Page:The grand tour in the eighteenth century by Mead, William Edward.djvu/118

 turn the stomach of a muleteer; and the victuals cooked in such a manner that even a Hottentot could not have beheld them without loathing."

All this is moving enough. But to some extent the experience of the traveler was shaped by chance. Unfamiliar with the country or the language he was often as likely to get the worst accommodations as the best. The irascible Sharp was as ready to complain as Smollett, but even Sharp, on returning from Rome to Florence, finds endurable inns along the road. He writes from Florence, "We arrived here last night, after a journey of four days from Rome, and found much more agreeable accommodations than we experienced either on the road to Rome from Venice, or to Naples from Rome; indeed, to do justice to the inns, we met with so much cleanliness, and such good beds, that we found ourselves most agreeably disappointed in these articles." And again: "The country from Bologna to this place [Alexandria] is a delightful, fertile plain, and the accommodations so much, better than those we meet with on the road to Rome by the way of Loretto, that I desire you will make the distinction betwixt my journey thither and my return, whenever you give a character of Italy from my letters."

Bad as were the majority of the country inns north of Rome, those between Rome and Naples were worse, and they called forth endless complaints. In general, observes Gorani, "the inns of these kingdoms" — Naples and Sicily — "do not deserve to bear the name. Nothing is to be found there but water, bad wine, and bread still worse." On the road between Rome and Naples "they gave us for supper," says Misson, "cheese made with the milk of buffles; and we were forced to lie upon mattresses, which, I think, were made with stones of peaches." "All the way to Naples," says the querulous Sharp, "we never once crept within the sheets, not daring to encounter the vermin and nastiness of those beds." He elsewhere observes: "Some of the inns on this road exceed in filth and bad accommodations all that I have ever written on that subject