GEOLOGICALLY speaking, Italy is a ruin—all that is left of a vast mountain complex which formed a square like modern Spain but which withered away(as even the hardest rock will do in the course of a few million years)and finally disappeared beneath the waters of the Mediterranean. Only the easternmost part of that ancient mountain-range is visible today, the Apennines, which reach from the valley of the Po to Calabria in the toe of the boot.

Corsica, Elba and Sardinia are visible remnants of that high prehistoric plateau. Sicily was of course another part of it.Here and there in the Tyrrhenian Sea small islands betray the presence of ancient pinnacles.It must have been a terrific tragedy when all that land was captured by the sea.But as it happened some 20,000,000 years ago, when the earth suffered from the last of its great volcanic epidemics, there was no one present to tell the tale.And in the end it proved to be of enormous benefit to those who afterwards were to occupy the Apennine peninsula, for it gave them a country enjoying such sublime natural advantages of climate, soil and geographical location that it seemed almost predestined to become the dominating power of antiquity and one of the most important factors of the development and dissemination of art and knowledge.

Greece was the hand that reached out to Asia, caught hold of the ancient civilization of the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates, and re-exported this article to the rest of Europe. But all that time the Greeks themselves remained something apart from the continent upon which they bestowed their manifold blessing.Their country might just as well have been an island.The fact that it was a peninsula did not do it any good, for rows and rows of mountains, indeed, the whole of the Balkan range, cut it off from the rest of European humanity.

Italy, on the other hand, enjoyed the advantages of being both a sort of island, surrounded on three sides by the sea, while at the same time being very distinctly a part of the land-mass of northern Europe. We often overlook that fact and talk of Spain and Greece and Italy as if they more or less resembled each other.Spain and Greece had much in common.The Pyrenees and the Balkan mountainranges were impassable barriers between north and south.But the great plain of the Po was a salient that reached well up into the heart of Europe.The northernmost cities of Italy enjoy a higher latitude than Geneva or Lyons.Even Milan and Venice are of a higher latitude than Bordeaux and Grenoble, while Florence, which we unconsciously associate with the very heart of Italy, is almost on a line with Marseilles.

And furthermore, the Alps, although much higher than the Pyrenees and the mountains of the Balkans, had been formed in such a way as to offer comparatively easy access from south to north. The Rhine and the Rhône, running parallel with the northern frontier of Italy, divided the Alps into two halves;and therefore the valleys of the little brooks and streams running into the Rhine and Rhône, making an angle of ninety degrees with the mother river, offered convenient short-cuts into the plain of the Po—as Hannibal, with a whole circus of elephants, was the first to prove to the great detriment of the unsuspecting Romans.

Italy therefore was able to play a dual role, that of a maritime nation, dominating the Mediterranean, and that of a continental power, conquering and exploiting the rest of Europe.

When the Mediterranean ceased to be a world sea and the discovery of America made the Atlantic Ocean the center of commerce and civilization, Italy lost its former advantages. Without coal and iron she could not hope to compete with the industrial countries of the west.But for almost twelve hundred years, from the founding of Rome in 753 B.C.till the fourth century of our era, Italy dominated and administered every part of Europe south of the Elbe and the Danube.

Unto the wild Germanic tribes that had just arrived from Asia and were now quarreling violently for the possession of this desirable“far west”Italy gave their first conception of law and order and the superior advantages of a semi-civilized life over the uncertainties and filth of a merely nomadic existence. Of course she enriched herself incredibly at the expense of every one else.But while taking a heavy toll of taxes, she delivered certain“goods”that were to shape the destinies of all those different regions for all times to come.And even today, the more than casual observer, visiting Paris or Bucharest, Madrid or Treves, will at once be struck by a certain similarity of look and outlook on the part of the inhabitants.He will be surprised that he can read the signs on the shops, no matter whether they are in French or Spanish or Roumanian or Portuguese.And then he will realize:“I am in an old Roman colony here.All this land once upon a time belonged to Italy just as the Philippines today belong to us.The first houses were built by Italian architects, the first streets were laid out by Italian generals, the first traffic and commercial regulations were written in the tongue of central Italy”,and he will begin to appreciate what tremendous natural advantages were enjoyed by this country that was at once an island and part of the mainland.

At the same time the fortunate geological accident which had enabled Italy to conquer the whole of the known world carried with it certain very decided drawbacks. A country born out of volcanic upheavals was forever threatened to be killed by the very mother that had given it birth.For Italy is not only the classical land of moonlit ruins, orange trees, mandolin concerts and picturesque peasants.It is also the classical land of volcanic eruptions.

Every Italian who reaches the normal threescore and ten(easy in a country where laughter and gracious manners seem to come as natural as grouchy grins and boorishness do in other less favored parts of the world)is sure to have been an active participant in at least one major earthquake and a couple of minor ones before he is reverently carried to the family lot in the Campo Santo. The seismograph(most reliable of instruments I wish all our instruments were as painstakingly true)reported 300 quakes for the period of 1905-1907 alone.The next year,1908,Messina was completely destroyed.If you want a few vital statistics(and mere figures are often infinitely more eloquent than pages of print)here is the record for the island of Ischia, situated just opposite Capri.

That island alone suffered from earthquakes in 1228,1302,1762,1796,1805,1812,1827,1828,1834,1841,1851,1852,1863,1864,1867,1874,1875,1880,1881,1883,etc.,etc.

As a result of these millions of years of violent eruptions, enormous tracts of Italian land got gradually covered with thick layers of tufa or tuff, a soft sort of rock composed of volcanic ash, thrown up by craters when in a state of violent eruption. These layers of tufa are very porous and they have a very decided influence upon the landscape of the entire peninsula.Some of those tufa fields cover areas of not less than 4000 square miles and the classical seven hills of Rome were really nothing but heaps of hardened volcanic ash.

But there are other geological developments, also the result of prehistoric upheavals, which make the soil of Italy so treacherous. The Apennines, which run the entire length of the peninsula, dividing it nearly into halves, are for a great part composed of limestone, a softish substance which lies on top of the older and harder rock formations.This limestone is apt to slide.The ancient Italians were so thoroughly familiar with this fact that even in the absence of volcanic upheavals they used to inspect the boundary lines of every large country estate once in twenty years to see whether the stone marks, indicating where one man's property ended and another man's began, were still in their correct position.And the modern Italians are made to realize this“sliding process”of their soil(and in a very costly and painful way)every time a railroad is pushed out of shape or a road is squashed to pieces or another village is rolled down the embankment of a lovely green mountain.

When you visit Italy you will be surprised at the large number of towns perched on the tops of high hills. The usual explanation is that the original inhabitants fled to those eagles'nests for safety's sake.That, however, was only a secondary consideration.When they moved to those uncomfortable pinnacles, so far removed from the wells of the valley and the main routes of communication, they did so primarily to avoid the dangers of sliding to death.Near the top of the mountains the base rocks of the ancient geological structure usually came to the surface and offered future residents a permanent place of abode.The sides of the hills, covered with soapy limestone, were as dependable as quicksand.Hence those picturesque villages that look so marvellous from a distance and are so incredibly uncomfortable once one is inside.

And this brings us to a consideration of modern Italy. For Italy, unlike Greece, does not merely have its future behind it.It works intelligently and courageously towards a new goal, and if it keeps long hours, it does so to undo the damage of a thousand years of neglect and once more regain its ancient and honorable status among the ranking nations of the earth.

In the year 1870 Italy once more became a united nation and as soon as the struggle for independence was over and the foreign rulers had been driven back across the Alps(where they belonged)the Italians started upon the gigantic and well nigh hopeless task of putting their long-neglected house in order.

First of all they turned their attention to the valley of the Po—the larder from which the whole peninsula could be conveniently fed. The Po is not a very long river as rivers go.As a matter of fact, if you will look at the picture of the comparative length of rivers, you will notice that the Volga is the only European river that is a fit candidate for such honors.The Po, which keeps close to 45°N.Lat.,is only 420 miles long but its basin area, the territory from which it draws its tributaries and which therefore comes under its direct influence, is 27,000 square miles.That is not as much as several other rivers have, but the Po has some other qualities which make it unique.

It is navigable for fully five-sixths of its entire length and it is one of the fastest delta-builders of the world. Every year it adds almost three-quarters of a square mile to its delta and pushes it 200 feet further outward.If it continues to do this for another ten centuries, it will have reached the opposite coast of the Istrian peninsula and Venice will be situated on a lake, separated from the rest of the Adriatic by a dam seven miles wide.

Part of this vast amount of sediment which the Po carries to the sea has of course sunk to the bottom of the river and has filled it up with a layer of solid substance several feet thick. In order to keep the ever-rising river from flooding the surrounding landscape, the people living along its banks had to build dikes.They began to do this in Roman times.They are still doing it.As a result, the surface of the Po is much higher than the plain through which it flows.In several villages the dikes are thirty feet high and the river runs at the same height as the roofs of the houses.

But the Po region is famous for something else. Once upon a time, and not so very, long ago, geologically speaking, the entire northern plain of Italy was part of the Adriatic Sea.Those lovely Alpine gorges which are now so popular with the summer tourists were narrow bays, like the fjords, the submerged valleys of the modern Norwegian mountains.These valleys were the outlet for the water that descended from the glaciers which then covered the greater part of Europe and of course a great deal more of the Alps than they do today.Glaciers get thickly covered with stones that roll down on them from the mountain slopes between which they pass on their way downwards.Such fringes of rocks are called moraines.When two glaciers meet, two moraines are bound to combine into a moraine double as high as the original ones, which is then called a“median moraine”,and when the glacier finally melts, it drops this rocky ballast, which is called the“terminal moraine”.

These terminal moraines are a sort of geological beaver-dam, for they close the uppermost part of the valley off from the lower. As long as the glacier period lasts, there will be enough water to make the terminal moraines a negligible hindrance for the water on its downward course.But gradually, as the glaciers disappear and there is less and less water, the terminal moraine rises higher than the water and we get a lake.

All the north Italian lakes, the Lago Maggiore, the Lago di Como and the Lago di Garda, are moraine lakes. When man appeared upon the scene and began his works of irrigation, those moraine lakes acted as handy reservoirs.For in the spring, when the snow began to melt, they caught the surplus water which, if it had descended upon the valley in one solid body, would have caused the most destructive inundations.The Lago di Garda can rise twelve feet and the Lago Maggiore as much as fifteen feet and still take care of the extra water.A simple system of locks will then do the rest and tap those lakes according to the necessities of the day.

At a very early date the inhabitants of the great Po plain began to make use of this fortunate circumstance. They connected with canals the hundreds of little streams that feed the Po.They built dams and dikes and today thousands of cubic feet of water pass through these canals every few minutes.

It was an ideal region for the growing of rice. In the year 1468 the first rice plants were introduced by a Pisa merchant and today the rice-terraces are a common sight of the central plain of the Po.Other crops, corn and hemp and beet-root, were added and the vast plain, although it has less rainfall than the rest of the Italian peninsula, is the most fertile region of the entire country.

But not only did it provide man with food. It also looked after his wife's garments.Early during the ninth century, the mulberry tree, which is the basic necessity for the cultivation of the silk-worm, made its entrance, brought hither from China by way of Byzantium, the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which survived until 1453 when the Turks took its chief city, Constantinople, and turned it into the capital of their own empire.The mulberry tree needs a great deal of heat.It found ideal living conditions in Lombardy, the plain of the Po, so-called after the Lombards or Long Beards, a Teutonic tribe from the mouth of the Elbe who lived here for a long time.Today almost half a million people are engaged in the silk industry and their product ranks much higher than that of China and Japan, the original home of Bombyx Mori, that inconspicuous little insect who provides us with the most luxurious of our wearing apparel.

No wonder that the whole of the plain is densely populated. The original town builders, however, kept at a safe distance from the river.Their engineering technique had not yet far enough advanced to provide them with reliable dikes and furthermore they feared the marshes which were an annual occurrence after the spring floods.Turin, the old residence of the house of Savoy, which now rules over the whole of Italy, and the connecting point for the passes that lead into France and Switzerland(the pass of the Mont Cenis going to France and the St.Bernard pass, famous for its dogs and monastery, giving access to the valley of the Rhône)is the only city of any importance directly situated on the Po.But it is so high that it needed have no fear of drowning.As for the other cities, Milan, the capital of that region, meeting-point for five important trade-routes(the St.Gothard road, the Simplon, the small St.Bernard, the Maloja and the Splügen pass),lies half way between the river and the Alps.Verona, the end station of the Brenner pass, one of the oldest connections between Germany and Italy, lies at the foot of the Alps themselves.Cremona, famous as the home of Stradivarius, Guarnerius and the Amati family, the fiddle-making dynasties, lies on the Po, but Padua and Modena, Ferrara and Bologna(the home of one of the oldest universities of Europe)are all at a safe distance from that main artery upon which they depend for their prosperity.

The same is true of two of the most romantic cities of the ancient world, Venice and Ravenna. Venice, the town in which 157 canals,28 miles in length, serve the purpose of streets, was originally a place of shelter for those who no longer considered themselves safe on the mainland and who preferred the discomforts of the mud banks thrown up by the Po and several smaller rivers to the dangers that followed in the wake of the Great Migrations.Once there, these fugitives discovered that they had a gold mine in the salt which lay there so to speak, for the picking.Their salt monopoly started them on the road to riches.Their straw-covered huts became marble palaces.Their fishing boats assumed the size of warships.For almost three entire centuries they were the leading colonial power of the entire civilized world and high-hatted Pope, Emperor and Sultan with a most haughty and at the same time a most elegant air.When news of the safe return of Columbus and the discovery(the supposed discovery, of course)of the road to India reached the Rialto, their business quarter, there was a panic.All stocks and bonds, dropped fifty points.For once the brokers were prophets, for Venice never recovered from this blow.Her well-protected trade-routes became a useless investment.Lisbon and Seville succeeded her as the international store-house towards which all of Europe turned for its spices and other Asiatic and American products.Venice, gorged with gold, became the Paris of the eighteenth century.All the rich young men who cared for a genteel education and some rather less genteel entertainment went to Venice.When the carnival began to last the greater part of the year, the end had come.Napoleon conquered the city with a corporal's squad.The canals are still there for you to admire.Another twenty years and the motor-boat will have destroyed them.

The other city, also a product of Po mud, was Ravenna. Today it is an inland city removed from the Adriatic by six miles of mud.A dull hole, a city that must have driven such famous guests as Dante and Byron to drink and distraction.During the fifth century of our era it was more important than the New York of today, for it was the capital of the Roman Empire—it harbored an enormous garrison and was the main naval base of that time, with the largest wharves and timber supplies.

In the year 404 the Emperor decided that Rome was no longer safe. The barbarians were getting too powerful.And so he moved to the“city in the sea”where he had a much better chance to protect himself against surprise attacks.Here he and his descendants lived and ruled and loved, as you may see to this very day when you stand speechless before those incredible mosaics of that dark-eyed woman who started life as a dancing girl in the circus of Constantinople and died in an odor of sanctity as Theodora, the beloved wife of the famous Emperor Justinian.

Then the town was conquered by the Goths and turned into the capital of their newly founded empire. Then the lagoons began to fill up.Then Venice and the Pope fought for it.Then for a while it became the home of that pathetic exile, whose services to his native city of Florence had been rewarded by a threat of being burned at the stake.He spent silent hours among those famous pine forests that surrounded the city.Then he descended into his grave.And soon afterwards the famous old imperial residence followed his example.

One more word about northern Italy. The kingdom has no coal but it has an almost unlimited supply of water-power.This water-power was just being harnessed when the war broke out.The next twenty years will see a tremendous development of this cheap form of electricity.The lack of raw materials will always remain a difficult problem.But with the proverbial industry of the average Italian citizen, his very sober mode of living and his moderate needs, Italy will be a dangerous rival for other countries which are rich in raw material but poor in man-power.

On the western side, the great plain of the Po is cut off from the Mediterranean by the Ligurian Alps, the connecting link between the Alps proper and the Apennines. The southern slopes of the Ligurian Alps, completely protected against the cold breezes from the north, form part of the famous Riviera, the winter playground of all Europe, or rather of that part of Europe which can afford a lengthy railroad trip and fairly expensive hotels.Its chief city is Genoa, the chief port of the modern kingdom and a city of the most imposing marble palaces, relics of the day when Genoa was the most dangerous rival of Venice for the colonial spoils of the Near East.

Toward the south of Genoa lies another small plain, that of the river Arno. The Arno takes its origin among the mountains about twenty-five miles north-east of Florence.It flow through the heart of that city which during the Middle Ages lay on the highroad that connected Rome, the center of Christianity, with the rest of Europe and which was able to use this favored commercial position, so cleverly that ere long it became the most important banking center of the world.One family especially, that of the Medici(they started life as doctors, hence the three pills in their coat of arms, which became the three golden balls of our own pawnshops)showed such brilliant gifts for that sort of work that they finally became hereditary rulers of the whole of Tuscany and were able to make their home town the most marvellous artistic center of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

From 1865 to 1871 Florence was the capital of the new Italian kingdom. Then it dropped slightly back in importance, but it still is one of those places that one ought to have seen to appreciate how beautiful life can be if money and good taste happen to be present in a well-balanced ratio.

The two cities near the mouth of the Arno, which flows through one of the loveliest garden spots to be found anywhere outside of the island of Java, are merely of some slight historical interest. Pisa has a leaning tower which leans because the architects were not very careful in laying their foundations, but which proved very handy when Galileo wanted to study the habits of falling objects.The other town is Livorno, which the English, for some curious reason, call Leghorn, and which is chiefly remembered as the town near which Shelley was drowned in the year 1822.

From Livorno southward the old stage-coach road as well as the modern railroad keep close to the seashore. They give the traveller a quick but hazy glimpse of the island of Elba(Napoleon's place of exile until he unexpectedly descended upon France to rush towards the final doom of Waterloo),and then enter the plain of Tiber.This famous river, called the Tevere in Italian, is a sluggish and tawny current, vaguely reminiscent of the Chicago River but not quite so wide, and of the Spree in Berlin, but infinitely less clear.It takes its origin among those Sabine Mountains where the earliest Romans went to steal their wives.In prehistoric times its mouth was only twelve miles west of Rome.Since then it has added two miles to its length, for like the Po, the Tiber is a first-rate mud-carrier.The plain of the Tiber is different from that of the Arno.It is much wider and while the Arno region is healthy and highly fertile, that of the Tiber is barren and a breeder of disease.The very word“malaria”was coined here by those medieval pilgrims who were firmly convinced that the“malaria”—the“bad air”—was responsible for those dreadful attacks of fever which burned up the body while one was still alive.In consequence of this fear, all the houses in this neighborhood were hermetically sealed as soon as the sun had set.This system, of preventative hygiene had one great disadvantage.It kept all the little mosquitoes carefully indoors, but as we only learned about the relationship between malaria and mosquitoes some thirty years ago, we can hardly blame our ancestors for that particular bit of ignorance.

In Roman times this flat territory, the famous Campagna, was decently drained and fairly well populated. But because it lay open and unprotected along the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea it was an ideal spot for the pirates who infested the whole of the Mediterranean as soon as the Roman policeman had disappeared.The towns were destroyed, the farms deserted, the drainage ditches neglected.Stagnant pools bred malaria mosquitoes and all during the Middle Ages and even as late as thirty years ago, this entire region from the mouth of the Tiber to the Pontine marshes near Monte Circeo was either avoided or passed through as fast as the unfortunate horse could drag the rattling coach.

Arises the question, Why should the most important city of the ancient world have been founded in a plague-spot?Why indeed?Why was St. Petersburg built in a marsh which took hundreds of thousands of lives to drain?Why was Madrid built on a bleak and treeless plateau hundreds of miles removed from everywhere?Why is Paris situated at the bottom of a large saucer, forever dripping with rain?I don't know.Chance mixed with greed—or that famous political foresight which covers such a multitude of blunders!Or chance alone—or greed alone.I don't know.And I am not writing a handbook of philosophy.

Rome was built where it was built, regardless of an unhealthy climate, scorching summers, chilly winters, and an absence of all decent communications. And yet it grew to be the center of a world-wide empire, the holy shrine of a world-wide religion.Under such circumstances, don't look for a single explanations.Look for a thousand different and inter-locking explanations.But don't look for them here, for it would take three volumes like the present one to get to the bottom of the secret.

Nor shall I go into details about the city itself. For I am the last person in the world to do justice to the Eternal City of the eastern hemisphere.It may have been due to those rebellious ancestors of mine who from the year 50 before the birth of Christ until 1650 of our own era felt themselves in the most cordial discord with everything that emanated from Rome.I ought to have wept, standing on the Forum, and I could only see the gangsters and racketeers who under the name of generals and party leaders despoiled all of Europe and a greater part of Africa and Asia, in exchange for those roads which seem to have been their eternal excuse for much that was unspeakably cruel.I ought to have felt a sease of trembling awe before the church devoted to St.Peter's memory, and martyrdom, and I could only deplore the waste of so much money upon a building that had not a single claim to either beauty or charm except that it was“bigger”than any other edifice constructed for a similar purpose.And I longed for the harmony of Florence and Venice—that I am particularly alone in these feelings.Petrarch, Goethe, everybody that ever amounted to something, has wept tears upon catching his or her first glimpse of Bramante's dome.We will let it go at that, but rather than spoil your taste for a city you will sometime see yourself, I duly note that Rome since the year 1871 is the capital of the kingdom of Italy and that it harbors a city within a city—the so-called Vatican City—which was surrendered to the Pope in the year 1930 and now gives the Pontiff that freedom of action which he had not enjoyed since that fateful day in September of 1870 when the troops of the Italian Kingdom entered the city and proclaimed a constitution instead of that absolute sovereignty which had been the form of Roman government until then.

The modern city of Rome has few industries. It has some terrible-looking monuments, a main street which reminds one of Philadelphia and many people in uniforms.The uniforms are good.

And that brings us to another city, until recently the most populous of the entire peninsula, which is a strange mixture of geography and history and which brings us once more face to face with that irritating puzzle,“Why didn't this city, enjoying every possible natural advantage, take the predominant place occupied by Rome, situated in a dead alley on a mean little river?”

For Naples was right on the sea front at the head of a magnificent bay. It was older than Rome and the territory around it was originally among the most fertile spots along the western Italian coast.Originally the Greeks, who founded Naples, had done their trading with the dangerous Apennine tribes from the safe distance of the island of Ischia.But Ischia proved too uncertain a proposition.It was forever trembling with volcanic emotions and the Greeks had moved to the mainland.The usual and apparently unavoidable quarrels between the colonists(bored because far away from home and badly administered by grasping governors)had caused civil strife and three or four little settlements bad been destroyed(it sounds like the beginning of our own country)when a fresh batch of immigrants had decided to begin from the very beginning and had built themselves a town which they called“New City”or“Neapolis”,which eventually became Napoli, or in plain English, Naples.

It was already a prosperous commerical center when Rome was still a village inhabited by shepherds, and yet those shepherds must have had a veritable genius for administration, for already in the fourth century before our era Naples was an“ally”of Rome, an agreeable-sounding term, much less harsh than the word“subject”but describing the same sort of relationship. And from that moment on, Naples played the second role, was afterwards overrun by whole hordes of barbarians and finally fell into the hands of one of the Spanish branches of the Bourbon family, whose rule became a byword for scandalous mismanagement and suppression of every form of independent thought and action.

Nevertheless, such were the town's natural advantages that it became the most over-crowded city of the European continent. How all those people lived, nobody knew and nobody cared until the cholera epidemic of 1884 forced the modern kingdom to dean house, which it has done with admirable intelligence and severity.

The background of this marvellous spot is most appropriately occupied by the ornamental Vesuvius. Vesuvius is the neatest and most systematic of all the known volcanoes in the way it spreads its ashes.It rises up to a height of about 4000 feet and is entirely surrounded by lovely little villages which grow a particularly fiery wine, the famous Lacrimae Christi.The ancestors of those villages already existed in Roman days.And why not?Vesuvius was extinct.Since the memory of man, almost a thousand years, there had not been an eruption.There had been vague rumblings in the bowels of the earth in the year 63,but that meant nothing in a country like Italy.

The great surprise was sprung sixteen years later. In less than two days time Herculaneum and Pompeii and a third smaller city were so deeply buried beneath deep layers of lava and ashes that they completely disappeared from the face of the earth.Thereafter, at least once every hundred years, Vesuvius gave signs of being far from extinct.The new crater, rising 1500 feet above the ruins of the original one, is forever belching heavy clouds of smoke.And the statistics for the last 300 years—1631,1712,1737,1754,1779,1794,1806,1831,1855,1872,1906,etc.—show that Naples is by no means sure of not being turned into another Pompeii.

South of Naples we enter the province called Calabria. It suffers from the fact that it is so far away from the center of the country.It has railroad connections with the north but the coastal regions suffer from malaria, the central part is composed of granite, and agriculture is practiced as it was in the days of the first Roman Repubic.

A narrow strait, the strait of Messina, separates Calabria from the island of Sicily. The strait, which is only a little over a mile wide, was famous in antiquity for the presence of two whirlpools, called Scylla and Charybdis, which were said to swallow up whole ships if they ventured so much as half a yard out of their course.The fear those whirlpools aroused gives us an adequate idea of the helplessness of such ancient vessels, for a modern motor-boat putt-putts quietly right through the heart of these eddies without noticing that there is any commotion in the water.

As for Sicily, its geographic position had made it the natural center of the ancient world. Furthermore it enjoyed a delightful climate, was densely populated and highly fertile.But like Naples, life here was perhaps a little too good, a little too easy, a little too comfortable, for the Sicilians during more than two thousand long years submitted peacefully to every form of misgovernment that foreign potentates wished to bestow upon them.When they were not being plundered or tortured by Phoenicians or Greeks or Carthaginians(they were only about a hundred miles away from the northern coast of Africa)or Vandals or Goths or Arabs or Normans or French or by any of the 120 princes,82 dukes,129 marquises,28 counts and 356 barons who derived their titles from this happy island, they were repairing their houses from the damage done by the local volcano, Mt.Etna.The eruption of the year 1908,which completely destroyed the most important city, Messina, is still in everybody's memory.It killed more than 75,000 people.

The island of Malta is really a sort of aquatic suburb of Sicily and therefore ought to be mentioned here, although politically speaking it does not form part of Italy. It is a very fertile island and lies midway between Sicily and the coast of Africa.It dominates the trade-route from Europe to Asia by way of the Suez Canal.After the failure of the Crusades, it was presented to the knights of St.John who thereupon called themselves the Maltese Order, Knights of Malta.In the year 1798 Napoleon took the island on his way to drive the English out of India via Egypt and Arabia(a most ingenious plan which however failed because the desert was so much larger than he had expected).This was an excuse for the English to occupy it two years later and they have been there ever since, much to the chagrin of the Italians but not of the Maltese, who on the whole are better off than they would be under a government of their own people.

1 have paid little attention to the east coast of Italy, but it is not very important. In the first place, the Apennines used to reach almost as far as the water-front, making large settlements very difficult.As the other side of the Adriatic was practically uninhabitable on account of the steepness of its hills, the development of trade was not encouraged.From Rimini in the north to Brindisi in the south(from where the mail leaves for Africa and India)there are no harbors of any importance.

The heel of the boot is called Apulia. Like Calabria it suffers from the fact that it is so far removed from civilization, and like Calabria its agricultural methods are those practiced in the days when Hannibal honored this region with his presence, waiting twelve long years for the help from Carthage that was never to come.

There is a city in Apulia which enjoys one of the finest natural harbors in the world but which, alas, has no customers. It is called Taranto and it gave its name to a particularly venomous sort of spider and to a dance by which the people who had been bitten by that spider were prevented from falling asleep and entering into a deadly coma.

The Great War has made geography very complicated, for no account of modern Italy is perfect without mention of the Istrian peninsula which was given to the Italians in recognition of the fact that they had turned against their own allies and joined with the enemy. The city of Trieste was the principal export harbor of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.Having lost its natural hinterland, it is not doing so well.And finally, tucked away at the further end of the bay of Guarnero, is Fiume, another former possession of the Habsburgs.It was the natural outlet for the German people who had no other good port along the whole of the Adriatic coast.But fear that it might eventually be a rival of Trieste made the Italians clamor for Fiume.When the statesmen who concluded the treaty of Versailles refused to give it to them, they simply took it, or rather, their poet d'Annunzio, an excellent writer and a great scoundrel, took it for them.Then the Allies turned it into a“free state”,but finally, after prolonged negotiations between Italy and Yugoslavia, It was ceded to Italy.

That ends the present chapter, except for the island of Sardinia. This is really a very big island but it is so far away and so few people have ever been there that we sometimes forget that it exists.But it does exist, the sixth biggest island of Europe, covering an area of almost 10,000 square miles.Being the other extreme of that prehistoric mountain-range of which the Apennines were part, it turns its back upon the mother country.The western coast has excellent harbors.The east coast is steep and dangerous and has not a single convenient landing place.During the last two centuries it has played a curious role in the history of Italy.Until the year 1708 it belonged to Spain.Then it went over into Austrian hands.In 1720 the Austrians swapped Sardinia against Sicily, which then belonged to the Dukes of Savoy whose capital was the city of Turin, situated on the Po.Thereafter the Dukes of Savoy proudly called themselves Kings of Sardinia(from duke to king is a decided step upward)and that is how the modem kingdom of Italy happened to grow out of a kingdom called after an island which not one Italian in a hundred thousand has ever seen.