The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the Ægean | Page 8

ourselves in the tonneau before the Sicilian, impatient to be
gone, stepped on the accelerator and the big Lancia, flinging itself over
the brow of the hill, plunged headlong for the first of these hairpin turns.
"Slow up!" I shouted. "Slow up or you'll have us over the edge!" As the
driver's only response to my command was to grin at us reassuringly
over his shoulder, I looked about for a soft place to land. But there was
only rock-plated highway whizzing past and on the outside the road
dropped sheer away into nothingness. We took the first turn with the
near-side wheels in the gutter, the off-side wheels on the bank, and the
car tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees. The second bend we
navigated at an angle of sixty degrees, the off-side wheels on the bank,
the near-side wheels pawing thin air. Had there been another bend
immediately following we should have accomplished it upside down.
Fortunately there were no more for the moment, but there remained the
village street of Cles. We pounced upon it like a tiger on its prey.
Shrilling, roaring and honking, we swooped through the ancient town,
zigzagging from curb to curb. The great-great-grandam of the village
was tottering across the street when the blast of the Lancia's siren
pierced the deafness of a century and she sprang for the sidewalk with
the agility of a young gazelle. We missed her by half an inch, but at the
next corner we had better luck and killed a chicken.

Meran--the Italians have changed its official name to Merano, just as
they have changed Trent to Trento, and Bozen to Bolzano--has always
appealed to me as one of the most charming and restful little towns in
Europe. The last time I had been there, before the war-cloud darkened
the land, its streets were lined with powerful touring cars bearing the
license-plates of half the countries in Europe, bands played in the parks,
the shady promenade beside the river was crowded with
pleasure-seekers, and its great tourist hostelries--there were said to be
upwards of 150 hotels and pensions in the town--were gay with
laughter and music. But this time all was changed. Most of the large
hotels were closed, the streets were deserted, the place was as dismal as
a cemetery. It reminded me of a beautiful house which has been closed
because of its owner's financial reverses, the servants discharged, the
windows boarded up, the furniture swathed in linen covers, the carpets
and hangings packed away in mothballs, and the gardens overrun with
weeds. At the Hotel Savoy, where rooms had been reserved for us, it
was necessary, in pre-war days, to wire for accommodations a fortnight
in advance of your arrival, and even then you were not always able to
get rooms. Yet we were the only visitors, barring a handful of Italian
commercial travelers and the Italian governor-general and his staff. The
proprietor, an Austrian, told me that in the four years of war he had lost
$300,000, and that he, like his colleagues, was running his hotel on
borrowed money. Of the pre-war visitors to Meran, eighty per cent. had
been Germans, he told me, adding that he could see no prospect of the
town's regaining its former prosperity until Germany is on her financial
feet again. Personally, I think that he and the other hoteliers and
business men with whom I talked in Meran were rather more
pessimistic than the situation warranted, for, if Italy will have the
foresight to do for these new playgrounds of hers in the Alps even a
fraction of what she has done for her resorts on the Riviera, and in
Sicily, and along the Neapolitan littoral, if she will advertise and
encourage and assist them, if she will maintain their superb roads and
improve their railway communications, then I believe that a few years,
a very few, will see them thronged by even greater crowds of visitors
than before the war. And the fact that in the future there will be more
American, English, French and Italian visitors, and fewer Germans,
will make South Tyrol a far pleasanter place to travel in.

The Italians are fully alive to the gravity of the problems which
confront them in attempting to assimilate a body of people, as
courageous, as sturdily independent, and as tenacious of their
traditional independence as these Tyrolean mountaineers--descendants
of those peasants, remember, who, led by Andreas Hofer, successfully
defied the dictates of Napoleon. Though I think that she is going about
the business of assimilating these unwilling subjects with tact and
common sense, I do not envy Italy her task. Generally speaking, the
sympathy of the world is always with a weak people as opposed to a
strong one, as England discovered when she