The baths of
Lucca were an especially and almost exclusively English resort.
It was possible to induce the _vetturini_ who supplied carriages and
horses for the purpose, to do the journey to the baths in one day, but
it was a very long day, and it was necessary to get fresh horses
at Lucca. There was no good sleeping-place between Florence and
Lucca--nor indeed is there such now--and the journey from the capital
of Tuscany to that of the little Duchy of Lucca, now done by rail in
less than two hours, was quite enough for a _vetturino's_ pair of
horses. And when Lucca was reached there were still fourteen miles,
nearly all collar work, between that and the baths, so that the plan
more generally preferred was to sleep at Lucca.
The baths (well known to the ancient Romans, of course, as what warm
springs throughout Europe were not?) consisted of three settlements,
or groups of houses--as they do still, for I revisited the
well-remembered place two or three years ago. There was the "Ponte," a
considerable village gathered round the lower bridge over the Lima, at
which travellers from Florence first arrived. Here were the
assembly rooms, the reading room, the principal baths, _and_ the
gaming-tables--for in those pleasant wicked days the remote little
Lucca baths were little better than Baden subsequently and Monte Carlo
now. Only we never, to the best of my memory, suicided ourselves,
though it might happen occasionally, that some innkeeper lost the
money which ought to have gone to him, because "the bank" had got hold
of it first.
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