During the nineteenth century journeys to the Mediterranean by land and sea were radically changed by steam locomotion, and in the first years of the twentieth century journeys by land were being changed again by the automobile. Nothing illustrates the modern revolution in transport so vividly as the experience of British travellers to the South.

In the 1830s and for most of the 1840s they relied mainly on horse power to carry them through France and Italy. Consequently the journey from London to Rome still took between three and four weeks–as long as it had taken in the days of the Roman Empire. Money could not buy greater speed—though it could buy a measure of convenience. Wealthy families could take their own vehicles and, by hiring teams of horses and voituriers at Boulogne, proceed on their way in well-upholstered comfort. At Abbeville in 1848 Effie Ruskin watched the departure of an English family of four and their six servants in a commodious coach. ‘They are just setting off,’ she reported, ‘with four horses, two cages full of canary birds, and a fat sick dog in a basket.’1 The carriage in which the Boyle family travelled to Italy in 1832 was fitted up like a miniature drawing-room, with a table, cupboards, and everything necessary for relaxation and refreshment. ‘The front box,’ recalled Mary Boyle, ‘on which we took it in turns to take an airing and see the country, had also receptacles for different treasures of travel, while the rumble behind was occupied by the faithful Henry. In this manner we proceeded leisurely, but comfortably … pausing in the middle of the day to bait our horses and feed ourselves, and sleeping at little wayside inns.’2 It was in this style that the Ruskin and Dickens families made their way to Italy in the 1840s. Ease and privacy could also be secured by taking a vettura. A contractor, called a voiturin in France and a vetturino in Italy, undertook to convey his passengers to a stipulated destination, feeding and lodging them on the way, for a fixed sum. This was a very popular form of travel and it was still in use in southern Italy as late as the 1890s. George Eliot and G. H. Lewes travelled by vettura from Toulon to Florence in 1861, and George Eliot described the journey as ‘the most delightful (and most expensive) … we have ever had.’3 Dr James Henry Bennet, writing in 1875, remembered this style of travel as ‘the most comfortable, pleasant and hygienic of any for tourists not much pressed for time, or very particular about expense’;4 and Frederic Harrison counted it among the precious memories of his old age. It was like ‘to have heard in their prime Rachel, Grisi and Lablache; to have read David Copperfield and Vanity Fair month by month in their early shilling numbers; to have seen the British fleet under sails; to have seen French cathedrals yet unrestored, and Rome as it was seen by Byron and painted by Piranesi.’5

These modes of travel were necessarily slow, even by early nineteenth-century standards, since the horses were not changed and had to be rested and baited. Thirty-five miles a day was about the most that could be expected. Any one disinclined to dally would travel post, hiring vehicles and horses from government postmasters at successive stations along the route. By this means it was possible to travel briskly without sacrificing comfort. In 1835 Henry Manning and his companions were able to reach Rome in twenty-five days, ‘spending two at Paris and the Sundays at Breteuil, Chalon, Nice and Civita Vecchia, and sleeping in … beds every night’, by travelling post.6

For the traveller compelled to rely on public transport the journey to the South in these early years was something akin to torment. He took his place in a diligence, a vehicle with the dimensions of a loaded haywaggon carrying between fifteen and thirty passengers and weighing up to five tons. These monstrous conveyances plied the length and breadth of France, Italy, and Spain at little more than walking pace, their axles hot and screaming and their passengers prostrate from successive days and nights of relentless motion and tight confinement. ‘From Paris’, wrote William Boxall to his sister in November 1833, ‘we journeyed to Chalon by diligence … This journey cost us three days’ and two nights’ perpetual travelling, sometimes at not more than three miles an hour, cramped, tired and exhausted.’7 Frances Power Cobbe looked back with nausea on her travels by diligence in Italy. She recalled ‘going four miles an hour in the heat and dust … and with a full complement of Italian travellers all ignorant of the fundamental principles of ablution … a journey of perhaps thirty, forty or fifty hours’.8 Passengers chose, according to their means, inside seats in the coupé or the intérieur, or outside seats on the banquette with the conductor; and each offered its species of misery. ‘I defy anything to render the banquette agreeable’, wrote the painter George Frederic Watts, who took the diligence from Paris to Chalon in 1843. ‘I never passed a more wretched night, except perhaps on my passage to Boulogne. Fancy a cold night wind and a horrid disgusting brute of a French conductor …’9 But the penalty of taking an inside place was a sense of asphyxiation and endless disputes with native passengers who were determined to keep the windows closed. Dr James Johnson, who travelled through France in 1829, described the diligences as ‘locomotive prisons … in which the traveller is pressed, pounded and, what is worse than all, poisoned with mephitic gasses and noxious exhalations evolved from above, below and around’.10 The artist Cato Lowes Dickinson reported that the diligence in which he crossed the Apennines in 1850 was ‘filled with the atmosphere of a cowshed impregnated with garlic’. He pulled the window down, whereupon a fellow-passenger promptly pulled it up. ‘I pulled it down,’ he went on, ‘for I was beginning to stifle! He pulled it up again, and he rattled away in Italian … At length, after some squabbling, I pulled it out of the frame altogether and he couldn’t put it back again. There was a great row about it and the people began to cover themselves up as if they had been crossing the Alps.’11 The chronicles of Continental travel are full of incidents of this kind, and Dr Thomas Madden expressed a popular British response when he wrote in 1864: ‘Any fond recollections I formerly entertained of the pleasures of stage-coach travelling in the palmy days of “the road” were completely dispelled by various journeys in diligences of from eighteen to twenty-four hours each through the south of Spain and France.’12 About the only traveller whose nostalgia survived the experience was–predictably perhaps–George Eliot, who went with G. H. Lewes from Malaga to Grenada by diligence in February 1867. ‘The vehicle was comfortable enough’, she declared, ‘and the road is perfect.’ But then they had the coupé to themselves, and the journey lasted only sixteen hours.13

The discomforts were even more acute when the vehicle crossed the Alps. It was not that the roads were bad. Napoleon had constructed two fine military roads across the Simplon and Mont Cenis passes, and a new carriage route across the St Gotthard was opened in 1841. Furthermore at the summit of the Mont Cenis pass there was, according to George Augustus Sala, ‘a tolerable hotel where you could get delicious lake trout and remarkably good cheese’. It was, as Sala explained, ‘the length of time consumed in the lagging diligence and the horrible jolting and creaking of the machine itself that reduced you to a condition approaching despair’.14 The crossing took about ten hours, and in winter passengers were transferred to a conveyance called a sledge but which, as Oscar Browning recalled, was really a box, so that ‘descending the lumpy slopes was … like being precipitated downstairs in a portmanteau’.15 Deterred by these vexations, the traveller by diligence more often than not avoided the Swiss routes to Italy and took instead the road to Marseilles or Aix and then proceeded along the Cornice. The stages were sixteen hours from Boulogne to Paris, four days and three nights from Paris to Marseilles, and then a further three days and two nights along the Riviera to Genoa. Even as early as the 1830s, however, it was unusual to go the whole way by road.

Steam was already at work to relieve the passenger of some at least of the tribulations of horse power. A regular service of river steamers operated on the Saône and the Rhône between Chalon and Avignon, and it was customary to transfer to one of these for the middle stretch of the voyage. As William Boxall explained to his sister: ‘The Rhône is so rapid that the boat performs in one day what it takes by diligence two days and two nights.’16 By this time, too, coastal steamers were plying regularly between the Riviera ports and Leghorn, Civita Vecchia, and Naples, and most travellers made use of these for the last stages of their journey to Italy, as well as for the first stages of their journey home. When the American traveller George Stillman Hillard boarded the steamboat for Genoa at Leghorn in 1848 he found, besides a full complement of passengers (‘most of whom were English’) three English travelling carriages strapped to the...