Page 17 - PBCJuly2012

Pickwick Bicycle Club Magazine. Volume 9 No.2 July 2012 17
he also thought of as a collection that was "picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful and
offensive". He didn't speak so badly of the Genoese taverns, though, with a liking to the "Tagliarini,
Ravioli, and German sausages, quite strong of garlic which was sliced to eat with fresh green figs".
Do serve that up some time, Old Connaught Rooms - Pickwickians will love it!

Some of the locals, he worried, were a "greater variety of sloth, deceit and intellectual torpor,
than could hardly be observed among any class of men in the world". A bit of the old Curate's egg
all round, you will guess, and then on "one pleasant autumn evening" he sails out of Genoa "to
snuff the morning air at Marseilles". This all becomes an adventure worth your time to read fully,
being an involved "Pictures from Italy" tale that includes him being held in quarantine at Nice, along
with a cargo of wool shorn from an Eastern flock. Something which had got up the noses - literally?
- of the French harbour authorities.

When Charles Dickens returns to Genoa it is November before he sets to travel again, and
writes it was "very wet, very cold, very dark and very dismal". When on the move the travel is at
something like four miles an hour, "jolting and wallowing through the mud" eventually to reach the
Po plain, where that mighty watercourse is as wide as the sea, being in flood. After that his problems
become the ice and cold through Switzerland, whilst moving towards Strasbourg and Paris and
then, "how the cliffs of Dover were a pleasant sight and England was so wondrously neat". Still
moving along at the four miles per hour behind horses, remember!

That Charles Dickens found great joy in travel should never be doubted . . "re-crossing the
Channel, with ice on the decks and snow laying pretty deep in France". Between Paris and
Marseilles he met the snow, but then a thaw, and even coach springs that broke on the Sunday
night and an enforced stay in miserable billiard rooms whilst repairs ensued. It got better . . "held
up in Marseilles where steamers that were advertised to go, didn't go". But in a little while longer
he spends the early year back in Genoa, and then soon afterwards is moving southwards down
the coast, to beautiful Spezzia. Along the way espying villages at the sea edge, hundreds of feet
below, that "are the saltest, the roughest, most piratical little places that ever was seen."

Carrara, the town of stonemasons and quarry hewers, is one stopping place where he marvels
at the way stone is quarried, and transported with incredible difficulty - even loss of life and injury
to horses and men. It is a trade from his time which continues to ours, but with the advantage of
machines taking over from manpower. Then from the summit of a hill by the town Charles Dickens
has his first view of the fertile plain upon which lies Pisa. "A fruitful country with rich woods of olive
trees" he writes.
"The moon was shining when we approached Pisa, and
for a long time we could see, behind the wall, the leaning
Tower, all awry in the uncertain light. "It is nothing like so
high above the wall as I had hoped." But Charles Dickens
was excited, to such a degree that he penned of the
collection of buildings by the Tower, they were "perhaps
the most remarkable and beautiful in the whole world".
The Baptistry and the Cathedral make up the scene with
the leaning Tower. "Nothing can exceed the grace and
lightness of the structure" are his words.