EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INNS
for smoke but the door." "In regard to bed, [the traveller] must tumble pell-mell in a large kind of barn, where the landlord and landlady, men and maidservants, and passengers of both sexes, cows, sheep, and horses pig all together on the ground; and happy he that's accommodated with comfortable clean straw. … In cities or large towns one is somewhat better entertained; though there is little occasion to commend their very best accommodations."[1]
Lady Mary Montagu traveled through Germany in 1716, and, writing from Cologne, says: "We hired horses from Nimeguen hither, not having the conveniency of the post, and found but very indifferent accommodations at Reinberg, our first stage; but that was nothing to what I suffered yesterday. We were in hopes to reach Cologn; our horses tired at Stamel, three hours from it, where I was forced to pass the night in my clothes, in a room not at all better than a hovel; for though I have my own bed with me, I had no mind to undress, where the wind came from a thousand places."[2]
When she reached Bohemia in November she pronounced it "the most desert of any I have seen in Germany. The villages are so poor, and the post-houses so miserable, that clean straw and fair water are blessings not always to be met with, and better accommodation not to be hoped for. Though I carried my own bed with me, I could not sometimes find a place to set it up in; and I rather chose to travel all night, as cold as it is, wrapped up in my furs, than to go into the common stoves, which are filled with a mixture of all sorts of ill scents."[3]
What was true of these regions applied equally to the south side of the Erzgebirge, where the inns were "not a jot better than the Spanish ones."[4]
In traveling through Friuli, in the extreme northeast of Italy, and the Austrian Duchy of Carniola, Dr. Moore declares, "The inns are as bad as the roads are good; for which reason we chose to sleep on the latter rather than in the former, and actually travelled five days and nights
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