EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INNS
inns of Genoa," we are told, "afford but indifferent accommodations. The wine is not very excellent, though they have it in sealed bottles from the vaults of the republic."[1]
The main roads to Rome were more traveled than, perhaps, any others in Italy, but we have numberless complaints that the inns were abominable. Travelers going on the main road to Rome from Siena had at least to halt at Acquapendente. Here, says one tourist: "We were told that the man who kept the hostry where we inn'd was the most wealthy person in the place. He had only two or three ragged servants, and waited at table himself."[2] All the way, in fact, "from Sienna to Aquapendente," says Keysler, "… the post-houses stand single, and afford but very indifferent entertainment."[3]
Even worse, if possible, was the condition of affairs on the central route from Rome to Florence through Terni and Perugia. As we might expect, that chronic grumbler Smollett on this route quite outdoes himself in describing some of his places of entertainment: "Great part of this way lies over steep mountains, or along the side of precipices, which render travelling in a carriage exceeding tedious, dreadful, and dangerous; and as for the public houses, they are in all respects the most execrable that ever I entered. I will venture to say that a common prisoner in the Marshalsea or King's-Bench is more cleanly and commodiously lodged than we were in many places on this road. The houses are abominably nasty, and generally destitute of provision; when eatables were found we were almost poisoned by their cookery: their beds were without curtains or bedstead, and their windows without glass; and for this sort of entertainment we payed as much as if we had been genteelly lodged and sumptuously treated. I repeat again; of all the people I ever knew, the Italians are the most villainously rapacious."[4]
In going from Perugia to Florence, over the mountains, he put up at "a small village, the name of which," he says, "I do not remember. The house was dismal and dirty beyond all description; the bed-cloaths filthy enough to
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