Pictures from Italy (1846)

Sorry for the length, but I just had to add all those quotes. Quotes and review might contain spoilers.

With 272 pages certainly one of the shortest books by Charles Dickens, and it's not a novel, it's a travelogue which seems to have served as a model for later humorous travel writers like Bill Bryson. In 1844 Dickens and his family spent a year in Italy. In Genua they rented a house and from there they took some longer trips and visited Modena, Bologna, Venice, Verona, Ferrara, Pisa, Carrara, Siena, Rome, Naples and finally Florence before they returned to France.

I enjoyed this book very much, not only because I have seen many of the places he describes and it was interesting to compare, but also because this book gave me an idea of 'Dickens at work'. Every old building has a story to tell, every person he meets becomes a character. Sure he sees the grievances, the dirt, the poverty. But he doesn't turn away in disgust, as Goethe did when he came to Verona. Instead he only takes a closer look. This is a great example:

“I wonder why the head coppersmith in an Italian town, always lives next door to the Hotel, or opposite: making the visitor feel as if the beating hammers were his own heart, palpitating with a deadly energy! I wonder why jealous corridors surround the bedroom on all sides, and fill it with unnecessary doors that can’t be shut, and will not open, and about on pitchy darkness! (…) I wonder why the faggots are so constructed, as to know of no effect but an agony of heat when they are lighted and replenished, and an agony of cold and suffocation at all other times! I wonder, above all, why it is the great feature of domestic architecture in Italian inns, that all fire goes up the chimney, except the smoke!
The answer matters little. Coppersmiths, doors, portholes, smoke, and faggots, are welcome to me. Give me the smiling face of the attendant, man or woman; the courteous manner; the amiable desire to please and to be pleased; the light-hearted, pleasant, simple air – so many jewels set in dirt – and I am theirs again to-morrow!"

Sure he takes notice of the inconveniences, and I admire the family for undertaking the strenuous travelling. Imagine sitting in a shaking carriage with so many people, day after day, spending the night in cold and dusty inns just to get back into the carriage early in the morning. We couldn’t imagine doing it in our times where you board a plane in London and leave it again 2-3 hours later in Rome. But CD doesn’t complain, on the contrary:

“Mr and Mrs Davis, and their party, had, probably, been brought from London in about nine or ten days. Eighteen hundred years ago, the Roman legions under Claudius, protested against being led into Mr. and Mrs. Davis’s country, urging that it lay beyond the limits of the world.”

Yet he is relieved when the long journey to Rome finally comes to an end:

“…when, after another mile or two, the Eternal City appeared, at length, in the distance; it looked like – I am half afraid to write the word – like LONDON!!!”

It is often said that there’s much criticism towards the Catholic Church in this book. For me however it looks like Dickens didn’t have any problems with the basic beliefs, it is the rites he is openly doubting, the exaggerated worship of relics, pictures and waxed dolls, the shameless traffic in indulgence which he abhorrs, seeing the wealth of the church and the poverty of the people.

This is the first Dickens book that was almost too short for my liking, I could easily have enjoyed another 100 or more pages. When the Dickens family leaves Italy and heads home again, he closes the book with the following that still in many ways holds true for Italy’s situation today:

(..) let us part from Italy, with all its miseries and wrongs, affectionately, in our admiration of the beauties, natural and artificial, of which it is full to overflowing, and in our tenderness towards a people, naturally well-disposed, and patiend, and seet-tempered. Years of neglect, oppression, and misrule, have been at work, to change their nature and reduce their spirit; (…) but the good that was in them ever, is in them yet, and a noble people may be, one day, raised up from these ashes. ( )