Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies

Author:Norman Davies [Davies, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141960487
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

Travellers usually reached Chambéry from France by crossing the frontier station on the River Guiers at le Pont de Beauvoisin, some 15 miles west of the city. St John reported a succession of peculiarly pedantic and intrusive customs examinations conducted by teams of French and ‘Sardinian’ inspectors. In local parlance, ‘beyond the Guiers’ meant ‘in France’, and ‘this side of the Guiers’ meant ‘in Savoy’. On leaving the city, travellers could go either north to Geneva and the Swiss frontier, south towards the border with Dauphiné, or east on the road to Italy. Fifteen miles from Chambéry, the eastbound road divides. The left fork takes one to Albertville, Moûtiers, Bourg St Maurice and via the Little St Bernard pass to the Val d’Aosta. The right fork, which Bayle St John preferred, leads to St Jean de Maurienne, the Mont Cenis and, through the Val di Susa, to Turin.

The capital of Piedmont lies 138 very precipitous miles from the capital of Savoy. On reaching it, having crossed the Mont Cenis on foot, Bayle St John did not conceal his distaste:

Turin has been suddenly swelled out to suit the convenience of a new royalty … [It] disappoints the stranger, not because it is uglier or meaner than he expects, but because of its audacious air of pretension … Every street, every square manifestly asserts its right to be admired, and fails at first because the mind puts itself into a hostile attitude. Instead of noticing the real beauties, we notice at once the tedious provoking uniformity …

Numbers of the houses and palaces are built of brick in a dirty London hue … The Carignan Palace, where the Chamber of Deputies sits, is a huge ugly pile … The palace of the king upon the Piazza Castello is nothing to look at, but its apartments are superbly laid out and decorated … The Palazzo Madama is an old brick house … To make it uglier than it would otherwise be, they have built an observatory on the top …

The court is as elaborate as the court of an empire, with all the same accumulation of useless offices and degrading titles, which are ludicrous … in so small a kingdom. If every soldier is a general, every man has two confessors.34

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