The automobilist should bear this in mind and not eat up the roadway through Æmilia at sixty miles an hour simply because it is possible. There are things to see en route, though none of your speeding friends have ever mentioned them. Get acquainted with them yourself and pass the information on to the next. That is what the automobile is doing for modern travel—more than the stage or the railway ever did, and more than the aeroplane ever will!

One does not forget the American who went home to the “Far West” and recalled Rome as the city where he bought an alleged panama hat (made probably at Leghorn). He is no myth. One sees his like every day. He who hurried his daughter away from the dim outlined aisles of Milan’s Gothic wonder to see the new electric light works and the model tramway station was one of these, but he was the better for having done a round of the cathedrals of Italy, even if he did get a hazy idea of them mixed up with his practical observations on street-lighting and transportation.

Superficial Italian itineraries have been made often, and their chronicles set down. They are still being made, and chronicled, but the makers of guide books have, as yet, catered but little to the class of leisurely travellers, a class who would like to know where some of these unexploited monuments exist; where these unfamiliar histories and legends may be heard, and how they may all be arrived at, absorbed and digested. The people of the countryside, too, are usually more interesting than those of the towns. One has only to compare the Italian peasant and his picturesque life with the top-hatted and frock-coated Roman of to-day to arrive quickly to a conclusion as to which is typical of his surroundings. The Medicis, the Borgias, and the Colonnas have gone, and to find the real romantic Italian and his manner of life one has to hunt him in the small towns.

The modern traveller in Italy by road will do well to recall the conditions which met the traveller of past days. The mere recollection of a few names and dates will enable the automobilist to classify his impressions on the road in a more definite and satisfying manner than if he took no cognizance of the pilgrims who have gone before.

Chaucer set out ostensibly for Genoa in 1373 and incidentally met Petrarch at Padua and talked shop. A monk named Felix, from Ulm on the banks of the Danube, en route for Jerusalem, stopped off at Venice and wrote things down about it in his diary, which he called a “faithful description.” Albrecht Durer visited Venice in 1505 and made friends with many there, and from Venice went to Bologna and Ferrara. An English crusading knight in the same century “took in” Italy en route to the Holy Land, entering the country via Chambéry and Aiguebelle—the most delightful gateway even to-day. Automobilists should work this itinerary out on some diagrammatic road map. Martin Luther, “with some business to transact with the Pope’s Vicar,” passed through Milan, Pavia, Bologna and Florence on his way to Rome, and Rabelais in 1532 followed in the train of Cardinal du Bellay, and his account of how he “saw the Pope” is interesting reading in these days when even personally-conducted tourists look forward to the same thing. Joachim du Bellay’s “visions of Rome” are good poetry, but as he was partisan to his own beloved Loire gaulois, to the disparagement of the Tiber latin, their topographical worth is somewhat discounted.

Sir Philip Sidney was in Padua and Venice in 1573, and he brought back a portrait of himself painted in the latter city by Paul Veronese, as tourists to-day carry away wine glasses with their initials embossed on them. The sentiment is the same, but taste was better in the old days.

Rubens was at Venice in 1600, and there are those who say that Shakespeare got his local colour “on the spot.” Mr. Sidney Lee says no!

Back to the land, as Dante, Petrarch, even Horace and Virgil, have said. Dante the wayfarer was a mighty traveller, and so was Petrach. Horace and Virgil took their viewpoints from the Roman capital, but they penned faithful pictures which in setting and colouring have, in but few instances, changed unto this day.

Dante is believed to have been in Rome when the first sentence was passed upon him, and from the Eternal City one can follow his journeyings northward by easy stages to Siena and Arezzo, to the Alps, to Padua, on the Aemilian Way, his wandering on Roman roads, his flight by sea to Marseilles, again at Verona and finally at Ravenna, the last refuge.

This was an Italian itinerary worth the doing. Why should we modern travellers not take some historical personage and follow his (or her) footsteps from the cradle to the grave? To follow in the footsteps of Jeanne d’Arc, of Dante Alighieri, or of Petrarch and his Laura—though their ways were widely divergent—or of Henri IV, François I, or Charles V, would add a zest and reason for being to an automobile tour of Europe which no twenty-four hour record from London to Monte Carlo, or eighteen hours from Naples to Geneva could possibly have.

There is another class of travellers who will prefer to wax solemn over the notorious journey to Italy of Alfred de Musset and Georges Sand. It was a most romantic trip, as the world knows. De Musset even had to ask his mother’s consent to make it. The past mistress of eloquence appeared at once on the maternal threshold and promised to look after the young man—like a mother.

De Musset’s brother saw the pair off “on a misty melancholy evening,” and noted amongst other dark omens, that “the coach in which the travellers took their seats was the thirteenth to leave the yard,” but for the life of us we cannot share his solemnity. The travellers met Stendhal at Lyons. After supper “he was very merry, got rather drunk and danced round the table in his big topboots.” In Florence they could not make up their minds whether to go to Rome or to Venice, and settled the matter by the toss of a coin. Is it possible to care much for the fortunes of two such heedless cynics?

It is such itineraries as have here been outlined, the picking up of more or less indistinct trails and following them a while, that gives that peculiar charm to Italian travel. Not the dreamy, idling mood that the sentimentalists would have us adopt, but a burning feverishness that hardly allows one to linger before any individual shrine. Rather one is pushed from behind and drawn from in front to an ever unreachable goal. One never finishes his Italian travels. Once the habit is formed, it becomes a disease. We care not that Cimabue is no longer considered to be throned the painter of the celebrated Madonna in Santa Maria Novella, or that Andrea del Sarto and his wife are no longer Andrea del Sarto and his wife, so long as we can weave together a fabric which pleases us, regardless of the new criticism,—or the old, for that matter.

We used to go to the places marked on our railway tickets, and “stopped off” only as the regulations allowed. Now we go where fancy wills and stop off where the vagaries of our automobile force us to. And we get more notions of Italy into our heads in six weeks than could otherwise be acquired in six months.

One need not go so very far afield to get away from the conventional in Italy. Even that strip of coastline running from Menton in France to Reggio in Calabria is replete with unknown, or at least unexploited, little corners, which have a wealth of picturesque and romantic charm, and as noble and impressive architectural monuments as one may find in the peninsula.

Com è bella, say the French honeymoon couples as they enter