Introduction

There is a particular kind of travel book that does something more than describe a journey. It recreates one. It puts you, the reader, not merely beside the author as a passive observer but somehow ahead of him, leaning forward into the landscape, already half in love with what is coming around the next bend. The volume you are holding belongs to that rare and fortunate category. Published in Boston in 1909 by L. C. Page and Company, and written under the pen name Francis Miltoun — a pseudonym whose precise biographical origins remain somewhat uncertain, though the name appears consistently across a substantial body of travel writing from the same period and publisher — this account of a motor journey through the length and breadth of Italy is one of the most vivid, intellectually generous, and genuinely pleasurable travel books produced in the early years of the automobile age. To read it now, more than a century after its first impression, is to experience something that very few historical documents can offer: the sensation of a world in the act of discovering itself.

That world was Italy in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the discovery in question was double. Italy was discovering the automobile, and the automobile was discovering Italy. These two facts, taken together, produced a cultural and perceptual revolution whose consequences we have perhaps never fully appreciated, because we arrived too late to witness the before. We know Italy as a country of roads, of drives, of scenic routes mapped and catalogued and photographed from every conceivable angle. We have forgotten — or rather, we never knew — what it felt like to turn off the railway line and push a motorcar down a white dust road toward a hill town that had received no significant number of foreign visitors since the age of the Grand Tour, and to find it essentially unchanged from the engravings in an eighteenth-century atlas. That is what Francis Miltoun and his companion, the illustrator Blanche McManus, did. And that is what this book, at its best, allows you to do alongside them.

The premise is straightforward enough. Two travellers — writer and artist, collaborators on numerous previous volumes in the same series — take a motorcar through Italy, departing from the well-worn circuits of the conventional tourist itinerary and striking out along the highways and, more importantly, the byways that the railway had rendered invisible to the educated traveller. They move through Liguria and Tuscany, down to Rome and Naples, across Umbria to the Adriatic coast, north along the Via Aemilia through Bologna and Parma, into the Veneto, through the Italian lake country, and finally back toward the Alpine gateways and the Riviera. It is, in geographical terms, a near-complete circuit of the peninsula, and the ambition of the undertaking is matched by the richness of what they find along the way.

But to describe the book in those terms is to undersell it considerably. What makes it exceptional is not the itinerary but the quality of attention brought to bear on everything encountered along the route. Miltoun is not a simple enthusiast, though enthusiasm is never far from the surface of his prose. He is a reader, a historian, an architectural observer, a student of manners and customs, and — perhaps most valuably — a writer who understands that the best travel writing is always, at some level, an argument about how to see. Every chapter is implicitly making a case: that the countryside matters more than the capital, that the small town reveals more than the famous city, that the peasant in his field is a more authentic index of Italian civilization than the frock-coated Roman bureaucrat, and that the motorcar, for all the anxiety it provoked in traditionalists, was in fact the greatest instrument of genuine discovery that the traveller had ever been handed.

That last argument is worth pausing over, because it is one of the book’s most interesting and historically resonant claims. The railway, Miltoun suggests, had paradoxically impoverished travel even as it democratized it. By connecting the major cities with speed and efficiency, it had created a circuit of obligatory monuments — the Vatican, the Uffizi, the Grand Canal, Vesuvius — and had rendered everything between those monuments effectively invisible. The traveller arrived, admired what Ruskin or Symonds or Augustus Hare had told him to admire, and departed, having absorbed, as Miltoun puts it with characteristic dryness, “little or nothing of the genuine feudal traditions of the background regions away from the well-worn roads.” The motorcar broke that circuit. It made the between-places accessible again. It restored to travel the element of contingency — the wrong turning that leads to the right discovery, the unscheduled stop in a village square that turns into an afternoon of unexpected revelation — that the railway timetable had systematically eliminated.

This is not merely a nostalgic argument, though nostalgia is certainly present in the book’s emotional texture. It is a genuinely philosophical position about the relationship between speed, attention, and understanding. Miltoun is perfectly aware that the motorcar could be used badly — he has sharp words for the automobilist who eats up the road through Aemilia at sixty miles an hour simply because the road permits it — but he insists that used well, used slowly and curiously and with a willingness to stop, it offers something that no previous mode of transport had made available: the ability to move at will through a landscape, to follow a hunch, to pursue a half-remembered reference from a history book down a side road and find, at the end of it, a castle or a church or a hilltop town that has been waiting, apparently undisturbed, since the fifteenth century.

A word about approach, because this is a book that rewards a particular kind of reading and can frustrate a reader who comes to it with the wrong expectations.

It is not, in the first instance, a narrative in the conventional sense. There is no dramatic arc, no building tension, no climax toward which the journey moves. The structure is geographical and cumulative rather than dramatic, and the pleasures it offers are the pleasures of accumulation: the slow building of a picture, chapter by chapter, of a country seen whole, from its Ligurian coast to its Alpine passes, from its Adriatic fishing towns to its Campanian volcanic shores. If you read it expecting the propulsive momentum of a novel, you will find yourself occasionally impatient. If you read it as you might listen to a very well-informed and very good-humored companion talking across a dinner table — following the digressions, enjoying the opinions, letting the historical anecdotes accumulate into something larger than any individual story — you will find it almost inexhaustibly rewarding.

The digressions are, in fact, among the book’s greatest pleasures, and they deserve a particular note of welcome. Miltoun is constitutionally incapable of passing through a town without reaching for its history, and his history is worn lightly but carried deeply. He moves with ease between the medieval and the classical, between architectural analysis and social observation, between the heraldic details of a palazzo facade and the practical question of where to find a decent road surface on the far side of the Apennines. The chapter on Italian roads and routes, which might sound like the driest possible subject, turns out to be one of the most fascinating in the book, because Miltoun understands that a road is never merely a road — it is a palimpsest of every civilization that has used it, from the Roman engineers who first laid the stones to the medieval pilgrims who wore them smooth to the early motorists who were now, in 1909, beginning to demand something rather better than a surface designed for oxcarts.

The illustrations by Blanche McManus deserve equal attention and equal credit. McManus was a prolific and accomplished illustrator who collaborated with Miltoun on numerous volumes, and her work here is not merely decorative. Her drawings — of palazzo facades, road signs, heraldic devices, town plans, architectural details, coastal views, and the faces and figures of the Italian countryside — constitute a parallel text, a visual argument running alongside the written one. Where Miltoun describes, McManus renders, and the two modes of attention complement each other in ways that a purely photographic record could not have achieved. Her line has the quality of genuine looking: it is the work of someone who has stood in front of the thing and tried to understand it, not merely to reproduce it. The maps and diagrams scattered through the volume are particularly valuable, giving the reader a spatial orientation that makes the written descriptions come alive in three dimensions.

It is worth noting, for readers who may be sensitive to such things, that the book was written in 1909 and reflects the assumptions and attitudes of its time and class. Miltoun’s Italy is seen from the perspective of a cultivated, English-speaking, motorcar-owning traveller of the Edwardian era, and that perspective has its blind spots and its condescensions. His observations on Italian manners and customs, while generally affectionate, occasionally carry the faint but unmistakable air of the educated outsider who is charmed by what he observes without quite relinquishing the assumption that his own civilization provides the standard of measurement. Modern readers will notice this, and should notice it, without allowing it to obscure the very considerable virtues of the book’s intelligence and generosity. The condescensions are mild and the affection is genuine, and on balance the portrait of Italy that emerges is one of deep and sustained admiration.

What Miltoun ultimately offers, beneath all the historical annotation and architectural description and practical advice about road surfaces, is a theory of civilization — or rather, a theory of how civilization is best apprehended by the traveller who wishes to understand rather than merely to see.

His central conviction, stated and restated in various forms throughout the book, is that the real Italy is not the Italy of the famous monuments but the Italy of the background regions, the small towns, the country roads, the wayside trattorias, the peasant festivals, the half-ruined castles on their hilltops, the Romanesque churches in their village squares. This is not an original conviction — it had been the working assumption of the more adventurous Grand Tourists for at least a century before Miltoun wrote — but he pursues it with unusual consistency and unusual success. Again and again, the book’s most memorable passages are not the set-pieces in Florence or Rome or Venice, though those are handled with considerable skill, but the encounters with the less celebrated: the grim castles of the Adriatic coast, the hidden mountain towns of Piedmont, the lake villages of Lombardy, the Umbrian hill towns that the railway had left in something close to their medieval condition.

There is a passage early in the book in which Miltoun invokes the long tradition of literary travellers in Italy — Chaucer at Padua, Dürer at Venice, Luther on the road to Rome, Sidney with his Veronese portrait, Rubens at Venice, Dante in his long exile moving from city to city along the roads that Miltoun is now following by motorcar — and the effect of this invocation is not merely to situate the current journey in a distinguished tradition but to suggest something more interesting: that the road itself is a kind of continuous text, written and rewritten by every traveller who has used it, and that the motorist of 1909 is not replacing that tradition but joining it, adding a new layer to a palimpsest that goes back to the Roman engineers and beyond. This is a generous and genuinely moving idea, and it gives the book a depth of historical resonance that lifts it well above the level of the ordinary travel memoir.