Excerpt from Edens of Italy
N our day it has come to pass, that the tour of Europe is quite I commonly regarded as the essential complement of a good education. Perhaps no popular notion is better founded in fact; since, of all means merely human, foreign travel is the most effectual for expanding the mind and improving the heart. But to the classical scholar and the student of history what other transatlantic country is so full of interest and instruction as Italy Among the many, however, who visit that land of art and beauty, how few can say they have really seen it Hare says, not more than one in five hundred. A month they spend in Rome, a fortnight in Naples, a week in Florence, three days in Venice, and two perchance in Milan. To a score of other cities, as rich in classic interest and heroic fame as in the productions of the pencil and the chisel, if they visit them at all, they can give but a few hurried hours, and these for the most part very poorly employed. Travelling per le paste with fresh relays of horses every two leagues, or dozing on velvet cushions while charioted along thirty miles an hour by stradaferrata, as if their aim were to get over as much ground and acquire as little knowl edge as possible, they make the tour of Italy with hardly a single valuable acquisition to their small stock of intelligence, and actually profit less from their trip than he who carries’an artist outside of his coach to sketch whatever of interest he may pass while sleeping within.
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