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Updated: May 13, 2025
Two friends of the noblest Italian families, the Patrizzi and Piccolomini, joined him in leaving the world to become hermits in the desert. The chalky cliffs overhanging the Maremma on Bernardo's estates were selected as a fitting retreat: here they dug grottoes in the sides of a precipice and lived on roots and water.
But it was not open, and we were obliged to turn from it to the group of statuary in the middle of the piazza, representative of the Maremma and Family returning thanks to the Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany for his goodness in causing her swamps to be drained.
The latter, however, had gone down with a bad touch of malaria which he had picked up in the deadly Maremma, and I, as the only other Englishman in Leghorn, had been asked by the Consul-General in Florence to act as pro-Consul until Hutcheson's return. It was in mid-July, and the weather was blazing in the glaring sun-blanched Mediterranean town.
As yet the plains of Pisa had not been reduced to marsh-lands by the combined negligence and jealousy of the Florentine Republic, neither had the rich country that lay around Rome been converted into a barren desert by the wars of the Colonna and Orsini families; not yet had the Marquis of Marignan razed to the ground a hundred and twenty villages in the republic of Siena alone; and though the Maremma was unhealthy, it was not yet a poisonous marsh: it is a fact that Flavio Blando, writing in 1450, describes Ostia as being merely less flourishing than in the days of the Romans, when she had numbered 50,000 inhabitants, whereas now in our own day there are barely 30 in all.
I have spoken with some detail of the improvements in the Tuscan Maremma, because of their great relative importance, and because their history is well known; but like operations have been executed in the territory of Pisa and upon the coast of the duchy of Lucca. In the latter case they were confined principally to prevention of the intermixing of fresh water with that of the sea.
No one then thought it possible to reside at Via Reggio, which latterly has become a summer resort. The low lands and bad air of Maremma stretch the whole length of the western shores of the Mediterranean, till broken by the rocks and hills of Spezia. It was a vague idea, but Shelley suggested an excursion to Spezia, to see whether it would be feasible to spend a summer there.
Of Earl of Leicester the Italian knew nothing; but Count of Montfort was a more familiar sound. "Si, si, vero!" Sicily had rung with it; and Count Rosso Aldobrandini, of the Maremma Toscana, had given his only daughter and heiress to the banished English knight, Guido di Monforte, who had served in the king's army as a Provencal. Richard's heart beat high.
The best gentlemen and the oldest, not only of Florence, but of all the world or the Maremma, are the Cadgers, a matter upon which all the phisopholers and every one who knoweth them, as I do, are of accord; and lest you should understand it of others, I speak of the Cadgers your neighbors of Santa Maria Maggiore.
"The Massarenes" may have faults, but how many of our actual woman-scribes, for all their monkey-tricks of cleverness, could have written it? The haunting charm of "In Maremma": why ask our public to taste such stuff? You might as well invite a bilious nut-fooder to a Lord Mayor's banquet.
When it could be proved that brigands had committed murder, they were confined in prisons in the Maremma, at Campo Morto, where fever prevails, and where they were supposed to die of malaria. I saw Gasperone, the chief of a famous band, in a prison at Civita Vecchia; he was said to be a relative of Cardinal Antonelli, both coming from the brigand village of Sonnino, in the Volscian mountains.
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