ERIC NEWBY

On the Shores of the Mediterranean

Dedication

To Wanda, the only item of essential equipment – apart from a Rolex watch (boiled in a stew by Afghans to test its waterproof qualities) – not lost, stolen or simply worn out in the course of some thirty years of travel together.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

I ITALY

A Tuscan Vineyard

In the Streets of Naples

An Evening in Venice

II THE ADRIATIC

On the Way to the Balkans

A Night in Montenegro

Albania Stern and Wild

III GREECE

Grecian Shores

In the Steps of Ali Pasha

Monasteries of the Air

The Ascent of Mount Olympus

IV TURKEY

A View of the Hellespont

Baths and Bazaars

The Harem at Topkapi

The Plain of Troy

An Encounter with Nomads

V THE LEVANT

Jerusalem

VI NORTH AFRICA

In and Out of a Pyramid

Return to Tobruk

Into a Minefield

Not Quite Leptis Magna

On the Edge of the Sahara

View from a Hill

VII RETURN TO EUROPE

Imperial Rock

Holy Week in Seville

Dinner at the Negresco

The Last Vintage

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

PART ONE ITALY

A Tuscan Vineyard

When people in England and America ask about our house in Italy and we tell them that it is in northern Tuscany, their eyes light up, because Tuscany is one of the parts of Italy that the British and the Americans know about, or think they do. For most of them who have visited it, Tuscany conjures up that rather open-cast country permanently suffused in golden light that forms the background of so many fourteenth-century paintings, country in which Chianti is made. In their mind’s eye they even think they know what sort of house it is we live in, though we stress the fact that it is very small and very ungrand. They immediately begin to think of the sort of house that appears with its name against it on a map, or in an architectural guide to Tuscany as a Villa, followed by the name of its past owner, often a hyphenated one, and that of its present owner, preceded by the word ora, meaning ‘now’; for example, to invent one, Villa Grünberg-Tiffany, ora Newby, a place with a spacious terrace and lots of statuary, the sort of place at which Sitwells used to, and Harold Acton still might, drop in uninvited to tea.

In fact our house is in a part of Tuscany so far to the north of Florence, Pisa and Lucca that it ceases to conjure up the idea of Tuscany at all, either in its countryside or in the quality of its light. It is quite near Carrara, a place famous for its marble, where Michelangelo had enormous blocks of the stuff quarried, as did later Henry Moore and Noguchi; marble that is still used to make the sort of tombstones that are popular with the Mafia and the Camorra, the other criminal secret society. Carrara, probably because of the abundance of blasting material conveniently to hand, is also the headquarters of the Italian Anarchists and the place where they hold, or used to until recently – nothing is for ever – their annual convention. The house certainly cannot be called a villa, or even a weekend villetta, let alone a Villa-whatever-it-was, ora Newby. Looking down on it from the upper part of our vineyard it resembles a dun, a prehistoric Irish fort, more than a dwelling, or else one of those enormous heaps of stone that people in limestone countries used to pile up in the process of making a field, before the coming of the bulldozer, which is what a lot of old peasant houses do look like in the Mediterranean lands. It does in fact appear as a small black blip on a sheet of the Italian 1:25,000 military maps, which look as if they had been drawn by a lot of centipedes with ink on their feet.

One of the reasons we had bought it was because it was exactly like almost any one of the various houses in which Italian peasants had hidden me high up in the Apennines in the winter of 1943–4 when I had been an escaped prisoner-of-war. It was in autumn 1943 that, emerging from my prison camp in the valley of the River Po, I had first met my wife, who lived in the nearby village and who had arranged for me, because I had a broken ankle, to be hidden in the maternity ward of the local hospital. Later, I had been recaptured and sent to Germany, but when I was finally released in 1945 I had gone back to Italy, and Wanda and I had subsequently married. And we still are married.

The house is in a little dell, and although it is hidden from almost every other point by the chestnuts, i castagni, from which it takes its name, and by olive trees and vineyards, it has a magnificent view over the valley in which the Magra, one of Italy’s polluted rivers, flows into the Ligurian Sea, one of the numerous more or less polluted seas into which the Mediterranean is sub-divided.

We found the keys, all five of them, where our neighbours had hidden them in case we arrived late at night, as like many of the older country people, they went to bed as soon as it was dark and they had eaten their evening meal, which was what most country people did before the arrival of television. Three of the keys are very big, all of them are very old and shiny. On the first day the house became ours some twenty years ago I lost one of the big ones, a key that had been made when the house was built more than a hundred years before, and I never found it again. Luckily there was a spare key, but that was the only one. The doors of the house are made of slabs of chestnut cut by hand, and they are so full of cracks and holes that from the inside you can see the light of day shining through them in dozens of places. When I lose the rest of the keys, or if the huge locks give up, it will mean new doors, and the house will never look the same again.

With the doors open I switched on the current and turned the water on at the tap outside the bathroom; the water comes from a spring higher up the hill called la Contessa and is very good. The bathroom is in what had been the stalla, the byre in which the animals were kept, on the ground floor below the hay loft, and this means that when we want to visit it in the night from our bedroom, which is upstairs, we have to go down the staircase which leads to it. The staircase is in the open air, which is why visitors are provided with chamber pots in which they occasionally put their feet when getting out of bed in the darkness, with spectacular results.

Apart from some dust and fallen plaster and a few dead mice, there was nothing much wrong. Here, the mice are almost as big as rats. This time they had eaten the poison laid down for them the previous winter instead of our bedding, as they often do, gnawing their way through the backs of old chests-of-drawers to get at it, although one or two of them had taken some chunks out of a red shirt of mine from L. L. Bean, Freeport, Maine, to make what we subsequently found when we discovered one of their nests, to be blankets for their children.

While I turned things on and buried dead mice, Wanda began to remove the plastic sheeting which protected the mattresses on the old iron bedsteads which are painted with flowers, some of them inlaid with mother-of-pearl, beds she had bought, or had simply been allowed to cart away, years ago, when the local farmers’ wives had decided to modernize their houses and had thrown them out to rust in their back yards.

Outside, in the vineyard on the side of the hill, the grapes looked healthy enough, having been sprayed with copper sulphate throughout the summer, and quite good, but not very numerous. It had been a very wet spring and had continued to be wet right into June, but what had then followed had been a phenomenally hot summer, even for Italy, with shade temperatures week after week up in the hundreds Fahrenheit, and absolutely no rain; and this weather had persisted into autumn, apart from a few short, welcome downpours. Down in central Tuscany, even as far north as Lucca, the grapes were abundant and it would be a good year. Here, where we lived, where often in early autumn it rained and rained when the sirocco blew from Africa, and the grapes then began to suffer from muffa, mildew, or a sudden hailstorm could destroy an entire crop in a few minutes, it was increasingly rare to have an outstanding year for what would never be, even if the grapes were outstanding, outstanding wines. Here, in an area which only appears on the most optimistic wine maps as being of moderate wine production, we and the neighbouring farmers make white and red wine, using as many varieties of grapes as possible, in our case about six, as a talisman principally against disease.

The end product is not what is known as DCG (Denominazione Controllata e Garantita), or DOC (Denominazione Origine Controllata), or even, until recently, DS (Denominazione Semplice), the humblest of all denominations, because in order to satisfy these minimal requirements, it would have to have a label stating the region in which it was produced, something I had never seen before 1983.

This wine can rarely, if ever, be found on sale even in local shops. When our neighbouring farmers sell what is surplus to their own enormous requirements, then it invariably finds its way into private houses or the sort of trattoria which announces its cooking as being cucina casalinga, the sort the best Italian mothers turn out every day for the whole of their working lives. This is because it fulfils the demand, which is becoming every year more difficult to satisfy, not only in Italy but in every other wine-producing country, for everyday drinking wine that has no additives, the sort of wine that has neither been pasteurized nor clarified with pills, although it is almost impossible to make white wine that can travel without any kind of help that will not change its colour. Wine that has been too generously assisted in this way, however, possibly with the addition of sodium bisulphate, looks like water, has a sickly aftertaste and gives the drinker a ferocious headache with its epicentre between the eyebrows.

The harvesting of the grapes, here where we live, hardly ever begins before the festa of San Remigio, which takes place on 1 October each year at Fosdinovo, a large village on the hill some nineteen hairpin bends above us. The stone effigy of San Remigio, the patron saint of the town, a saint who baptized Clovis, King of the Franks, stands high above the altar in one of the two churches. Also high up to one side of it is the tomb of one of the Malaspina family, feudal lords of this part of Italy, which is still called Lunigiana, after Luni, a Roman city and seaport now high and dry on what had been the northern borders of ancient Etruria. They still own and inhabit the castle which looms above the rooftops and in which Dante stayed.

For weeks before the festa there is bee-like activity everywhere and all the specialist shops along the terrible, traffic-ridden Via Aurelia, one of the great Roman roads to Rome, which sell barrels, hods, grape crushers and presses, have them prominently displayed outside their premises.

The actual festa begins to assemble itself early in the morning, long before dawn, when a procession of vans, lorries and motor cars starts groaning up the hill to the town loaded with merchandise which will later be displayed on the stalls in the open-air market place under the plane trees below the village. It is mostly cheap stuff, but some products of the pre-plastic age still persist: copper cauldrons, earthenware casseroles, mousetraps made of wood that look like lock-up garages, thick woollen socks and vests and the bed-warmers known as preti, priests, wooden frameworks which you put between the bedsheets on cold winter nights with an iron pot full of hot ashes inside them and which warm a bed in a way that no other kind of warmer can. Also on sale will be pack-mules, pigs and cattle. The animals are sold on the same patch of ground that has been used for this purpose as long as anyone can remember, although it has now been turned into a children’s playground and is full of plastic gnomes. And there is plenty to eat. In the market you can also buy panini, big, crusty sandwiches filled with delicious slices of pork cut from a young pig that has been roasted on a spit. And there is also plenty to drink. Until recently there were open-air drinking booths under the plane trees at which you could sit and eat panini and drink last year’s wine at tables with white cloths on them. Now, if you want to eat and drink you have to do it indoors because it is very rare, almost unknown, for it not to pour with rain on the festa of San Remigio. Last year was an exception. This is the day, too, when Wanda, and she did it for more than fifteen years, worked in one of the two hotels as a waitress, to help out with the farmers’ lunches, invariably receiving an offer of marriage from one of them who had become a widower in his fifties.

This year we have arrived too early for San Remigio, but not too early to harvest our grapes and make our wine, or help others with their vendemmia, the harvesting and the wine-making. We always help four families with the vendemmia. The harvesting of the grapes usually takes one or two days; the fermentation takes about ten days. To be asked to help is an honour because it means that we are regarded as hard workers, and therefore earn the prodigious quantities of wine and food that are served throughout the vendemmia.

It takes several days to get ready for our own vendemmia. All the barrels have first to be washed and scrubbed and then kept standing upright with a hose running water into them until the seams swell and close and they no longer leak. So on the first morning when the vendemmia begins we start work with the family which owns the farm across the road from where the track leads down to our house. We have known them ever since we first came here. Their children have come to England and stayed with us and we have seen them grow up, get married and themselves have children.

Tomorrow, around seven-thirty, dressed in our oldest clothes, we will turn up at the big modern farmhouse they have built to replace the old, more beautiful one, armed with baskets with iron hooks on them so that we can hang them from the pergole, the horizontal wires on which vines are trained, while we cut the grapes with scissors, secateurs, or just sharp knives, all of which become equally painful to handle when you use them day after day.

If the family is an efficient one, and this one is highly efficient, there should be about a dozen people waiting outside, and the tractor should be warmed up and the trailer attached to it, already filled with the heavy hods called bigonci, sometimes made of plastic now and much lighter, in which the grapes are brought back to the house and poured into the macchina da macinare, the grape crusher. If they are an inefficient lot and no one else has turned up, which often means they have forgotten to ask them, a lot of screaming across valleys to other houses takes place – ‘Maariaaa! Ahmaaandoh! Doveee seei?’ (‘Maria! Armando! Where are you?’) – just as they had screamed at one another across similar expanses up in the nearby Apennines when I was hiding from the Germans. Or they could still be scrubbing the barrels or even waiting for the barrel staves to swell sufficiently to stop the barrels leaking, which should have been done long before, or perhaps the man with the tractor hasn’t arrived, in any of which cases we hang about and get cheesed off. The most inefficient people we know are the P.… s, who are never ready. One year the bottom literally fell out of their biggest barrel, which was really enormous, after we had quarter filled it with crushed grapes. Yet in spite of being highly inefficient, they make some of the best wine in the district.

We always start at the most distant vineyard, which may be a mile or more away from the house, up or down the hillside, often separated from it by other people’s properties and usually only reached by the roughest and steepest of tracks.

In some of the vineyards the grapes are still trained on pergole, trellises, some of them extended out over steep banks which are anything up to eight feet high. Pergole are picturesque and shade you from the midday sun, but they no longer accord with modern wine-making theory. No more trellises are being constructed, and new vineyards are planted in regular, widely-spaced parallel rows in fields bulldozed out of the hillside, and the pretty terraced fields one above the other will soon be no more. It is difficult to cut the bunches of grapes under a pergola. If they are very high you have to use triangular, home-made step ladders, which everyone keeps for this purpose and for harvesting the olives later in the year, but often, when the ground underneath is too bumpy to set them up, I find myself swinging from the pergola, like one of the larger primates trying to reach some far-out bunches.

If it rains it is hell. If it rains heavily you have to stop work, because you get too much water with the grapes when you squash them in the press. A sack is the best thing to wear over the head and shoulders when it rains, cooler and less constricting than a waterproof. If the grapes are more or less a write-off, as they were in 1972, and it rains as well, it is indeed lugubrious, but whatever the conditions, the day passes in constant gossip, which seems to become more and more lubricious as the day goes on; some of the more hair-raising stories being recounted by respectable-looking ladies dressed in the deepest black. From time to time, gusts of laughter sweep through the vineyard as a result of some particularly coarse remark. Some of the time I don’t harvest the grapes. Instead I am given the job of heaving the bigonci, filled with grapes, on to the trailer which will take them back to the press. This is because I am one of the few grown men here who haven’t yet had a hernia from lifting enormous weights.

At about ten o’clock, after we have worked for a couple of hours or more, we have a merenda, a picnic, in whichever field we happen to be in, brought there by the farmer’s wife; a very un-English breakfast spread out on a white cloth on the grass, with lots of fresh pecorino, cheese made with ewe’s milk, prosciutto, and what is here called mortadella but which is nothing like real mortadella di Bologna – more like salami – bread baked in the outside wood oven which every house possesses, and wine. We go on having swigs of wine throughout the day, to keep us going, not much but enough, always white.

At about a quarter to one we go back to the house for the midday meal, by which time we have, temporarily at least, had enough. All the morning a band of women have been sorting the bunches that they take from the baskets at tables set up in the various fields, cutting off long stalks, removing leaves which would give the wine a bad taste and rejecting unripe grapes or those covered with mildew, before putting the rest into the bigonci. Sometimes, if it is hot, we eat at a long table outside in the yard, but usually we are in the parlour with great black and white photographs of ancestors on the walls. We never drink before the meal, apart from the occasional swig we have already had in the fields, and we never mix white with red, because drinking on an empty stomach and mixing white with red is thought to be injurious to health.

We eat brodo, broth, made with beef or chicken stock, with pasta in it, followed by manzo bollito, boiled beef, stuffed with a mixture of spinach, egg, parmigiano cheese and mortadella; and also roast or boiled chicken chopped up with a chopper and the bones broken, the chickens being the best sort that have scratched a living in the yard, roast potatoes, the bitter green salad called radici, mixed with home-produced olive oil and vinegar, and plates of delicious tomatoes eaten with oil, salt and pepper.

The afternoon seems longer and harder and, if it is hot, much hotter than the morning, and the work goes on in the fields until it is so dark that it is no longer possible to see anything. It goes on longer back at the house where there is usually a last trailer-load of bigonci full of grapes that have to be fed into the macchina da macinare, from which they fall into full ones which you hoist on your shoulder before staggering away with them and pouring the contents into one of the barili in which it will eventually become wine.

Now, after a good wash at a tap in the yard, we all sit down again, with the children home from school, to eat a dinner: a home-made ravioli (each house has a special piece of furniture called a madia, a sort of dough tray, for making pasta), more meat and chicken, but never for some reason pork, then cheese and lots of walnuts, with which we drink the stronger, sweeter wines of which the owner is usually very proud, and coffee.

Then we all reel home under the stars, or through wetting rain, sometimes, if we have indulged too freely, falling into ditches which some thoughtless fellows seem to have dug since we passed that way in the morning; and the next day will be the same, and the next.

This time, we had not come here only to make the wine or simply to drink it while at the same time enjoying the heat of the Mediterranean sun. This time, we were using I Castagni as the point of departure for other, some of them wilder, shores of the Mediterranean. Now it was August. This year, to do our vendemmia we would have to return from wherever we happened to be.

What we were hoping to do was to travel around the shores of the Mediterranean, or as many as we felt inclined to travel round (some of them being at that time – as they still are – either difficult or undesirable places to visit unless you have to), with the idea of seeing people, places and things that we had either never seen before or had not seen for so long that we both wanted to see them again and to discover – though we were less anxious about this – what changes time had wrought in them.

‘Shores’ were something we were going to interpret liberally. I knew, from visiting our own neighbouring shores in the Gulf of Spezia and almost the entire Tuscan littoral south of it as far as Livorno, that if I slavishly traversed the entire coastline of the Mediterranean I would end up either as a topographical bore or as one of those prophets of doom and pollution who is actually confronted with what he has been prophesying, rather as Smollett was when he travelled to Rome by way of the Riviera in the eighteenth century. For what has happened to enormous tracts of the Mediterranean was, as we later found out if we did not know it already, too awful for anyone but the most insensitive traveller to contemplate. All the coasts of the Mediterranean, from the east coast of Spain in the latitude of the Balearic Islands to Albania, including the coasts of France, Italy and Yugoslavia, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and the Balearics, are so badly polluted that swimming and eating fish caught in these waters is said to be dangerous, and the same applies in the eastern Mediterranean from northern Syria to the borders of Egypt and Libya.

‘Shores’ were something we interpreted to include places that might be far inland – such as Fez in Morocco where I had long wanted to go, or the edge of the Sahara – providing that they were part of the Mediterranean world. History was something I proposed not to delve into too deeply, even though in order to pay for this land-borne Odyssey I was going to write a book about it. The thought of attempting to chronicle in more or less detail the peoples who had dwelt on its shores, sometimes merely as a passing whim, made my mind reel: Minoans, Egyptians, Greeks, Macedonians, Israelites, Phoenicians, Romans, Dacians, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Persians, Arabs, Assyrians, Albanians, Jews, Vikings, Crusaders of various nationalities, Byzantines, Vandals, Genoese, Turks, Venetians, Dutch, English, French, Spaniards, Slovenes and Croats and Montenegrins, Barbary pirates of various sorts and goodness knows who else, like a cast of billions in some colossal, crazy Cecil B. de Mille film of the thirties. It was no wonder that many of the writers of books about the Mediterranean, of whom there are lots, had failed to keep such a mob under control. I had no intention of trying.

‘Where were you thinking of starting?’ Wanda asked me one cold morning in deepest Dorset when the idea of the Mediterranean had finally taken shape.

‘I was thinking of Gibraltar,’ I said. ‘There’s a nice view from the top and I could start the book at the end, with the collapse of the British Empire, like they do in films. The Americans should like that, the bit about the collapse. Or I could start in Egypt, on top of the Great Pyramid. The only thing is you can’t see the Mediterranean from the top of it.’

‘I thought you said you wanted to go back to Naples,’ she said.

‘I do, at some stage,’ I said.

‘Well why don’t you start in Naples and go clockwise round the Mediterranean instead of dashing off in all directions like a lunatic?’ she asked.

So we did.

In the Streets of Naples

The train trundled into Naples through the happy hunting grounds of the Camorra in the suburbs of Grumo, Frattamaggiore and Casoria, past the Cimitero Monumentale up on the hill at Poggioreale and the Cimitero Nuovo, past a forgotten section of the city called the Rione Luzzatti, past the Mercato Agricola and the Prison, the Carcere Giudiziario, and past the Pasconello marshalling yards in which long lines of carriages stood shimmering in the sun like so many red-hot ingots. It was so hot that I wondered if the place might literally explode.

‘There are no hotels in Pozzuoli,’ a sollecitatore, a tout for one of the hotels, said as, carrying our luggage, we entered the foyer of the Stazione Centrale, which although built almost entirely of stainless steel and plate glass was, after the train in which we had been immured for about eight hours, a haven of coolness if not of quiet. We wanted to stay in Pozzuoli, outside the city to the west, partly because we knew it would be quieter than Naples and partly because it is on the shores of the fascinating region known as the Campi Flegrei, the Phlegraean Fields.

‘Non fare lo stupido!’ Wanda said. The very rude equivalent in Italian of ‘Don’t be bloody daft!’ ‘There were dozens of hotels and pensions when we last stayed there.’

‘Well, there aren’t any now,’ he said. ‘They’re all kaput. There are terremoti, earthquakes.’

‘Of course there are hotels and pensioni at Pozzuoli,’ the man at the official Tourist Information desk in the station said when we appealed to him. ‘This man is lying – va via!’ he said to the sollecitatore, and when he had gone off, grumbling to himself, ‘There are altogether nineteen hotels and pensioni at Pozzuoli; but unfortunately they are all full.’

We asked him how he knew they were all full.

‘Because other visitors who arrived earlier today have also asked to stay in Pozzuoli and I have telephoned every one of them. All are full.’

And with that, because we were hot and done in, we allowed him to consign us, telling us how much we would enjoy staying in it, to a pensione in Mergellina that might have won a prize, if the owner had wanted to enter for it, for the noisiest and worst pensione in its class anywhere on the Italian shores of the Mediterranean.

He, too, the man at the information desk, was lying. In fact all the hotels and pensioni in Pozzuoli were completely empty, which was not surprising considering that the town was being shaken by up to sixty earthquake shocks a day of an intensity between three and four on the Mercalli scale.

‘The only thing the hotels at Pozzuoli are full of is paura [fear],’ said an elderly gentleman who we found sitting on a bench at the railway station at Pozzuoli watching the trains go by, when we went there a few days later.

‘And what are you doing here, then,’ Wanda asked him, ‘if it’s so dangerous?’

‘Io?’ he said. ‘Io sono di Baia. Vengo ogni giorno in treno. Sono in pensione. Mi piace un po’ di stimolo.’ (‘Me? I’m from Baia. I come in here every day on the train. I’m an old-age pensioner. I like a bit of excitement.’)

Loaded with inaccurate information we went out through the swing doors of the station into Piazza Garibaldi which was filled with orange-coloured buses, where yet more of the local inhabitants were waiting to practise their skills on us: vendors of hard and soft drugs, contraband cigarettes and lighters, souvenirs, imitation coral necklaces; male prostitutes; juvenile and not so juvenile pimps, pickpockets and bag-snatchers, as well as large numbers of inoffensive, if not positively kindly Napoletani. In fact it was just like any other open space outside a main station anywhere.

Somewhere near the middle of the Piazza someone, presumably someone unused to Naples, had tethered a motorcycle to a lamp standard with the equivalent of a small anchor chain that would have been difficult to cut even with bolt cutters, threading it through and round the front wheel instead of through the frame, a serious error. Now, all that remained of the motorcycle was the front wheel, still chained to the lamp standard.

It was obvious that whatever had happened elsewhere in the Mediterranean in the twenty years since we had last visited it, basically Naples was one of the places that had not changed.

Six nights later we were sitting at a table in the open air in Piazza Sannazzaro, at the west end of Naples, midway between the Mergellina railway station and Porto Sannazzaro where yachts, fishing boats and the big, grey, fast patrol boats of the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian equivalent of the British and American customs, lie moored practically alongside the fast, perhaps faster, smaller boats used by the smugglers, the Contrabbandieri.

One of the entrances to this Piazza is by way of a long, fume-filled tunnel, the Galleria della Laziale, which runs down into it under Monte Posillipo from what was, until recently, the village of Fuorigrotta (Outside the Grotto), now a huge, modern suburb out towards the Phlegraean Fields to the west.

At the point where this tunnel enters the Piazza there is a set of traffic lights which are set in such a fashion that they only operate in favour of pedestrians at intervals of anything up to five minutes, and then only for something like thirty seconds, before the drivers of vehicles once again get the green, which in Naples is interpreted as a licence to kill.

But because this is Naples, when the light turns green it is still not safe for pedestrians to cross here (or anywhere else in the city for that matter), even with the lights in their favour, as motorcyclists and drivers of motor vehicles still continue to roar into the Piazza whatever colour the lights are.

This is because for Neapolitan drivers the red light has a unique significance. Here, in Naples, it is regarded as a suggestion that perhaps they might consider stopping. If however they do stop, then it is practically certain that those behind will not have considered the possibility of them doing so and there will be a multiple collision, with everybody running into the vehicle in front. Because of this possibility it is equally dangerous for Neapolitans, whether drivers or pedestrians, to proceed when the green light announces that they can do so.

At this particular set of lights there is yet another danger for pedestrians waiting on the pavement. When the lights are against the traffic emerging from the tunnel, any motorcyclist worth his salt mounts the pavement and drives through the ranks of those pedestrians who are still poised on it trying to make up their minds whether or not it is safe to step into the road and cross.

And what about the orange light? It is a reasonable question to ask.

‘And what about the orange light?’ Luccano de Crescenza, a Neapolitan photographer and writer, the author of a very amusing book on the habits of his fellow citizens, La Napoli di Bellavista, once asked an elderly inhabitant who passed the time of day at various traffic lights, presumably waiting for accidents to occur. To which he replied, ‘l’Arancio? Quello non dice niente. Lo teniamo per allegria.’ (‘The Orange? That doesn’t mean anything. We keep it to brighten the place up.’)

This tunnel, and another which also runs under Monte Posillipo, more or less parallel to it, the Galleria Quattro Giornate, replace the tunnel, a wonder of ancient engineering more than 2200 feet long, 20 feet wide and in some places 70 feet high, that linked Roman Napolis with the Phlegraean Fields.

Above the eastern portal of this tunnel, now closed, which emerged at Piedigrotta (Foot of the Grotto) next door to the Mergellina railway station, there is what is said to be a Roman columbarium, a dovecote. It stands on what is supposed to be the site of the tomb of Virgil, who was buried on Monte Posillipo after his death in Brundusium, the modern Brindisi, on his way back from Greece, in September, 19 BC and which was visited by John Evelyn on his way to the Phlegraean Fields in 1645.

Previously Virgil had lived in a villa on the hill where he composed the Georgics and the Aeneid but was so dissatisfied with the Aeneid, which he had written for the glorification of Rome, that he gave orders that after his death it should be destroyed, a fate which, mercifully for posterity, was avoided by the intervention of the Emperor Augustus, who forbade it.

Although it was by now after eleven o’clock in the evening and a weekday, it was August, holiday time, and the tables in Piazza Sannazzaro were as crowded as they had been two or three hours previously. In fact the tables were so closely packed together that the only way in which it was possible to be sure which establishment one was patronizing was by the different colours of the tablecloths.

These were very cheap places in which to eat, that is to say you could have a meal, the principal plate of which might be risotto or spaghetti con vongole, clams, which we hoped had been dredged from some part of the Mediterranean that was not rich in mercury and other by-products of industry, and almost unlimited wine (at least two litres) at a cost of about 12,000 lire for two. (At this time, August 1983, the exchange was around L2395 for £1, L1605 for $1.) Here, you could eat an entire meal, which few of the sort of Napoletani who brought what appeared to be their entire families with them could afford to do, or a single dish. Or you could eat nothing at all and simply drink Nastro Azzurro, the local beer which, strangely enough, is better in bottles than on draught when it is usually too gassy, or wine, or Coca Cola. Here, in the Piazza, beer drinkers outnumbered wine drinkers.

One of the sources of drink in Piazza Sannazzaro was a dark little hole in the wall with VINI inscribed over it on a stone slab, from which this and the various other beverages were dispensed by a rather grumpy-looking old woman in the black weeds of age or widowhood or both, who spoke nothing but the Neapolitan dialect. This dispensary formed in part an eating place called the Antica Pizzeria da Pasqualino which offered four different varieties – gusti specialità – of pizza: polpo (with octopus) al sugo, capricciosa, frutta di mare and capponato, presumably filled with capon. These pizzas are good. They make anything bought outside Italy, and some pizzas made in Italy and even in Naples by those who are not interested in making them properly – a bit of underbaked dough smeared with salsa di pomodoro, tomato sauce, and adorned with a few olives and fragments of anchovy – seem like an old tobacco pouch with these items inside it. The sort of pizza that the English traveller Augustus Hare was offered when in Naples in 1883, the one he described as ‘a horrible condiment made of dough baked with garlic, rancid bacon and strong cheese … esteemed a feast’.

What he should have been eating is something of which the foundation is a round of light, leavened dough which has been endlessly and expertly kneaded, on to which have been spread, in its simplest form, olive oil, the cheese called mozzarella, anchovies, marjoram and salsa di pomodoro, and baked in a wood-fuelled oven.

Amongst all the Napoletani there were very few foreigners to be seen. This was because there is relatively little accommodation in Mergellina – a couple of small hotels and three pensioni – and very few visitors to Naples, once they find out what can happen to them in the city, unless they are young and active and travelling together in a band, are at night prepared to go far from the area where they are actually sleeping.

Our evening in Piazza Sannazzaro had been almost too full of incident. Just after nine o’clock, a boy had ridden up on a Vespa and stopped outside the Trattoria Agostino, a place very similar to the one we were in and about fifty yards away on the corner of Via Mergellina, at its junction with the Salita Piedigrotta. There, at point-blank range, without dismounting, he had fired five shots in rapid succession, from what sounded to me more like a peashooter than a pistol, at a man sitting at a table outside the establishment, apparently trying to gambizzare, blow his kneecaps off, all of which missed, except one which grazed his bottom.

The man at the table was Mario dello Russo, aged thirty-four. He had a criminal record as a member of the Camorra, a fully fledged member of the Nuova Famiglia, the principal rivals of the now-ascendant Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO) with whom they were currently engaged in a fight to the death, or until some other satisfactory arrangement could be arrived at.

This battle, which was taking place under our eyes, was for the ultimate control of almost everything criminal: robbery, kidnapping, intimidation of shopkeepers, all sorts of smuggling including drugs, male and female prostitution and illegal property development not only in Naples and the offshore islands of Ischia and Capri but in the whole of Italy from Apulia and Calabria in the deep south as far north as Milan.

After five minutes, three cars loaded with members of the Squadra Mobile arrived, together with an ambulance, and dello Russo was carted off. The boy who actually fired the shots was, in fact, a person of no consequence, what is known in the Camorra, an organization with unchanging, traditional ways of doing things, rather like Pop at Eton, as a Picciotto di Onore, a Lad of Honour, an unpaid apprentice to the Camorra, anxious to prove his worth and loyalty to the cause. The next step up the ladder was to become what used to be called a Picciotto di Sgarroe. This needed a far greater degree of self-sacrifice and abnegation, the postulant often being required to take the responsibility for crimes committed by fully fledged Camorristi and to accept whatever sentence was meted out to him by law, even if it meant spending years in prison.

Altogether, on that day alone, in the last week of August, those arrested in and around Naples included the uncle of Luigi Giugliano of Forcella, a high-ranking member of the Nuova Famiglia who had been instantly deported to Frosinone; three traffickers in hard drugs; two pairs of brothers, all between twelve and seventeen years of age, who between them had broken into twenty different apartments in the districts of Vomero and Colli Aminei, two of them being armed; a man who had assaulted the police while they were chasing two thieves; Vicenzo Scognamiglo, aged forty-nine, who had stolen a wallet from an Iranian; Bruno and Gennaro Pastore, for snatching a handbag from an American tourist; and Salvatore Imparata, aged fifty-six, and Giovanni Lazzaro, twenty, both of whom were found to be carrying guns.

That same night, Francesco Iannucci, otherwise known as Ciccio 800 (Ciccio being a diminutive of Francesco), a thirty-seven-year-old Camorrista of the Nuova Famiglia, succeeded in jumping from a prison train and getting away, although the following day he was sighted from a Carabinieri helicopter and recaptured, after having been shot in the knee. In 1975 he had been condemned to twenty-four years’ imprisonment for the murder of Andrea Gargiulo, otherwise known as ’O Curto (the Short One), head of a rival band of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata who specialized in extortion in Iannucci’s native suburb of Torre Annunziata, on the shores of the Bay below the southern flanks of Vesuvius, not far from Pompeii.

But by far the biggest coup of the day had been the arrest, by Carabinieri of the Special Operations Group, Napoli I, of Carmela Provenzano, aged thirty-three, at her home in Secondigliano, on the northern outskirts of the city. She had been committed to the earthquake-ridden women’s prison at Pozzuoli in which the occupants were now refusing, with some reason, to be locked in their cells. Carmela was the wife of Pasquale d’Amico, better known as ’O Cartunaro (literally the gatherer of cardboard boxes, for reconditioning), who besides being a scavenger was also one of the strategic planning staff in the upper echelons of the NCO.

Carmela had acted as principal courier for the NCO, maintaining a regular communication service between those of its members who were outside with those who were inside. One of her most important calls had been at the Supercarcere, the maximum security prison, at Nuoro in Sardinia, itself a town in a region that is one of the great epicentres of violent, organized crime on the island. There, in August 1981, she delivered the death sentence, pronounced by Raffaele Cutolo, otherwise known as Il Professore, head of the NCO, on Francis Turatello, otherwise known as Faccia d’Angelo (Angel Face). Turatello was one of the inmates, and, if not commander-in-chief of the Nuova Famiglia, was certainly boss of all illicit activity in the Po Valley, as far north as Milan, as well as being a protégé of the Mafia.

Turatello died on 17 August, during the open-air exercise period, having been stabbed sixty times. That same day, the Carabinieri of Napoli I also arrested Maria Auletta, aged eighteen, wife of the Mafioso Salvatori Imperatrici, one of the sicari (cutthroats) who had stabbed Turatello to death. She was what is known as a fiancheggiatrice, a helper or flanker of the NCO.

Carmela Provenzano was arrested in Secondigliano, Maria Auletta in Arzano. Both are small places adjacent to one another in what is known as Il Triangolo della Morte, or Il Triangolo della Camorra, both of which have the same significance for those who have the misfortune to live in them and are not themselves members of either the Camorra or the Mafia. Inside Il Triangolo, which is made up of three main areas, Afragola-Casoria, Caivano-Fratta and Acerra, live more than half a million people, a large proportion of whom are unemployed and without any apparent hope of finding employment. Everything within Il Triangolo is inadequate: schools, water supply, housing and recreational facilities, which are practically non-existent.

Of the eight comuni, municipalities, that make up Caivano-Fratta, five do not even have a single police or Carabinieri post which might afford some protection to the inhabitants. Afragola-Casoria, with 200,000 people living in it, does not even have a hospital. In Acerra, which has the largest concentration of industry – Aeritalia, Alfasud, Montefibre – the three comuni of Acerra, Pomigliano and Casalnuovo, which together have a population of 100,000, have more than 20,000 unemployed, of whom 8000 are what is known as cassa integrati, that is paid not to work.¹ At Acerra large numbers of earthquake victims are accommodated in metal containers of the sort carried on lorries. In the last week of this August, because of the heat, a four-year-old child died of asphyxiation inside one, the third child to die in this fashion in four months. Of the eight communes that make up Caivano-Fratta, which has about 200,000 inhabitants, the one with the largest number of unemployed is the one which has been industrialized. In fact, the setting up of industrial complexes in the Triangle has obliterated enormous tracts of agricultural land without providing alternative employment for the inhabitants.

It is not surprising that the Triangle is used as a battlefield by the warring clans of the Camorra; there were fifty murders there in the first eight months of 1983. The most dangerous area is Acerra, where, by the time we arrived in Naples, there had been twenty-two murders in eighteen months. Everywhere robbers, many of them no more than children, had organized themselves in bands anything up to twenty strong. Banks were constantly under attack. The only faint ray of hope in what was otherwise a prospect of unrelieved gloom and horror was that students and working men living in the Triangle had joined together to set up an organization of vigilantes, headed by a bishop. We decided to give Afragola-Casoria, Caivano-Fratta and Acerra a miss.

In view of all this general unpleasantness, it was therefore with a certain trepidation that we set off, as we did each night, to walk back to our macabre bedroom in the Pensione Canada on the waterfront facing Porto Sannazzaro, through streets that were now rapidly emptying of people, but not traffic, which continued to circulate until the early hours of the morning unabated. This room was twelve feet high, twelve feet square, lit by a very old circular fluorescent tube that when it was warming up resembled a crimson worm and was furnished with a bidet hidden by a tall bamboo screen, like a bidet in a jungle. It was also furnished, which was unusual for a bedroom, with an upright piano belonging to the brother of the proprietor. The only picture on the walls was a colour photograph of the Mobilificio Petti, a furniture warehouse at Nocera Sopra Camerelle (SA), with the telephone numbers – there were two lines, 723730 and 723751–printed underneath it, in case one wanted to order up more furniture during one’s stay.

Fortunately there were other things besides shootings, of which one soon tires, going on in Piazza Sannazzaro. Night after night we had sat in it watching a succession of events unfold themselves, always with the same protagonists, until we had come to realize that what we were looking at was an unvarying ritual. Even the order in which they took place and the participants appeared and disappeared was governed by immutable laws. It was only on this particular evening, when the Camorra had demonstrated its existence, coming up from the depths and showing a small part of itself, like some immense fish of which only the smallest part breaks the surface, that there had been any interruption.

First to open up, and the only one who remained on site throughout the entire evening, was a young man who sold raw tripe and pigs’ trotters from a shiny, brand new, stainless steel stall with the owner’s name and what he dealt in painted around the top of it – TRIPPE OPERE E’O MUSSO – in black letters, illuminated on a pink background.

The grey pieces of tripe were displayed on a sort of miniature stainless steel staircase which was decorated with vine leaves and lemons stuck on metal spikes, with a centrepiece which consisted of what looked like an urn made entirely of rolled tripe, with the pinkish pigs’ trotters laid out attractively at the foot of it. Down this staircase tumbled an endless cascade of water, making the whole thing a sort of hanging garden of tripe and pigs’ trotters; it was surprising how attractive looking it was, considering how unpromising were the basic materials.

Next to appear on the scene, after E’O MUSSO, was a very poor, very fragile, faintly genteel old lady, who looked as if a puff of wind might whisk her away to eternity. She moved among the tables never asking for money but nevertheless receiving it, for the Neapolitans recognize and respect true poverty. A surprising amount of what she received was in the form of 500 and even 1000 lire notes. This old lady rarely, if ever, made the circuit of all the tables. When she had collected what she presumably considered enough for her immediate needs, after taking into account whatever payments she might have to make to the Camorra in a way of dovuti, dues, or what she considered the market could stand each night without spoiling it, she would give up and totter off round the corner and up the hill called the Salita Piedigrotta which leads to the Mergellina railway station and the church of Santa Maria Piedigrotta. There, by day, during opening hours, she used to sit outside the main door, at the receipt of alms. Santa Maria Piedigrotta is the church which is the scene of one of the great Neapolitan religious festivals, that of the Virgin of Piedigrotta, which takes place, to the accompaniment of scenes of wild and pagan enthusiasm, on the night of 7–8 September.

The old lady was followed by an even older, even more decrepit couple, presumably husband and wife, each of whom carried a couple of very large plastic bags. They moved from table to table asking for bread, and because they didn’t miss any out, they got a lot of it.

What did they do with all this bread?

One night, feeling mean about doing so, I followed them out of the Piazza, round the corner and up the Rampa Sant’Antonio a Posillipo, built in 1743 by Charles of Bourbon’s Spanish Viceroy in Naples, Don Ramiro de Guzman, Duque Medina de Las Torres, which is one of the ways of reaching Virgil’s tomb and a pillar indicating the whereabouts of the remains of the poet Leopardi. There, from a distance, I saw them eating bread as hard as they could. It was a harrowing sight. But what happened to the bread they couldn’t eat? There was so much of it, and more arriving every evening. Did they sell it to other old people too infirm or too proud to go into the streets and beg? Or did they sell it to a pig farmer for swill? It was yet another Neapolitan mystery.

The old man and the old woman were followed by a venditore di volanti, literally a seller of flyings, in this case balloons, who always did good business with the owners of children who had long since got tired of sitting at the tables with their parents and were now zooming about all over the place.

Next came a poor, sickly, probably tubercular, humble-looking young man like someone out of a Victorian novel, who handed out colour prints, as pallid as he was, of Santa Lucia, the Virgin martyred by the Emperor Diocletian, shown holding a palm frond and, as patroness of the blind, a dish with a pair of eyes apparently swimming in it, all against a Neapolitan background of umbrella pines.

He was followed by a more vigorous-looking man carrying a sort of wooden framework, a bit like those that were once used to carry hawks into the hunting field, supported by straps from his shoulders but loaded with toy musical instruments, selling at 1000 lire a time, that looked like ice-cream cornets and which, when he blew into a demonstration model, produced a hideous noise. Soon the air was filled with the sounds of dozens of these instruments being blown by children and adults which mingled with the terrible howlings emitted by the sirens of the police cars and ambulances tearing through the streets, just as they do in every other city in the civilized world.

Then came another, older man, pushing an old-fashioned perambulator with a piece of board on top of it which he used as a mobile stand. He was a torronaro, selling torronne, nougat. On both sides of the pram he had painted the words QUESTO ESERCIZIO RIMANE CHIUSO IL LUNEDI (THIS ESTABLISHMENT REMAINS CLOSED ON MONDAYS), which was why we hadn’t seen him on the evening we arrived. Below that he had added his telephone number, just like the owner of the furniture warehouse at Nocera Sopra Camerelle (SA) in case someone had a sudden, overwhelming desire to eat nougat.

Last of all, a four-man band came marching into the Piazza. Three of them were middle-aged with little black moustaches, wearing the sort of red caps with gold-embroidered peaks worn by Italian station masters when seeing a train off from their stations, bright green shirts and yellow knickerbockers with silver braided side seams. Two of them were beating drums, and the third one played the harmonica. They were led by a drum-major dressed in a white tunic with gold-embroidered epaulettes, bright yellow trousers the same shade as the bandsmen’s knickerbockers and what looked like a colonial governor’s hat decked with white plumes. He was whirling a baton with a Negro’s head on top of it in one hand and, with the other, making various obscene gestures. Each night when we gave the drum-major his due – he was well over seventy years of age – which was not always easy at this late hour, as besides being breadless by this time, we were also running short of the kind of money we were prepared to give him, he used to hand Wanda a quantity of visiting cards, so that if she had stayed on for another week in Naples she would have had enough cards to play poker with. The print on them read:

BOTTONE SALVATORE

ORGANIZZATORE-PAZARIELLO

PROPAGANDA: PER NAPOLI E PROVINCIA

AFRAGOLA (NA) TEL: 8697539

DALLE ORE 2 ALLE ORE 24

Then, when he had sucked everyone in the Piazza dry of lire, Signor Salvatore marched his band of pazarielli, signifying, in the dialect, entertainers of a surrealistic, loony kind, away up the Salita Piedigrotta in the steps of the old lady, the old man and woman collecting bread, the sickly young man with the prints of Santa Lucia, the seller of musical instruments that looked like ice-cream cornets, the venditore di volanti and the torronaro, to the place where they had parked the old, beat-up van which would take them all back to dear old Afragola in the heart of the Triangolo della Morte.

The entertainment was at an end. Suddenly the tables began to empty and the waiters began stacking them and the chairs against the walls. The evening was over.

But not quite over. There was one establishment that during the hours of darkness never closed. The proprietor was called Gennaro and he lived on the first floor over what a sign over the door described as a Ferramenta e Hobbyistica, an ironmonger’s shop which also catered for those interested in hobbies, which stood next door to the shop where the grumpy old lady dispensed her vini and Nastri Azzurri.

This man Gennaro had a monopoly of contraband cigarettes in the Piazza, perhaps over an even wider area. All you had to do was to stand below the balcony and call, ‘Gennaro!’ and then more softly, ‘Un pacco!’ and shooting down on a rope came a panaro, a wicker basket, into which you put 2000 lire which was immediately whisked away aloft. Then by return of post, as it were, you received a packet of genuine Marlboros, the only thing lacking being the Italian excise stamp.

But why 2000 lire a packet when the going price, bought from an official government tabaccaio, tobacconist, was 1800 lire including duty and tax? Because all the official establishments were shut. Gennaro made a killing with his contrabbando which by day would have to sell for infinitely less than 1800 lire to compete with what was a monopoly of the state.

There was nothing extraordinary about this way of doing business, with a basket on the end of a rope. In Naples, where many of the old tenements are eight storeys high, it is commonplace. The only difference is that there the trade is generally legitimate and the buyers, often elderly ladies living alone on an upper floor, are the ones who lower the panari to the sellers of such commodities as vegetables in the street below, who have attracted their attention by shouting at the tops of their voices in the dialect, ‘Signo [Signora]! The price of whatever it is is so-and-so a kilo. Acalate ’o panaro!’ (‘Lower your basket!’)

When Wanda decided to buy the only packet of Marlboros she ever bought from Gennaro and she shouted up, ‘Gennaro, un pacco!’, the strangeness of these three words, in her north Italian, Parmigiano accent, made him sufficiently inquisitive to lean out over the railings to see who owned it, and for a moment we found ourselves being looked down on by a hard-looking character of sixty-odd with short white hair and eyes like Carrara marbles. What we were looking up at was the last link in an illicit industry, the one that actually dealt with the public. An industry which at the height of its prosperity, largely in the field of cigarette smuggling, which continued well into the seventies, supported, by its own admission, some 50,000 Napoletani and their families, out of a total population of some 1,200,000.

In the good old days up to about 1978 when the contrabbandieri used to challenge the customs officers to football matches, money would change hands in large quantities to keep them sweet – which it probably still does – and the smugglers’ equivalent to the Royal Yacht Squadron bar at Cowes was the Bar Paris in Santa Lucia. But by that time the Camorra, and therefore the contrabbandieri, were already deeply involved with drugs and the special relationship they had enjoyed with the Guardie had come to an end, and, what had been unthinkable until then, the Guardie actually took to opening fire, if not actually at the contrabbandieri themselves, then on their motoscafi, although how it was possible to discriminate between one and the other at night it is difficult to imagine.

It was at this time that the contrabbandieri did something that only Neapolitans would think of doing. They formed a union which they christened Il Colletivo Autonomo Contrabbandieri, the Autonomous Collective of Smugglers, and called a public protest meeting, advertising it with posters which read more or less as follows:

SMUGGLING AT NAPLES ALLOWS 50,000 FAMILIES TO SURVIVE ALBEIT WITH DIFFICULTY. FOR ALMOST A YEAR NOW THE GOVERNMENT AND THE CUSTOMS HAVE DECLARED WAR ON US. HANDS OFF THE CONTRABAND UNTIL YOU FIND US ANOTHER WAY OF LIFE! COME TO THE MEETING OF ALL SMUGGLERS OF NAPLES ON THURSDAY NEXT IN FRONT OF THE UNIVERSITY IN VIA MEZZOCANONE 16.

A particularly appropriate venue as large numbers of students actually worked for the Paranze a Terra (an organization for distributing contraband).

Now, five or more years later, there were still 50,000 Neapolitan families involved in smuggling at Naples and more money was involved, as would be natural to keep pace with inflation even without taking account of drug smugglers.

There had been some changes in Naples since we had last taken a fairly prolonged look at it, back in the autumn of 1963, and it would have been surprising if there had not been.

Then we had been working on a guide book to the hotels, pensioni and restaurants in southern Italy, a task that had left us, even before we left Naples and began to tackle the rest of the Italian peninsula, in a state of near collapse. At that time the pensione with the piano had not existed, although there were one or two hotels and pensioni that ran it very close.

Some of the biggest changes that had taken place, apart from whole areas in which the original buildings had either fallen down of their own accord or had been knocked down and rebuilt, were down in the docks, all along the waterfront as far as San Giovanni a Teduccio, where the pontili, the landing stages, stretch out like long fingers into the filthy waters of the Bay, always a dangerous place, if only because of the long lines of freight cars propelled by tank engines that used to come stealing up behind one on their way to or from some marshalling yard. One was only saved from death by the engine drivers letting off a tremendous blast on their whistles. Altogether the place was a madhouse, what with steam engines whistling, ships, some of them big passenger liners, blasting off on their sirens announcing that they were leaving for the Hudson River and similarly distant destinations, and the appalling din made when a crane driver skilfully dropped a whole slingful of packing cases into a ship’s holds, shattering them so that the portuali, the stevedores, could get their hands on the contents, just as crane drivers and stevedores did in every other port in the world at that time.

Now there were no more steam engines; no more transatlantici stealing out into the Bay in the golden light of early morning; no more crane drivers dropping packing cases making music in the ears of the portuali. These noises had been replaced by the ghostly whirrings of the special lifting machines, each of them worked by one man in what had become an automated wilderness, as they picked up the pilfer-proof containers and either loaded them on to a container ship with the minimum of human interference, or else on to an articulated truck.

Now, denied what for centuries they had regarded as their legitimate perquisites of office, the heart had gone out of the portuali, and providing that the money could be found, and it almost certainly would be, by 1985, 750 out of a total workforce of 1700 portuali would have voluntarily taken the sack. What to do with the remaining 950 was a problem that no one in the government or in the port authority had yet had the courage to face. What was obvious was that as far as being a place of interest to travellers such as ourselves, or to anyone but the technically minded, Naples, as a port, like Barcelona, Marseilles, Trieste, the Piraeus, Iskenderun, Beirut, Haifa, Alexandria, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers and Tangier, was finished.

What had gone, too, from many parts of the city in which previously it had operated at full blast, was what can only be described as the roaring street life. The change was particularly noticeable in the heart of Montecalvario, the large grid-iron of streets, alleys and flights of steps to the west of Via Toledo, that immensely long, straight street which under five different names (the others are Via Roma, Via Enrico Pessina, Via Santa Teresa degli Scalzi and Corso Amedeo di Savoia Duca d’Aosta), rather like Broadway, bisects the city from south to north, from the Royal Palace where it looks out on Piazza Trieste e Trento at the seaward southern end to the foot of Capodimonte at the top, north end where the other royal palace of Naples looks out over the city and the Bay.

These changes were not noticeable at first. It is only when you reach La Speranzella, the Street of Some Hope, which runs across Montecalvario parallel to the Toledo, and you see that many of the tall tenements are only prevented from collapsing by forests of wooden beams and metal scaffolding and that they have been abandoned by all except the most stubborn or desperate for accommodation, that you realize that the heart of Montecalvario is gone and that one single, fairly powerful earth tremor would bring the whole place crashing down in a vast mountain of rubble.

Here every different flight of steps from one level to another, every one of the sixty or more streets, every alley, has its own shrine, to Santa Lucia, San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples, to Our Lady of Piedigrotta and so on, tended by old ladies who charge the lamps with oil, change the candles, collect any offerings, while meanwhile, in a sort of grotto beneath the shrine, the terracotta figures of men and women, which often include a priest among them, fry in purgatory.

Now what was perhaps the most vigorous street life in Naples was to be found in and on either side of Spaccanapoli, literally the Street that splits Naples, in the same way as Via Toledo does from north to south but from west to east. A long, long street with eight different names which begins as Via Santa Lucia al Monte high up in Montecalvario below the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, coming to an end in a vicolo cieco, a cul-de-sac, called Borgo Tupputi, half a mile from the Stazione Centrale in Piazza Garibaldi. An astonishing, fascinating street full of medieval, Renaissance, baroque and rococo churches, palaces and monuments; bookshops; repairers and vendors of second-hand dolls; and with long, narrow dangerous alleys running uphill from it in an area infested with robbers, one of which is full of makers and sellers of presepi (cribs) and the painted terracotta figures of the infant Christ, the Virgin, the Shepherds and the Kings and the animals which every Neapolitan family brings out in Christmas week; artificial flowers for cemeteries and religious images. The streets running down from it towards Corso Umberto, such as those around the Forcella, the home of Luigi Giugliano, whose uncle had been deported to Frosinone, were still the abode of puttane, tarts, some of them enormous.

Twenty years previously, sent off by Wanda to conduct this particular piece of fieldwork by myself, awe had overcome lust as I looked for the first time at these mountainous women somehow inserted into skirts so tight that it seemed that they must burst, bigger even than many of their biggest customers, who were themselves gigantic. Now, fat or thin, they were fighting an uphill battle against the thousands of male prostitutes and transvestites who, as long ago as the seventies, as everywhere else in Italy, were already beginning to outnumber them, if they had not already done so. Some, seeing their livelihood threatened by the indifference of a seemingly increasingly myopic clientele and not receiving much support from the Nuova Famiglia or the NCO, who would take a percentage of any earnings, whether they were male, female or transvestite, pinned cards on the doors of their places of business announcing that whoever was inside was a PUTTANA VERA – a Genuine Prostitute.

The beggars of Naples were now less numerous, less ragged than they had been twenty years previously. The poor, in fact, although they might be relatively poorer than they had been, now looked slightly more prosperous, more bourgeois. Some of the raggedest beggars were still to be found lying on the steps leading up into the enormous Galleria Umberto Primo, which has a nave 160 yards long and is 125 feet high with a dome towering 60 feet above that, a place that for at least a couple of decades after 1943 was the centre of every imaginable and unimaginable clandestine activity. It was now more difficult to see in Naples what had appeared in a photograph taken in the seventies, and used by de Crescenza to illustrate his book, of a man lying on a flight of steps apparently in the depths of winter with an empty begging bowl beside him and a notice which read, ‘Ridotto in questo condizione di mio cognato’ (‘Reduced to this condition by my brother-in-law’).

But although there were now more bag-snatchers, more pickpockets, more people ready to beat you up if for no better reason than to give you something to remember them by, as there were almost everywhere else in the Mediterranean lands, or Europe, or the entire world for that matter, there seemed to be slightly less trufferia, petty swindling. It was now less certain that, having made some purchase in the Mercato della Duchesca, or in the street, in the Forcella, for instance, and having had it parcelled up, you would find on opening it up later that something of the same size and weight had been substituted for it, although I was sold a guide book to Pompeii, sealed in plastic, which turned out to be nothing more than the cover with blank pages inside.

On the other hand, to be more or less sure of keeping what money you had about you, it was now doubly necessary either to wear a money belt or carry it inside one’s shoes and, even then, you could not be absolutely sure that someone might not knock you down and take them from you, or even cut off your feet if necessary in order to get at it. The city, too, seemed to have lost some of the skills that for so long after the war had made it one of the great world centres of the imitative arts. Perhaps whatever skill we had possessed in searching out these artefacts had deserted us, but we now experienced difficulty in locating facsimiles of Vuitton trunks, or bottles purporting to contain ten-year-old Glen Grant, Fernet Branca² that back in 1963 had existed in almost too great abundance, considering how slow anyone’s individual intake is of this particular product, Hermès’ Calèche or Chanel Number 5.

Nothing was ever wasted among the Neapolitan poor and to some extent this is still true today. There used to be and perhaps still are whole families devoted to the reanimation of second-hand clothes. These rianimatori used to hang the garments in closed rooms in which bowls of boiling water were placed which gave off a dense steam which raised the nap of the material. If the garment had a moth hole or a cigarette burn in it, fluff was scraped from the inside of the seams with a razor blade and stuck over the hole with transparent glue.

Until recently there were solchanelli, mobile shoe repairers. A solchanello carried the tools of his trade in a basket with a board on top which he used as a seat on which he could squat down anywhere and begin work. Uttering a strange cry, ‘Chià-è! Chià-è!’, to attract attention he would sometimes latch on to some unfortunate person with a hole in one of his shoes or a sole coming off and follow him, sometimes for miles, all the while reminding the victim of the defect in an insistent monotone until whoever it was, unable to stand it any more, sank down in despair on the nearest doorstep and allowed the solchanello to carry out the repair.

In Naples the loss of one of a pair of shoes does not necessarily mean that the other will not have a long and useful life ahead of it, even if it is not sold to some unfortunate person with only one leg. It is still possible to find what are known as scarpe scompagnate, unaccompanied shoes, in the great market for new and secondhand shoes which, weather permitting, takes place every Monday and Friday in Corso Malta, an interminable, dead-straight street that runs northwards from the Carcere Giudizario on Via Nuova Poggioreale to Doganella, at the foot of the hill where the cemeteries begin.

Few people, even Napoletani, buy one shoe. Some, however, can be persuaded to buy two shoes which do not match. Luccano de Crescenza recorded a conversation in dialect between a potential buyer of two odd shoes and a vendor of scarpe scompagnate which went more or less as follows:

‘But these shoes are different, one from the other!’

‘Nosignuri, so tale e quale – they are exactly alike!’

‘Well, they look different to me.’

‘And what does it matter if they look different? That’s only when you’re standing still. Once you start walking they will look exactly the same – tale e quale. Let me tell you about shoes. What do they do, shoes? They walk. And when they walk one goes in front and the other goes behind, like this. In this way no one can know that they are not tale e quale.’

‘But that means I can never stop walking.’

‘How does it mean you can’t ever stop walking? All you have to do when you stop is to rest one shoe on top of the other.’

Sometimes in Naples one felt that one was in a city on the Near Eastern or North African shores of the Mediterranean, with Castel Sant’Angelo its kasbah or Capodimonte its seraglio, because in it the makers and vendors of particular kinds of merchandise tend to come together and occupy whole reaches of streets and alleys as they do in bazaars and souks in Muslim countries, so that Via Duomo becomes the street of the wedding dresses and the appropriately named Via dell’Annunziata the one in which newly arrived Neapolitans are fitted out with cribs and baby carriages.

Uphill from Spaccanapoli there is a narrow alley which runs up alongside the church of San Gregorio Armeno, which was once a convent of Benedictine nuns and has a famous cloister which was given the rococo treatment at a time in the first part of the eighteenth century when the viceroys of Naples were no longer Spanish but Austrian – Austria having been given Naples and Sardinia in 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht which had brought to an end the War of the Spanish Succession – viceroys who would themselves soon cease to exist, the last one being ejected by the young Charles of Bourbon in 1734.

In this alley are to be found some of the men and women who model and bake and paint and dress the miniature terracotta figures, sometimes finding and using ancient materials to do so, and painting the back-cloths, the fondali, for the presepi. At Christmas the whole of this little alley is illuminated and decorated with hundreds of these figures.

Amongst the most remarkable of the presepi that have survived wars and earthquakes and all the other evils to which Naples and the Neapolitans have been subjected, are those in the Certosa di San Martino, the former Carthusian Monastery on the hill below the Castel Sant’Elmo, now a museum.

Among the first to inspire the construction of these great eighteenth-century set pieces was a Dominican, Father Rocco, the famous preacher and missionary to the poor of Naples, who was afraid of no one, rich or poor, and saw this as a way to bring the mystery of the nativity to the people of the city. He was also responsible for the setting up of shrines at street corners in the city. This was in the 1750s, and until 1806 the lamps and candles lit at these shrines were the sole source of illumination in the streets of the city.

It was Father Rocco who inspired Charles to order the building of the enormous Albergo dei Poveri – it has a facade nearly 400 yards long – for the poor to live in, and it was he, too, having set up a presepio in a grotto in the park at Capodimonte, who imbued the King with enthusiasm for what was to become a life-long passion. From that time onwards, Charles and his family reserved a part of each afternoon when he was in residence to working on one of his great presepi, designing and modelling the settings, while his wife and daughters chose materials and sewed and embroidered the costumes. In doing this he set a fashion. One of these presepi in the Certosa, which depicts the arrival of the Magi, is made up of 180 lay figures, 42 angels, 29 animals and 330 finimenti – the jewellery, the musical and agricultural instruments, the ruins, the grottoes, the trees and the temples, the fruit and vegetables, the strings of sausages. The Three Kings, their gold-embroidered turbans encrusted with pearls, wearing silk pelisses lined with fur, have arrived at the scene of the Nativity with a great concourse of followers, Asiatic and African, and are looking down at the Child who is lying on a bed of straw at the foot of what remains of a temple with Corinthian columns and a ruined archway. A band of blackamoors and Turks, ringing bells, blowing into strange wind instruments, playing harps and cymbals and beating drums and blowing on trumpets, is still winding down the hill to the scene of the Nativity through a pass in the mountains, together with the pack animals. The camels which have carried the caskets containing the gifts of gold and myrrh and frankincense on their long journey have already arrived, while others are waiting to be unloaded; and there is a dwarf leading two monkeys on chains dressed in a miniature version of what the other noblemen are wearing, a coat of wild silk embroidered with precious stones and lined with fur and with a turban, like theirs, swathed in pearls, but without the chibouques, the tobacco pipes, some of them carry in their belts, and the yataghans, the curved Turkish swords.

To the right the scene is more mundane. There is a market place full of miniature facsimiles of fruit and vegetables and meat that are so lifelike that one instinctively reaches out to touch them. The modelling and painting of these fruits and vegetables was a specialized art, the work perhaps of Giuseppe di Luca, one of the great masters of it, but we shall never know.

And there is la Taverna, the inn with a band of musicians playing outside it, men of a sort you can see today in the streets of Forcella and Spaccanapoli or among the contrabbandieri of Mergellina, apparently oblivious to the great events taking place only a few yards away, above which a band of angels in swirling draperies with attendant putti are suspended by almost invisible cords in a pale blue heaven.

But we, with our noses pressed against the glass which separates us from these scenes, like children in a museum, can hear in the imagination as well as see everything that is going on because of the genius of those mostly unremembered men and women who constructed these scenes two hundred or more years ago: the clashing of the cymbals, the beating of the drums, the squeaking of the violin outside the tavern, the roaring of the camels, the neighing of the horses, one of which is frightened and is rearing on its hind legs, the sound of the women gossiping in the market place, the beating of the angels’ wings.

Nothing much had changed either in the realms of death. It was still just as easy to lay on a horse-drawn funeral in Naples as it had been back in the early sixties. Hearses drawn by eight, ten or even twelve horses running in pairs and driven by a single cocchiero, coachman, were still available to convey the Neapolitans, or anyone else who fancied it, on their last journey to one of the vast cities of the dead on the eastern outskirts. In fact the same firm, Bellomunno, still had a monopoly of this sort of funeral. There are large numbers of Bellomunnos in the Naples telephone book, all devoted to what are called Pompe Funebri, Funeral Pomps, otherwise the undertaking business, all of them belonging to the same clan, some of them having splintered off to form their own set-ups. The only branch of Bellomunno not listed is the horse-drawn section, and its stables off the Via Don Bosco, in a not-easy-to-be-found street called the Rampe del Campo, the Ramps of the Fields, are ex-directory.

Via Don Bosco is a long, long street, straight at first, then winding and partly cobbled in its later, mountain sections, which begins in Piazza Carlo III opposite the Albergo dei Poveri, begun by Charles’s architect Ferdinando Fuga in 1751 but never completed. It then runs up through Doganella under an enormous concrete fly-over which joins Via Malta, on which the shoe market is held, to the Tangenziale, the Naples Ring Road. Via Don Bosco passes on its way the Cimitero Vecchio, the Old Cemetery, at the foot of the hill, the Cimitero Santa Maria del Pianto (of the Crying), and the sad-looking Protestant Cemetery, eventually reaching the square called Largo Santa Maria del Pianto. From here one road leads to Capodichino Airport; another, the Via del Riposo, to the Cimitero della Pietà, in which the poor are buried; and a third, Via Santa Maria del Riposo, to one of the principal entrances to the two biggest cemeteries, the Cimitero Monumentale and the Cimitero Nuovo, in both of which the dead are dried out in the tufa soil for eighteen months before being filed away in niches on an upper floor.

It is a lugubrious part of Naples at any time and certainly not one in which to linger unaccompanied (you can get knocked on the nut just as easily in a Neapolitan cemetery as anywhere else in Naples), but one in which on almost any day in working hours, providing that business is normal, anyone interested in horses and/or horse-drawn funerals can see at least one horse-drawn hearse making its way up the long ascent to one or other of these resting places. Those ghouls who enjoy any sort of funeral or are simply interested in horseless carriages can see an almost endless procession of motor hearses of various degrees of melancholy splendour all on the same course.

There are few places in the world, now that the Ancient Egyptian and the Imperial Chinese dynasties are no more, apart from Bali, where death is celebrated in such a memorably conspicuous fashion.

Until long after the last war (and even now Bellomunno employees are not prepared to take an oath that such an operation could not still be organized out in the sticks) it was possible to assemble a cast of hundreds, even thousands, of professional mourners to follow the hearse, provided that those who were left alive had inherited sufficient financial clout to pay them: squads of orphans, or if not real orphans simulated ones whose parents were only too happy for them to appear as orphans for the occasion, all of them, real or simulated, dressed in deepest black. Provided there was sufficient inducement, whole bevies of nuns, as well as hosts of professional wailing women, could be made instantly available.

Up to 1914, and possibly even later, the corpse was accompanied by strangely dressed hooded members of the deceased’s Fratria, the Brotherhood to which so many Neapolitans then belonged. At a yet earlier date, the hearse was also accompanied by a body of poor men wearing black stove-pipe hats, grey uniforms over their rags and carrying black banners with the initials of the deceased person embroidered on them, all chanting a doleful litany which began:

Noi sarem come voi sete …

We shall be as you are …

This grey company of death, as one Neapolitan described them, were the Poveri, the Poor of the Hospice of San Gennaro, all of them penniless, many of them ex-soldiers who had fought as mercenaries in various parts of the world. They lived, when not accompanying funerals, in the Ospizio di San Gennaro dei Poveri, now a psychiatric hospital, which was founded in the seventeenth century among the Christian catacombs, which they used to show to visitors along with the church next door, which was built on the site of a chapel in which the head of San Gennaro³ was at one time preserved after his martyrdom in AD 305 at Pozzuoli.

We set off for the Bellomunno horse-drawn branch on the Rampe del Campo in rain that became progressively heavier while we waited for a bus to take us there.

Travelling up Via Don Bosco, having passed Charles’s enormous workhouse, was more like being in the Mile End Road on a wet December afternoon than twelve o’clock in Naples, in August. It was not therefore surprising that we missed the whistle stop for the Rampe del Campo and found ourselves at the beginning of the long haul up to the cemetery plateau, and by the time I realized the mistake and had managed to struggle forward through the bus shouting the equivalent in Italian of ‘Here, I say …’ to the driver and had persuaded him to make an unscheduled stop, we were just coming up to the concrete fly-over.

He did stop, under the fly-over, making it abundantly clear that he thought we must be a couple of tomb robbers, wanting to get down in a place that has very little else to offer in the way of diversion, even in fine weather, except a visit to the Cimitero Vecchio.

But there, underneath the fly-over, with ten horses, and everyone else involved taking a breather before attacking the long salita, was one of Bellomunno’s huge, jet black, baroque hearses with a jet black coffin inside behind expanses of glittering plate glass, a top-hatted, long-black-coated coachman on the box, and a pair of uniformed mutes doubling as grooms holding the two lead horses’ heads with, behind them, four pairs of magnificent, jet black Dutch horses, like the leaders all tossing their heads and all steaming like mad. And behind the hearse a long line of black motor cars, containing the supporters.

‘What happened to the old cocchiero?’ Wanda asked the coachman on the box high overhead who was about twenty-five and as wet as we were. ‘He was a very kind man. The last time we came to the Rampe del Campo was in a taxi and he sent us back to Naples in one of your motor hearses to save us the fare.’

‘He died in 1973,’ he said. ‘They gave him a fine funeral. And you, too, will soon be dead if you don’t change your clothes,’ looking down on us where we stood in a pair of puddles. ‘At the top of the salita,’ he went on pointing up the hill, ‘in Largo Santa Maria, beyond the Cemetery of Santa Maria, there is a pizzeria called the Loggia del Paradiso [Verandah of Paradise] which overlooks it. That is the cemetery we are bound for. Go to the Loggia and tell them I sent you. They will dry your clothes by the oven and lend you some while you’re eating. The hearse which will take this coffin down into the cemetery from the gates is a motor one. I can’t get into it with ten horses. After the funeral the driver and his men will go to the Loggia to have their lunch, and when they go back to the city, which will be about two o’clock, I will ask them to take you with them and drop you off in Piazza Garibaldi.’

From the automobiles, which were as black as the hearse itself and crammed with mourners, the women heavily veiled, came the sounds of groans and sobbing. The cocchiero winked and waved his whip with a graceful gesture, comprehending everything in and out of sight: the pouring rain, the appalling, thundering traffic, the fearful landscape, the keening women and the corpse high overhead behind him.

‘Com’è bella Napoli!’ he said.

Then he shouted to the men holding the heads of the leaders; they let them go and they were off, their hooves skidding a bit on the cobbles, eventually breaking into a trot with the grooms hanging on behind the hearse, out into the pouring rain up towards the Cemetery of Santa Maria del Pianto.

Warm and dry and full of lunch on the way back to Piazza Garibaldi in the Bellomunno motor hearse, we caught up on what had been happening to the old firm in the course of our twenty years’ absence.

They no longer had the white horse-drawn hearse used for children, or the small, black, two-horse one in their stables at the Rampe del Campo; but they still had two of the big ones, one of which – the twin of the one we had seen that morning – was undergoing extensive repairs and redecoration which would take many months to complete. This work of reconstruction was being carried out, part time, by a skilled body-worker from Alfa-Romeo, called Vincenzo di Luca, a man known in the horse-drawn carriage trade as ‘a builder and varnisher’. His family had carried on these trades for generations, and he was one of the last, if not the last, to practise them in Naples – it was fortunate for Bellomunno that he was still a youngish man. His son, who was about eighteen or nineteen, although capable of doing this work and at present assisting his father, preferred to look after the horses in the stables at the Rampe del Campo and this was what he was now doing. To build a new hearse of this kind would take three and a half years, and it was probable that Bellomunno would eventually decide to do so. The cost of building such a vehicle would be prodigious. It would involve the use of various sorts of wood, all of which would have to be properly seasoned, iron, steel, brass, leather, cloth, glass etc., and the services of one or two craftsmen such as di Luca who would now have to carry out a wide variety of works which would previously have been carried out by a number of specialized craftsmen: body-makers who built the upper parts, carriage-makers who constructed and put together all the underparts, wheelwrights, joiners, fitters, trimmers, blacksmiths, painters and polishers. Such a hearse might be given up to twenty separate coats of paint and varnish. One of the great difficulties in the 1980s was to find suitable rubber to make the solid tyres.

In 1983 a horse-drawn funeral employing ten horses cost between 2,000,000 and 3,500,000 lire. The last twelve-horse funeral Bellomunno had organized had been that of Achille Laura, a shipowner who had also been mayor of Naples, earlier that year. He was what is known as a pezzo grosso, literally a big piece, an important man with various far-reaching affiliations; everyone who was anyone and almost everyone who was no one turned out for his funeral, for fear that his absence might be noted. A funeral of this sort could well have cost 7,000,000 lire.

Such funerals are particularly popular with senior members of the Camorra, just as Camorra weddings – at which diamond-studded shirts are often worn by male guests – are notable for conspicuous consumption. Whether horse-drawn or motorized, they are not very popular with those Neapolitan undertakers who are called on to organize them. The last time Bellomunno put in a bill to the family of a deceased Camorrista for a horse-drawn funeral – whose funeral they didn’t say – instead of receiving a cheque through the post, they got a bomb through the counting-house window.

¹ Under the cassa integrazione 70–80 per cent of what a worker would normally earn is paid by agreement between the employer, employee and the state.

² It is said that in one year, 1978, 500,000 bottles of imitation Fernet Branca were seized by the customs at Naples alone.

³ San Gennaro’s blood is first said to have liquefied in the hands of the sainted Bishop Severus on the occasion when the body was first translated from Pozzuoli to Naples at the time of Constantine. The first documented liquefaction took place in the Abbey of Montevergine on 17 August 1389.

The miracle repeats itself three times a year: on the first Saturday in May, when the two phials are taken in procession to the great, bare convent church of Santa Chiara in Spaccanapoli, and on 19 September and 16 December in the Cappella del Tesoro of the Cathedral, on all three occasions before enormous audiences.

An Evening in Venice

During the autumn following our Neapolitan excursion we laid what plans we could for our clockwise journey round the Mediterranean, which, thanks to Wanda telling me to get on with it and plunging me into Naples instead of going off and sitting on top of the Rock of Gibraltar and feeling imperial, had started before it was intended to.

That winter we set off for Chioggia, a fishing port at the southern end of the Venetian Lagoon, about twenty miles south of Venice, a place that is picturesque enough in summer but in winter can look a bit pinched and poverty-stricken and has extremely draughty side-streets. It is also noted for having inhabitants who are extremely difficult for an outsider ever to get to know. Here, worn down by the efforts of trying to hire a boat for a private trip to Venice at a price we could afford from monoglot Chioggiotti who see quite enough of polyglot visitors such as ourselves for eight months of the year without being pestered by them during the other four, we decided to leave their austere but strangely attractive city – in which by far the jolliest place is the fish market – by public transport. In summer we could have gone the whole way by steamer, but because this was the dead season there was no direct service and we would have to travel first by boat across the Porto di Chioggia, the southernmost of the entrances to the Lagoon, to the Litorale di Pellestrina, one of the three elongated, offshore dunes which together form the Venetian Lagoon and at the same time protect it from the fury of the Adriatic, and from there take a No. 11 bus along the Litorale to Porto di Malamocco, the entrance to the Lagoon which now takes all the biggest ships, where it is driven on to a ferry and taken across to the Litorale di Lido to continue its journey to Piazzale Santa Maria Elisabetta, where one can take a No. 11 vaporetto across the Lagoon to Venice. Nothing to it, really.

Although we had failed in our dealings with the Chioggiotti, it would have been easier, if we had been really pushed, to do a deal with them than with the Veneziani, who have a tariff for everything and with whom there is no possibility of bargaining, something a lot of other representatives of Christendom discovered back at the time of the Fourth Crusade on their way to the Holy Land.

At the last moment before the Venetian fleet, which the Crusaders had booked in 1202 to take them to the scene of the action, was due to sail with them on board, from their assembly point on the Litorale di Lido, some of their commanders found themselves unable to meet their commitments to the Veneziani who, although there were fewer Crusaders than had been originally contracted for, still insisted on being paid, according to the tariff, the full passage money for those who had not turned up.

This deadlock was only resolved when the Doge Enrico Dandolo, who in spite of being nearly ninety and almost blind was leading the expedition in person, made a deal with their leaders whereby the Venetians would forgo part of the payment in exchange for help while en route in re-taking Zara, one of their ports on the Adriatic, which had gone over to the Hungarians.

But even this was not enough for the Venetians. Once they had reduced this Christian city with the aid of the Crusaders, a campaign that was punished by the Pope excommunicating all the Venetians and all the Crusaders taking part, the Doge then imposed a further condition: that the Crusaders should help the Venetians to storm yet another stronghold of Christendom, the Greek Byzantine city of Constantinople, in order, ostensibly, to restore the Emperor, who had been deposed, but in fact to revenge the death of thousands of Venetians who had been slaughtered there by the Greeks ten years previously, and to make Venice the most influential power in the eastern Mediterranean. The Doge himself led the combined forces against the city in April 1204, breaching the seaward walls and taking it by storm, virtually destroying it and gathering loot of a magnificence that was to make Venice the envy of the world. It also made her – personified by the Doge, who stayed on and eventually died and was buried there – mistress of three-eighths of what was now to become a Latinized city, as well as of Durazzo, on what are now the Albanian shores of the Adriatic, Lacedaemon, otherwise Sparta, the Greek islands of the Cyclades and Sporades, and Crete. The other five-eighths of the city became the property of Count Baldwin, who was crowned as Latin Emperor of the East in what had now become, as Santa Sofia, a Roman Catholic cathedral, as did half the Byzantine territory which lay outside the walls. The other half was given to various Crusader knights, who held it as vassals. Altogether, for the Venetians, it had been a famous victory.

By the time we sailed from Chioggia, the Lagoon, the Litorali, and the Adriatic out beyond them were shrouded in freezing fog, and when we got down at the boat terminus on the Litorale di Pellestrina, which is just opposite the cemetery, and decided to miss the bus connection and take a later one in order to see the murazzi, the sea walls, it was with some regret that we watched its rear lights disappearing into the fog.

The houses in Pellestrina, clustered about a big white church, were a series of rectangles painted in ox-blood, vivid blues and greens and soft greys that rendered them almost invisible in the fog. Closely shuttered against it, as they were, only the drifts of smoke from the strange, tall Venetian chimneys showed that they were inhabited.

Walking amongst them we came to the murazzi, on the seaward side of the Litorale. They had been conceived by a cosmographer, Father Vincenzo Coronelli, in 1716, and work was finally begun on them in 1744 under the direction of Bernardino Zendrini, a mathematician. It took thirty-eight years to complete them at a cost of forty million Venetian gold ducats, and they were the last major works undertaken by the Magistrati delle Acque, the Magistrates of the Waters, who were responsible for building and maintaining the defences of the Lagoon and the city against the Adriatic, before the shameful extinction of this Republic of the Sea by Napoleon in 1797. They replaced previous defences which consisted of wooden palisades that had to be renewed every six years, long groynes extending seawards and musk-smelling tamarisk planted to give stability to what was mostly sand, defences that each winter had been breached and destroyed with monotonous regularity by the sirocco storms. More than 14 feet thick at the base, two and a half miles long, and nearly 20 feet high, they are built of gleaming white blocks of marble, some of them more than 6 feet long and a yard and a half wide, all brought from Istria on the Yugoslavian side of the Adriatic in barges, the same stone used to build so many of the churches in Venice and the Lagoon. Now, ghostly in the fog, they stretched away into it on either side, the only sound the Adriatic sucking at their outer defences, an enormous breakwater of heaped-up boulders.

Although the murazzi are the most impressive to the eye of all the works carried out by the Magistrati in and around the Lagoon, equally important was what they did to the rivers. It was they who were responsible for the death of the Po di Tramontana. Until the sixteenth century the mouth of the river was directed towards the Valle dei Sette Morti, an area of the Venetian Lagoon north of Chioggia, which the river had turned into an area of laguna morta, dead lagoon, only inundated at high tides. They decided, with the presence of mind and self-interest which had always to their rivals been one of the Republic’s least lovable characteristics, to direct the river southwards. In five years thousands of labourers cut a channel, called the Sacca di Goro, from the Po Grande into a bay of the Adriatic east of Pomposa, where the great Benedictine abbey still stands in which Guido d’Arezzo invented the musical scale. By this boldly conceived piece of hydraulic engineering the Po di Tramontana ceased to exist, Venice was preserved and the results for the Po Valley and the Delta were disastrous. The silting process was accelerated and, although the area of the Delta increased nearly three times in the space of 220 years, the inundations increased and no one, except the Venetians, was better off.

But in spite of their success in turning away from the southern part of the Lagoon and finally destroying the Po di Tramontana, they were still subject to the recurrent nightmare that the same silting-up process might happen further north in the part of the Lagoon in which the city stood and deprive it of the isolation on which it depended for at least part of its power and importance; it might also block the vital channels to the sea.

The Republic had before it the awful examples of other great ports in the Mediterranean, long since silted up and left far from the sea, all of which we were subsequently to visit in the course of our travels: Pergamum, Ephesus, Miletus, Patara, the high and dry port of Xanthus in Lycia, in western Asia Minor. And much nearer home they had the equally awful example of Ravenna, a former lagoon city, dependent for its continued existence on tidal movements, acquired by them but only long after it was high and dry, the only memorial to its former Byzantine greatness five splendid churches in the wilderness. And there was also Ferrara, founded on the right bank of the Po in AD 450 by refugees from Attila and his Huns, left equally high and dry.

In the seventeenth century the Magistrati re-routed a number of other rivers so that instead of flowing into their lagoon, they by-passed it completely and flowed into the sea. When the Venetians had finished this colossal work, the Brenta, which originally came out into the Lagoon behind Venice, entered the Adriatic south of Chioggia; the Sile, a very pretty little river which, nevertheless, was doing enormous damage to the Lagoon by pouring silt into it north of the city, was directed into a canal which carried it into what until then had been the bed of the Piave and into the sea near Jesolo; while the Piave itself was turned into the bed of the next river to the north of it, the Livenza.

Later that afternoon we descended from the No. 11 bus on the Litorale di Lido and groped our way through the fog to a dark, deserted waterfront behind the Casino, which faced the Lagoon. It is difficult to write feelingly about something you can’t see, and the fog that shrouded the Lagoon was impenetrable. In fact we could hear more than we could see of it: the melancholy crying of gulls, the tolling of a bell mounted on a buoy moored out in one of the channels, the noise of boat engines and, occasionally, angry cries as helmsmen, set on collision courses, recorded near misses. Altogether, with the whole of the Mediterranean to choose from, it was a hell of a place to end up in on such a day. We might just as well have been on the Mersey, for all the genius loci I was able to sop up, and this made me think of home, a hot bath and a couple of slugs of Glenmorangie.

‘You’re in trouble, author,’ said Wanda, my companion in life’s race, near the mark as always, sensing that I felt like emigrating back to Britain, ‘if you can’t see what you’re looking at.’

As she said this, as if to show that she wasn’t always right, the fog lifted, not everywhere, not over Venice itself which remained cocooned in it, but here and there, and for a few moments that didn’t even add up to minutes we found ourselves looking down long corridors of vapour illuminated by an eerie yellow light that must have been the last of the setting sun, down which one had distant prospects of mud banks uncovered by the tide, with labyrinths of channels running through them, and one or two of the almost innumerable islands of the Lagoon which supported until quite recently – and some still support – monasteries, nunneries, forts, miniature versions of Venice, a cemetery, and the lonely enclosure to which, once every ten years when it begins to fill up, bones are taken; fishing settlements, lodges used by the wildfowlers who in winter wait in barrels sunk in the Lagoon for the dawn and dusk flights, quarantine stations, lighthouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums, prisons, barracks, magazines that, when they were full of gunpowder, had a tendency to go up in the air, taking their custodians with them, deserted factories, old people’s homes, private houses, market gardens, vineyards, and some that were just open expanses that a farmer might visit once or twice a year to cut the hay. The channels among them were marked by long lines of bricole, wooden piles either driven into the bottom with their heads pressed together, as if they were lovers meeting in a lagoon, or else in clusters of three or four, also with their heads pressed together as if they were conspirators discussing some dark secret. Some of the more important channels had lights on the bricole. Some that were only navigable by the smallest sorts of craft, such as gondolas and boats called sandali, were indicated by lines of saplings.

There was another, equally momentary vista of part of one of the industrial zones that had been created by filling in vast areas of the northern part of the Lagoon and its mud flats, a huge, nightmare, end-of-the-world place without houses or permanent inhabitants, made up of oil refineries, chemical, fertilizer, plastic, steel, light alloy, coke, gas and innumerable other plants all belching dense smoke and residual gases into the sky and effluents into the Lagoon, so various and awful that collectively they made up a brew that even to a layman sounded as if it had been devised by a crew of mad scientists intent on destroying the human race, which in effect is what they are doing. Then the fog closed in again, more impenetrable than ever now that the sun was almost gone.

According to the tide table I had bought that morning in Chioggia it was now just after low water at Porto di Lido, what had been the principal entrance to the Lagoon and to Venice when it was commonplace to see 60,000-ton tankers wandering about in St Mark’s Basin. This was until they dredged the deep-water channel from Porto Malamocco to Marghera, using the material brought up from the bottom as infilling for the Third Industrial Zone. About now the flood would be beginning to run through Porto di Lido, Porto di Malamocco, and also through Porto di Chioggia, the three entrances that the Magistrates of the Waters had left open centuries ago, having sealed off the others after years of trial and error, by doing so preserving a delicate balance which allowed Venice to function both as a city and a great seaport. Now, for six hours, the tide would flow into the Lagoon, which is not what it appears to be – a single simple expanse of water – but is made up of three distinct basins, each separated one from the other by watersheds known as the spartiacque, spreading through its main arteries and myriad veins, channels so small that no chart shows them, and scouring and filling the canals of the city itself. Then, at the end of the sixth hour, when it was at the full, the tide would begin to run out, loaded with the effluent of the industrial zones, which sometimes includes dangerous quantities of ammonia and its by-products of oxidation, phenol, cyanide, sulphur, chlorine, naphtha, as well as oil from passing ships and boats, all the liquid sewage of Venice, the peculiarly filthy filth of a city entirely without drains, a large part of the solid ordure produced by its inhabitants, and at least a part of that produced by Mestre and Marghera, together with vast quantities of insoluble domestic detergent. One of the more awful sights in the Lagoon used to be a mud bank at Marghera with mountains of ordure rising from it, preserved, presumably for all eternity, or until they burst, in plastic bags. There they waited for an exceptionally high water, an acqua alta, to distribute them over other distant parts of the Lagoon, with thousands of gulls, apparently unable to penetrate them with their beaks, hanging frustratedly over them. All because a large incineration plant, built in the Second Industrial Zone, failed to work.

Twenty years ago the only fish of any size that was indigenous to the Lagoon and which reproduced itself in it was something called the Gò (Gobius ophocephalus), which nested in the mud on the edge of the deep canals. All the others were caught in the open sea and penned in the valli at the northern and south-western ends of the Lagoon. Mussels were also cultivated. Whether it is safe to eat any of these fish today must be questionable. There is no need any more for the Commune to display the warning against swimming on the door of the crumbling open-air swimming place on the Zattere, the long waterfront in Venice facing the Giudecca Canal. It is only too obvious.

The Adriatic performs this operation of filling and emptying the Lagoon four times every twenty-four hours over an area that used to be roughly thirty-five miles long and up to eight miles wide, but is now much less because of infilling and the construction of new valli. That is except during periods of what Venetians call la Colma or l’acqua alta, high water.

Even though the moon was nearly full there would be no acqua alta on this particular night. Acqua alta is not dependent on the tide itself being exceptionally high, or even high. It occurs when the barometric pressure falls sufficiently low to allow the level of the Adriatic to rise on what is a very low coastline, and when the strong, warm, south-westerly sirocco blows up it. If the barometric pressure is low enough and the sirocco is strong enough at the time when the ebb is beginning in the Lagoon, the water is penned inside it, unable to get out, and when the next tide begins to press in through the three entrances, the Porti, and is added to the high water already there, the natural divisions between the three basins of the Lagoon, the spartiacque, cease to exist and Venice and many other islands, inhabited and uninhabited, are flooded. Other factors can make the acqua alta even higher – heavy rain, a full moon, something called the seiche, the turning of the Adriatic on an imaginary pivot – but the sirocco and a low barometer are the two indispensable conditions.

This is not a new phenomenon. The records of the acqua alta from the thirteenth century onwards are full of entries such as ‘the water rose to the height of a man in the streets’ (on 23 September 1240); ‘the water rose from eight o’clock until midday. Many were drowned inside their houses or died of cold’ (in December 1280); ‘roaring horribly the sea rose up towards the sky, causing a terrible fear … and with such force that it broke the Lido in several places’ (in December 1600).

In 1825, the murazzi, neglected since the fall of the Republic in 1797, were breached during an enormous storm, but were made good again. On a day in 1967, the first year in which accurate measurements were kept, the water rose five feet above the average sea level. In the forty-seven years between 1867 and 1914, only seven exceptionally high waters, those more than three and a half feet above the normal level, submerged the city; but in the fifty years between 1917 and 1967 Venice sank beneath the waves more than forty times, an extraordinary increase, so that looking at a vertical graph of these high waters during the period from 1867 to 1967 the lines representing them appear as eight more or less isolated trees between 1867 and 1920, some thick clumps in the thirties, late forties and early fifties, and a dense, soaring forest in the late fifties and sixties. The longest line of all is the one showing the acqua alta of 4 November 1966.

During the night of 3–4 November, the sirocco blew Force 8, the barometer fell to around 750 mm, there was continual heavy rain and waves twelve feet high roared in over the Litorali, submerging Cavallino, the northernmost one, smashing the elegant bathing establishments on the Lido and hurling aside the outerworks of the murazzi on Pellestrina, the great boulders piled fifteen feet high, then breaching, in ten different places, the walls themselves, composed of huge blocks of marble six feet long, but on which no proper repair work had been done for more than thirty years. This time the water at Venice rose six and a half feet above the average sea level, and the result was spectacular.

It poured under the 450 or so bridges (scarcely any Venetians, let alone outsiders, agree about the number of bridges in the city, or any other of the following figures), overflowing the 177 – some say 150 – canals, the rii, 46 of which are branches off the Canalazzo, the Grand Canal, inundating the 117, or 122, or whatever number of shoals or islands on which the city is said to be built, the 15,000 houses in which large numbers of people were living on the ground floors in the six sestieri, or wards, into which it is divided, and the majority of the 107 churches, of which 80 were still in use. It also inundated 3000 miles of streets and alleys, the various open spaces, the campi, so called because they were once expanses of grass, the campielli and the piazzette, not to speak of the only Piazza, St Mark’s, with an unimaginably vile compound of all the various effluents mentioned previously in connection with the Lagoon. To which was added diesel oil and gas oil which had escaped from the storage tanks, leaving the city without electric light, means of cooking or heating, or any communication with the outside world, not to speak of the awful, immense, much of it irreparable, damage done to innumerable works of art.

The acqua alta persisted for more than twenty hours. The most dangerous moment came at six in the evening, when the water reached the highest level ever recorded. This was the moment that the Venetians call the acqua morta, when it should begin to go down but doesn’t. By this time the glass was down to 744 mm and if at this moment a fresh impulse had been given to the waters by the sirocco, forcing it to yet higher levels, Venice might well have collapsed. As it was, a miracle occurred. The wind changed. It began to blow from the south-west, a wind the people of Venice and the Lagoon call the vento Garbin, and by nine o’clock that night the waters began to fall and the city was saved, at least for the time being.

Long before we stepped ashore from the steamer on to Riva degli Schiavoni, the great expanse of marble quay off which Slavs from the Dalmatian coast used to moor their vessels in St Mark’s Basin, darkness had added itself to the fog, creating the sort of conditions that even Jack the Ripper would have found a bit thick for his work down in nineteenth-century Whitechapel.

The fog dissipated what had seemed a romantic possibility when we left Chioggia but now seemed a crazy dream, that we might sweep into Venice from the Lido on the No. 11 steamer up the Canale di San Marco and see the domes and campanili of San Giorgio Maggiore and Santa Maria della Salute not as we had seen them once, coming in from the sea in the heat of the day, liquefying in the mirage, then reconstituting themselves again, something that would be impossible at this season, but sharply silhouetted, appearing larger than life, against the afterglow of what could equally well be a winter or summer sunset, with what would be equally black gondolas bobbing on the wine-coloured waters in the foreground. This was a spectacle we had enjoyed often, usually in summer, coming back after a long afternoon by the lifeless waters of the Lido with sand between our toes and stupefied with sun, our only preoccupation whether we would be able to extract enough hot water from the erratic hot water system in our equally decrepit hotel to allow us to share a shallow bath; and whether we could find another place to eat, in addition to the few we already knew, which was not infested with, although we hated to admit it, people like ourselves, fellow visitors to Venice who on any day in the high season, July and August, probably outnumber the inhabitants.

Never at the best of times a very substantial-looking city – even the largest buildings having something impermanent about them, due perhaps to the fact that they have not only risen from the water but, however imperceptibly to the human eye, are now in the process of sinking back into it – on this particular evening the fog had succeeded in doing what the mirage could only accomplish for a matter of moments – caused it, apart from its lights, to disappear from view almost completely.

Disembarking from the steamer, we turned left on Riva degli Schiavoni, passing the entrances to the narrow calli which lead off from it, Calle delle Rasse, where the Serbian material used for furnishing the interiors of the felzi, the now largely extinct cabins of the closed gondolas, used to be sold, and Calle Albanesi, the Street of the Albanians, down which some of our fellow passengers had already vanished. While walking along the Riva we just missed falling into what is, because it is spanned by the Bridge of Sighs, the best known and most photographed canal in Venice after the Grand Canal, the Rio Palazzo. This would have been a bore because besides contracting pneumonia (our luggage was already at the railway station), if we had inadvertently drunk any of it we would have had to rush off to the Ospedale Civile, San Giovanni e Paolo, in order to have pumped out of us a mixture the smallest ingredient of which was water. Then we crossed the Rio by the Ponte di Paglia, passing on our right hand the Palazzo delle Prigioni, from which the magistrates known as the Signori di Notte al Criminale used to look out at night for evil-doers, malviventi, arrest and try them, and if they were sufficiently low and common and criminal, sentence them to the Pozzi, otherwise the Wells, the cells at the lowest level of the Prigioni, which were reserved for the worst sort of common criminals.

Then on along the Molo, the furthest point pirates ever reached when attacking Venice, back in the ninth century when it was young, past the forest of piles where the gondolas were moored, now, in this weather, all covered with tarpaulins, as they would be in the Bacino Orseolo, the basin behind the Piazza San Marco where there is another big fleet of them moored. For no one on a day like this would have used a gondola, unless they were sposi, newly married, or were dead and being conveyed in a funeral gondola to Isola San Michele from one of the undertakers’ establishments on the Fondamenta Nuove. In fact, today, scarcely anyone goes to the cemetery in one of the old funeral gondolas, which were picturesquely decorated with a pair of St Mark’s lions in polished brass; now the undertakers’ boats are almost all big, powered vessels.

Then we turned right into Piazzetta San Marco, with the Palazzo Ducale on one hand and the Mint and the Library designed by Jacopo Sansovino on the other, passing between the feet of the two immense grey and red granite columns that someone had brought here from Syria or Constantinople. Somewhere overhead, invisible in the fog, the grey column supported the bronze lion, really a chimera, a fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent, whether Etruscan, Persian or Chinese no one really knows, to which some inspired innovator has added wings. The other bears a marble figure poised on a crocodile, said to be that of Theodore, the Greek saint who was the patron of the Veneto until the body of St Mark arrived in such a dramatic fashion in the city (having been hastily cleared through customs in Alexandria by Muslim officials who had been told he was a consignment of pork). In fact the statue is not one of St Theodore at all, but is made up of several pieces from the ancient world, the topmost part being a magnificent head of Mithridates, King of Pontus. The statue is a copy. The original is in the Palazzo Ducale.

We entered the Piazza, described by Napoleon, in a rare lighthearted mood, and with reason, as the ‘finest open-air drawing room in the world’, an immense open space, originally paved with bricks, now covered with black trachyte, a fine-grained volcanic rock of rough texture, from the Euganean Hills near Padua, ornamented with narrow inserts of white Istrian marble. The design, made by Andrea Tirali in 1723, forms a pattern of interconnecting squares and rectangles, punctuated by white dots on the black background, so that from the belfry of the Campanile high overhead, the Piazza looks as if two parallel rows of black and white carpets have been laid end to end in it on top of a large, black, fitted carpet, for the reception of some distinguished personage.

Although a superficial glance gives one the impression that it is rectangular, the Piazza is a trapezoid, a quadrilateral having neither pair of sides parallel, and is more than thirty yards wider at its eastern than at its western end.

Three sides of it are occupied by what appears to be one enormous, soot-blackened palace of what are, to all but the most pernickety, irreproachable dimensions. The fourth side is occupied by what is arguably the most fantastic basilica in Christendom, San Marco, a building surmounted by Islamic domes, embellished with cupolas and gilded crosses on top of them, that look more like extra-terrestrial vehicles sent to bear the building away to another world than the work of an architect.

To the right of the Basilica, facing the square, is the smallest of the two squares that lead into the Piazza, the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, furnished with a fountain and red marble lions. At the far end of this little piazza is what was once the splendid banqueting hall which used to be linked with the Ducal Palace by a corridor; and at the point where it ceases to be the Piazzetta and becomes the Piazza, an archway leads out of it into the street of shops called the Merceria dell’Orologio under the Torre dell’Orologio, a very pretty building with two bronze giants on top of it, who together strike the hours for the clock below on a great bell. Hidden within the tower are the Magi who, in Ascension week, emerge from a little side door, preceded by an angel, and pass before the Virgin in her niche above the gilt and blue enamelled clock face to vanish through a similar door on the far side, a procession they make every hour.

To the left of St Mark’s Basilica the new Campanile, surmounted by a pyramidical steeple panelled in green copper and a gilded figure of the Archangel Gabriel, soars 322 feet into the air, far above anything else in the city, even the campanile of Santa Maria Maggiore. On 14 July 1902, the 113th anniversary of the sacking of the Bastille, at ten in the morning and with scarcely any warning, the original Campanile telescoped into itself and fell into the Piazza, having previously successfully withstood being struck by lightning, shaken by earthquakes, and being insidiously undermined by the acque alte. In doing so it damaged the corner of the Libreria Sansoviniana, initiated by Jacopo Sansovino, completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi and described by Palladio, in the sixteenth century, as ‘the richest and most decorated building ever perhaps created from ancient times until now’. It also completely destroyed Sansovino’s Loggetta, which was used as a guardroom when it was built; missed his magnificent bronze statues of Minerva, Apollo, Mercury and Peace, but smashed his terracotta group of The Virgin and Child (later repaired) and the Child John the Baptist. It also wrenched from its position at the south-east corner of the Basilica the Pietra del Bando, the stump of porphyry column brought by the Venetians from Acre in 1256 and set up here at the place from which the laws of Venice were promulgated, but sparing the fabric from damage. In falling, four of its five bells were broken, but the biggest, the Marangona, so called because one of its functions was to tell the craftsmen of the Marangoni, the guilds of the city, when to begin and stop work, was undamaged and was found protruding from the mountain of rubble which filled the eastern end of the Piazza. Also shattered was the beaten copper figure of the Archangel Gabriel which came plummeting down from above.

And behind the Campanile in the Piazzetta di San Marco, but visible from the Piazza, part of the west front of the Palazzo Ducale can be seen, luminously beautiful, its body clad with pink and white marble in the form of Gothic arcades one above the other, a wonder of lightness and beauty. Altogether the finest enclosed spaces to be found anywhere in all the Mediterranean lands, finer than St Peter’s Square in Rome. Perhaps, as Napoleon said, the finest in all the world.

All that was visible of this wonder of the world on this particular night in January were the enfilades of lights which hang in elegant glass globes under the arches of the long arcades of the procuratie, once the offices and residences of the Procurators of Venice, who were the most important dignitaries after the Doge, vanishing away into the fog towards the far western end of the Piazza where the wing known as the Ala Napoleonica, built to replace a church torn down by his orders, was completely invisible. Beneath the arcades there were some amorphous, will-o’-the-wispish smudges of light, which emanated from the windows of expensive shops and cafés. There were also some blurs of light from the elegant lamp standards in the Piazzetta di San Marco, where the fog was even thicker. All that could be seen of the Basilica were the outlines of a couple of bronze doors, one of them sixth-century Byzantine work: nothing at all of the great quadriga of bronze horses overhead in front of the magnificent west window, copies of those looted from the Hippodrome at Constantinople by Doge Dandolo after he had taken the city, plunging ever onwards, stripped of their bridles by the Venetians as a symbol of liberty, on their endless journey from their first known setting-off place, the Island of Chios, through what were now the ruins of the world in which they had been created.

Now the giants on top of the Torre dell’Orologio began banging away with their hammers on the big bell, as they had done ever since they were cast by a man named Ambrosio dalle Anchore in 1494, some 489 years ago, the year Columbus discovered Jamaica, a slice of the action the Venetians would like to have been in on, the year Savonarola restored popular government in Florence, something they themselves were already badly in need of. They made things to last in those days. No question of replacing the unit if something went wrong.

It was five o’clock. Soon, if it was not raining, or snowing, or there was no acqua alta to turn it into a paddling pool, and there was none of this damn fog, the better-off inhabitants, those who wanted to be thought better-off and those who really were badly-off but looked almost as well-dressed as the rest, which is what you aim at if you are a Venetian, having changed out of their working clothes would begin that ritual of the Christian Mediterranean lands, something that you will not see in a devout, Muslim one, the passeggiata, the evening promenade, in Piazza San Marco and in the Piazzetta, in pairs and groups, young and old, the old usually in pairs, the young ones often giving up promenading after a bit and congregating on the shallow steps that lead up from the Piazza into the arcades, the ones that in summer have long drapes hanging in them to keep off the sun, which gives them a dim, pleasantly mysterious air. So the Venetians add themselves to the visitors who swarm in the Piazza at every season of the year, costing one another’s clothes, casting beady, impassive eyes on the often unsuitable clothes of the visitors, as their predecessors must have done on various stray Lombards and other barbarians down on a visit, and on the uncouth Slavs and Albanians who came ashore at the Riva degli Schiavoni. Those on whom they had not looked so impassively had been the Austrians who filled the Piazza in the years between 1815 and 1866, the period when, apart from a few months of brave but abortive revolution in the winter of 1848–49, the Venetian States were under the domination of Austria, to whom they had originally been sold by Napoleon in 1797. (He got them back again in 1805, only to lose them when Austria received them yet again at the Congress of Vienna, a couple of months before Waterloo.) In those years the Austrian flag flew in the Piazza in place of what had been that of the Republic of St Mark, an Austrian band played, which it is said no true Venetians opened their ears to, let alone applauded, and one of the two fashionable cafés that still face one another across its width, the one which was frequented by Austrians, was left to them.

Meanwhile other, less elegant but equally ritualistic passeggiate would be taking place in the principal calli, campi and salizzadi, in other parts of the city, and there the younger ones would probably flock to some monument and drape themselves around the base of it. There would also be crowds in the Merceria dell’Orologio, merceria being a haberdashery, which is still, as it always was, filled with rich stuffs which the Veneziani love, a narrow street which leads from the clock tower into Merceria di San Giuliano and from that into Merceria di San Salvatore, once the shortest route from San Marco to the other most important centre of the city, the Rialto. This was the way the Procurators and other important officials used to follow on their way in procession to enter the Basilica, and the one followed by persons on their way from the Rialto to be publicly flogged.

Then, quite suddenly, after an hour or so, except at weekends or on days of festa, old and young suddenly disappear indoors, many of them having to get up what is in winter horribly early in order to get to work on the terra firma, leaving the Piazza and other places of passeggio to visitors and to those making a living by catering to their needs.

Tonight the passeggiata was definitely off. The pigeons had long since given up and gone to bed – that is if they had ever bothered to get up in the first place, and the only other people on view were a few dark figures with mufflers wrapped round their mouths, hurrying presumably homewards, some of them coughing as they went. The only people, besides ourselves, who were not on the move were a lunatic who was sitting at the feet of the Campanile gabbling away happily to himself, and a pretty young girl, dressed in a smart, bright red skiing outfit, to which even the Venetians could not have taken exception, and those après-ski boots with the hair on the outside, that make the occupants look as if they have forgotten to shave their legs. She was leaning against a pile of the duckboards the municipality puts down in various parts of the city when an acqua alta is expected, listening in on her earphones and reading Fodor’s Guide with the aid of a pocket torch.

‘Hi!’ she said, removing her earphones and switching off, at the same time displaying a mouthful of pearly white teeth that had not been near a capper’s. ‘Would you mind repeating that? I didn’t get it.’

‘We said, “Good evening, it’s a rotten night”.’

‘Yes, it certainly is a lousy night. This is my first time in Venice. What an introductory offer! My sister and I came down this afternoon from Cortina. The son of the guy who runs our hotel there gave us a lift but once we got out of the mountains we couldn’t see a thing, not even Treviso. It was like being out in the boondocks. It’s brilliant in Cortina. My sister’s back where we’re staying, not feeling so good. I guess we should have checked out on the weather. We’ve got to go back tomorrow. Maybe it’ll be better tomorrow. I haven’t even seen a gondola yet.’

‘There are some over there,’ I said, ‘moored by the Molo. But you have to watch your step. We nearly fell in.’

‘I’ll check on the gondolas on the way back to the hotel,’ she said. ‘I was just boning up on the Piazza San Marco, about it being beautiful at all times of day and night and all seasons of the year, one of the only great squares which retains a feeling of animation when there are very few people in it. Personally, I don’t think this Fodor person was ever here in a fog. He says bring plenty of color films. What a laugh! Personally, I think it’s kinda spooky, what with that poor old guy over there hollering away to himself and that bell going on all the time. Why, it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw some old Doge.’

It wouldn’t have surprised me either, standing where we were in the heart of Doge-land in freezing fog listening to a bell on a buoy making a melancholy noise somewhere out in St Mark’s Basin.

What is strange, if not spooky, about Venice is the feeling of impermanence brought on by the thought that not only are the waters constantly rising in it because of the general increase in the levels of the oceans brought about by the melting of the polar ice, but that the city is at the same time sinking because the re-routing of rivers has deprived it of alluvium and because of the enormous amount of water and methane gas that until recently was being drawn out of the subsoil in the Industrial Zones. So that one day, quite suddenly, without warning, just as the Campanile collapsed, so too will the wooden piles that support the buildings of the city, of which there are said to be more than a million beneath Santa Maria della Salute alone, suddenly give up supporting them and allow the city to disappear for ever.

Much of the city is crumbling as well as sinking. Everywhere leprous walls and rotting brickwork proclaim the fact. Much of it is also abandoned, empty. Great palazzi on the Grand Canal – many of them built as warehouses in which the merchants lived, as it were over the shop, some of them big enough, now that there is no merchandise, to house a hundred persons – have watergates through which the merchandise used to pass which look as if they have not been opened for a hundred years. The steps leading up to them are covered with long green weed which sways in the wash of motor boats and water buses. Inside, the vast room on the piano nobile is lit, if at all, by a 40-watt bulb. Sometimes another, equally feeble light in a room high up under the eaves proclaims that there is a resident caretaker. This feeling of emptiness extends far beyond the confines of the Grand Canal. You can feel it up in the Quartiere Grimani, in the territory around the Arsenale, in the Ghetto with its enclave of the Venetian equivalent to skyscrapers hemmed in on all sides by water, and in the alleys of San Tomà where the cats of Venice reign supreme and there is scarcely a dog to be seen.

But then, just when you begin to experience a sense of horror at being alone in this dead city, you are treated to a series of glimpses – through windows that are invariably barred – of a family sitting around a table to eat risotto alle vongole, risotto with clams, which is being brought to it in a cloud of steam, of children doing their homework, of someone working late in an archive, of a man and a girl kissing, of an old couple watching television, like a series of realistic pictures hung in the open air on walls of crumbling brick and flaking stone.

Deciding that we needed a drink, we walked to Florian, which is under the arcade of the Procuratie Nuove on the south side of the square.

Florian is the oldest café in Venice, opened by someone called Floriano Francesconi in 1720, and it has a faded and beautiful elegance all of its own which if once destroyed one feels could never be repeated, but perhaps it has been restored: Venetian craftsmen are wonderfully adept at making copies of the antique and then ‘distressing’ them, which is the expression used in the trade for making things look older than they are.

Tonight, the rooms in Florian overlooking the Piazza, with the innumerable mirrors, the painted panelling and the alcoves barely large enough to contain one of the little cast iron tables, were empty. The Venetian dowagers, ample or emaciated and certainly rheumaticky, rheumatism being an endemic Venetian disease among the aged, who would normally be here at this hour sipping tea or hot chocolate and talking about death and money, sometimes with equally ancient male contemporaries, were all at home, being cosseted by equally ancient maids, fearing if they went out prendere un raffredore, to catch a cold, or worse. The majority of visitors who come to Venice in the hot weather rarely enter these rooms, preferring to sit outside in the Piazza, where there is more action.

Tonight, what action there was was in the bar, which is about as comfortable as most bars have become in Italy, which means that there is hardly anything to sit on. In it three men and three girls were standing at the bar drinking Louis Roederer, which is a terrible price in a shop in Italy and an unimaginable price in such a place as Florian, where anything, even a beer, costs at least twice as much as it would in a more modest establishment.

The men were dressed in tweed and grey flannel. Two of them had camel-hair coats draped over their shoulders and the third wore a double-breasted herring-bone coat. All three of them wore Rolex watches and beautifully polished black or brown moccasins with tassels, one of the badges of the well-off, or those who want to be thought well-off, everywhere. All were over forty, possibly nearer fifty, with dark hair so uniformly and stylishly grizzled that I was tempted to ask them if they had barbers who grizzled it for them. They had typical Venetian faces: prominent, rather Semitic noses, the calculating eyes of shopkeepers, which in fact was probably what they were, shopkeepers who looked as if they might be involved in slightly questionable activities but nothing that would normally lead to actual prosecution, and if it did, and was successful, would only involve a fine which they could afford. Hard faces, softened for the drinks with the girls; the faces of men not easily amused, or much given to laughter, unless in the form of some carefully controlled internal convulsion; the faces of men who were by nature slightly condescending, omniscient – to put it bluntly – know-alls, courteous, suspicious, contemptuous of outsiders, enjoying being in the position of being able to observe others, but not enjoying being scrutinized themselves.

The girls were in their middle twenties. All three wore wedding rings, in addition to other loot, on their fingers. What were they, we both wondered. These men’s mistresses, other men’s wives? They might, just conceivably, be their daughters, or their nieces. No one was giving anything away, not even the barman whom they all called by his first name. Uniformly well-formed, longhaired, long-legged, the sort of girls who can wear flat heels and still look as if they are wearing high heels, not particularly beautiful but so well-groomed that most men would not notice the fact, the product of female emancipation in post-war Italy where, until well into the sixties, girls stayed at home with their mothers in the evening, were chaperoned if they went out, and it was exceptional to find one who could drive a car. These girls looked not only as if they drove cars, but drove fast ones.

They did not look like typical Venetians, although, like the men, they interpolated whole paragraphs in Venetian dialect into their conversation, that strange amalgam which has strains of French, Arabic and Greek overlaying the Italian, blurring and contracting it. Perhaps girls do not become typical Venetians until they become older. Their mothers would look as Venetian as the men they were drinking with; their grandmothers would be the dies from which typical Venetians are pressed. These girls just looked like girls. Whether they were well-off or not, they were giving a convincing display of being so. It was difficult to imagine a band of such overtly conspicuous consumers, dressed like this and loaded with expensive ephemera, sallying out into the fog from some drinking place in SW1 and walking home without being mugged, for this is what they were going to have to do when they did leave, in a city without motor cars, that is unless they slept over the premises or had bodyguards waiting for them.

One of the girls, who was wearing a Loden cape, announced that she had just inherited an eighteenth-century villa, in the country somewhere west of Treviso, destroying, in her case, the theory that she might be either daughter or mistress – perhaps they were assistants to the shopkeepers. Apparently it was in a very bad condition, having been used as a farmhouse for more than fifty years.

‘What should I do with it?’ she asked. ‘It could be very beautiful.’

‘I would insure it for a lot of money,’ one of the men said. ‘Say four hundred and fifty milioni [about £190,000 or $266,000]. And then I would pay someone to burn it down.’ It was difficult to know if he was joking.

The villa she was talking about was one of the country houses to which rich Venetians, Trevisans, Paduans and Vicenzans used to escape from the heat and stench of their cities in summer and in the autumn. They began building them in earnest in the sixteenth century, although some date from as early as the fourteenth century, and they built them in the plain between the foothills of the Alps and the lagoons. They continued to build them far into the eighteenth century, by which time they had become almost symbolic of the frivolity and lack of energy for commerce which characterized the last years of the Republic. They lined the banks of the Brenta Canal between Mestre and Padua with them, making of it a watery triumphal way. The best known is the mysterious and withdrawn Villa Malcontenta, one of the masterpieces of Palladio – together with the Villa Capra at Vicenza, the most famous Palladian villas – which stands on its right bank near Mestre under what is now almost invariably a sulphurous sky, with the plants and factories of the Industrial Zone creeping closer to it every year. They built them on the banks of the Sile, which emerges as a pond full of vegetation in the plain west of Treviso and bubbles and seethes its way through this charming little city, apparently unpolluted. And they built them along the Terraglio, now a nightmare road, Strada Statale 13, between Mestre and Treviso, where villas with the sonorous names of past and present owners – Villa Gatterburg ora Volpi, Villa Duodo Malice ora Zoppolate (shades of Villa Newby), some in vast parks full of planes and cedars, with statues on the cornices looming against the sky – are today hemmed in by filling stations and windowless factories painted in bilious colours. And they built them in the depths of the country, miles from anywhere.

The Venetians went to their villas by gondola, or in the large rowing barges called burchielli, which had a sort of miniature villa on top of them in which the passengers could shield themselves from the elements and from the vulgar gaze. When there was no waterway leading to their villas, they travelled by ox-cart, which must have been pretty uncomfortable.

Their movements were as regular as those of migrant birds. The exodus from the city began on the eve of St Anthony’s Day in June and they stayed in the country until the end of July, after which they went back to the city. On October the first they went to the country again and in November, at the end of St Martin’s Summer, the time when the last grapes are picked which were not ripe at the vendemmia in October, they returned to Venice for a round of theatres and masked routs. As Venice declined, so the diversions increased in extravagance.

At night in their villas they gambled until dawn, unless there was some other diversion. They rose late, to watch other people cultivating their gardens and their vines, to visit their labyrinths, contemplate great nature, ponder further improvements and, as time went on, contemplate and ponder their diminished bank balances. For the Venetians were seldom content with one villa. It was not uncommon for a single family to own a dozen. At one time the Pisani owned fifty. More than two thousand villas are still in existence in the Veneto.

Of the great Venetian villas the grandest is the Pisani family’s villa at Stra¹ on the Brenta Canal east of Padua, which has huge stables, a labyrinth, a fantastic gateway-cum-belvedere flanked by columns encircled by spiral staircases and crowned with statuary; and on the ceiling of the ballroom frescoes of angels blowing trumpets, putti, eighteenth-century gentry, one of them well placed between the thighs of a naked lady who has temporarily landed on a cloud, and what look like Red Indians, all by Giambattista Tiepolo, forever whirling across a pale blue sky. Another huge villa is the Villa Manin, at Passariano, south-west of Udine, which is so large that its outlines actually show up on the 1:200,000 Touring Club Italiano map. This was the villa built for the last Doge, Lodovico Manin, and with its immense all-embracing arcaded wings it resembles a small town rather than a habitation. The smallest of the villas is the exquisite Casa Quaglia – the Quail House – built in the fourteenth century at Paese, west of Treviso, now a shamefully neglected farmhouse, which has Venetian Gothic windows and a facade painted in the form of a tapestry with fabulous animals.

Some, however, like the one inherited by the girl in the bar at Florian’s, are in decay. In a typical one of this sort, if it is big, several families of contadini may live in the barchesse, the curving wings, which spring from a central block in which most of the windows have been bricked up on the lower floor. Inside, the immense salon on the piano nobile, in which the ceiling may be entirely covered with seventeenth-century frescoes of gods and goddesses floating in the air, may also be half full of corn on the cob. There are great cracks in the ceiling, the door openings are covered with tattered sacking, and one day, soon, it will collapse.

‘How would you like to spend the evening?’ I asked, opening my favourite guide book. According to this, the Guide Julliard de l’Europe, there are four intelligent ways to spend an evening in Venice: the first and dearest is to hire a gondola (a closed one if one has improper thoughts and the means to gratify them); the second is to install oneself at a table in the Piazza San Marco; the third to look for adventures in the streets and alleys; the fourth to go to bed with a good book and a bottle of Scotch. ‘When one has tried all these,’ the authors say, ‘there are the night clubs.’

‘I know which one you’d choose,’ Wanda said, ‘but you can’t hire those closed gondolas any more.’

‘I wouldn’t choose any of them on a night like this.’

‘What time’s the train?’

‘Eight forty-five. It’s half past five now. I think we should go. I’m awfully hungry. We can have dinner at that place near the Colleoni monument. What do you call it?’

‘You mean the Trattoria alle Bandierette.’

‘Yes, that’ll take at least twenty minutes in this weather. We’d better telephone them and see if they can feed us around six-thirty. Then, by the time we’ve walked to the station, or if it’s going we might get the circolare2 from the Fondamente Nuove, and get the bags out of the deposito, we shall just make it. Lucky we booked to go by train. We’d look pretty silly with plane tickets for London on a night like this.’

‘I’m glad we’re going home,’ Wanda said, who gets fed up when it’s cold, as she had done once in Siberia. ‘Just for now I’ve had enough of travelling and enough of the Mediterranean. I want to sleep in my own bed for a bit.’

¹ Now owned by the state, which has such great difficulty in finding custodians that it is frequently closed in winter.

² There are two services of water buses that circle Venice in opposite directions, Service No. 5 Circolare sinistra and destra.

PART TWO THE ADRIATIC

On the Way to the Balkans

One of the problems about travelling round the Mediterranean under your own steam and not as part of a group is the cost of transportation. Luckily, by one of those miracles to which we fortunately are no strangers, we were offered a trip back to Venice, which we had so capriciously abandoned because it was foggy, on the inaugural run of the Venice – Simplon – Orient Express.

The scenes at Victoria before this inaugural train was hauled away by a humdrum British diesel (it had not been possible to use steam engines on any sections of the route because of lack of steam train facilities) were memorable for anyone interested in such trivia, which included us. For the first time for many a day the rich, or those making a stab at being thought to be so, like ourselves, could be seen travelling together and the station was awash with what Veblen described in his Theory of the Leisure Class as ‘conspicuous consumption’.

It had been suggested that we come dressed in the manner of the thirties and as a result pre-1939 taxis and motor cars of the same period hired from specialist hire firms were rolling up, one of them a mauve Panther which to my untutored eye looked like an overblown Bugatti. These disgorged a merry throng: gentlemen in wing collars and Panama hats, ladies in white felt and pill-box hats, and yards of beads. Liza Minnelli arrived bowler-hatless in non-period black, which suited her. Denise, Lady Kilmarnock, a partner in the firm which was promoting all this, was splendid in a shocking pink turban and was the life and soul of the party. I had a new shirt for the occasion. My wife had a new white beret. Nigel Dempster, gossip columnist of the Daily Mail, also had a new shirt. Calmest of all was Jennifer, society columnist of Harpers and Queen. The best organized of all the recorders of this and succeeding scenes, she had done her homework on her fellow travellers. She had no need to go scurrying around finding out who was who. Meanwhile the Coldstream Guards’ band played away like anything.

At 11.44 on the dot, having settled into a coach called Zena, used on the Bournemouth Belle from 1929 to 1946, we pulled out to the accompaniment of an enormous fanfare of trumpets. The interior was exquisite, the result of taking the whole thing to pieces and rebuilding it (in Lancashire) and the work of such people as cabinet-makers skilled in marquetry, and upholsterers.

Soon we were tucking into a delicious collation: watercress soup; salmon with tarragon cream, carrot and fennel; iceberg and mint leaf salad; tomatoes stuffed with mushrooms; and ‘Henley Pudding’, sort of mousse; with the glasses and cutlery, designed in France, which you can buy if you have enough of the necessary, setting up a magic tinkling.

Meanwhile, we were wondering who among this glittering throng was the Duchess of Westminster, Princess Esra Jah of Hyderabad, Rod Stewart, Sir Peter and Lady Parker (head of British Rail and designated ‘Folkestone only’), the grandson of George Mortimer, inventor of the Pullman Car, and Mrs Wheeler and son, the second people to book for this trip, back in 1978, all of whom were reputed to be on the train. As a result, although I had a pre-1914 Baedeker which would have given us a blow by blow account of the route to Folkestone, there was not much chance to use it or glimpse anything more than an occasional oast-house from the window.

At 14.00 we left Folkestone (and the Parkers, who had been given a good old grilling by the press as to why Sir Peter’s British Rail trains weren’t like this one) on a Sealink ferry, preserved from the common herd in the Verandah Deck Saloon which was reserved for VSOE passengers, but not protected from the media, who had been totally pre-empted by teams of Japanese television cameramen who had recorded the journey, travelling with the train all the way to Venice on a trial run and also following it with a fleet of helicopters.

Ninety minutes later, at Boulogne, we had our first sight of the European section of the train, seventeen coaches in the dark blue and gold livery of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits et des Grands Express Européens decorated with bronze cyphers, drawn up on the quay side. There were greetings from the Mayor, or was it the President of the Chamber of Commerce?

Eleven sleepers, each with sixteen or eighteen compartments, restaurant cars, a bar car with a grand piano in it, staff and baggage cars, had all been restored at Bremen and Slyke near Ostend with what must have been a goodly slice of the £11,000,000 it had cost to get the two trains on the rails. These sleepers were Lx, L denoting luxury, the cars associated in people’s minds with the old Simplon – Orient. They had been everywhere, on the Rome Express, the Berlin – Naples, the Aegean Express and Taurus, the Nord Express to Riga before the war. We were in Wagon-Lit 3525, built at La Rochelle in 1929, decorated by René Prou, master of wagon-lit design, stored at Lourdes during the Second World War, last used on the Simplon – Orient and Rome Expresses between 1949 and 1961. Our luggage, which we hadn’t seen since Victoria, was already in the compartment. At 17.44, to the accompaniment of a band of serenading musicians, the train pulled out for Paris.

Changing for dinner in Lx 3525 – the decree was that ladies would dress and dinner jackets would be worn – was a feat of acrobatics, like the Marx Brothers in the cabin scene on the Atlantic liner (some of these compartments got smaller during conversion) and I got the bottom fly button of my trousers done up through the top buttonhole.

Down in the bar car it was like an Arabian night; everyone was dressed to the nines, with feathers and bandeaux. The champagne was flowing from those expensive Indian-club-shaped bottles. There we met an American husband and wife who owned their own parlour and sleeping cars back home in California where they hitched them on to trains and rode out to Kentucky or wherever the spirit moved them.

Dinner, which cost £20 ($28) a head (lunch and drinks on the train in England were included in the fare), was served while we were in the outskirts of Paris. It was cooked and presented by the chef, Michel Ranvier, late of the three-stars-in-Michelin Troisgros restaurant at Roanne. Memorable was the Foie Gras de Canard Entier Cuit Tout Naturelle, the little lobsters served à Vinaigrette d’Huile d’Olive, and the Jambonnette de Poulette au Vin Jaune et Morilles.

It took hours, due to one of the gas stoves in a kitchen going wrong, but who cared, we were not going on anywhere afterwards.

There was a red carpet down at the Gare d’Austerlitz, but no nobs to see us off, the present administrators of the country disapproving of conspicuous consumption and no one else wanting to be associated with the venture.

Then on through the night with a pianist, Monsieur Dars, at the grand piano in the bar, belting Scott Joplin and such as we roared down the line to Switzerland. The piano was such an impediment to navigation that sometimes I wished we’d brought a chain saw with us.

At 04.22 we arrived at Vallorbe, 266 miles from Paris, a station in the strange no-man’s-land between France and Switzerland, where as always a man plodded past groaning ‘VALLORBE … VALLORBE’, while another tapped the axles with a hammer, as in Anna Karenina.

I was asleep when they put the croissants on the train at Lausanne at 05.21, all the way along the shores of Lake Geneva and all the way up the Rhone Valley; waking in the entrance to the Simplon tunnel for the 12½-mile run under the Lepontine Alps, between Monte Leone and the Helsenhorn, where the previous week one of the Japanese camera crew had been nearly decapitated, putting his head out of the window in the middle of it.

We ate the croissants and drank coffee running along the shores of Lago Maggiore. Cork and cedar trees rose above the early mist on the Borromean Islands and the place names on the map – Stresa and Locarno – were those of long-forgotten treaties made before the war. It was going to be a lovely day. At Milan, at 10.00, the papers came on board with pictures of a frigate burning in the Falkland Islands.

Lunch on the train, £15 ($21) a head if you had to pay for it, was tagliatelle with butter, small chickens in a delicious sauce, smoked salmon, Parma ham, strawberry tart, the most delicious lemon cake and more of the Laurent-Perrier champagne on which everyone had been over-indulging themselves. Then, three hours out of Milan, we rumbled through the hideous environs of Mestre and out along the causeway to the beautiful, sinking, stinking city in the Lagoon.

We arrived at Santa Lucia Station at 14.44 to be greeted on the platform when we descended by the station master, the massed concierges of the Cipriani, the Gritti and the Danieli, the assembled staff of the Venice – Simplon – Orient Express and the Gondolieri Chorus.

Miss Minnelli left in another little black number decorated with bugle beads. She told me she had enjoyed the trip. We never saw her again. Boats took us away up the Grand Canal, a vision in the sunshine, to stay at the Cipriani for free. It was all over.

Leaving Venice some considerable time later, this time in a van by the causeway across the Lagoon, turning right at Mestre on the old main road to Trieste, we crossed the plains of the Veneto and Venezia Giulia. For much of the way the road, as are most of the other main roads in northern Italy, is lined with developments, factories and furniture showrooms mostly, whose owners now choose what were previously remote rural locations for them, so that for long periods of time it is impossible to see the country on either side at all.

It is country which when one can see it is of endless flatness, through which the irrigation ditches stretch away to what seems like infinity between the high embankments, just as they do in the Po Delta. In summer, in the heat of the day, when the mirage is operating, this country sometimes looks more like a jelly than terra firma. In it, in summer, the farmhouses and villages stand like islands isolated in seas of ripening corn and grapes. (In winter they stand in seas of freezing mud.) In autumn, in late September or October, the contadini in their wide-brimmed straw hats, at this season engaged in the vendemmia, take shelter beneath the vines, around half past nine or so, by which time it is already hot, to eat their merenda, just as we do in the vineyards around I Castagni.

The rivers that flow down through the plain from the Alps into the lagoons and marshes that fringe the coast are the Piave, the Tagliamento and the Isonzo, which first sees the light of day as the Soča, bubbling up over clean sand in a deep cleft in the rock in the Julian Alps in Yugoslavia, each of them in full, sometimes dangerous, flood in spring when the mountain snows melt. In the hot weather long reaches of them are often nothing more than arid wildernesses of shingle with a few livid green stagnant pools among them. Rivers that were practically unheard-of in the outside world until the First World War when hundreds of thousands of Italians and Austro-Hungarians died fighting one another on their banks.

Having crossed the Isonzo, the most eastward of these rivers, we arrived in the late afternoon in Monfalcone, a rather sad shipbuilding and industrial town on the shores of the Gulf of Panzano, an inlet at the head of the Gulf of Trieste, sad-looking because it was more or less destroyed in the First World War and then rebuilt in the early twenties at a time when domestic as well as public architecture was rather sad anyway.

The only old building of note is the castle, and even that is not exciting as castles go, although the view from it is magnificent, over what is actually only a small part of the vast plain which extends uninterruptedly for some 300 miles from the Julian Alps to the Maritime and the Cottian Alps in which the Po rises on the French frontier beyond Turin, with the shining lagoons reaching into it from the sea and with towers and campanili rising into the air above it, of which that of the cathedral of Aquileia, the Roman city sacked by Attila, is the most easily identifiable.

The castle stands on the very edge of what the Italians call Il Carso, the Yugoslavs call the Kras and German-speakers the Karst, a wilderness of limestone here rising in a steep escarpment abruptly above the town and the plain, like a whale surfacing from the depths of the ocean, scarred by quarrying, utterly bare except for a few plantations of conifers and innumerable electric pylons which protrude from it like harpoons. Having fought and negotiated so ferociously either to obtain or retain it, it would be comical, if it was not tragic, to see how the Italians have treated what they are always going on about as their patrimony.

Much of the Carso is bare rock, but parts of it are covered with ash, rowan, hawthorn shrubs and holm oaks, the last vestigial remains of the primeval forest that provided some of the wooden piles on which, miraculously, Venice still stands, although now plantations of conifers are rapidly changing its appearance.

Here, among what in some places look like torrents of rock, the making of the fields, before the coming of the bulldozer, was the back-breaking work of generations of men and women and their children. Here, you can still see piles of pale, rain-washed stones, as much as ten feet high and sixty feet long, like great burial cairns, all hand-picked from this wilderness to make a field of red earth perhaps three feet deep and thirty yards long in which vines, corn, turnips or potatoes could be grown.

It is a place of extremes. In winter the fearful wind called by the Slovenes the Kraška Burja, by the Italians the Bora, sweeps over the plateau from the north-east, sometimes attaining a velocity of up to 130 mph and in the past upsetting heavily laden ox-carts and even halting trains on the railway line from Trieste to Ljubljana, although it now rarely blows with such ferocity, possibly because the plateau is being protected by the reafforestation.

The early part of the year is particularly beautiful. The grass is fresh and green and carpeted with snowdrops, daffodils and lilies of the valley, and the hillsides are covered with narcissus.

In summer a huge, brooding silence envelops the Carso, a silence accentuated by the endless shrilling of cicadas that seems eventually to become part of the silence itself. The woods have a sinister, claustrophobic feeling about them and one has the sensation of being watched, and one is being watched anywhere close to the Yugoslav – Italian frontier, across which, walking in the woods, it is easy to stray.

Here in the Carso, ten minutes after the most violent rainstorm, there is no water to be seen; it has all gurgled away through fissures in the rock. For the Kras is hollow. Beneath it there is a whole subterranean world, only a minute part of it explored, of vast caverns, dark, secret rivers and black, icy lakes. From the air it looks as if it has been subjected to intense artillery bombardment, as it was when it was a major battlefield in the First World War. Its entire surface is pitted with craters but these are natural phenomena. The largest are called, in Slovene, kolisevke, basins with vertical sides as much as 300 feet deep and a quarter of a mile wide, huge caves whose roofs have collapsed. A smaller variety, doline, are blocked-up swallow holes that once led underground, funnel-shaped depressions anything from six to sixty feet deep and up to three hundred feet in diameter which contain the best earth and are cultivated as sunken fields.

One of the principal rivers is the Reka, which, as the Timavo, by which name it is still known to Italians, was as famous in classical antiquity as the Nile or the Euphrates and was written about by Virgil, Martial, Ausonius, and Strabo, who said that it contained specks of gold.

At Škocjan, a village that stands on a natural bridge of rock between two precipices, the Timavo plunges beneath one of them into a cave as high as a twenty-storey building, and emerges on the other side of the village in a dolina, five hundred feet deep and a third of a mile wide, eventually to disappear from view in the Lake of the Dead, four miles under a mountain.

It has been established, by someone who dropped fluorescein into it, of which one part can be detected in up to twenty million times its volume in water, that the Timavo then flows into the subterranean Lake of Trebiciano, which is at the bottom of a thousand-foot shaft in what is a sort of no-man’s-land beyond the municipal rubbish tips of Trieste, on its way to enter the Adriatic near Monfalcone twelve miles away, in Italy at San Giovanni Timavo. There it emerges from the base of a cliff in an arcadian place which remains arcadian only because it is the property of the Trieste waterworks, beside a church built on the site of a Roman temple itself built to hallow the spot. After its twenty-mile journey underground, it bubbles up in a series of pools, partly hidden from view by the willows that bend over them, before flowing over a series of weirs into the sea in the Gulf of Panzano, where its mouth is now disfigured by an enormous marina. Here, the Argonauts are supposed to have landed. Here, though strictly forbidden, because it belongs to the waterworks, we had a lovely picnic on the grass.

Down below in the caverns of the Carso there are strange creatures: Troglocaris Schmidti, a cave crab with a round belly which swims canted over to one side as though its ballast has shifted, and which sometimes, if it takes a wrong turning, gets sucked up into the Yugoslav drinking-water system; and, most remarkable of all, Proteus anguineus, a weird, stick-like member of the salamander family with four legs, that somehow survived the ice age in the temperate cavern air. Amphibious, breathing either through lungs or gills, according to which element it is in, quite blind, although born with embryonic eyes that later disappear, in its native habitat it lives for fifty years, and in captivity enjoys a diet of worms and mince meat. There is also a variety of blind spiders, scorpions and centipedes, all said to be either light brown or to have no colour at all.

The plateau of the eastern Kras through which the Timavo flows, mostly underground, was and is still the birthplace of some of the finest horses the world has ever seen. The rough ground and the excellent grass which grows on it combine to produce a race of horses of exceptional strength and speed with thick shanks, supple knees and particularly well-formed, strong hoofs.

Here, the ancient Greeks, and later the Romans, bred their horses for war and the great chariot races. In the oak woods near Škocjan the Thracians erected a temple to Dionysus, protector of horses. At Lipiča, among the same sort of oak woods only a few miles away, there is a mews and stud founded in 1580 by the Archduke Charles, brother of the Emperor Maximilian II. He introduced the Spanish horse into Austria and for 339 years, until the end of the Empire in 1919, horses from Lipiča were supplied to the Imperial Spanish Riding School at Vienna, the only great riding school to survive both the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars: and for more than 240 years this breed of white horses, sired by Arab-Berbers brought from Andalucia, horses from Polesine in the Po Valley and, in the eighteenth century, from Germany and Denmark, performed the evolutions of the haute école in the great white baroque Winter Riding School in the Josefs-Platz, more like a ballroom than a manège, that is the masterpiece of the architect Fischer von Erlach.

These are the horses, Lipizzas, or Lippizaners, white as marble when grown, compact, broad-chested, with thick necks, long backs, thick, long manes, and with protuberant and intelligent eyes – fully grown they are between fifteen and sixteen hands – that when you see them moving with a high knee action in a natural, spirited trot, which at Vienna would be later schooled into what is known as the Spanish Walk, remind you of the horses on a Greek urn, or else of Verrocchio’s statue of the horse being ridden by the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni in Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, next door to the little restaurant, the Bandierette, where we had our dinner before leaving for London on the Simplon Express.

The stallions at Lipiča are descended from one of six hereditary branches of the male line: Pluto, descended from the Danish stallion born in 1765; Conversano, from the brown Napolitan born in 1767; Napolitano, from a bay of that name born in 1790; Favory, a dun Lipiča born at Kladrub, another imperial stud between Prague and Brunn, in 1779; Maestoso, a grey born in 1819 at Mezohëgyes in Hungary of a Spanish dam sired by a Lipiča; and Siglavy, a grey Arab born in 1810, also at Mezohëgyes. Originally there were eighteen dynasties of dams at Lipiča. Several are now extinct. At Lipiča a horse takes its name from his forefather, followed by that of its dam – Siglavy-Almerina, Pluto-Theodorasta, and so on.

Lipiča no longer supplies horses to the Spanish Riding School. The Austrian horses now all come from Piber, near Graz in Styria, and the stud at Lipiča has become a sort of tourist attraction, although it still supplies horses to the state stables and they are exported all over the world as circus and saddle horses. In the Balkans, at least until recently, they were much used for heavy agricultural work.

Some years ago there were rumours that the stud was to be closed down and that all the horses were to be sold to a sausage factory which has its premises conveniently close by, but nothing came of it.

‘You have been here before,’ any reader who has got this far may well say. It is true I have been, many times, in this part of the world, in the Carso. This is the country, part of Slovenia, itself one of the republics that make up Yugoslavia, in which my wife was born; its inhabitants proud, prickly people with long memories, some of them endowed with second sight, musical, very fond of singing, passionate lovers of flowers, part of a tiny nation conquered by Charlemagne in the seventh century, which, although it struggled successfully to preserve its language, never attained independence. Many of them are now scattered to the far ends of the earth, principally in Australia and South America.

This was the place she meant when, tried beyond endurance by some domestic row, she used to cry, majestically, ‘I shall return to my country and my people!’

Actually, she never did carry out this threat. Instead we returned there together year after year, usually with our children, to stay in her parents’ house.

Over this disputed territory – about twenty miles deep and altogether about the size of Long Island – which has always been one of the principal ways of access for the people of Middle Europe to the Mediterranean, have flown, among others, the flags of Bonaparte’s Illyria, of Austria-Hungary and, more recently, those of both Italy and Yugoslavia, which now have it divided unequally and uneasily between them.

To Italians, the Carso is, as it always has been, the frontier between Latin civilization and what they regard as Slavonic barbarism. It is a very old habit for them to think of it as such. This was the region held by the Tenth Legion and called by the Roman Senate ‘The Impassable Confine’. In their brief modern tenure of it, which lasted about twenty-five years, they succeeded in extending their hold over it, but at great cost. Between 1915 and 1917, fighting against the Austro-Hungarians, in the twelve battles of the Isonzo, in the small area between Monte Michele north of Monfalcone and the Adriatic, they lost 175,000 men, a quarter of their losses in the entire war.

To the Austrians it was Der Karst, or Das Küstenland, now not much more than a nostalgic memory of a time when Trieste was the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s principal port on the Mediterranean. To the Yugoslav nation it is the Kras, what they failed by a hair’s-breadth to seize at the end of the Second World War, which would have given them a prestigious outlet on the Mediterranean, and which became a danger point in their relationship with the West. To the Slovenes it is also the Kras, but to them a place where for some 1300 years they have wrested a hard-earned living from its inhospitable terrain.

After 1918 it was annexed by Italy, and Slovene villages began to have their names printed together with their Italian equivalents on signposts and on Italian maps, as they still do on Italian maps even though many of them are now in Yugoslavia. Under Mussolini, the teaching of Slovene was forbidden and Slovene schoolteachers were replaced by Italians, the Slovene teachers being sent to Italy. There, those who spoke no Italian – most spoke German as a second language (the Slovenes, as members of the Empire, fought in the Austrian army in the First War) – experienced the same difficulty in communicating with their pupils, until they had learned the language, as did monoglot Neapolitans sent to teach Italian to Slovene children, which was what happened to my Slovene father-in-law.

That afternoon we crossed out of Italy at the frontier post at the hamlet near Trieste called Fernetti and into Yugoslavia at Fernetič, which is the name for the same place on the Yugoslav side.

Although it is fairly easy to find frontier officials equally disagreeable to deal with as the Yugoslavian officials on the shores of the Mediterranean, it is difficult to find any more disagreeable to deal with. If nothing else, they make one realize the difference in the tempo of life in Yugoslavia and Italy, now the length of a cricket pitch away. To watch a Yugoslav frontier official examining your passport is like watching one of those fascinating slow motion films, taken over a period of weeks, which shows a plant breaking through the earth, burgeoning and gradually flowering before one’s eyes. Wriggling among the contents of our luggage, the fingers of the customs official were like pale grubs. Thus we entered for the umpteenth time the country in which my wife was born, and to which she had so often threatened to return for ever.

As her mother was now very recently dead – her father had died some years previously – we had decided that this time, before going to stay with other members of her family, we would vary what had been for some thirty-five years an immutable itinerary, and visit first of all a distant kinswoman of hers who had invited us to spend the night in the village in which she lived in the eastern part of the Kras. Here, as in other places in the Mediterranean lands, kinsmen, and kinswomen particularly, recognize kinship to a point at which, in England – but not perhaps in Wales or Scotland – they would long since have ceased to be acknowledged as still existent. Here, everywhere you turn, are to be found kinsmen and kinswomen extending outwards in ever-increasing circles, like ripples on a pond when you throw a stone into it until, in the end, rather like the family of Queen Victoria which covers over two pages of small print in Whitaker’s Almanack, almost everyone is your kin.

This village could have been the prototype of any village in the Kras. Its stone houses, huddled together as if for mutual protection, had walls feet thick, most of them hidden away in walled courtyards behind heavy oak doors under high, carved stone archways. These courtyards, havens in which the owners and their animals shelter from the rigours of the climate and modern Yugoslavia outside, are full of flowers in summer, something about which Slovenes are quite dotty. (My mother-in-law once, at the age of eighty, brazenly took cuttings inside one of the temperate houses in the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew which did very well in her garden in the Kras.) Overlooking the courtyard, at the upper storey, a wooden balcony runs the whole length of the front of the house with an outside staircase leading up to it, and this balcony and the staircase leading up to it are also full of flowers – asters, dahlias, pansies and geraniums, mostly displayed, as are the ones in the courtyard, in old tin cans with their lids cut off.

The bedrooms look out on to the balcony. The old-fashioned ones are furnished with big dark wooden or iron beds some of which weigh up to three or four hundred pounds. They stand on scrubbed wooden floors and the walls are hung with photographs of immediate ancestors that look as if they have been taken as well as framed by the local undertakers. Younger married people now have flashier furniture, wardrobes and beds with veneer and lots of mirrors, but the women, young or old, unless they are Party members, will have hung a print of the Virgin above the bed as an insurance against misfortune and, perhaps, excessive high jinks.

In the centre of the village is the church, with a white bell tower rising above it to one side and sometimes with the bell rope swinging in the breeze under an arch at the foot of it.

Nothing that the Government or the Party could do after the war, when Yugoslavia became officially communist, to stop the people, particularly the women, in these villages from going to church, was even remotely successful. In the years from 1945 onwards, when priests were forbidden to wear vestments and say mass, they went to the church just the same and simply stood inside it in a silent gesture of defiance and disapproval. When transport to distant places of pilgrimage to which they were accustomed to go was denied them, they set off for them on foot.

Wanda’s kinswoman worked as a waitress in a gostilna, a village inn. Its courtyard was shielded from the sun by a trellis of vines so thick that those sitting beneath it were in perpetual twilight. Under it men were playing cards, slapping them down on the tables and making a great deal of noise. One of the characteristics of the Slovene language, at least up here on the Kras, is that those who speak it often sound as if they are engaged in a violent quarrel when, in fact, they are thoroughly enjoying themselves. Also under the vines there was a bowling alley made of rolled earth. In such a place the only woman on view is usually the waitress. The gostilna is like a London club, a man’s world.

From the terrace of the inn, long, stone-walled expanses of rock with a bit of earth in them masquerading as fields, and interspersed with windbreaks of young trees, swept up to the foot of the mountains, the Nanos, and the Javornik. The Nanos with its bare, high summit covered, as it often is, with what looked like a wig of white cloud; the Javornik, to the south of the gap through which the road and railway run eastwards to Ljubljana, covered with dense forest which still harbours within its fastnesses red deer, wild boar, wolves and what are some of the last European brown bear.

Marija, Wanda’s soi-disante kinswoman, was a widow of indeterminate age, good-looking, if not positively sexy, in a black, widow’s-weedy sort of way. She took us into the building and sat us down at a table in a pale, austere room of which the only other occupants were four fierce-looking young men in blue overalls, who looked as if they might be off duty from a filling station and were playing the same game that was being played on the terrace, a form of whist, slamming the cards down on the table as if they were practising to cut it in quarters with a karate chop, making the rafters ring with cries of what was either rage or triumph.

In one corner there was a big white-tiled wood-burning stove with a long, silver-painted metal pipe extending up from it and across the width of the room and then out into the open air through a hole in the outer wall, which would ensure that the room was always stiflingly hot in winter, however cold it was outside. Old-fashioned lace curtains effectively obstructed what would have been the same view from the windows that one could enjoy outside on the terrace, and the walls, which had been stencilled with a pale apple-green pattern on a white background, rollers being used for this purpose, were hung with the stuffed heads of various sorts of small game, game that were now completely extinct a few miles away over the border in Italy. (It is a paradox that the enthusiasm of the communist apparat for the chase organized on capitalist lines, to the exclusion of the hoi polloi, has led in many communist countries to a positive proliferation of species that in many capitalist countries in Europe have long since become extinct.)

There was also an astonishing profusion of what can only be described as Victorian potted plants, aspidistras, castor oil plants and such, all standing on rather wobbly whatnots. It was all terribly melancholy and over everything hung a faint but palpable, slightly acid smell, compounded of Slavonic cooking, cigarettes, drainage and other elements, difficult to identify, let alone describe, but once inhaled never forgotten. It was a room that was the prototype of a room in a village inn anywhere between the one in which we were now sitting near the eastern shores of the Adriatic, and the Volga.

Here in the Kras, in spite of the heat and the vines heavy with black grapes, not more than twenty miles from its shores, one felt the Mediterranean world receding, could sense that people were no longer looking to it either for sustenance or inspiration, but to Middle Europe.

Having seated us at the table Marija hurried away and after a bit returned carrying a tray on which there was a litre bottle of red wine, a plate of the local ham called pršut, so thinly sliced that it was almost transparent, and a kind of flat, crusty bread called pogača, which she proceeded to cut up, meanwhile making pantomime gestures of eating and drinking to me, reinforcing them with little cries in Italian, which she had somehow got it into her head I was unfamiliar with, of ‘Bere! Mangiare!’, using an infinitive form commonly reserved for cretins, monoglot soldiers of invading armies and infants still at the breast. The pogača was hot from the wood oven, which was outside in the back yard. The pršut was delicious, a rare delicacy. The smoking of this sort of ham is usually carried out in late autumn or in winter and the process of preparing it is only commenced at the time of the full moon. At any other time an inferior product will result. Like many other peasant communities around the Mediterranean, and also elsewhere, the inhabitants of the Kras are still to a great extent governed by the moon in their everyday life. No one used to be surprised, for instance, when one of the apparently robust wooden bedsteads, bought by a newly married couple, disintegrated if it was purchased at the time of the new moon. No other fate could be expected for it. But that was in the past. Now, in the 1980s, bedsteads disintegrated whatever phase the moon was in.

To prepare this ham it was first kept in salt for a week, then it was put in what looked a bit like an old-fashioned letter press for another week, the pressure being increased daily. It was then hung in a chimney to smoke over a fire of ash wood and after that it was hung for anything from seven months to a year in a dry place, having been previously sprinkled with pepper as a protection against flies which, together with dampness, were its principal enemies. By the time a pršut reached Trieste, a good one was about as expensive as smoked salmon.

The wine was Teran, the product of a close circle of about a dozen villages north of the main road from Trieste to Ljubljana, between the Nanos range and the present frontier with Italy. It is a deep purple colour, almost black, with a taste that some people, when they first try it, compare to that of rusty old nuts and bolts. It is best either with hot food, or else with the pršut and the pogača. It is not a wine to drink by itself. It improves on acquaintanceship.

Meanwhile, we ate and drank, while Marija constantly refilled the glasses, particularly my glass, which somehow became empty quicker than Wanda’s, all the time going on and on to Wanda in Slovene about births and deaths and marriages and who had emigrated where, only pausing to go out and get another bottle.

‘Marija says we must drink,’ Wanda said, I thought illogically. Usually she spends her time telling me not to.

‘I am drinking. It’s you who’s not drinking. Anyway, why doesn’t she drink?’

‘Here, it is not the custom for widows …’

‘It’s not the custom for anyone to drink like this, even where I come from. You’d think she wanted to keep me here in pickle.’

‘Bere! Bere!’ (‘Drink! Drink!’) said Marija, who was already refilling my glass. From the yard outside came the sounds of what later proved to be a free-range chicken being slaughtered.

‘That’s our dinner,’ Wanda said. ‘Now they’re going to pluck it, draw it, truss it, put it in a pot on top of the stove with butter and rosemary. It’s going to be hours before we eat dinner.’

‘How many hours?’

‘Three hours.’

‘It’s only seven o’clock now. It’ll be ten. By then I’ll be dead at this rate. Why didn’t you tell her we’d be happy with something simpler? An omelette or just more pršut, more pogača.’

‘I did but she wouldn’t listen. Now she wants to give you some žganje to keep you going.’

‘Why don’t you stop her? What’s come over you?’

‘She will be very upset if you don’t drink. She will say that you do not like her drinks. Tonight you must drink. It is the custom.’

‘Bere! Bere!’ cried Marija, this by-now-to-me-terrible woman, bringing a clean glass and more than half filling it with žganje, then waving her arms as if she was performing a conjuring trick or conducting some vast alcoholic orchestra. What Wanda said was true. The more I drank the more she seemed to warm to me.

Žganje is the equivalent of Italian grappa or French marc, spirit distilled from the skins, pips and stalks left over after the grapes have been pressed and the wine made, but here, in the sticks, home-made and much stronger than what is normally sold commercially because it has been distilled more often. On top of what I had already drunk it was murderous.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve either got to go to bed until it’s time for dinner, or go for a walk or something. I just can’t go on like this.’

‘You can’t, we’re going to sit with the deads.’

‘You mean a wake? What they had for your mother?’

‘I don’t know what you call it in English. In Italian it’s veglia. You sit with the deads.’

‘I know you sit with the deads,’ I said. ‘We did it with your mother.’

‘Yes, that’s right, wake for the deads. A very old lady, ninety-three, called Nunča Pahorča, Marija’s aunt, died this morning. She was very nice. She’s being buried tomorrow.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’m half tight. If you think I’m going to sit by some dead dear old lady for three hours until dinner’s ready you’ve got it all wrong. Besides, we had enough of this funeral thing in Naples.’

‘It’s better than sitting here getting dronker,’ she said. ‘And I was only joking about the chicken. It was being killed for someone else. Ours is nearly ready. And you know it doesn’t matter about being a bit dronk, others will be dronk also. We shall only stay a few minutes.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s go, before she brings any more žganje. Otherwise it’ll be a double funeral and I don’t fancy sharing a vault with a nice old lady of ninety-three.’

The house in which the remains of Nunča Pahorča were on exhibition was very small, for she had been a widow for twenty years and had moved to it when her husband died when she herself was well over seventy. Nunča means ‘aunt’ in the dialect spoken nearer the Adriatic, where she had once lived, but where she now lived she would have been known as Teta Pahorča.

The heavy old bed in which she had died only a few hours before had been taken to pieces and removed temporarily to a shed in her vegetable garden, where it now stood together with a bedside table on which there were a number of bottles containing various liniments that were sovereign remedies against aches and pains, the sort that have labels with gloomy likenesses of their moustached and bearded inventors and their scrawly, illegible signatures printed on them. Now, washed and changed by a couple of the women of the village who knew how to do these things, she lay dressed from head to foot in her best black, from the black lace mantilla which covered the snow-white hair of which she had been so proud to her black felt boots, on her best linen sheets which were part of her marriage trousseau and which she had kept for more than seventy years for this purpose, in a plastic coffin with simulated metal handles, lined with pink ruched nylon, her now waxen features decently composed but no longer with any human attributes, her hands crossed and holding a candle and a rosary that had been placed in them. The walls of the room had been hung with black cloth by the undertaker’s men; a tall candle burned at each of the four corners of the coffin, and at the foot of it, on a table, there were sprigs of box and a receptacle containing holy water.

The room was full of people. Most had come to pay their respects, take a sprig of the box, dip it in the holy water, sprinkle it over the corpse, stay a little while to pray or talk to relatives and friends about the virtues of the deceased, and have a drink, after which they left to get back to their televisions, and be replaced by other mourners. Some of the men, of whom I was one, were, as Wanda had forecast, a bit ‘dronk’.

The remainder, women mostly, old and young, although there were one or two elderly men among them, sat on hard upright chairs round the coffin, dressed in their best clothes, the women reciting the rosary, counting the decades of the Aves, the Ave Marias, on their beads, sometimes at the conclusion of a whole fifteen of them stopping to recount some edifying anecdotes about Nunča Pahorča who had always been very devout, sometimes to the distraction of her husband. They talked about how she had never missed going to mass and benediction and how she used to tick off the acolytes for picking their noses or otherwise misbehaving themselves during the celebration while the priest’s back was turned. And once they sang a Slovene song, which was one of her favourites, and which began:

Tam cĕz jezero | There, over the lake,
dol na gmajničo | Down in the meadows
je prelepi dom | Is the most beautiful place
moje zibelke … | Where my cradle was …

After which they wept a bit, had another little drink and began reciting the rosary once more. Long after midnight, by which time we had finished dinner, we went back with Marija for a second visit, and found that they were still at it and showed no signs of giving up.

The dinner was memorable, although like a relieving force for a beleaguered garrison it only arrived in the nick of time to save me. The chicken, which had spent its life scratching among the grit in the back yard, was flavoured with rosemary and full of delicious natural juices. With it we had ajdova polenta, like Italian polenta but grey not yellow, made from the seeds of a white flower which grows all over the Kras in summertime, and really meant to be eaten with golaž, goulash, which was also on the menu that evening. Many of the dishes served in this part of the world have Austro-Hungarian origins. With it we ate radič, a bitter, delicious green salad, and fižol, cooked, dried red haricot beans, with olive oil and vinegar. Last of all, as a great treat, we were given cespljevi cmoki, dumplings made with flour, potatoes and egg, like Italian gnocchi, each dumpling stuffed with a plum, sprinkled with sugar and then eaten with a sauce of melted butter and fried breadcrumbs. After all this, and more Teran, and more žganje, we went to bed.

The next morning, after having attended the funeral of Nunča Pahorča, following the coffin to the cemetery on foot, feeling decidedly unwell, in a procession which included almost all those inhabitants of the village able to walk, and seeing the red earth thud down on it as it lay alongside her husband’s in the grave, we went away, crossing the ridge of the Javornik mountains which here formed the pre-1939 frontier between Yugoslavia and Italy, where the now empty casemates of the two not very friendly nations still face one another across vestiges of what had once been fields of barbed wire.

Then we drove along the far shore of the Cerkniško Jezero, which was staging one of its customary disappearing acts – hay was being harvested from the bottom of it – to Planina, a village in the pass between the Nanos and the Javornik which carries the main road from Trieste to Ljubljana.

A rather unusual lake, the Cerkniško Jezero, normally a sheet of water seven miles long and six feet deep, at certain seasons, of which this was one, disappears without warning, together with its inhabitants which include fish with horns and a freshwater jellyfish. Besides these fishy inhabitants, and in winter enormous numbers of waterfowl, it also has a ghostly population of skeleton warriors armed with lances and axes and mounted on skeleton horses. From time to time they rise from beneath the surface and, preceded by flocks of skeletal birds, circuit the lake making the night hideous with the clattering of their bones and weapons.

At Planina, the Pivka, another underground river, emerges in a deep valley, having been joined, also underground, by the Rak, a river which has its origins beneath the Cerkniško Jezero. In the valley at Planina the now-augmented Pivka is joined by a third river which also emerges from underground at this point, the Malenska, after which, still called the Pivka, it flows through watermeadows of extraordinary beauty until, eventually, it sinks for what is the last time in its career beneath the Ljubljanski Mountain near Ljubljana, beyond which it joins the Sava and eventually the Danube, flowing with it into the Black Sea.

Across the river from Planina, standing on the edge of the forest from which the red deer come down into the park from the Javornik, is the Haasberg, a castle, a country house really, of the Princes of Windisch-Graetz, a family reputed to have owned ninety-nine castles in Austria-Hungary before 1914, a figure that makes one suspect that this is legend because anyone having ninety-nine castles could surely not have resisted the temptation to acquire one more and make it a round hundred. Nevertheless, when the Italians annexed a large slice of what had been until 1918 Slovene territory in Austria-Hungary, the Windisch-Graetz still had sufficient influence to have the new frontier moved sufficiently far to the east, a matter of yards, for the house itself to be on Italian soil. The stones marking the boundaries can still be seen in the park behind the house.

The Haasberg was burned by the Yugoslav partisans in 1944 when it was an Italian headquarters. Now it is an empty shell. The watermills that stand one above the other in the valley of the Malenska are ruined; the church in the park unused, occupied by thirteen members of the family lying in stone sarcophagi. (The fourteenth sarcophagus lies empty with its lid drawn to one side, waiting for an occupant who will now, presumably, never come.) Very old retainers, one of whom was pottering about the dilapidated barns and outbuildings in a battered green hat, recall what to them was a happier age before the Second World War.

Whatever the Carso or the Kras may be, this sad and beautiful place has nothing at all to do with the Mediterranean and never has done. Here, if anywhere, you can say that the Mediterranean world ends and that of Middle Europe begins.

A Night in Montenegro

South of Rijeka the Adriatic Highway with its sometimes amazing views of offshore islands that appear to be swimming one behind the other, like a shoal of sea monsters, extends almost to the Albanian frontier. Now, in late summer, the roadside and the cliffs below it on what had been until recently one of the most beautiful coasts in the entire Mediterranean were littered with the detritus of snacks and picnics and with the shattered and burnt-out shells of motor cars whose occupants, down here on holiday from the Nordic north, had departed this life for what one hopes is a better world.

Along this road, one of the most perilous in the world in high summer, were the official camp sites, surrounded by high wire fences which effectively separated the campers from the local inhabitants, keeping the former in, the latter out. Some of the larger camps were guarded by armed soldiers and spending the night in one of these places I really felt that once more I was in a concentration camp. As on the shores of most other Mediterranean countries it was forbidden to camp anywhere other than in an organized camp site. Given the state of the roadsides it was difficult to see what else the authorities could do. But for the existence of these camps, some of which after months of continuous occupation were themselves in a repulsive condition, there would probably have been large scale outbreaks of typhoid.

Now the season was nearly over. Soon the Highway would be largely deserted, except by long-distance lorries, and the cleaning-up squads would emerge to haul away the wrecks of automobiles, clear away the beer cans, burn the plastic, unblock the drains in the camp sites and replace the shattered lavatories and wash basins. We kept our spirits up by reminding one another that we were on our way to Cetinje in Montenegro where we were going to stay in the Grand Hotel.

The road to Cetinje, the former capital of Montenegro, begins near Kotor, a seaport at the head of the Gulf of the same name, an astonishing inlet of the Adriatic, with the Crna Gora, the Black Mountain from which the country takes its name, rising above it.

The town stands at the foot of the Lovčen, a summit which rises more than 5700 feet above it, and appears to be still intact behind the fortifications built by the Venetians which zigzag up the mountainside from it.

It was only necessary to go into it through the main gate down by the harbour, as we did, to realize that something was seriously wrong with Kotor. Inside the walls, the city was moribund. A great earthquake which had convulsed large portions of the Balkan Peninsula in 1979, had rendered it uninhabitable, doing to Kotor what a succession of invading Saracens, Serbians, Tartars, Hungarians, Bosnians, Venetians, Austrians, French, British, Russians, Austrians again, Montenegrins, Turks (who had unsuccessfully besieged it in 1538 and 1667), other earthquakes, in 1563 and 1667, and an outbreak of plague in 1572, had all failed to do, except temporarily.

Yet in spite of this latest misfortune Kotor, although more than half-dead, was not completely so. A few stubborn inhabitants still lived within its walls, either in deep, dark, labyrinthine streets, from most of which the afternoon sun had long since gone by the time we arrived in them, that is if it ever shone into them at all, or in little squares, some of them still sunlit, in which children played happily, streets and squares in which the houses and palaces, most of them long since converted into tenements, were often either shored up with balks of timber or else had already been gutted and were shells empty of everything except rubble. Its fate, or only hope, perhaps, depending on how one regarded such things, was to become a museum city, although even that seemed improbable, for it gave the impression that even one minor tremor might be enough to demolish it completely. Meanwhile, the bulk of its former inhabitants, hoiked into the twentieth century in this unpleasant fashion, now either lived in caravans or in lightly built, more unattractive but less dangerous modern houses out beyond the walls.

Because of all this it was no longer possible to visit what other travellers describe as the amazing treasury of the twelfth-century cathedral of St Tryphon and see the head of the city’s patron saint, also the patron saint of gardeners, who was born in Phrygia, the son of a gooseherd, and was put to death in Nicaea in about AD 250, a relic which the citizens of Kotor are said to have acquired out of a ship bound for Europe from Asia Minor, together with other assorted relics of other saints, arms, legs, etc., for 300 gold pieces. Nor was it possible to see the great wooden crucifix, with its tormented Christ nailed to it, said to have been given by Baldwin II, the last Latin Emperor of Constantinople, to the widow of a thirteenth-century Serbian king. Perennially hard-up, he also, at about the same time, disposed of the Crown of Thorns, a portion of the True Cross, the baby linen of Jesus, the Lance, the Sponge and the Chain of the Passion, the Rod of Moses and part of the skull of St John the Baptist – to St Louis, Louis IX of France, the most Christian king.

By the time we left Kotor the sun had already gone from the town completely, as it does quite early, leaving it in cold, dark shadow, and dense black clouds hung threateningly over the tops of the surrounding mountains, although, out beyond the inlet on which the city itself is built, the Gulf was still bathed in sunlight.

The main road to Cetinje by way of the Lovčen Pass was a wild one even by Montenegrin standards. It climbed the steep side of the Lovčen, on the summit of which the remains of Petar II Petrović Njegoš, Prince-Bishop of Montenegro, last of a line of prince-bishops who began to reign in 1516 when the previous ruler retired to Venice, are entombed in a remarkable mausoleum designed by the Serbo-Croat sculptor Ivan Mestrović, who died in 1962.

The road to the Pass, lined with ruined forts, climbed through plantations of oak and pine ravaged by fires that had only recently swept the mountainside. It was loosely metalled, full of pot-holes, had twenty-four major hairpin bends on it and was only one vehicle wide, with lay-bys. Its outside edge frequently overhung precipices and at some places gaps in the masonry, as they did in so many places on the Adriatic Highway, showed where vehicles had been driven clean through the protecting walls taking the occupants on what had been, presumably, a spectacular exit to eternity.

Our ascent of it was made more difficult by a large caravan of picturesquely-clad gypsies who were descending it from the Pass in horse-drawn carts, on foot and with numbers of animals running loose along with them; but finally, having emerged from a tunnel that had been driven through one of the outlying spurs of the massif, we reached the Pass, which was literally white with sheep. Here the sky was threatening and a few drops of icy rain fell. Already old women in long, rusty black skirts and white-moustached men wearing little round black pill-box hats and waistcoats and what looked like baggy jodhpur breeches of heavy, brown homespun were urging the flocks and the cattle that had been grazing around the head of the Pass down to the little village of Njeguši in anticipation of the coming storm.

The village was disposed along one side of what Slavs call a polje, a big green meadow that had once formed the bottom of a lake, with dark woods extended down to the edge of it on the far side. Above it loomed the Lovčen, its limestone rocks now a steely grey in the rapidly gathering darkness. This wild spot was the birthplace of Petar II Petrović Njegoš, the future ruler of Montenegro, sometime between 1811 and 1813.

From the village the road wound up past abandoned and roofless houses to another pass, the Krivačko Ždrjelo, at around 4300 feet, on the rim of another enormous polje in which Cetinje stands more than 2000 feet below.

Just below this pass there was an inn, a gostiona, which is the Montenegrin way of spelling gostilna, where we stopped for a drink.

Inside it four men, one of them the proprietor who was in his shirt-sleeves, were drinking the Albanian brandy called XTRA. All were drunk and beginning to be acrimonious. It was not a place to linger. The three customers had their vehicles parked outside, one of which was a large petrol tanker, and when we got up to go one of them, who turned out to be the driver of the tanker, easily identifiable by his overalls, got up, too, clutched one of the lapels of my coat in order to keep himself in an upright position and, swaying backwards and forwards on his feet like some Cornish rocking-stone, announced that he was about to drive his tanker down to Kotor by the road we had just climbed to the Lovčen Pass. How he was proposing to do this and remain alive was a mystery.

By the time we emerged from the gostiona the storm was directly overhead and for an instant a single, blinding flash of lightning turned the grey limestone of the mountain a dazzling white. It was followed by a single, deafening roll of thunder which reverberated among the rocks. Then an apocalyptical wind blew, bending the trees as if they were reeds. Then the heavens opened.

Thanking our lucky stars that tonight we would sleep in a Grand Hotel instead of in the back of a van unconverted for this purpose, which was what we had now been doing on and off for months, we set off downhill through the downpour into what, insofar as we could see anything at all, resembled a crater filled with twisted rocks, narrowly missing a head-on collision with a bus that was groaning up through the hairpin bends on its way to Njeguši, loaded with what we later discovered was part of the day shift of the ‘Obod’ factory in Cetinje which made refrigerators and other electrical appliances, the ‘Košuta’ footwear factory and the ‘Galenika’ factory for processing pharmaceutical preparations, all of whom would have been a serious loss to the economy.

By the time we reached the city it was completely dark and the rain that had been clouting down had given place to a monotonous drizzle; so dark that in a dimly-lit boulevard opposite what had once been the building occupied by the Italian diplomatic mission I ran over and killed a black cat which darted across the road in front of us. However, even this melancholy incident failed to dampen our spirits completely. For we were looking forward to staying the night at the hotel, which was not just any old hotel but the Grand Hotel of Vuko Vuketič, as it used to be known, otherwise known as the Lokanda, one of the last hotels of its kind in the Balkans: the Balkans strictly speaking being the mountains in Bulgaria that extend across the country from the Yugoslav border to the Black Sea: but in the sense in which I interpret it, the one in which it is commonly used, of the Balkan Peninsula, the lands between the Adriatic and the Black Seas.

I had last stayed in it in the 1960s. I remembered it as a rather splendid cream- and yellow-coloured building with a sort of semicircular foyer that was a bit like a Victorian greenhouse. Originally built in 1864, it was the first hotel to be constructed in Cetinje and to it were sent the official and honoured guests of what was then the Montenegrin capital, which even in its heyday never had more than 5000 inhabitants. (Now it had more than 10,000 inhabitants and had several large factories producing, as well as electrical appliances, shoes, pharmaceutical products and white bauxite.) At one time the hotel housed the United States diplomatic mission. Reconstructed in 1900, and enlarged in 1929, it had two restaurants and forty bedrooms. In its remarkable foyer and in other public rooms, all rather dingy when I was last there, tall old men in national costumes with huge white moustaches, some, almost unbelievably, still with Lugers and Mausers and other weapons stuck in their cummerbunds, sat sipping away at their rakijas, their Albanian XTRA brandies and various other strong drinks for hours on end while remembering old blood feuds, an activity which in Montenegro had been raised to an art form. In fact one visitor, the author of the excellent Companion Guide to Jugoslavia, J. A. Cuddon, records one of these Montenegrin mountaineers taking out his pistol and shooting a mad dog in one of the dining rooms.

The hotel stood in what had been a windswept square when I was last there, for although it was already spring down on the Adriatic, 2100 or so feet below, up here at Cetinje, which is invariably snowed up for five months of the year from October until the end of February, there was still snow on the ground.

Now, on this really foul, wet night, we looked forward to the hot baths which could usually be had in it, sometimes to the accompaniment of alarming clanking noises from the plumbing system; to the big drinks, the scalding hot lamb soup we planned on ordering, and the great gobbets of Montenegrin pork, all brought to the table by ancient servitors; and after that to retiring to bed in one of the large and shabby but clean bedrooms. All things I remembered about the hotel with pleasure from my previous visit and of which I had spoken enthusiastically and perhaps too frequently to my fellow traveller. I could even remember the way to it, through little streets lined with lime and black locust trees, the latter a form of acacia.

By the time we reached the square in the centre of the town in which the hotel stood a thick mist had descended on it and as it was ill-lit I got down and set off on foot to look for it, leaving Wanda in the vehicle.

There, at the southern end of the square in which I remembered it as standing, I was confronted with what looked like an enormous pancake but on closer inspection turned out to be a mound of yellowish rubble. There was no sign of the hotel.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to a passer-by who had halted, curious at my interest in a heap of rubble, speaking in Italian, which sometimes serves in these parts of the world. ‘Do you happen to speak Italian?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Can you please tell me the way to the Grand Hotel?’

‘Grand Hotel,’ he said. ‘That is the Grand Hotel,’ pointing at the mound of bricks and plaster.

‘But what happened?’ I asked.

‘It was the earthquake,’ he said. ‘The great earthquake of 1979. It destroyed not only the Grand Hotel. It also damaged and destroyed a large part of the city.’

‘Is there another hotel?’ I asked him, remembering that back in the sixties although the Grand Hotel had been the only one of any consequence in Cetinje, there had been some talk of another hotel, although whether it was built or about to be built I could no longer recall.

‘No,’ he said, ‘there is no other hotel. The Grand Hotel was the only one. Tourists are no longer allowed to stay in the town. In fact there is no longer even a Tourist Office.’

I told Wanda. At first she thought it was funny about the hotel, especially as there had been no loss of life when it collapsed, although there had been elsewhere in the city. Then when she realized that it meant another night in the van and, if the police found us, probably a long drive all the way back to the coast at Budva, where the nearest hotels and camp sites were, her vocabulary was immense.

In spite of the drizzle and the fog it was the hour of the passeggiata in the main street, which although many of its buildings had been badly damaged was either being rebuilt or had already been built in their original, old-fashioned form.

Young, tall, dark and incredibly handsome men, moustache-less and pistol-less, and equally beautiful girls wearing jeans and as upright as if they had been brought up to carry pots and heavy weights on their heads, as they probably had, walked up and down in little bands past the lighted shop fronts of the pleasant, pale-coloured buildings I remembered, talking animatedly, smoking cigarettes like chimneys and eyeing one another. Apart from the two of us there was not a tourist in sight and the Tourist Office, as my informant had already told me, was closed, with a notice in the window to that effect.

We dined well on the sort of huge pieces of pork we would have been offered at the Grand Hotel if only it had remained standing, quantities of bread – there were no vegetables of any kind on offer – a delicious pastry stuffed with figs, a sort of baklava, but softer than the Greek variety, and drank copiously of a robust red wine of the region called Vranač Plavka in an effort to banish the thought of another night in the open, in a restaurant which resembled a brick-lined bier-keller, except that it was on the ground floor. The waiters, who were all well over six feet tall, wore white shirts and black trousers and black waistcoats. Male guests drank oceans of beer straight out of the bottles, spurning glasses; and old men of the sort I remembered with moustaches like racing bicycle handlebars kissed one another before settling down, as I had remembered them doing, to speak nostalgically, according to Wanda who could understand some of what they said, of what had been until quite recently an almost unbelievably violent past.

‘He who revenges himself is blessed,’ was one of the dicta of family life in a country where male children used to have loaded firearms placed in their hands before they could even stand on their two feet, let alone fire them, in order to prepare them to be good Montenegrins, worthy members of the only Balkan State that was never subdued by the Turks. For Montenegro, until the Second World War, was a man’s country in which a woman’s lot was to perform menial tasks such as agriculture, beget as many male children as possible to make up for the constant death roll among the men, and attend the funerals of their lords and masters when they failed to survive a ceta, one of the predatory raids they spent so much of their time either planning or taking part in. The results of such expeditions were subsequently recorded for posterity by guslari, minstrels, many of them blind, who used to accompany their recitals of these bloody doings on the guslar, a one-stringed instrument rather like a lute, made of wood, or clay, or copper, sometimes even of stone. Some of the ballads, which the guslari knew by heart, were anything up to seventy thousand words long and are still recited today in some parts of what is the smallest Yugoslavian republic. Now these feudal practices were ostensibly no more in Cetinje.

After dinner, having ascertained that there was no official camp site in Cetinje and therefore no camping, which put us in a rather difficult position, we drove hurriedly away and hid the van and ourselves with it behind one of the walls of what had been the royal park, outside the Crnojević Monastery, otherwise the Monastery of the Virgin, so named after Ivan Crnojević who built it in 1484. This original monastery, which he surrounded with a moat and heavily fortified, was razed to the ground by the Turks in 1692, again in 1712 and again in 1785. Above it on a hill, when I had last been in Cetinje, there had been a round tower called the Tablja which the Montenegrins used to decorate with the skulls of Turks, emulating by so doing the Turks who built the Celé Kula, the Tower of Skulls, at Niš in Serbia which they decorated with a thousand Serbian skulls, a few of which are still in position. Whether the Tablja was still standing or whether it had fallen a victim to the earthquake it was impossible to say because it was dark, and the following day, with the fog still persisting, we forgot to ask.

What with earthquakes, the Turks who had set fire to it and destroyed it three times, and the Austrians, Italians and Germans, who had each consigned it twice to the flames, it was a wonder that there was anything left of Cetinje at all. One of its proudest possessions, now in the Treasury of the Monastery, is the skull of the Vizier Mahmut-Pasha Busatlija of Shkodër in Albania, one of Montenegro’s greatest enemies and the last Turkish leader to fight his way into Cetinje and destroy it and the Monastery, in 1785, who was killed in a great battle with Petar I Njegoš in 1796.

There, behind the wall, we spent, as we anticipated we would, an awful night, which not even the good red wine of Vranač Plavka we had drunk alleviated. Soon after we arrived some policemen drove up in a car to the Monastery, obviously in search of us, and we only narrowly escaped discovery.

Meanwhile the rain, which had become torrential again, drummed on the tinny roof of the van making sleep impossible. Finally, in the early hours of the morning, when the rain had finally ceased and we had at last succeeded in dropping off, we were besieged by a pack of savage dogs, one of a number of such packs that infested the park and which had already made the night hideous with their barking and fighting. Why they chose to surround our van was a mystery. Perhaps they could smell a salami that we had hanging up in it.

There were still several royal palaces at Cetinje. The Old Palace, otherwise known as the Biljarda, was a long, low single-storey stone building with strongpoints at each of its angles, more like a fort than a palace, built as his residence by Petar II Petrović Njegoš, who reigned from 1830 to 1851 and was six feet eight inches in his socks. Previously he had lived in the Monastery. Besides being a prince and bishop of this country half the size of Wales, and before that having been a monk, he was also a warrior who led his people in resisting Austrians and Turks, a traveller, crack shot, player of the guslar and author of an epic poem, the ‘Gorski Vijenac’, otherwise ‘The Mountain Wreath’. As a result of being all these things, he was naturally also the hero of the Montenegrins, and is to this day. The Palace was called the Biljarda because it was to it that the Prince, in the face of what might have appeared to anyone else something of insuperable difficulty, had a very large slate-bedded billiard table from England manhandled three thousand feet up the mule track from Kotor to the Lovčen Pass – at that time the road did not exist – then downhill to his birthplace, up again to the Krivačko Žvdrelo Pass and then 2000 feet down through a chaos of limestone to the Palace, where it was installed without the slate being broken.

Not much more than a bomb’s toss away from the Biljarda was an elegant palace, painted in sangue-de-boeuf picked out in white, the residence of King Nikola I Petrović, the first and last King of Montenegro, a cultured, ruthless despot of a sort the Montenegrins were perfectly prepared to put up with providing they were allowed to destroy Muslims and one another. He ruled for fifty-eight years, from 1860 to 1918, having assumed the title of king in 1910. Forced to flee the country in 1916, when it was occupied by the armies of Austria-Hungary, Montenegro having entered the war against them in 1914 on the side of Serbia, he never returned, dying in exile in Antibes in 1921. After the war, in 1919, as a result of a Balkan version of a free vote, Montenegro became part of Yugoslavia and remained part of it until 1941 when the Italians occupied it and proclaimed a new kingdom. In 1945 it again became part of Yugoslavia.

Now the Palace of King Nikola, which had been seriously shaken by the earthquake, stood swathed in plastic sheeting, a hollow shell, awaiting restoration. Outside it was the tree under which the King used to sit, dispensing Montenegrin justice.

At the Art Gallery of the Socialist Republic of Montenegro, which is housed in the former Government House, the Vladin Dom, the largest building in Montenegro, we were kindly received by the Director, a cultivated man who was very upset about the siting of the ‘Obod’ electrical appliance factory, which had been plonked down in a prominent position in the town and had done nothing to improve its appearance. He himself, as director of the gallery, had suffered an almost worse aesthetic misfortune in the form of an enormous inheritance of paintings known as the Milica Sarić-Vukmanović Bequest which, although it did contain a number of good paintings, including works by foreign artists, was largely made up of post-war kitsch of a particularly awful sort which he had not only been forced to accept but put on permanent display, completely swamping what was otherwise an interesting and representative collection of Montenegrin art from the seventeenth century to the present.

Then, having admired the outsides of various buildings, some of which had once housed the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, French, English and Italian diplomatic missions, some of them wonderfully eccentric buildings, and having failed to find the Girls’ Institute, one of the first girls’ schools in the Balkans, founded in 1869 by the Empress Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, with which Montenegro had a close relationship before the First World War, we left Cetinje with genuine regret, and took the road to Albania.

Albania Stern and Wild

From Cetinje we travelled down to Virpasar on the shores of Lake Shkodër by a very minor road through the Kremenica Mountains. There we waited for Tour Group ALB 81/6, the group with which we were to visit Albania, group travel being the only permitted form of travel in the country, to arrive in a bus from the airport at Titograd, which they did at a quarter to eleven at night. We now numbered thirty-four people – English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish from both sides of the border who didn’t mix with one another, three Canadians, a New Zealand lady and a German boy with a fine, full beard, apparently anxious to try out the Albanian barbering facilities. No Americans were allowed into Albania, no Russians, no Chinese, no Yugoslavs, nobody with ‘writer’ or ‘journalist’ inscribed in his or her passport, no males with long hair or beards, unless ‘with a large shaven area between sideboards and start of beard … should authorities not be satisfied in this respect beards will be cut by the barber on arrival’. No mini-skirts, maxis, flared trousers, no bright colours (‘People may be asked to change,’ although a couple of girls defiantly flaunting forbidden, folklorique maxi-skirts were not). No Bibles, since a bold band of Evangelists, having pondered the possibility of dropping Bibles on the by-that-time officially Godless Albanians in a free fall from a chartered aircraft, had decided to join a tour and deliver them in person. No Korans, either.

While eating dinner – soup with what looked like weeds in it from the lake and the worst sort of Balkan rissoles – we observed our new companions, wondering, as they were too presumably, who among us were revisionists, anti-revisionists, who was representing MI6, the CIA and similar organizations, and which ones were writers and journalists in disguise.

Meanwhile, the Tour Leader went over all the other things we weren’t to do in addition to wearing beards and skirts of forbidden lengths while in Albania. There seemed an awful lot.

‘What happens if I die in Albania?’ asked a fragile septuagenarian with her mouth full of rissole.

‘There’s a hot line to the French Ambassador in Tirana [Tirana is the capital of Albania]. He takes over. It shouldn’t hold us up much.’

Next morning the sun rose out of the mist over the lake, looking like a large tangerine, silhouetting the rugged peaks of Albania the Mysterious, away on the far side of it.

It was market day at Virpasar and the market was taking place under the trees at the end of a causeway which crossed a little arm of the lake. Every moment more and more people were arriving with their mules and donkeys, driving or riding them along the causeway, the women wearing white head-dresses, and white skirts with white pantaloons under them. Others, fishermen and their wives, all dressed in black, were arriving by water in narrow, pointed boats with their outboards roaring. There were also a number of young Albanian men with the same razor-sharp noses with moustaches to match that had made the late King Zog of Albania such a memorable figure. With their white felt skull caps they looked rather like bald-headed eagles. Two of these young men were being subjected to a prolonged interrogation by a couple of grim-looking Yugoslav policemen. There are large numbers of expatriate Albanians living in Yugoslavia on the periphery of Albania and at this particular time most of these areas were in a state of ferment. In fact much of Kosovo-Metohija, an autonomous region in southwest Serbia, abutting on northern Albania, with a population of about a million Albanians, was in a state of revolt, under martial law, and foreigners were forbidden to enter it.

Within a matter of minutes I, too, found myself being subjected to an equally severe interrogation, having been arrested for photographing the naval base when in fact I had been photographing a rather jolly-looking lady who was crossing a bridge on a donkey on the way to the market.

We set off for Albania in a Yugoslav tourist bus, crossing the lake by a causeway which carries the main road and the railway from Bar, the port on the Adriatic coast, to Titograd, the present capital of Montenegro. Then after a bit we turned off on to a lesser road, which leads to the frontier between Yugoslavia and Albania. It ran through a wide plain at the foot of bare limestone mountains in which sheep were being shepherded by women wearing the same white outfits the women had worn in the market at Virpasar, and there were a lot of market gardens. We sat in front next to the driver and he said that most of these people were Albanian Catholics and very hard-working.

The road crossed a saddle and an inlet of Shkodër Lake was revealed. Green watermeadows extended to the water’s edge, in which willows were growing in the shallows. The water was greenish-blue, choked with aquatic lotus, and beds of reeds inhabited by egrets and white herons extended far out into it. Men were fishing in the channels between them and women were working from their narrow boats, gathering water chestnuts. There are carp in the lake which weigh forty pounds or more and which, when smoked, are regarded as a great delicacy. According to the driver, sardines enter it to spawn by way of a river from the Adriatic, of which it was once an inlet. Beyond the lake, to the south-west, were the ragged tops of the Krajina Rumija mountains. Along the roadside scarlet-flowering pomegranates grew. It was a cloudless day. The atmosphere was already incandescent with heat. The lake shimmered in the haze. To the left bare hills rose steeply, shutting off the view of the mountains further inland. There was not a house to be seen. Rich Italians came here in winter to shoot wildfowl. It was an eerie place, as almost all places close to frontiers seem to be, perhaps by association of ideas. The coach radio emitted blasts of outlandish music which the driver said was Albanian.

The Yugoslav customs house was on another, longer, deeper inlet of the lake, called the Humsko Blato, which was about as wide as the Thames at Westminster. White buoys down the middle of it marked the frontier.

Forty yards or so down the road beyond the Yugoslav customs house was the Albanian one, near a hamlet called Han-i-Hotit where, in the time of the Ottomans, there was a han, a caravanserai.

Here, while we waited on the Yugoslav side, the Tour Leader told us that the Albanians would take from us any literature of an even faintly political character and all newspapers if we tried to take them into Albania and that the Yugoslavs would do the same if we tried to do the same with any Albanian literature when leaving. Here, a lady who was a member of the group asked if she could use the lavatory in the Yugoslav customs house, the door of which stood invitingly open, revealing a pastel-coloured suite, and was told brusquely by an official that she couldn’t, and must wait until she got to Albania.

Also waiting to cross was the Albanian football team, on its way back to Tirana from Vienna, after having been defeated in the European Championships. We felt sorry for them. They looked so woebegone in their shabby, variegated clothes, nothing like bouncy international footballers usually do. One of them had bought a bicycle tyre and inner tube in Vienna. One of our party, a Welsh football enthusiast, asked them for their autographs and this cheered them up a bit.

We were now joined by two Italian gentlemen intent on entering Albania who arrived in a motor car, having driven from Rome.

‘You cannot enter Albania without a visa,’ one of the Yugoslavs said in Italian.

‘But where do we get these visas?’ one of them asked.

‘At Rome!’

‘Va bene, torniamo a Roma,’ the driver said, without hesitation, and turning the car round headed back for Bar, where they had disembarked from the ferry from Italy the previous day. When they had gone, it suddenly occurred to me that the official had not told them that they would not be allowed into Albania unless they were with a group, and I asked him why.

‘Because they did not ask me,’ he said. And he seemed to think it a good joke.

Now we lugged our luggage, the young aiding the aged and infirm, along the sizzling expanse of road which constituted the no-man’s-land between the two countries, looking a bit like survivors of some disaster, to the very border of Albania, where we were halted at a barrier by a savage-looking soldier in shiny green fatigues, armed with a machine pistol. To the right was the inlet in which fast little motor boats were kept ready in the shallows, where orangey-yellow water fuchsia were growing. To the left was the steep hillside and, running along the foot of it, an electric fence with white porcelain insulators supporting the wires, about eight feet high with overhangs, which would have made it impossible to scale even if the current was off. It looked as if it was no longer in use and I wondered if it had been the sort that frizzles you to a cinder or the kind that rings bells, or indeed the type that does both, and whether it actually encircled Albania.

The barrier was surmounted by a sign bearing an imperialistic-looking double-headed black eagle and a red star on a yellow background which announced that this was the Republika Popullore e Shqiperise, Shqiperia being ‘The Land of the Eagles’. Knowing that I would have difficulty in remembering how to spell this later on, I began to write it down in a notebook, but the sentry made such threatening gestures that I desisted.

Here, with us all still standing on the Yugoslav side of the barrier, Nanny, our Tour Leader, handed over a multiple visa, procured from the Albanian consulate in Paris, with photographs of all thirty-four of us attached to it, most of them taken in those smelly little booths that can be found in amusement arcades or on railway stations. It made the visa look like an illustrated catalogue for a chamber of horrors and it took the official, to whom he now presented it, some time to convince himself that what he was looking at were real people, although one would have thought that he must have had plenty of experience of looking at similar documents.

It was during the inspection of these credentials, in the course of which we were called forward to be identified one by one, that he discovered that the numbers printed on our two passports did not tally with those on the multiple visa. This was because our old passports had expired when we applied to join the tour and the new ones had not yet been issued to us when the visa was applied for by the tour company because of a strike by British passport officials. Eventually we were admitted, probably because the coach that had brought us to the Yugoslav frontier had already driven away and we would have been a problem to dispose of.

Now, in the customs house, one of the antechambers to Albania, we were ordered to fill in customs declarations, and a wave of collective panic seized the group when it was discovered that the only two languages in which the questions were posed were French and Albanian.

Possèdez-vous les objets suivants Poste émetteur et récepteur, appareil photographique, magnétophone, téléviseur, refrigerateur, machine à laver et d’autres equipements domestiques, montres, narcotiques, imprimés comme lettres, revue du matérial explosif?

As a result of not knowing what a lot of this meant, normally law-abiding members of the group imported radios, tape recorders, copies of English national newspapers, the New Statesman, Spectator, New Scientist and a pictorial souvenir of the Royal Wedding, although one timid girl, asked by a hopeful official if she had any pornography about her, blushingly handed over a copy of Over 21.

Here, in these otherwise bare rooms, we had our first close-up of Enver Hoxha (pronounced Hoja), founder of the Albanian Communist Party in 1941, First Secretary since 1954 of the Central Committee of the Party, and the Leader, apparently for life (he was born 1908), photographed with survivors of the 1979 earthquake, below a placard with an injunction from him that read:

EVEN IF WE HAVE TO GO WITHOUT BREAD WE ALBANIANS DO NOT VIOLATE PRINCIPLES. WE DO NOT BETRAY MARXISM-LENINISM.

From then on we were confronted everywhere by his smiling, cherubic-mouthed, well-nourished – no sign that he was forgoing the staff of life – slightly epicene image. It was Evelyn Waugh who, while on a wartime mission to Tito, suggested that Tito was a woman and he could with equal propriety, or rather lack of propriety, in both cases belied by their records, have said the same about Hoxha. We saw him on enormous hoardings, sometimes marooned in the middle of fields, usually wearing a silvery-looking suit with matching trilby and carrying a bunch of flowers, like a prodigal son, who has made it successfully into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, returning to visit an aged mother in a hut. Sometimes he was depicted, but usually only in more sophisticated surroundings such as the foyers of tourist hotels, straining to his bosom pampered little girls, of the sort popular with his hero and mentor, Stalin, some of whom were wrapped in equally silvery furs.

‘Shall we be able to see him in Tirana?’ was the first question we asked the Albanian interpreter who would be accompanying us on our tour and who was about thirty-five with streaks of black hair plastered down over a brainy-looking noddle, like a baddie in a Tintin book. He looked at us as if we were a couple of loonies.

The first Albanian I ever met, and the last for some twenty-five years, was Zog, the King of Albania.

It was in Egypt in 1942, and I was spending my leave from the Western Desert in a rather grand house in Alexandria. While I was breakfasting with my hostess, the chef appeared, as he always did at this time of the morning, in order to receive his instructions for the day.

‘There will be twenty to luncheon,’ she said as she did more often than not, at least whenever I was staying in the house, addressing him in French, and the chef inclined his head without batting an eyelid. And to me, ‘I do hope you will come. I am sure the King will enjoy talking to you.’ They then went on to consider the menu in detail.

The King was then forty-nine years old, very tall and very thin and dark with a razor-sharp moustache of the sort I later learned was much affected by Albanians. His Queen, Geraldine Apponyi, a Hungarian countess, was extremely good-looking, if not downright saucy-looking.

The King spoke French with his host and hostess and the various other guests of high rank who were present. From what I could hear he appeared, rather like Edward VIII, to be interested in trivia; but he looked a tough customer. I never spoke to the King or the Queen, being a very junior officer of no consequence. Instead, I got a rocket from a general who was also present for wearing a flannel suit instead of uniform. I told him that my uniform was in a bad state of repair and that it was being mended by an upstairs maid, which impressed him. ‘I don’t have an upstairs maid,’ he said, with unconcealed regret. He also asked me what I was doing and I told him that I wasn’t allowed to tell him as it was supposed to be secret, which was true but didn’t go down very well either. Altogether, it was not a luncheon easily forgotten.

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