The old roads are wonderful,
skilfully aiming their way. But these new great roads are desolating,
more desolating than all the ruins in the world.
I walked on and on, down the Ticino valley, towards Bellinzona. The
valley was perhaps beautiful: I don't know. I can only remember the
road. It was broad and new, and it ran very often beside the railway. It
ran also by quarries and by occasional factories, also through villages.
And the quality of its sordidness is something that does not bear
thinking of, a quality that has entered Italian life now, if it was not
there before.
Here and there, where there were quarries or industries, great
lodging-houses stood naked by the road, great, grey, desolate places;
and squalid children were playing round the steps, and dirty men
slouched in. Everything seemed under a weight.
Down the road of the Ticino valley I felt again my terror of this new
world which is coming into being on top of us. One always feels it in a
suburb, on the edge of a town, where the land is being broken under the
advance of houses. But this is nothing, in England, to the terror one
feels on the new Italian roads, where these great blind cubes of
dwellings rise stark from the destroyed earth, swarming with a sort of
verminous life, really verminous, purely destructive.
Pages:
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275