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Updated: June 9, 2025
Vague recollections of the brigand Manzoni, the scourge of the neighbourhood and the murderer of more than one unhappy visitor to the ruins of Paestum in the good old vetturino days, flashed through our mind, as we surveyed the muscular frame and the fowling-piece of the strange being before us.
The half-French, half-Italian Vetturino, who undertook, with his little rattling carriage and pair, to convey us thither in three days, was a careless, good-looking fellow, whose light-heartedness and singing propensities knew no bounds as long as we went on smoothly.
I wish you to go and find our vetturino, and direct him to be here half an hour before that time with the carriage, to load the baggage. He knows that we were going soon, and he will be prepared. In the mean time you may get our baggage ready. Copley's trunk, however, is not to go. Pack that, and send it by a porter over to the Hotel d'Amerique.
By and by the vetturino brought his passport and my own, with the official vise, and we kept on our way, still ascending, passing through vineyards and olives, and meeting grape-laden donkeys, till we came to the town of San Lorenzo Nuovo, a place built by Pius VI. as the refuge for the people of a lower town which had been made uninhabitable by malaria.
At the same moment, a man burst into the room, speaking very loudly, and asked me to tell the officer that the affair must be settled at once, because he wanted to leave Cesena immediately. "Who are you?" I asked the man. He answered that he was the 'vetturino' whom the captain had engaged.
I saw that it was a regular put-up thing, and begged the captain to let me attend to the business, assuring him that I would settle it to his honour and advantage. "Do exactly as you please," he said. Then turning towards the 'vetturino', I ordered him to bring up the captain's luggage, saying that he would be paid at once.
The vetturino cheated us, one of the horses giving out, as he must have known it would do, half-way on our journey; and we staggered on through cold and darkness, and peril, too, if the banditti were not a myth, reaching Rome not much before midnight.
Punctual to his time, the new vetturino as to whose selection Sir Henry had been very particular arrived at Storta; and the whole party, with great willingness left the wretched inn, and its suspicious inmates. There certainly could not be a greater contrast, than between the two Vetturini.
If the jolting carriage had even permitted sleep, the horrid cries of the vetturino, urging on his horses, would have prevented it; and I decided, while trying to relieve my aching limbs, that three days' walking in sun and sand was preferable to one night of such travel. Finally about four o'clock in the morning the carriage stopped; my Italian friend awoke and demanded the cause.
Whenever I did so I found that impulse was right and reason wrong, and for all that I have still continued reasoning. When I arrived at Senegallia, at three stages from Ancona, my vetturino asked me, just as I was going to bed, whether I would allow him to accommodate a Jew who was going to Ancona in the chaise.
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