Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III CHIANTI AND MACARONI A Chapter for Travellers by Road or Rail The hotels of Italy are dear or not, according to whether one patronizes a certain class of establishment. At Trouville, at Aix-les- Bains in France, at Cernobbio in the Italian Lake region, or on the Quai Parthenope at Naples, there is little difference in price or quality, and the cuisine is always French. The automobilist who demands garage accommodation as well will not always find it in the big city hotel in Italy. He may patronize the F. I. A. T. Garages in Rome, Naples, Genoa, Milan, Florence, Venice, Turin and Padua and find the best of accommodation and fair prices. For a demonstration of this he may compare what he gets and what he pays for it at Pisa — where a F. I. A. T. garage is wanting — and note the difference. The real Italian hotel, outside the great centres, has less of a clientele of snobs and maladesimaginaires than one finds in France — in the Pyrenees or on the Riviera, or in Switzerland among the Alps, and accordingly there is always accommodation to be found that is in a class between the resplendent gold-lace and silver-gilt establishments of the resorts and working-men's lodging houses. True there is the same class of establishment existing in the smaller cities in France, but the small towns of France are not yet as much '' travelled '' by strangers as are those of Italy, and hence the difference to be remarked. The real Italian hotels, not the tourist establishments, will cater for one at about one half the price demanded by even the second order of tourist hotels, and the Italian landlord shows no disrespect towards a client who would know his price beforehand-—and he will usually make it favourable at the first demand, for fear you will " shop around " and fin...