'I AM always miserable in places where one cannot .talk,'
confessed Mrs. Templeton While visiting a noisy milk-bottling centre in Parma; but she must have been very happy Writing this book, for she keeps up a remark- able garrulity for nearly three hundred pages. She visited not Rome, Florence or Venice but Cremona, Parma, Mantua, Ravenna, ' Urbino and Arezzo. Then she wrote a long gossip column about them. She describes cathedrals, palazzi, restaurants and professors in that voice of semi-secre- tive surprise which is usually happier announcing that dresses this year will be Made out of blotting-paper. She saw a great number of fascinating things—Marie- Louise's summer palace in Colorno, where t‘.11c memory of the former empress is care- tally preserved by a dedicated professor, the martyrs of Sabbioneta, and the mosaics of San Vitale; but for some incoMprehen-
sible reason it all has to be told in that
tedious graphic present, the tense which sounds so uncomfortable in English prose.
Apparently 'I go to the cathedral' is sup- posed to be lively and 'I went to the cathe- dral' is dull.
Tltis is the perfect book for sophisticated culture-vultures, crammed with food for thought.
The Aeneid is an epic plum-pudding [we have reached Mantua] and one must pick out the fruit and leave the suet on one's Plate. Yet, Virgil is my darling among poets, and I will talk now about the largest plum. It is Dido.
Italy has a rude name, but the Italians do not know it.' Yet when it comes to Ravenna it seems hardly necessary to say such silly things about Dante and the
Conunedia, where Beatrice is raised to a guiding angel, and very sickening she is, too. Never a word about his wife. If I had been in her shoes I should have had something to say about this.
These informative little asides—and the author is well read in several languages—fill in the gaps between the cathedrals, palazzi, restaurants and professors. They still do not succeed in putting one off Italy altogether, and perhaps, for methods of propa- ganda are always changing, they may even make some people want to go.
M. C,
Previous page
