MY sister and I tarried at Genoa on our way to Castagnolo where we were to have again the joys of a Tuscan vintage. But between Genoa and Florence lay our well-loved Porto Fino and, having an invitation from our old friend Monty Brown, the English Consul and his young wife, to stay at their castello there, we spent a week at that Eden. We were alone for part of the time and thoroughly relished the situation, with only old Caterina, the cook, and the dog, “Bismarck,” as company. Two Marianas in a moated grange, with a difference. “He” came not, and so allowed us to clasp to our hearts our chief delights—the sky, the sea, the olives and the joyous vines. In those early days many of the deep windows had no glass, and one night, when a staggering Mediterranean thunderstorm crashed down upon us, we really didn’t like it and hid the knives under the table at dinner. Caterina was saying her Rosary very loud in the kitchen. As we went up the winding stairs to bed I carried the lamp, and was full of talk, when a gust of wind blew the lamp out, and Alice laughed at my complete silence, more eloquent than any words of alarm. We had every evening to expel curious specimens of the lizard tribe that had come in, and turn over our pillows, remembering the habits of the scorpion.

But that storm was the only one, and as to the sea, which three-parts enveloped our little Promontory, its blue utterly baffled my poor paints. But paint I did, on those little panels that we owe to Fortuny, so nicely fitting into the box he invented. There was a little cape, crowned with a shrine to Our Lady—“the Madonnetta” it was called—where I used to go daily to inhale the ozone off the sea which thundered down below amongst the brown “pudding-stone” rocks, at the base of a sheer precipice. The “sounding deep.” Oh, the freshness, the health, the joy of that haunt of mine! Our walks were perilous sometimes, the paths which almost overhung the deep foaming sea being slippery with the sheddings of the pines. At the “nasty bits” we had to hold on by shrubs and twigs, and haul ourselves along by these always aromatic supports.

Admirable is the industry of the peasants all over Italy. Here on the extreme point of Porto Fino wherever there was a tiny “pocket” of clay, a cabbage or two or a vine with its black clusters of grapes toppling over the abyss found foot-hold. We came one day upon a pretty girl on the very verge of destruction, “holding on by her eyelids,” gathering figs with a hooked stick, a demure pussy keeping her company by dozing calmly on a branch of the fig tree. The walls built to support these handfuls of clay on the face of the rock are a puzzle to me. Where did the men stand to build them? It makes me giddy to think of it.

Paragi, the lovely rival of Monty’s robber stronghold, belonged to his brother, and a fairer thing I never saw than Fred’s loggia with the slender white marble columns, between which one saw the coast trending away to La Spezzia. But “goodbye,” Porto Fino! On our way to Castagnolo, at lovely Lastre a Signa, we paused at Pisa for a night.

“Pisa is a bald Florence, if I may say so; beautiful, but so empty and lifeless. There are houses there quite peculiar, however, to Pisa, most interesting for their local style. Very broad in effect are those flat blank surfaces without mouldings. The frescoes on them, alas! are now merely very beautiful blotches and stains of colour. We had ample time for a good survey of the Duomo, Baptistery, Camposanto and Leaning Tower, all vividly remembered from when I saw them as a little child. But I get very tired by sight-seeing and don’t enjoy it much. What I like is to sit by the hour in a place, sketching or meditating. Besides, I had been kept nearly all night awake at the Albergo Minerva by railway whistles, ducks, parrots, cats, dogs, cocks and hens, so that I was only at half power and I slept most of the way to Signa.

“At the station a carriage fitted, for the heat, with cool-looking brown holland curtains was awaiting us on the chance of our coming, and we were soon greeted at dear Castagnolo by Mrs. Ross. Very good of her to show so much happy welcome seeing we had been expected the evening before, not to say for many days, and only our luggage had turned up! The Marchese, who had to go into Florence this morning for the day, had gone down to meet us last evening, and returned with the disconcerting announcement that, whereas we had arrived last year without our luggage, this year the luggage had arrived without us. ‘I bauli sono giunti ma le bambine—ChÈ!’”

Here follows the record of the same delights as those of the year before. We had been long expected, and Mrs. Ross told me that the peaches had been kept back for us in a most tantalising way by the padrone, and that everything was threatening over-ripeness by our delay. The light-hearted life was in full force. There were great numbers of doves and pigeons at Castagnolo which shared in the general hilarity, swirling in the sunshine and swooping down on the grain scattered for them with little cries of pleasure. I don’t know whether I should find a socialistic blight appearing here and there, if I returned to those haunts of my youth, over that patriarchal life, but it seemed to me that the relations between the padrone and his splendid contadini showed how suitable the system obtaining in Tuscany was then. The labourers were the fanciulli (the children) of the master, and without the least approach to servility these men stood up to him in all the pride of their own station. But what deference they showed to him! Always the uncovered head and the respectful and dignified attitude when spoken to or speaking. I mustn’t forget the frank smile and the pleasant white teeth. It was a smiling life; every one caught the smiling habit. Oh, that we could keep it up through a London winter! And to a London winter we returned, for my friends in England were getting fidgety about “Inkermann.” One more extract, however, from the Castagnolo Diary must find a place before the veil is drawn. The Marchese took us to Siena for two days.

“September 29th.—We got up by candlelight at 5 a.m. and had a fresh drive in the phaeton to the station, whence we took train to the fascinating Etruscan city, whose very name is magic. The weather, as a matter of course, was splendid, and Siena dwells in my mind all tender brown-gold in a flood of sunshine. Small as the city is, and hard as we worked for those two days, we could only see a portion of its treasures. The result of my observation in the churches and picture galleries shows me that the art there, as regards painting, is very inferior; and, indeed, after Florence, with its most exquisite examples of painting and drawing, these works of art are not taking. I suppose Florence has spoilt me. Here and there one picks out a plum, such as the ‘Svenimento of St. Catherine’ in San Domenico, by Sodoma, the only thing by him that I could look at with pleasure; also, of course, the famous Perugino in Sant’ Agostino, which I beheld with delight, and a lovely gem of a Holy Family by Palma Vecchio in the Academy—such a jewel of Venetian colour.

“The frescoes, however, in the sacristy of the cathedral are things apart, and such as I have never seen anywhere else, for the very dry air of Siena has preserved them since Pinturicchio’s time quite intact, and there one sees, as one can see nowhere else, ancient frescoes as they were when freshly painted. And very different they are from one’s notions of old frescoes; certainly not so pleasing if looked at as bits of colour staining old walls in mellow broken tints, but intensely interesting and beautiful as pictures. Here one sees what frescoes were meant to be: deep in colour, exceedingly forcible, with positive illusion in linear and aËrial perspective, the latter being most unexpected and surprising. One’s usual notion of frescoes is that they must be flat and airless, and modern artists who go in for fresco decorative art paint accordingly, judging from the faded examples of what were once evidently such as one sees here—forcible pictures.

“Certainly these wall spaces, looking like apertures through which one sees crowds of figures and gorgeous halls or airy landscapes, do not please the eye when looking at the room as a room. One would prefer to feel the solidity of the walls; but taking each fresco and looking at it for its own sake only, one feels the keenest pleasure. They are magnificent pictures, full of individual character and realistic action, unsurpassable by any modern.

“I cannot attempt to put into words my impression of the cathedral itself. Certainly, I never felt the beauty of a church more. It being St. Michael’s Day, we heard Mass in the midst of our wanderings, and we were much struck by the devotion of the people, the men especially—very unlike what we saw in Genoa. In the afternoon we had a glorious drive through a perfect pre-Raphaelite landscape to Belcaro, a fortress-villa about six miles outside Siena, every turn in the road giving us a new aspect of the golden-brown city behind us on its steep hill. Perhaps the most beautiful view of Siena is from near Belcaro, where you get the dark pine trees in the immediate foreground. The owner of the villa took us all over it, the Marchese gushing outrageously to him about the beauties of the dreadful frescoes on walls and ceilings, painted by the man himself. We had been warned, Alice and I, to express our admiration, but I regret to say we had our hearts so scooped out of us on seeing those things in the midst of such true loveliness that we couldn’t say a thing, but only murmured. So the poor Marchese had to do triple-distilled gush to serve for three, and said everything was ‘portentoso.’

“In the evening we all three went out again and, in the bright moonlight, strolled about the streets, the piazza, and round the cathedral, which shone in the full light which fell upon it. The deep sky was throbbing with stars, and all the essence of an Italian September moonlight night was there. Oh, sweet, restful Siena dream! Like a dream, and yet such a precious reality, to be gratefully kept in memory to the end.”

Back at Castagnolo on October 1st. “Went for my solita passeggiata up to the hill of lavender and dwarf oak and other mountain shrubs, where I made a study of an oak bush on the only wet day we have had, for my ‘Inkermann’ foreground. Mrs. Ross, a fearless rider, went on with the breaking in of the Arab colt ‘PasciÀ’ to-day. Old Maso, one of the habituÉs of the villa, whooped and screamed every time the colt bucked or reared, and he waddled away as fast as he could, groaning in terror, only to creep back again to venture another look. And he had been an officer in the army! I have secured some water-colour sketches of the vintage for the ‘Institute’ and knocked off another panel or two, and sketched Mrs. Ross in her Turkish dress, so I have not been idle.” Janet Ross seemed to have assimilated the sunshine of Egypt and Italy into her buoyant nature, and to see the vigour with which she conducted the vintage at Castagnolo acted as a tonic on us all; so did the deep contralto voice and the guitar, and the racy talk.

We left on October 14th, on a golden day, with the thermometer at 90 degrees in the shade, to return to the icy smoke-twilight of London, where we groped, as the Diary says, in sealskins and ulsters. Castagnolo has our thanks. How could we have had the fulness of Italian delights which our kind hosts afforded us in some pension or hotel in Florence? And what hospitality theirs was! We tried to sing some of the “Stornelli” in the hansom that took us home from Victoria Station. One of our favourites, “M’affaccio alla finestra e vedo Stelle,” had to be modified, as we looked through the glass of the cab, into “Ma non vedo Stelle,” sung in the minor, for nothing but the murk of a foggy night was there. What but the stern necessity of beginning “Inkermann” could have brought me back? My dear sister cannot have rejoiced, and may have wished to tarry, but when did she ever “put a spoke in my wheel”?