Italy, indeed, is very singularly situated in respect to climate. With its feet resting against the snow-clad Alps, and its head stretching towards the burning shore of Africa, it is alternately exposed to the suffocation of the sirocco, from the arid sands of Lybia, and the icy chill of the tramontane from the Alps or the Apennines. The elevated ridge of mountains that bisects the whole of Italy longitudinally, operates powerfully in modifying her climate. Against the summits of this rugged and lofty chain of Apennines the sea-breeze that has swept the Mediterranean or even the Atlantic Ocean, on one side, or the Adriatic on the other, strikes often with great violence; but is, on the whole, impeded in its course-more especially the lower strata of air-hence the stillness of the atmosphere so remarkable at Rome and many other parts of the western plains and valleys of Italy. This stillness is by no means advantageous, in point of salubrity, to a country where deleterious exhalations are hourly issuing from the soil in the Summer season, and which are dissipated by winds and concentrated by calms. Thus, then, this ' Apennine ridge affords no protection from the chilling blast of the Alps, or the enervating sirocco of Africa; while it diminishes the utility, by obstructing the current of the sea-breezes, from whatever point they may blow. But the Apennines themselves, when they annually resume their caps of snow, become the source of most piercing and cutting winds, more chilling than those from the Alps, on account of their greater proximity to the plains. The Apennine, therefore, is one of the agents which produce those excessive transitions of temperature, to which the atmosphere of Italy is subjected. The belt of ground, or series of plains and valleys, on the western side of the Apennines, is very differently circumstanced from that on the eastern. The lime-stone stratum, on the Adriatic side, is prodigiously thick; and prevents the issue of subterranean fires, in the form of volcanos. That stratum covering the primitive rock, on the western side of the Apennines, is infinitely less dense. No vestiges of volcanos have ever been ATMOSPHERICAL VICISSITUDES. 257 found on the Adriatic declivities-while the western slope, on which all the great cities are built, presents craters in abundance. The geology of the Roman environs, and of Italy generally, shews, first, the operation of some tremendous subterranean fire that hove up the Apennines themselves ;—secondly, the operation of the sea on all the grounds lower than the Apennine ridges;-thirdly, the operation of fire again, in heaving up and disrupting the marine depositions ;-lastly, the operation of stagnant fresh waters, as evinced by the various depositions from that source. In Rome and its immediate neighbourhood, the operation of the last three causes has been clearly traced by Leopold, Von Buch, and others. From the relative situation, then, of the Alps, the Apennines, and the sands of Africa, it may be said that almost every breeze in Italy comes over a volcano or an iceberg—and, consequently, we are alternately scorched by the one and frozen by the other. There is a vast difference between the variability of climate in England and in Italy. In England, the changes (barometrical, thermometrical, and hygrometrical) are very frequent, but they are also very limited in their range. In Italy, it is just the reverse the transitions are not very frequent; but, when they do occur, the range is often most extensive. Now the frequency of alternations in England, and the moderate range of these alternations, are the very circumstances which render them comparatively innocuous. We have cloud and sunshine, heat and cold, winds and calms, drought and rain, twenty times in one day at home; but the British constitution becomes inured to them, and safely so, from the rapidity of their recurrence and the limitation of their range. Nay, this perpetual scene of atmospheric vicissitudes not only steels us against their effects, but proves an unceasing stimulus to activity of body and mind, and, consequently, to vigour of constitution. Hear the words —the last words, of one of the most talented philosophers of our own days. "Of all the climates (says Sir Humphry Davy) of Europe, England seems to me most fitted for the activity of the mind, Ll and the least suited to repose. The alterations of a climate so various and rapid, continually awake new sensations; and the changes in the sky, from dryness to moisture, from the blue etherial to cloudiness and fogs, seem to keep the nervous system in a constant state of excitement. In the changeful and tumultuous atmosphere of England, to be tranquil is a labour— and employment is necessary to ward off the attacks of ennui. The English nation is pre-eminently active, and the natives of no other country follow their objects with so much force, fire, and constancy."* The above is fact-the following is a good deal tinctured with fancy, if not fiction. "In the mild climate of Nice, Naples, or Sicily, where, even in Winter, it is possible to enjoy the warmth of the sunshine in the open air beneath palm trees, or amidst the evergreen groves of orange trees, covered with odorous fruit and sweet scented leaves, mere existence is a pleasure, and even the pains of disease are sometimes forgotten amidst the balmy influence of Nature, and a series of agreeable and uninterrupted sensations invite to repose and oblivion."+ Yes! but when we come to be startled from this bed of roses by the SIROCCO or the TRAMONTANE, we find to our cost, that the longer the series of agreeable sensations, the more susceptible do we become to the deleterious influence of the enormous transition in the climate. The rapid, the frequent, but the tiny vicissitudes of an English atmosphere, are no more to be compared to the mountain blast superseding the sirocco, than a * Consolations of Travel, 1830. + Ibidem. ‡ Lady Morgan, with her usual acuteness, draws, in a few words, a more accurate picture of the climate of Naples than the philosopher. "In Rome and its surrounding deserts, every thing depicts the death of Nature; in Naples and its environs, all evinces her vigour and activity—an activity that preys on itself—a feverish vitality that consumes while it brightens. The air is fire, the soil a furnace. Sun-beams bring death ! and the earth, when struck, sends up burning vapours !" ATMOSPHERICAL VICISSITUDES. 259 squall at Spithead can be likened to a typhoon in the Indian ocean. It is to be remembered that the usual Summer temperature of Italy approaches very near to that of the West Indies, without the advantage of the regular land and sea-breezes of tropical countries bordering on the ocean. This is a peculiarity which the cold of the neighbouring Alps, so often poured down on the fervid vales of Italy, renders a most dangerous anomaly among the climates of the earth. Sir Humphry Davy travelled with the curiosity of a philosopher, rather than with the discrimination of a physician, or the sensitiveness of an invalid. Let us hear what a clergyman of erudition, talents, and keen perception-himself a valetudinarian, says of the "balmy influence " of Italian skies. "February 11th. The weather is beautiful (says Mr. Matthews) and as warm as a June day in England. We sit at breakfast without a fire, on a marble floor-with the casements open-enjoying the mild breeze. "February 12th. Oh this land of Zephyrs! Yesterday was warm as July ;-to-day we are shivering with a bleak easterly wind, and an English black frost. Naples is one of the worst climates in Europe for complaints of the chest. Whatever we may think of sea-air in England, the effect is very different here. The sea-breeze in Devonshire is mild and soft-here it is keen and piercing." "March 14th. EGRI SOMNIA-if a man be tired of the slow lingering progress of consumption, let him repair to Naples; and the denouement will be much more rapid. The Sirocco wind, which has been blowing for six days, continues with the same violence. The effects of this south-east blast, fraught with all the plagues of the deserts of Africa, are immediately felt in that leaden oppressive dejection of spirits, which is the most intolerable of diseases. This must surely be the "plumbeus Auster” of Horace."* Diary of an Invalid. The Sirocco did not escape the observation of lf, thermometrically speaking, we say that the Summer heat of the Italian valleys approaches the temperature of the tropics* -while the tramontane blast of Winter depresses the mercury as much as a Caledonian North-easter-we convey a very inadequate idea of the feelings and the physical effects occasioned by these opposite conditions of the atmosphere in Italy. I have alluded to this subject, under the head of Naples, and also on the journey from Genoa to Nice. The thermometer, in fact, is no index or criterion of our feelings under the influence of the SIROCCO and TRAMONTANE. The former appears to suspend, exhaust, or paralyze the nervous energy of the body, and the sensorial vigour of the mind; both of which fall prostrate beneath the flood of enervating steam engendered by the aerial current sweeping over burning sands and evaporating seas. The latter, or tramontane, comes down from the Alps or Apennines, with such a voracious appetite for caloric, that it sucks the vital heat from every pore-shrivels up the surface of the body-impels the tide of the circulation, with great violence, upon the internal organs-and endangers the lungs or whatever other structure happens to be weakest in the living machine. We have seen in the quotation from Mr. Matthews-that a SIROCCO blew for six days uninterruptedly at Naples, and that in the month of March. What must be the consequence of a chilling Tramontane, after a relaxing vapour-bath of six days and nights' duration? In the same month, and in the same page, we find the following astounding memorandum. "Seized with an acute pain in my side. Decided pleurisy. Summoned an English surgeon. High fever. Copious bleeding. Owe my life, under Heaven, to the lancet. I find pleurisy is the endemic of Naples."+ Homer, who speaks of 66 Vapours blown by Auster's sultry breath, "Pregnant with plagues, and shedding seeds of death.” * Dr. Clark states the mean temperature of the Mediterranean generally, in the month of August at 80° Fahrenheit, which is very little less than the mean annual temperature of the Indian ocean. Diary of an Invalid, p. 205. |