* * * * As the road winds up beside
the turbulent Serchio—its sides studded in the season with primroses, cyclamens and Canterbury bells—the eye travels across the trembling floors of the chestnut forests to the sentinel mountains that stand guard round the hill-village of Bagni di Lucca. It is the surroundings and life of the little village and its historical associations that Mrs. Whipple describes very charmingly in A Famous Corner of Tuscany (Jarrolds, 15s.). Most she is attracted—and her readers will be attracted, too, by her pleasant gossip about them—by the many famous people 'who have come to take the waters at this sequestered spot. Ouida, 61 mamma del rani, as a contadina called her, rests here ; Montaigne said that at the Bagni he was " quite as comfortable as in Rome " ; here Shelley wrote and the Old Chevalier touched for the King's Evil; and hither came two of Italy's greatest modern poets, Carducei and Pascoli. The book will be a delight both to those who love Italy and good letters.
Previous page
