Soon after dark, we halted for the night, at the osteria of La
Scala: a perfectly lone house, where the family were sitting round
a great fire in the kitchen, raised on a stone platform three or
four feet high, and big enough for the roasting of an ox. On the
upper, and only other floor of this hotel, there was a great, wild,
rambling sala, with one very little window in a by-corner, and four
black doors opening into four black bedrooms in various directions.
To say nothing of another large black door, opening into another
large black sala, with the staircase coming abruptly through a kind
of trap-door in the floor, and the rafters of the roof looming
above: a suspicious little press skulking in one obscure corner:
and all the knives in the house lying about in various directions.
The fireplace was of the purest Italian architecture, so that it
was perfectly impossible to see it for the smoke. The waitress was
like a dramatic brigand’s wife, and wore the same style of dress
upon her head. The dogs barked like mad; the echoes returned the
compliments bestowed upon them; there was not another house within
twelve miles; and things had a dreary, and rather a cut-throat,
appearance.
They were not improved by rumours of robbers having come out,
strong and boldly, within a few nights; and of their having stopped
the mail very near that place. They were known to have waylaid
some travellers not long before, on Mount Vesuvius itself, and were
the talk at all the roadside inns. As they were no business of
ours, however (for we had very little with us to lose), we made
ourselves merry on the subject, and were very soon as comfortable
as need be. We had the usual dinner in this solitary house; and a
very good dinner it is, when you are used to it. There is
something with a vegetable or some rice in it which is a sort of
shorthand or arbitrary character for soup, and which tastes very
well, when you have flavoured it with plenty of grated cheese, lots
of salt, and abundance of pepper. There is the half fowl of which
this soup has been made. There is a stewed pigeon, with the
gizzards and livers of himself and other birds stuck all round him.
There is a bit of roast beef, the size of a small French roll.
There are a scrap of Parmesan cheese, and five little withered
apples, all huddled together on a small plate, and crowding one
upon the other, as if each were trying to save itself from the
chance of being eaten. Then there is coffee; and then there is
bed. You don’t mind brick floors; you don’t mind yawning doors,
nor banging windows; you don’t mind your own horses being stabled
under the bed: and so close, that every time a horse coughs or
sneezes, he wakes you. If you are good-humoured to the people
about you, and speak pleasantly, and look cheerful, take my word
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Dickens, Charles – Pictures From Italy
for it you may be well entertained in the very worst Italian Inn,
and always in the most obliging manner, and may go from one end of
the country to the other (despite all stories to the contrary)
without any great trial of your patience anywhere. Especially,
when you get such wine in flasks, as the Orvieto, and the Monte
Pulciano.
It was a bad morning when we left this place; and we went, for
twelve miles, over a country as barren, as stony, and as wild, as
Cornwall in England, until we came to Radicofani, where there is a
ghostly, goblin inn: once a hunting-seat, belonging to the Dukes
of Tuscany. It is full of such rambling corridors, and gaunt
rooms, that all the murdering and phantom tales that ever were
written might have originated in that one house. There are some
horrible old Palazzi in Genoa: one in particular, not unlike it,
outside: but there is a winding, creaking, wormy, rustling, dooropening,
foot-on-staircase-falling character about this Radicofani
Hotel, such as I never saw, anywhere else. The town, such as it