Giambattista Bodoni. Valerie Lester

Turin to Genoa stopped overnight along the way, and passengers descended to eat their meal of the day and to stay in local establishments of varying degrees of sleaziness. On offer were inns, guesthouses, and rooms in private homes. Sometimes travelers were given dirty hay to sleep on, but this might have been preferable to the letto abitato, a bed shared with other people and bed bugs. Tobias Smollett, the dyspeptic Scottish author, traveling in Italy at almost the same time as Bodoni, grumbles: “The hostlers, postilions, and other fellows hanging about the post-houses in Italy, are the most greedy, impertinent, and provoking. Happy are those travelers who have phlegm enough to disregard their insolence and importunity: for this is not so disagreeable as their revenge is dangerous.”¹⁷ Invariably, travelers came away feeling exploited, and quickly learned to negotiate a price before agreeing to spend the night.

      Lenten fare along the way would have consisted mainly of vegetable soup, which relied heavily on field greens and a variety of legumes such as kidney beans, chickpeas, lentils, and above all fava beans. Bread, omelets, anchovies, frogs, snails, crabs, plus fresh water fish caught in local ditches and streams, would also be available¹⁸ — for prices the boys may not have been able to afford.

      At Genoa, Bodoni had his first sight of the sea; until then, his experience with important bodies of water had been exposure to a rather petite Po flowing through the lower reaches of Saluzzo and a plumper Po flowing through Turin. At Genoa, la Superba, with the Appenines at her back and the Mediterranean at her feet, Bodoni came into contact with a city filled with gorgeous palaces and parks plus all the seaminess of a port that was home to sailing vessels plying their trade from port to port in the Mediterranean.

      Bodoni and Costa remained in Genoa waiting for transportation to take them south. Bodoni spent his time wisely: he quickly found work with a printer. (Genoa has a history of printing dating back as far as 1471.) There he earned more funds for the continuation of the journey. Finally, in the most likely scenario, he and Costa set sail for Civitavecchia, the port for Rome, rather than traveling overland.

      On arrival at Civitavecchia, after a fast, stomach-churning winter sail, with the north wind racing down the coast of Italy, they would pick up a diligence for the last stage of their journey of 85 kilometers along the Via Aurelia to Rome. The closer they approached Rome, the more desolate the landscape became, a landscape exhausted by its own glorious past, now nothing more than an unproductive wasteland. After the sweet orderliness of Saluzzo, the long approach to Rome through this miserable malarial wilderness would have been disconcerting and disappointing. At last the diligence passed through the Porta San Pancrazio and into Rome, near the top of the Janiculum hill.

      Now we must imagine the moment: a few paces more and the boys can quench their thirst in the huge, gushing Acqua Paola fountain, and then, looking east, they see the city unfolding in the valley below. Look! There’s the Tiber! I see the Pantheon! Is that the Forum? Over there on that hill, that’s Trinità dei Monti! Look at the snowcapped mountains beyond!

      They had arrived at last, and all Rome lay at their feet as they gazed out across the Tiber.

      

      The Palazzo Valentini, Bodoni’s home in Rome, directly behind Trajan’s column.

      

      PLATE 1 Don Ferdinando di Borbone, Duke of Parma. Circa 1770. By Pietro Melchiorre Ferrari.

      

      PLATE 2 Father Paolo Maria Paciaudi. By Giuseppe Lucatelli.

      

      PLATE 3 Ennemond Petitot. By Domenico Muzzi.

      

      PLATE 4 Guillaume Du Tillot, Prime Minister of Parma. By Pietro Melchiorre Ferrari.

      

      PLATE 5 Don Ferdinando di Borbone, Duke of Parma. By Johann Zoffany.

      

      PLATE 6 Maria Amalia of Austria, Duchess of Parma. By Johann Zoffany.

      

      PLATE 7 José Nicolás de Azara. By Anton Raphael Mengs.

      

      PLATE 8 Joachin Murat, King of Naples.

      

      PLATE 9 Is it or isn’t it Bodoni? This unnamed portrait of a young man, attributed variously to the artists Giuseppe Baldrighi and Andrea Appiani, was long assumed to be of Bodoni. Recently, experts in the history of clothing have dated it to the 1790s rather than the 1770s, so unless either artist were drawing from memory, it is probably not Bodoni. However, the young man’s features so closely resemble those in Appiani’s later portrait that a face-match on iPhoto paired the two images.

      

      PLATE 10 Giambattista Bodoni. By Andrea Appiani.

      

      PLATE 11 Napoleon in the Robes of the King of Italy. By Andrea Appiani.

      

      PLATE 12 Empress Marie Louise of France. Later Duchess of Parma. By Robert Lefèvre.

      

      PLATE 13 Don Ferdinando in Maturity. Artist unknown.