To Jane Lampton Clemens and Family
15 July 1867 • Genoa, Italy
(MS: NPV, UCCL 00141)

Genoa, Italy, July 14.

Dear Folks—

I am just on the eve of starting on a month’s trip to Milan, Padua, Verona, Venice & Rome, & shall rejoin the ship at Naples on the 9th of August.1

I wrote you from Paris & Marseilles, but wrote little. It seems to me I have no time to do anything. We are rushing constantly. Since we touched dry land we have gone to bed after [midnight ]& rose again at 7 to rush all day. I cannot even get a chance to write newspaper letters regularly—but such as they are you must take them as home letters.2

We tired ourselves out here in this curious old city of palaces yesterday & shall again [to-day]. We may possibly leave here at daylight tomorrow morning.3 The city has 120,000 inhabitants & ⅔ of them are women & the most beautiful one can imagine[.] We a And they are the most tastefully dressed & the most graceful. We sat in a great [gas-lit ]public grove or garden till 10 last night, where they were crowded together drinking wine & eating ices, & it seems to me that it would be [goo[d] ]to die & go there.4

These people think a good deal [ [of] ] Columbus, now, but they didn’t [formerly[.] ] 5

Yrs aff.

Sam.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Over the next two and a half weeks, Clemens, Jackson, and Slote stopped a day or two each in Milan, Bellagio on Lake Como, Venice, Florence, and Rome. They passed through, but did not stop in, Padua and Venora. On or about the evening of 25 July, after traveling from Florence with a brief stop in Pisa, they rejoined the Quaker City at Leghorn. Because the ship was expected to be put in quarantine at Naples, its next stop, they left it again the following morning and sailed for Civitavecchia on a French steamer. From there they took a train to Rome. Upon their arrival in Naples about 1 August, the same day the Quaker City arrived there, they took rooms in the city while the ship waited out its quarantine. The Quaker City sailed from Naples on the morning of 11 August.

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2 Although by 1 July Clemens had written four letters to the Alta and one to the Tribune (SLC 1867 [MT00555], 1867 [MT00557], 1867 [MT00558], 1867 [MT00559], 1867 [MT00548]), since then he had written only one additional Alta letter, on 12 July (SLC 1867 [MT00560]). Since he intended to produce a total of fifty Alta letters (two per week during the twenty-five-week voyage), plus an unknown number of Tribune and Herald letters, he was indeed behind schedule, even though it was unrealistic to expect to write four letters during the first two weeks of the trip, which were spent entirely at sea.

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3 The Quaker City arrived in Genoa on the morning of 14 July. Clemens must therefore have written this letter on 15 July. He and his companions did leave Genoa by train on 16 July, arriving in Milan that evening.

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4 According to Jackson,

On the evening of our arrival we strolled into the Corso, a handsome public garden, or park, in the centre of which is a fine fountain, and where every evening the walks are thronged with all classes of the community, who meet here for social intercourse, visiting at each others houses being almost unknown. The men are handsomely dressed—much more so, to my surprise, than the Parisians. The women are clean and neat, rather given to ornamentation (not peculiar, I believe to Genoa) and wear their beautiful black hair plainly divided in front, with the back park braided and confined with a large gold pin. A similar one attaches a scarf of white illusion to the top of the head, and this, falling down on each side nearly to the feet, gives them a peculiarly neat and graceful appearance. (Abraham Reeves Jackson 1867)

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5 Jackson reported that at the “Municipal Hall we were shown three magnificent letters of Columbus preserved with great care. Near this place a handsome sculptured monument bearing his likeness has been erected to the memory of this pride of the Genoese. We were also shown the house where he formerly lived” (Abraham Reeves Jackson 1867).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV). The MS is inscribed in pencil on a single leaf of cream-colored notebook paper, measuring 3 15/16 by 6½ inches, with twenty-four horizontal blue rules. Clemens almost certainly wrote the letter in a notebook (now lost) which he presumably used in the period between 2 July 1867 (the last entry in the surviving Notebook 8) and 11 August (the first entry in the surviving Notebook 9) (CU-MARK; see N&J1, 370–71). The dimensions of the MS page match both these notebooks, and it is ruled in exactly the same way as Notebook 9. When Clemens ripped the letter out of the notebook, it damaged several characters, all easily supplied.

Previous publication: L2, 74–75.

Provenance:see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 512–14.

Emendations and textual notes:

midnight • mid-|night

to-day • to-|day

gas-lit • gas-|lit

goo[d] • goo[d] [torn away]

[of] • [] [torn away]

formerly[.] • formerly [] [torn away]