as beautiful as Venetia at sixty miles an hour, with the incomparable
landscape whirling past in a confused blur, like a motion-picture film
which is being run too fast because the operator is in a hurry to get
home, seems to me as unintelligent as it is unnecessary. Like all
Italian drivers, moreover, our chauffeur insisted on keeping his cut-out
wide open, thereby producing a racket like a machine-gun, which, though
it gave warning of our approach when we were still a mile away, made any
attempt at conversation, save by shouting, out of the question.

Because I wished to follow Italy's new frontiers from their very
beginning, at that point where the boundaries of Italy, Austria and
Switzerland meet near the Stelvio Pass, our course from Venice lay
northwestward, across the dusty plains of Venetia, shimmering in the
summer heat, the low, pleasant-looking villas of white or pink or
sometimes pale blue stucco, set far back in blazing gardens, peering
coyly out at us from between the ranks of stately cypresses which lined
the highway, like daintily-gowned girls seeking an excuse for a
flirtation. Dotting the Venetian plain are many quaint and charming
towns of whose existence the tourist, traveling by train, never dreams,
their massive walls, sometimes defended by moats and draw-bridges,
bearing mute witness to this region's stormy and romantic past. Towering
above the red-tiled roofs of each of these Venetian plain-towns is its
slender campanile, and, as each campanile is of distinctive design, it
serves as a landmark by which the town can be identified from afar.
Through the narrow, cobble-paved streets of Vicenza we swept, between
rows of shops opening into cool, dim, vaulted porticoes, where the
townspeople can lounge and stroll and gossip without exposing themselves
to rain or sun; through Rovereto, noted for its silk-culture and for its
old, old houses, superb examples of the domestic architecture of the
Middle Ages, with faded frescoes on their quaint façades; and so up the