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I must tell you about it. Lord Albert Gower had invited us to go to Spezia on his beautiful yacht. From there we were to go to Florence, and later make a little trip in Italy. We had all been asked to a dinner at the Duke de Vallombrosa's villa at Cannes, and some of us to spend the night there.
Now the way from Genoa out of the Pisan gate to Nervi is none of the pleasantest, being suburb all the way; but those eight chilometri over and done with, there is nothing but delight between you and Spezia.
After a time they identify themselves with the family they serve, as my faithful Luigi has done with all his heart. I am sincerely attached to him. In the spring, when I had recovered, my son and his wife came to Spezia, and we all went to Florence, where we had the pleasure of seeing many old friends.
Though none too careful to proportion its projects to the force at its disposal, the Directory sufficiently understood that a detachment at Spezia could not be self-dependent, nor could, with any certainty, combine its operations with those of the army in the Riviera; and also that, to be properly supported at all, there must be reasonably secure and unbroken communication, either by land or water, neither of which was possible until the British fleet was neutralized.
I never saw Garibaldi during his three months' residence at Varignano and Spezia; I had no previous acquaintance with him; consequently, as I could be of no use to him, I did not consider myself entitled to intrude upon him merely to gratify my own curiosity, although no one admired his noble and disinterested character more than I did.
See Le Mesurier, op. cit. p. 78. It was already summer when, one morning, soon after sunrise, I set out from Genoa for Tuscany. The road to Spezia along the Riviera di Levante, among the orange groves and the olives, between the mountains and the sea, is one of the most beautiful in Europe.
No; the great merit of Spezia, to my eye, is that I engaged a boat there of a lovely October afternoon and had myself rowed across the gulf it took about an hour and a half to the little bay of Lerici, which opens out of it.
For this purpose he had recommended, and the Government had ordered, a blockade of all Genoese ports including Spezia; Genoa, now the Ligurian Republic, being considered as much France as Toulon. Nothing, he said, could distress France more. This blockade had been but feebly enforced, owing to the lack of small cruisers; but he hoped to attain the same end by the frigates off the Hyères.
"But she had sailed, and the dock which had held her was empty. "This discovery did not daunt me, for I had expected it. I should have been surprised if she had been at her berth; and the fact that she had weighed under cover of night fell in so well with my anticipation that I waited only to ascertain officially what ships had left Spezia during the past twenty-four hours.
Quarries of crystalline marbles, admirably adapted for the purposes of the sculptor and architect, were opened in the range of the Apennines overlooking the beautiful Bay of Spezia, in the vicinity of Carrara, Massa, and Seravezza, and largely worked in the time of Augustus. This emperor could boast that he had found Rome of brick, and left it of marble.
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