Pisa to Lake Garda - Part 1 Great Continental Railway Journeys

I'm embarking on a new railway adventure that will take me

across the heart of Europe.

I'll be using this - my Bradshaw's Continental Railway Guide,

dated 1913, which opened up

an exotic world of foreign travel for the British tourist.

It told travellers were to go, what to see and how to navigate

the thousands of miles of tracks criss-crossing the Continent.

Now, a century later,

I'm using my copy to reveal an era of great optimism and energy

where technology, industry, science and the arts were flourishing.

I want to rediscover that lost Europe that, in 1913, couldn't know

that its way of life would shortly be swept aside by the advent of war.

On this journey,

I'm heading to one of the most popular

destinations on an Edwardian traveller's itinerary,

to a country whose famous sights had, in 1913,

already attracted British grand tourists for more than 200 years.

A century ago, foreign tourists in Italy,

armed with their Bradshaw's guide, regarded the country as a museum.

They ambled through its glorious past

and endured its present day of beggars and smells and bad hotels.

Their attitude was unconsciously condescending

but there was, apparently, amongst Italians a Futurist movement,

proud of Italy's engineering prowess and obsessed with speeding cars

and trains and aeroplanes. Whoa!

The foreign tourist might need to fasten his seatbelt.

In 1913, Italy had been a united kingdom for a little over half

a century.

Unification had involved a decade of war, which had taken its toll.

While the British enjoyed

nostalgia for the Italian Renaissance, Italians felt

that their country had been reborn and many wanted to look forward.

My journey begins in Tuscany at the coastal city of Pisa.

From there, I'll travel inland to the ancient walled city of Lucca

before continuing east to the cradle of the Renaissance - Florence.

I'll then head north to Bologna before ending my journey

at glorious Lake Garda.

'Along the way, I'll find out

'how one of Italy's best-loved tourist attractions

'was saved from collapse.'

They were very concerned that it was about to fall over.

And it actually was.

'I'll attempt to carve out my place in Italy's artistic history.'

Michelangelo, eat your heart out!

'And I'll catch a spot of impromptu opera.'

THEY SING

Bravo!

In 1913, when Italy was a new nation forging its future,

many thousands of British tourists flocked to marvel at its past.

My first stop is Pisa.

Bradshaw's reminds me it was "the Pisai of the Romans.

"It's situated on both banks of the River Arno.

"The campanile, generally known as the Leaning Tower, 179 feet high

"and 13 foot out of the perpendicular, was finished in 1350."

Since time immemorial, tourists have had a penchant for the tower

and I believe that we retain that inclination today.

Those tourists arriving here 100 years ago came to experience

Italietta - a small,

sleepy country packed with treasures to be picked over.

That attitude endured despite Italy's tectonic political change and

its impressive industrial revolution at the start of the 20th century.

In Pisa, the sights that those tourists were coming to enjoy

still draw the crowds today.

What do you think of the Leaning Tower? Is it as good as you

-hoped it would be?

-It is a little smaller than we thought it would be.

-Is it your first time in Pisa?

-Yes. Very... It's beautiful.

The Leaning Tower is very, very special. It looks very attractive.

It just pulls your attention.

Do you think the tower will fall down?

-No, I didn't think so.

-Never, never! It won't.

The precarious-looking tower belongs to the 11th century cathedral.

Tourists may, in fact, be confident of its safety now

but not long ago, the monument teetered on the edge of collapse

until a group of engineers was charged with saving it.

I'm meeting emeritus professor John Burland from Imperial College

in London.

He was part of the rescue mission a quarter of a century ago.

-John, why does it lean?

-Ah!

Now, every child has tried to build a model brick tower on a carpet,

and what you all learn, all children, is you can get it

so high and then it begins to lean...

..and that's exactly the same with this tower.

Instead of a carpet, it's on, really, marsh land,

so the foundations are very soft

and there's a certain height at which a tower of that weight

and that height would start to lean,

and the tower is exactly at that height and that's why it's leaning.

Begun in the 12th century, the tower took nearly 200 years to construct.

Although it leaned from the outset, it wasn't

until the early 20th century that the danger became apparent.

The tower has had a very long history.

What was happening around the time of my Bradshaw's guide?

In 1911, they started making very precise

measurements on the inclination of the tower.

They did it every Christmas Day, presumably before they had a drink!

But they'd go out on Christmas morning

and make a measurement on the tower. It was quite a ritual.

Those measurements were very important to the commission

that I was on.

-100 years of precise records?

-Yes, that's right.

By the late 20th century, the tower leaned by around 15 feet

and was in danger of collapse.

In 1990, it was closed to the public as the government realised

that something had to be done.

Now, what was it that you came to do?

They were very concerned that it was about to fall over,

and it actually was.

And what we did was reduced its inclination, which took

the load off the south side because it was about to explode.

And the way we did it was instead of trying to push the leaning

side up, we actually took some ground out.

-So it leans less than it did?

-Yes.

John and his team attached 900 tonnes of lead weights to the tower's

north side to stabilise it

while earth underneath the higher side was removed.

Overall, it took more than a decade to secure the structure

and to reduce the inclination by almost two feet.

Finally, in 2001, the 800-year-old tower was reopened,

deemed safe for the next three centuries.

John, it's such a strange feeling as we ascend the tower.

-First we're thrown to the right, then we're thrown to the left.

-Yes.

Michael, that's because we're going up an inclined helix.

HE CHUCKLES

How did it feel to work on this project?

There were times when the stress was enormous

and I wondered why I had ever taken it on or agreed to it

but now that it's all done, you can look back on it and say, to have

worked on a World Heritage monument like that is a huge privilege.

You couldn't ask for any more, as an engineer.

The glistening tower, like many of Italy's most famous statues

and structures, was made of white marble,

which could be found in abundance just along the coast.

I'm leaving Pisa, taking the train 30 miles north.

I'm on my way to Carrara.

The guide calls it "an agreeable little town,

"almost exclusively engaged in working

"the world-known marble quarries.

"Many sculptors have studios here."

At the time of my guidebook, Italy had not long begun its industrial

revolution, which was concentrated in the north of the country.

In Carrara,

the population swelled as workers sought employment in the quarries.

The stone excavated here over millennia has been

used in some of the world's most famous monuments,

including the Pantheon in Rome and London's Marble Arch.

Thanks to its grain and purity of colour,

more marble has been mined here than anywhere else on Earth.

By contrast with Pisa, Carrara has no tourists,

and so one can appreciate its charming cathedral alone.

It's decorated with lovely friezes of animals and a cartwheel symbolising

the carts that used to bring the marble down from the mountain.

And here is the marble, close up and personal.

So many colours, so many variations of grain, so absolutely beautiful.

I'm meeting tour guide Nicola Musetti just outside town.

From these jagged hillsides,

close to a million tonnes of marble is exported every year.

It's a wonderful view of the mountains

and an enormous industrial scale.

Why is it that Carrara is so valued by sculptors?

Because in Carrara,

they can find the real, good marble to make sculptures, so that's

why Michelangelo came over here many times, in order to look for blocks.

So the Pieta, the Moses, the David,

all the masterpieces by Michelangelo were carved in our marble.

Only here they can find a huge quantity

and the best quality in the world to make sculptures and statues.

Until the 19th century,

the marble was cut by hand or blasted out in chunks.

In the late 1800s, the introduction of the helicoidal wire,

a kind of lubricated, giant cheese cutter,

allowed huge cubes to be precisely excavated.

Other innovations made their mark at the time.

When the railway age came,

-did that make a difference to the way that they mined the marble?

-Yeah.

It was a very big evolution and development

for the industry of marble

because they started to increase the quantity of marble to be

transported downwards to the sea, to the harbour,

so that was really a revolution for our marble industry.

Carrara maintains its position

as one of the world's leading marble producers.

I'm now heading to one of its oldest marble workshops.

I'm meeting Francesca Nicoli amongst an amazing library of plaster

casts, which are the first stage in the creation of a marble statue.

Francesca, what an extraordinary place.

Here, I find a British Prime Minister, WE Gladstone,

here, the very substantial figure of King Edward VII,

and here, the disapproving form of his mother, Queen Victoria.

Why are these plaster casts here?

These plaster casts belong to an important

tradition of portraits of eminent politicians.

My ancestor, Carlo Nicoli, he made, himself,

13 portraits of Queen Victoria.

One very important one was made for Brighton,

so it's been a very important production during the Victorian age.

First, a plaster cast was made

and approved before being passed on to the sculptor or to

a series of skilled carvers to be meticulously crafted in marble.

A custom-made statue was the ultimate display of 19th-century importance.

And are you still making monuments like this?

Little by little, this tradition, glorious tradition, of the portraits

of eminent politicians like William Gladstone has come to an end,

making space for modern artists.

Politicians really don't have much hope now of getting a monument?

No, but top models like Naomi Campbell, yes they do.

How the world changes!

The subjects of sculpture may be different today,

but they are created in much the same way as 100 years ago.

Ciao.

Michele.

-Diego.

-Diego.

It takes years to learn this art, but today I've been granted

permission to lay my untrained hands on this precious stone.

This is the most important implement

and there is the second most important implement.

Michelangelo, eat your heart out!

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

I have to do it gently, he says.

It would take Diego over two months to carve a statue out of this block.

Let's hope I don't set him back too far.

-Not ready to hire!

-Not now!

-Not at the moment. Not now!

Oops!

Very satisfying. Lovely work.

Diego, I'm going to let you finish.

After all that concentration, I'm ready for sleep.

Tomorrow, I'll be bound for the heart of Tuscany.

I'm up bright and early to catch a connection from Pisa

headed 35 miles inland.

My next stop is Lucca, which Bradshaw's tells me,

"is a pleasant town, Roman again, situated in a fertile plain.

"From the railway station the Duomo is seen towering above the ramparts."

100 years ago, Bradshaw tourists came to see

the heavily fortified city states that had warred against each other.

But Italians were proud that for 50 years they had been a united kingdom.

OPERA SINGING

Lucca's defensive walls

and the exquisite mediaeval streets within them

are some of the best preserved in Italy, and a great draw for visitors.

For early 20th century travellers, there was another attraction.

As an opera lover,

I'm excited to be in a city associated with a favourite composer.

I'm meeting theatre and opera director Vivian Hewitt,

who is based in Italy just behind the opera house.

Vivian, why is Lucca Puccini's city?

Not only was he born here but throughout his long,

much travelled career in which he travelled all over the world,

he kept coming back here.

He has this very intense relationship with his home town.

-Do we find any influences of Lucca in the music?

-It's everywhere.

He somehow or other draws on his own personal experience

of where he lives and of what surrounds him

to create extremely exotic places that are very far from him.

Puccini's operas became familiar to British audiences

in the years before my guidebook.

Between 1897 and 1904, La boheme, Tosca and Madame Butterfly

were performed in Britain shortly after their Italian premiers.

The British were seduced by the Italian language

and by Italian romanticism.

But Puccini transported audiences far afield to Paris, China,

Japan and the Wild West.

The operas are full of passion,

the most extraordinary elongated love duets.

What was the inspiration for that?

I think Puccini is a man who is almost permanently in love.

He is not just a Don Giovanni,

he just doesn't amuse himself seducing women.

I think it's often women who seduce him.

As a very young man, he falls in love with Elvira,

who is a married woman and already has a family.

She is the wife of a friend of his.

She becomes pregnant and they run away together.

She is his permanent life companion.

In the meantime, of course, every time he writes an opera

he has a muse and he falls madly in love with somebody.

His passion-filled operas, inspired by real life,

made Puccini a huge success.

He rapidly became one of Italy's best-loved new composers.

# O soave fanciulla

# O dolce viso

# Di mite circinfuso alba lunar

# Fremon

# Gi nell'anima

# Le doclezze estreme

# Tu sol comandi, amore

# Nel bacio

# Freme amor. #

Bravo!

With that duet ringing in my ears,

I must leave Lucca to continue my journey.

I'm bound for the Tuscan capital

and one of the most celebrated stops on any tourist itinerary.

Bradshaw struggles to sum up the beauty of Florence.

"It's generally conceded pre-eminence as the centre of intellectual life.

"Literature and fine arts have attained a dignity

"and grace that fittingly adorn a city set like a gem amidst beautiful,

"natural surroundings."

It tells me that Florence was formally the capital

of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and sometime

the capital of the Kingdom of Italy between 1865 and 1871.

I'd like to find out how it was that this gem lost its crown.

Since the Italian Renaissance began here in the 14th century,

Florence has drawn people from around the globe to admire

its intoxicating mix of art, architecture and literary history.

Certainly no Edwardian tour of Italy

could be complete without visiting the city.

In 1913, the old town had recently undergone extensive transformation

after the capital of Italy moved here from Turin in 1865.

I've arranged to meet historian Silvia Cavicchioli.

Silvia, what was the effect then on Florence physically

on becoming the capital of Italy?

Well, Florence at the time was still a medieval town

with an ancient heart within the medieval walls.

The problem was that many people who had arrived from Turin,

we are talking about a flux

of something like 30,000 people.

It was hastily re-planned by an architect,

Giuseppe Poggi, who intended to enlarge

and to modernise the ancient town.

The population of 118,000 swelled

as politicians and citizens moved to the new capital.

Poggi re-planned the city to accommodate them,

replacing the medieval walls with a ring road around the ancient centre.

As parts of Florentine history were torn down,

Italy's united future was being built.

The geographical achievement of unification had been very fast

so the ruling class needed symbols

to create a sense of national identity.

And this is why they looked for symbols of unity in the past.

And so the modernisation of Florence went hand in hand

with the recovery of the glorious past of Italy.

Along with rebuilding the city,

the government commissioned celebrations and statues

to glorify Italian heroes such as the 13th century poet, Dante.

But Florence's role as Italian capital wasn't to last.

In 1871 it was moved to its final location - Rome.

Did Florence regret losing the status of capital city?

Michael, I think that Florentines were, and are, very clever people.

They were aware that Rome was destined to be the final step

of the Italian Risorgimento.

Florence may have been the country's capital just briefly,

but the streets today were shaped by changes made during those six years.

I'm ready for some rest

before I continue my exploration in the morning.

'Next time, I'll learn how violence erupted in this city

'after the Futurists arrived by train.'

There was no friendly discussion. They arrived here

to defend Futurism with their fists.

-A-ha!

-Release the tagliatelle.

'I'll tangle with a dish

'that titillated the taste-buds of Edwardian tourists.

'And I'll get to experience

'the Italians' century-long need for speed.'

HE CHUCKLES