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Updated: June 1, 2025
The village is only a tiny hamlet, ending in a small trattoria with a rough terrace above the sea, overlooking a strip of sand where a few boats lie. As Hermione came to the steps that lead down to the terrace she stood still and looked over the wall on her left. The boat from the island was at anchor there, floating motionless on the still water.
'Spanish Steps, that's where the models sit. Propaganda, famous Jesuit school. Hope I shall see the little students in their funny hats and gowns. That's the great monument thing put up to settle the Immaculate Conception fuss. Very fine, but the apostles look desperately tired of holding it up. Dear old houses! Heavens! there's a trattoria man with somebody's breakfast on his head!
Poverty was more picturesque abroad than in his prosaic native land. His song was not quite so joyous, that was all; he would go to Italy; he would take a smaller room; he would eat at the Trattoria of the people; he would make studies of the peasant, the contadini. Jack had written, "There is pie in Venice when we are there; Mama knows how to make pie; pie cannot be purchased elsewhere.
"I shall not be in to dinner to-night." He was speaking to the waiter at the door of the Egyptian Room. A minute later he was in the Via Chiatamone at the back of the hotel waiting for the tram. He must go by Posilipo to the Trattoria del Giardinetto, walk down to the village below, and take a boat from there to the island. That was the quickest way. The tram-bell sounded. Was he glad?
Prominent on the shore, rather nearer to Cofano than to Monte Erice, is the caserma, an oblong white bungalow, and scattered upon the plain are a few fishermen's cottages, but no other dwellings. We first sent a boy off to the caserma to tell the brigadier I had come, and then Mario, after attending to his horses, joined me in the only trattoria in the place and we ate our provisions.
It was already midday when I came to the little city of Montelupo at the foot of these hills, and, in front of a beautiful avenue of plane trees, to the trattoria, a humble place enough, and full at that hour of drivers and countrymen, but quite sufficient for my needs, for I found there food, a good wine, and courtesy.
Journeying afield in those romantic times was probably as comfortably accomplished, by monarchs at least, as it is to-day. The writer has seen the Dowager Queen of Italy lunching at a neighbouring table at a roadside trattoria in Piedmont which would have no class distinction whatever as compared with the average suburban road-house across the Atlantic.
These incoherent remarks were made with a good-nature decidedly optimistic, as could be seen, when the fiacre finally drew up at the given address. It was that of a very modest restaurant decorated with this signboard: 'Trattoria al Marzocco. And the 'Marzocco', the lion symbolical of Florence, was represented above the door, resting his paw on the escutcheon ornamented with the national lys.
Nor would I attempt to say why the artists chose it and why, because they did, we should, for it was then the dirtiest, noisiest, and most crowded trattoria in Venice, though the last time I was there, years afterwards, it was so spick and span, with another room and more waiters to relieve the congestion, that I could not believe it really was the Panada and, with the inconsistency natural under the circumstances, did not like it half so well.
We have our dinner from the Trattoria at two o'clock, and can dine our favourite way on thrushes and Chianti with a miraculous cheapness, and no trouble, no cook, no kitchen; the prophet Elijah or the lilies of the field took as little thought for their dining, which exactly suits us. It is a continental fashion which we never cease commending.
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