EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INNS
and, consequently, damp; for a covering you have another sheet, as coarse as the first, and as coarse as one of our kitchen jack-towels, with a dirty coverlet. The bedsted consists of four wooden forms, or benches; An English Peer and Peeress must lye in this manner, unless they carry an upholsterer's shop with them, which is very troublesome. There are, by the bye, no such things as curtains, and hardly, from Venice to Rome, that cleanly and most useful invention, a privy; so that what should be collected and buried in oblivion, is for ever under your nose and eyes."[1]
Sharp goes on to damn the dirtiness of the pewter plates and dishes, as well as the tablecloths and napkins. The food is vile. "The bread all the way is exceedingly bad, and the butter so rancid, it cannot be touch'd, or even borne within the reach of our smell."[2] But what is a greater evil to travelers than any of the above recited, though not peculiar to the Loretto road, is the infinite number of gnats, bugs, fleas, and lice, which infest us by night and by day. You will grant, after this description of the horrors of an Italian journey, that one ought to take no small pleasure in treading on classic ground: yet, believe me, I have not caricatured; every article of it is literally true."[3]
Sharp certainly appears to speak from a full heart, and his Italian critic Baretti practically admits that the charges are in part true. But he points out that Sharp went by an "unfrequent road to Rome," and that he might easily have obtained from Italians of good social position letters of introduction to their friends along the road "who would have occasionally accommodated him better than he was at the inns, where his Vetturino thought proper to carry him; to which inns few Italians of any note resort."[4] They stay, says Baretti, with their friends, or put up at convents.
Baretti's defense of his compatriots, in this as in some other cases, does not squarely meet the criticism of fair-minded tourists, who had already anticipated in the seventeenth century about all that was said against the inns of the eighteenth century. "The inns are wretched and
86
- ↑ Letters from Italy, pp. 43, 44.
- ↑ Ibid., pp. 45, 46.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 46. Coryate, Crudities, i, 58, 59, had already complained of the cimices in Italian beds. Cf. also Ray's Travels, in Harris's Collection of Voyages and Travels, ii, 688.
- ↑ Manners and Customs of Italy, i, 25. The Italians appear, indeed, to have been exceptionally hospitable to strangers. "An Italian nobleman, hearing an Englishman complain of the accommodation at country inns, expressed his surprise that he frequented such places, and observed, that with a few recommendatory letters he might traverse Italy from one extremity to the other, without being once under the necessity of entering an inn."Eustace, Classical Tour in Italy, iii, 153.
