World So Wide by Sinclair Lewis

Author:Sinclair Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Adelaide Library

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lewis/sinclair/world/chapter11.html

Last updated Sunday, March 27, 2016 at 11:57

World So Wide, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 12

Olivia was youthful in white linen. “For a scholar, she spends quite a lot on clothes,” he reflected. Like a girl back home, she was not wearing stockings, and there was a glow of bare ivory knees as she tucked herself into the topolino.

“Is it possible that she has chucked her aloofness, that she likes me a good deal?” he wondered.

They were close together in the tiny car on this, their first mammoth excursion. Wisteria was beginning to paint the walls, the mimosa bush was in yellow cataracts, and the daffodils were like shy English visitors. The Tuscan spring was sweet with the smell of plowed fields among the vine rows, where gentle oxen moved in leisure, great white oxen against the brown earth, and the liberated lovers were bound for Venice, city to them enchanted but unknown. They sang together as they crawled, spiraled, sped up on the road across the Apennines that is the highway to Bologna and Venice.

After the Futa Pass, before the high notch of Raticosa, there was a long upland ridge with valleys like unknown kingdoms castle-starred below them. It was flying. The sheep pastures, the pocket vineyards, the dumpy plaster farmhouses, and lone monasteries which were high above the valley floor and yet hundreds of feet below the car could be comfortably reached, said Hayden, by a jump and then a good deal of quiet falling. It was a twisted trail for eagles.

Olivia looked out of the car and directly down. “I’m not much used to mountain driving. Are you good at it?”

“Used to it, at least.”

“You sound confident. Then I am.”

Before Raticosa they were in a mountain-top barren of stunted pine and heather. Up here, it was still late winter, and patches of sandy snow were dark along the road as they went back in time two months behind Florence. The higher peaks beyond them were solid snow.

“This must be frightening, in January. Like your Rockies. I’m a plodding plainsman and marsh-jumper. A lot of my childhood in Southern New Jersey,” said Olivia.

The Italians have been admirable road-engineers since centuries before Julius Caesar, and the car came down fast but securely on the corkscrew road that drops from the pass to Bologna in its valley, brisk red Bologna with its arcades. Then it was all flat land across Emilia and the Veneto, and eight hours from Florence, they left the car at the Piazzale Roma and magically took a gondola up the canals of Venice, past palaces whose doorsteps were washed by the sea channels.

Venice, on the map, resembles one large island (which is really a group of small ones) curved like a heavy thumb and hand, grasping at the head of another island like a timid animal with agitated pointed paws. When Hayden pointed this out, rattling a map in the breeze, Olivia cried, “An architect does get to have an eye! My poet!”

For propriety, they stayed at two different pensioni near the Piazza Morosini.

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