierce old warfare
between Arian and Orthodox imaged on the walls, the element
which quenches all strife below — where can one find a greater
contrast ? Especially perhaps at Sant' Apolhnare in Classe,
where without there is the creaking of the leisurely bullock-
carts as they bring their loads of sugar beet to the factory,
or carry away the dripping residue, and within the stillness,
the emptiness, the soul-satisfying tracery on the ancient
sarcophaguses, does one feel the greatness of the victory,
the magnitude of the defeat. In the austerity, the restraint
of its art Ravenna is unique among the cities of the plain,
and Hke that proud lady, her erstwhile ruler — twice an empress
and twice a slave — who was buried sitting in her robes and
jewels that after death at least she should be beyond the
reach of the blows of fate, so in death is Ravenna a queen.
Less fortunate than the city, of which much yet remains, the
great queen was burnt within her tomb, and only her empty
sarcophagus stands now facing the Cristo senza Barha, the
Good Shepherd who had not yet become the Crucified.

The creed which made Ravenna's art was not that which
filled Florence with pictures of Mother and Child ; its symbol-



292 THE NORTH ITALIAN PLAIN

ism — of peacock and grapes, of lamb and dove and stag —
was passionless and aloof, the art of a people who faced an
inevitable doom without fear and without hope. As one
wanders through the quiet streets, and notes in building after
building the repetition of the symbols of the peacock, which
is everlasting hfe, and of the lamb, which is peace ; the
absence of imaged material joys and pains, of the whole
conception of redemption through innocent sulTering ; the
constant representation of men and women in their prime
as against the fevered hope that a new generation may accom-
phsh what the old has failed to do ; the dignity of a Hfe which
yearns but does not hope — senza sfeme vivemo in disio — we
find something which the rest of Italy cannot give. This
is another religion from that which has left its mark in the
hill towns beyond the x4.pennines, and if we rejoice that
that other religion raised the slave, we have to remember
that this was the reUgion of free men and women. The
slave redeemed is still the tainted man, and to us, steeped
in the traditions and phraseology of that creed, the older,
the conquered faith has something to say.

Do not, therefore, forget to include in your North Italian
tour that deviation from the beaten track which brings you
to the marshes by the sea, even if it involve facing for a
second time the pandemonium which reigns at Bologna in
the tourist season.

Venice of course no one is likely to omit. To prevent
disappointment, however, those who are intensely interested
in Italian art may be recommended to make their first visit
to the town precede rather than follow that to Florence or
any of the hill-towns, and to reahse that above all Venice was
always a traders' settlement. In this respect it resembles
Milan, but two facts obscure in the existing cities the basal
resemblance. Both stand — necessarily as commercial towns
— at a crossing place of routes, but while with modern changes
in modes of communication the routes which converge upon



VENICE 293

Milan have increased rather than diminished in importance,
the trade of to-day tends to turn away from Venice. Second,
IVIilan was always without natural defence, or almost so, a
fact which to-day faciUtates free communication, but which
in the old days meant that time and again the town was
sacked and burnt. Thus relatively few artistic treasures
from earlier periods remain. There is within the town a
principle of hfe which bids it rise again after every conquest,
but after each resurrection it has the interest of the present,
not of the dead past.

Venice, a natural fortress, has preserved, except against
the assaults of time, many treasures almost untouched.
But its security has been its ruin. Saved by isolation from
the necessity of constant change and adjustment, it has lost
the power of assimilation of new elements or new ideas.
The two towns may be recommended to the special notice
of those who repeat the parrot cry that in human life force,
the power of self-defence, is the only safeguard of national
or individual life. To have lost the need of constant read-
justment, reconstruction, regeneration is to lose the power
of continued existence. The makers of Venice fled to the
marshes to escape land and sea foes, found security, pros-
pered greatly till in the course of time their descendants
found that the safe life had sapped the wellsprings of national
character, as the unstable marshes sapped the foundations
of their noble buildings. Milan, apparently helpless, besieged,
it is said, forty-eight times, sacked on twenty-eight occasions,
has arisen greater after every defeat. The South American
Glyptodon, armed at every point, has left but its bones for
our museums ; the tiny lizard, helpless and fragile, suns
itself in myriads on every vineyard wall — the timid might,
one would think, take some comfort from such thoughts as
these.

But they are perhaps irrelevant. Let us note in a word
or two some of Venice's advantages and disadvantages.



294 THE NORTH ITALIAN PLAIN

As regards the first her proximity to the relatively low eastern
Alps is of course important, for, especially in early days,
before the great railway tunnels were built, the fact gave
her easy access to the northern countries, greedy for the
products of Italy and the East. For we must note that,
despite their height and continuity, the Alps have never been
in a real sense a barrier between peoples. Nay, despite
their high and difl&cult passes, in some ways we have to
think of them as stimulating traffic. To their presence,
as already seen, we have to ascribe some part of the sharpness
of the contrast of climate, and therefore of products, between
Central and Mediterranean Europe, and it is this contrast
which promotes trade. If the Italian has but little induce-
ment to chmb the steep wall which bars progress to the north,
the inhabitant of the transalpine countries is led naturally