Mrs. G. Gretton

A glance at Turin in 1858—The progress of Sardinia—Exhibition of national industry—Productions of Piedmont—Appearance of the Piedmontese—Railway enterprise—Progress in machinery.

Artistically considered, Turin is the least interesting of all the Italian capitals. It boasts of no Roman antiquities, of but few mediÆval monuments, and its museums and picture galleries, however creditable to the liberality of the sovereigns by whom they were founded or enlarged, can bear no comparison with the Vatican or the Uffizj. Though its position is singularly grand, with the Alps for a background, and the Po, the father of Italian rivers, circling round its base,—an absence of variety in the landscape, of the picturesque in the population and accessories, in whatever regards costume, colouring, and form, serves to complete its dissimilarity to Italy in all that has hitherto constituted Italy's sources of attraction.

But for those who love to mark a nation's struggles, progress, and development, this city has interest of another kind; and its contrast of life and energy with the decay so long familiar to me during my residence in the Papal States never struck me more forcibly than last summer, when, with a view to your edification and entertainment, reader, and to gather fresh impressions and revive former ones, the Signorine forestiere—a staid Signora now—paid a visit to Turin. Its outward characteristics are soon delineated. Broad, level, well-paved streets, intersecting each other at right angles, terminating towards the north and west by a noble panorama of the snow-capped Alps, on the east by the verdant Collina, a range of undulating hills studded with country seats, while southwards stretch the fertile plains of Piedmont; large, regularly-built squares, handsome, thriving shops; private carriages, omnibuses, and citadines dashing about in every direction; soldiers, gay and debonair; and a busy, plain, but honest-looking population.

According to the last census of 1858, Turin contains one hundred and eighty thousand inhabitants; an increase of forty thousand since 1848. This one fact serves to give some idea of the country's rapid development under a liberal Government. The same policy which has attracted refugees from all parts of Italy to swell the population of the State, has wrought a corresponding expansion in its material and intellectual resources. It is scarcely possible to overrate all that Sardinia has gained in the last ten years. An Englishman, unless thoroughly acquainted with the condition of the rest of the Peninsula, cannot appreciate the extent of these improvements. Measuring everything by the gauge of home perfection, he remarks that there is still much left to do;—while the Lombard, or Modenese, or any other subject of the various Italian States, compares all he sees with what he has left perhaps only a few miles behind him, and is filled with rapture and astonishment.

Another class of my countrymen, looking on Italy as the special province of the antiquarian and the tourist, think these changes are dearly purchased. Piedmont, they declare, thanks to her boasted reforms, is fast losing all that rendered her worth seeing! Under the united influences of the constitution, railroads, and a free press, this consummation may not in truth be very distant. The country has undeniably degenerated from the characteristics formerly possessed in common with her Italian sisters. Politics, judicial reforms, vast public works, schemes more gigantic still of national emancipation, now hold, in the thoughts and conversation of the majority of the Piedmontese, the place which elsewhere in the Peninsula is assigned to the dÉbut of a promising singer, or the apotheosis of a new saint. In lieu of grass-grown streets and decaying palaces, new quarters are springing up in every town; and the busy hammer of the workman is almost too ready to efface the inroads of time, to modernize and repair, to snatch from the treasures of the past whatever may be pressed into the service of the eager present. Those wonderful studies of mendicity, infantile beauty and dirt, and barefooted friars, so dear to the artist's eye,—hitherto considered as inseparable from Italy as the blue sky or the cicada's summer chirp,—in the Sardinian States are fast disappearing also. The beggars are placed in asylums, the children are sent to school, and the friars are being suppressed.

And all this is the work of ten years! It is not necessary to be old to remember when, in political and religious intolerance, and in opposition to any of the novelties of the age, the Sardinian Government ranked amongst the most despotic and conservative of Europe.

Hence it is that the events which led to these changes, the men by whom they have been worked out, and the struggles of opposing parties, are so bound up with Piedmontese life that any attempt at describing it involves frequent reference to these topics. Like MoliÈre's Monsieur Jourdain, “Qui faisait de la prose sans le savoir,” people in this country, without being exactly conscious of it, are living in history, and living very fast too. Blame me not therefore, if, carried away by the influences surrounding me, I should occasionally write it!

The great object of public attention at the time of my visit was the decennial exhibition of National Industry, comprehending every branch of native produce or manufacture, held in the palace of the Valentino, on the outskirts of the city. As a sumptuous relic of the seventeenth century, when the Duchess Regent Christina, daughter of Henri Quatre, had introduced into Piedmont a taste for the French style of architecture and magnificence in decoration, the Valentino for itself alone is well worth an inspection; and a stranger could not have seen it to greater advantage than in the blaze, glory, and animation of those summer days. Approached by a wide avenue of noble trees, its peaked roofs stood out in glittering clearness against the deep blue sky, and the unwonted stir around and within its precincts, recalled the descriptions of the revelries in which the regent was wont to seek solace from the toils of state or the loneliness of widowhood.

Under the colonnades that form a semi-circle on either side of the piazza in front of the palace, in shady walks laid out with the dignified precision of the Louvre, in long ranges of apartments on the ground floor, and in the grand suite of state-rooms upon the first, were arranged the varied specimens of industry, perseverance, and improvement furnished by the different provinces of the Sub-Alpine kingdom; Savoy, Piedmont, Genoa, Nice, and the island of Sardinia.

Agricultural and farming implements of all kinds, ploughs, wine-presses, butter-churns, honey, wax, beehives, and cheeses of every description, from the twin-brother of the piquant Parmesan to the rich Gorgonzola or the mottled Mont Cenis. Wheat, Indian corn, beans, rice, barley, beet-roots for the production of sugar, hops, wines, beer, liqueurs, sausages, hams. The fine paste in which Genoa especially excels; maccaroni, vermicelli, rings, stars, balls; every imaginable variety of shape, some white, some saffron-coloured. Chocolate, dried and preserved fruits, others crystallized in sugar; bonbons and confectionery, which rival any that Paris can produce. Steam-engines, models of shipping, hydraulic and sewing machines, iron stoves, balconies, winding staircases, beds, surgical instruments, clocks, watches, plate, jewelry, gold and silver filigree, and coral variously wrought; church ornaments, crucifixes, chalices, candelabras; cannons, mortars, fire-arms; lead and silver from the mountains of Savoy, rich samples of copper ore from Aosta and Pignerol, and iron from the island of Sardinia, disclosing a source of wealth long dormant in the country, but now rendered available through the activity of the Government in resuming the working of mines almost wholly abandoned, and directing the exploration of new ones, coupled with the generosity of King Victor Emmanuel in throwing open to national enterprise what had hitherto been a crown monopoly. Numerous chemical products, composition candles, soap, starch, colours, and varnishes. Glass and earthenware. Silk in every stage, from the cocoon to the flowered damask of Turin, the gauze of ChambÉry, or the three-piled velvet of Genoa. Woollen stuffs, broad-cloth, carpets, and cotton fabrics, in the manufacture of all which, through the removal of the duties on the raw material, a wonderful advance is of late discernible. Paper, hemp and cordage, flax and linen, saddlery, valises, travelling bags; carriages and harness; wigs, gloves, hair-brushes, paint-brushes, &c. Ready-made clothing; magnificent church vestments, worked in gold and silver or coloured silks; embroidery and lace from Genoa; artificial flowers. And lastly, all those articles of luxury in which Piedmont used to be almost wholly dependent upon France: ornamental furniture, worked up to the highest finish, inlaid, carved, or gilded; mirrors and musical instruments.

With an evident eye to harmony in arrangement, the nature of the articles displayed was adapted to the rooms in which they were placed, so that the state apartments were the recipients of all the costliest specimens, and from their loftiness, gilded and painted ceilings, and richly-sculptured doorways, gave additional effect to the glittering objects crowded within them. It was long since the halls of the Valentino had worn so gay an aspect, or been trodden by so many feet. In every quarter you encountered a pleased, quiet throng, chiefly of the middle and lower classes, for the whole thing was rather too utilitarian to be quite to the taste of the high world of Turin, which gave one ample facilities for the study of national physiognomy.

The women of Piedmont are not in general well-favoured; they are undersized and angular in figure, with a weather-beaten complexion, and flat noses. This struck me doubly, coming from Genoa, where female grace and attractiveness are proverbial; the transparent white veil or pezzotto worn by the Genoese is here also poorly replaced by caps tawdrily trimmed with coloured ribbons or artificial flowers. A good many peasants were amongst the crowd, but except the women of the environs of Vercelli, who had a curious headgear of silver pins, the rest wore straw hats, not white, large, and flowing like the Tuscans, but dark in hue and heavy in texture, tied under the chin with some ill-assorted ribbon. It was easy to see you were in a country which had never produced any great painters.

To the men nature has been more bountiful. Though fine features are, comparatively speaking, rare, tall, well-set figures, a frank and manly bearing, might be encountered at every turning. A Piedmontese can be told at once by his open, brave, but not over-intellectual face, in which you look in vain for the chiselled contour, the thoughtful brow, and quick, restless eyes of central and southern Italy. It was interesting at the Valentino to compare the different Italian races, for every country in the Peninsula was there represented. The political freedom enjoyed in Piedmont, the exceeding liberality shown towards those who have sought in it a refuge from the persecution of their own Governments, have made it the resort of scores of thousands, many of whom are now naturalized as Sardinian subjects. Romans, Lombards, Neapolitans, Sicilians, have here all found a home; and in their affection towards the land of their adoption seem completely to have laid aside those miserable international jealousies which have hitherto been the bane of Italy. The evidences of the country's prosperity arrayed before them, appeared as much a subject of congratulation to the emigrati as to the natives, all former rivalries being merged into the dominant feeling of satisfaction that, in Sardinia at least, a centre of Italian civilization had been preserved.

Regarded as the fruits of ten years' enlightened and fostering administration, this exhibition was well entitled to be classed as a national success. It is to Count Cavour, the celebrated statesman at the head of the cabinet of Turin, that this development is owing; ever since his entrance into the ministry, in the autumn of 1850, he has laboured indefatigably in promoting every department of industry, commerce, and public works. Not many months before he came into power, only seventeen kilomÈtres[21] of railway were open to public traffic in the Sardinian States. At the end of 1858, one thousand kilomÈtres were completed, besides other lines in progress, the chief of which, that destined to connect Savoy with Piedmont by piercing through Mont Cenis, will be a wonder of the world. To appreciate the activity of the Government, no less than the public spirit of the population in submitting to the heavy taxation these works entailed, it must be borne in mind that they have been carried out by a State with only five millions of inhabitants, already burthened with the expenses of the two disastrous campaigns against the Austrians in 1848-49, and the part it had been called upon to take in the Crimean war in 1855. The progress of the Piedmontese in machinery has kept pace with the spread of their railroads. Formerly entirely dependent upon England for steam-engines, the lines which intersect the country are now traversed by locomotives of native construction.

In all these pursuits, Count Cavour has met with little support from the aristocracy, which has not yet reconciled itself to the change from an absolute monarchy, under which it monopolized every channel to power and distinction, to a representative form of government, where absence of title is no barrier to advancement. Except where fighting is concerned, the Piedmontese noble systematically opposes whatever Cavour proposes, and thinks it due to his caste to throw as many impediments in the way of reform as he can devise. The innovations of the day are mourned over by fully three-fourths of the old families of Turin, as if the precursors of the downfall of order and religion; the subjects upon which the country at large feels most enthusiasm, being precisely those regarded by these ultra-conservatives with the greatest indifference or aversion.