HEADLAND-HOPPING TO ROME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 241, 4 February 1944, Page 10

HEADLAND-HOPPING TO ROME

But We Went By Tandem, Not Tank

(Written for "The Listener" by

M.

R.

HRICE now the Allied armies in Italy have bypassed land opposition by making another landing further up the coast. Can this "headlandhopping" (as I suppose we may call it), go on indefinitely? Considerations of material, personnel, transport and terrain enter into that question. I can tell you only about terrain. Ten years ago, in a super-summer like our last December, I came down that Tyrrhenian coast by the best of all methods for seeing while you travel -a bicycle. By car you see too little altogether (or, if you prefer, too much all together). While if you trayel by foot, you generally end up by car. What is better still, I was the "lady back" of a tandem. The "pilot" for’ard kept one eye on the road for both of us. As "observer," I simply observed-and, of course, pedalled. The far north, coming down from Genova toward Livorno (Genoa to Leghorn) is the well-known Riviera or Blue Coast (Cote d’Azure). The southern curl of the Alps, which later thins into Italy’s "shinbone" of Apennines and then frazzles out cato’-nine-tail-wise into the ranges our armies have been range, hangs here steeply above the sea. The beaches below used to be covered (and I don’t write metaphorically), with gaudy bathing boxes and their inhabitants, striped pavilions, spotted tents and jazz sunshades-very Lido-like, but we New Zealanders prefer to see our beaches. To-day, no doubt, they are lined with wire, while binoculars in the mountains above keep a jittery watch on Allied-occupied Corsica, which shows up very tall above the sea on really clear days much like the Little Barrier from Auckland. However, as you work your way out of this too self-consciously picturesque region you run into simple country and a shore which is neither al] staked out by tourists and rentiers nor so much a right-angled intersection between sea and mountain as to be (I imagine), uninteresting to invasion commanders. The Aurelian Road "You take the old Aurelian Road by shore-déscending pines Where, blue as any peacock’s neck, the Tyrrhene ocean shines." Kipling fathered these words on to a homesick centurion in Britain about A.D. 144. But-accepting hearsay evidence about the peacock--they perfectly apply to-day. Livorno is a busy port on the plain of Tuscany that runs up to Florence, Anthony Adverse’s city, plus some square concrete wharves and ‘blocks. But on either side of it stretched broad, flat, empty beaches alongside an almost equally level sea. Determined to pitch our moving tent a day’s march nearer Rome each night, we pedalled south three days beside it, more often than not with "Tyrrheno’s" brisk salt tang fragrantly filtered through an unbroken belt of pines along the sandhills.

On the landward side is Italy as you imagine it-hills of olives and vines; castles (or at least towers), on high points, and elsewhere neat red-tiled cottages among fruit trees; and lumbering solid-wheeled wagons barely moving behind a yoke or two of huge-horned kind-eyed, white oxen. Public Observer No. 1 Headlands jut out here and there where the road looks down into pellucid green and blue caves among red rocks. But the most striking possession of the coast mile after mile is the amazingly un-Italian institution of solitude. So, at any rate, we were congratulating ourselves one mid-day halt, Stretched sun-bathing on the seaward side of the pine belt, when, happening to look up, we saw about five yards distant an Italian farmhand whom we had passed a full mile back regarding us with an unblinking stare. All Italians are rubbernecks of Dunlop’s First Grade, psychological giraffes in fact, -but we remember him as _ Public Observer Number One. Having followed with his eyes each forkload of wriggling pasta from billy to mouth, he stumbled down the long beach after us, undressing: among the ripples to follow us should we swim out of sight..... Even more keenly would the Tuscans_ greet foreigners coming up _ those lonely sands to-day-especially if they brought pasta. In fact, I suspect that those patriotic artists who painted Il Duce’s bulldog features on their house walls (as one frequently saw), have been keeping a pot of whitewash handy for some time. Whether they will give a more material welcome is another matter. Don’t Carry Mind-Pictures Moving south along this coast I lost my remaining faith in novels, postcards _and travel-folders. Picture-book Italy ended abruptly less than halfway to Rome. Towed behind a friendly lorry on an otherwise deserted road, we flew one whole hot afternoon through a yellow-brown eucalypt-strewn country that would have been way-back Australia if only the occasional two-story square white casa, battened down by wooden blinds against the besieging heat, had been a single solitary ruinous iron-roofed shack. Night in the mountains beyond was South Island high country, down to the nip in the air and the lamb bleating in the distance. Morning was Venuezuela, with the road lost among head-high pampas vegetation into which the sunning snakes slid away after striking viciously at our spokes. Breakfast brought Grossette, a highlycompressed (almost dehydrated), country centre, practically Spanish in its bareness of high, blank walls, And by evening we were passing women with waterpots on their heads and men on tiny Eastern donkeys. Beware of mindpictures of Italy. The country varies with the kilo-pegs. However, there is one stretch-the stretch that is in the news at presentfrom Orbetello down past Civitavecchia (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) and the Tiber mouth to where the landings have been made that is all of a piece. It is called the Roman Campagna. But if "Campagna" brings you visions of green fields and vines, please think instead of a shaved plain, suncracked into gullies of coarse, tawny grass, and looking down on a distant, strangely unfriendly sea. Seen from the top of the famous Alba Longa near Rome-Long Alba indeed, to a cyclist! -when Kesselring is probably regarding it at this moment, it is desolation. Seen riding through it as we did, it shows unexpected life. But first about Orbetello, since it cannot stay out of the news for long. It used to be a miniature and primitive fisherman’s Venice on the land side of Insula Argentaria, a blue forested island much like Kapiti, only smaller and nearer to shore. Within recent centuries, sandbacks have crept out on either side and have changed it into an all-weather seaplane base lagoon. Balbo’s air fleet to America had set out from here the week before we camped on the now well-shrubbed sandbank. To-day Orbetello probably wards off return visits along this whole shore. Ants drove us from a spot where every prospect pleased and man, the vile, the rubberneck, was absent-ants, not, as usual, preserving our siesta from interruption by never allowing it to start, but pilfering our panniers with a pertinacity, organisation, and ruthless disregard’ for ownership that would have shamed any human army. We considered their ways and were wise. We left. Sirocco! _ Night found us tented on the baked Campagna, still weary and still sleepless. But now the reason was drifting chaff, the husks of qa recent reaping. And in dawn light we pushed down the gully sides, past the strange hill top shape of Tarquinia (hometown of Rome’s first kings and continuously inhabited ever since).-yes, we pushed our steed, down hill, 0.2 foot. Civitavecchia appeared, a considerable fishing town, overcast, yet sweltering. When we tried to light the primus in the shelter of the sea rocks nearby our matches ~ were too wet to strike. When we lay down out of the wind behind a wall, we steamed with sweat. When we tried

in the open, we grew clammy and brine-soaked. Atmosphere parching, wind sticky and wet, wind-pressure so constant as to hide its gale force-and then a totterer-by panted the secret: "Ah! Ah! Troppo caldo! Ah! Ah! Troppo vento! Troppo Aqua! SIROCCO! We were exhausted long before daylight was, and crawled gratefully across to a railway settlement of three houses that gradually approached. "Camp in my garden," invited one owner. But he had just flooded it from the engine tank. "In mine, then," begged the second. But his was a rockery. "Ah, I have something ideally level," sighed the last. It was level-a concrete yard. To hurt no feelings we pretended that we were recovered enough to push on to Rome. "Quite wise. It’s a mere 25 kilos," said A. "You'll be there in an hour-35 kilos," said B. "-40 kilos," said C, We were not nearly so elastic. In fact, we were stretched to breaking-point before reaching the next dwelling, two miles ahead. It was a huge red concrete block, a city tenement down to its many stories and windows flagged with wash- | ing, and to the human ants surging to meet us out of its tunnel entrance. But they were adamant as the wall: only the manager could give water, straw and permission. And where was he? Out at another State Grain Farm, two miles off our route. Water and protection from that tickling, flying straw we must have, however. We staggered on. But inside the tunnel of this State Agricultural Factory (4 la Russe), we did at least find welcome, a swallow of water and fruit, a bed on the harnessroom floor-and oblivion. Nevertheless, the teamsters coming to harness-up at dawn found us already packed and cooking the breakfast rice. Stamina? Not at all.. The chaff-cutter through the wall had started up at 3.0 a.m. Maybe the Campagna is less unfriendly in winter to foreign invaders. _ But I doubt it.