Presently I heard a German explaining to his wife about a wreck ahead. We were just starting now, perhaps twenty-five or thirty miles from Ventimiglia, and were dashing in and out of rocky tunnels and momentarily bursting into wonderful views of walled caves and sunlit sweeps of sea. The hill-town, the striped basilica with its square, many-arched campanile was coming into view. I was delighted to see open plains bordered in the distance by snow-capped mountains, and dotted sparsely with little huts of stone and brick--how old, Heaven only knows. “Here once the Tuscan shepherds strayed.” As Barfleur said, Italy was much poorer than France. The cars and stations seemed shabbier, the dress of the inhabitants much poorer. I saw natives, staring idly at the cars as we flashed past, or taking freight away from the platforms in rude carts drawn by oxen. Many of the vehicles appeared to be rattle-trap, dusty, unpainted; and some miles this side of Genoa--our first stop--we ran into a region where it had been snowing and the ground was covered with a wet slushy snowfall. After Monte Carlo, with its lemon and orange trees and its lovely palms, this was a sad comedown; and I could scarcely realize that we were not so much as a hundred miles away and going southward toward Rome at that. I often saw, however, distant hills crowned with a stronghold or a campanile in high browns and yellows, which made up for the otherwise poor foreground. Often we dashed through a cave, protected by high surrounding walls of rock, where the palm came into view again and where one could see how plainly these high walls of stone made for a tropic atmosphere. I heard the loud-voiced English woman saying, “It is such a delight to see the high colors again. England is so dreary. I never feel it so much as when we come down through here.” We were passing through a small Italian town, rich in whites, pinks, browns and blues, a world of clothes-lines showing between rows of buildings, and the crowds, pure Italian in type, plodding to and fro along the streets. It was nice to see windows open here and the sunshine pouring down and making dark shadows. I saw one Italian woman, in a pink-dotted dress partly covered by a bright yellow apron, looking out of a window; and then it was that I first got the tang of Italy--the thing that I felt afterwards in Rome and Florence and Assisi and Perugia--that wonderful love of color that is not rampant but just deliciously selective, giving the eye something to feed on when it least expects it. That is Italy! When nearly all the diners had left the car the English lady left also and her husband remained to smoke. He was not so very far removed from me, but he came a little nearer, and said: “The Italians must have their striped churches and their wash lines or they wouldn’t be happy.”