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Updated: July 5, 2025
General Leutrum was detached with twenty battalions, to drive the French from Ventimiglia; but Belleisle marching back, that scheme was likewise frustrated; and thus ended the campaign. In this manner was the French king baffled in his projects upon Italy; nor was he more fortunate in his naval operations.
He proved a great egotist and delighted to relate his own picturesque ambitions, though he had already confessed that these ambitions were modified. "We are a race that once lorded it over western Italy," he declared. "Midway inland, between Ventimiglia and Bordighera, is our old fastness beneath the mountains and beside the river.
The traveller who on his way to Italy passes along the Riviera di Ponente, through Marseilles, Nice, and Mentone to Ventimiglia, or crossing the Alps touches Italian soil, though scarcely Italy indeed, at Turin, on coming to Genoa finds himself really at last in the South, the true South, of which Genoa la Superba is the gate, her narrow streets, the various life of her port, her picturesque colour and dirt, her immense palaces of precious marbles, her oranges and pomegranates and lemons, her armsful of children, and above all the sun, which lends an eternal gladness to all these characteristic or delightful things, telling him at once that the North is far behind, that even Cisalpine Gaul is crossed and done with, and that here at last by the waves of that old and great sea is the true Italy, that beloved and ancient land to which we owe almost everything that is precious and valuable in our lives, and in which still, if we be young, we may find all our dreams.
Early the next morning the adventurers set out for Monte Carlo, taking only their hand-luggage. More tunnels. A compartment filled with women and children. And hot besides. But the incomparable beauty of the Riviera was a compensation. Ventimiglia, or Vintimille, has a sinister sound in the ears of the traveler, if perchance he be a man fond of his tobacco. A turbulent stream cuts the town in two.
Cannes, Mentone, Ventimiglia, Ospedeletti, Bordighera, Taggia, Alassio: was that their fair succession, or did they follow in another order?
When we came to think, it was the first we had seen since Ventimiglia, though on the French side of the Riviera the things had been a pest to everybody who hadn't one.
At the commencement of these disturbances, and the beginning of the year 1455, Pope Nicholas died, and was succeeded by Calixtus III., who, to put a stop to the war newly broken out so near home, immediately sent Giovanni Ventimiglia, his general, with what forces he could furnish.
If you come by Ventimiglia, starting early, all the afternoon that white vision will rise before you like some heavenly city, very pure and full of light, beckoning you even from a long way off across innumerable and lovely bays, splendid upon the sea.
Our way would take us, after passing through Ventimiglia, up the Roya Valley which Terry had decided upon as a route because of its wild and unspoiled beauty, different from anything that our passengers could have seen in their brief experience of the Riviera.
Away to the left the coast took a magnificent sweep, past the clustering houses of Roccabruna, past the mountains at whose base Mentone nestled unseen, past the Italian frontier, past the bight of Ventimiglia, to where the Capo di Bordighera stood faintly outlined between sea and sky. There was not a solitary sail on the whole expanse of the Mediterranean.
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