Twain had the opposite reaction instead, describing his guide with utmost respect. His trip began just two years after the end of the Civil War, a fraught time when it would have been easy for the Missouri-born Twain (who grew up in a slave-owning family) to poke fun at this guide, the son of an enslaved South Carolinian who self-emancipated himself when brought to Europe by a white American. One, however, was notably spared the sardonic misnomer treatment: an unnamed African-American who led Twain and his fellow travelers through the art and architecture of Venice. Among other jabs, the author nicknamed every guide with the all-American alias of “Ferguson,” completely writing off their actual identities. Twain’s local guides on this excursion only heightened the scribe’s inferiority complex, and so he settled the score on the printed page. ![]() It described, with characteristic sarcasm, the young writer’s inaugural trip overseas in 1867-a five-month tour of Europe and the Holy Land-and a period when he often felt like an uncouth American dunce. The humor-packed travelogue, currently celebrating its 150th anniversary of publication, was the author’s first book and his best-selling title during his lifetime. That was me.“The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad,” Mark Twain famously warned in his 1869 travel memoir The Innocents Abroad. He had made an egregious ass of himself before the whole ship. The humbled mutineer smelt it, tasted it, and returned to his seat. “It is inferior-for coffee-but it is pretty fair tea." He smelt it-tasted it-smiled benignantly-then said: “Just try that mixture once, Captain Duncan.” He flourished back and got his cup and set it down triumphantly, and said: The incipient mutineer was more outraged than ever, then, at what he denounced as the partiality shown the captain’s table over the other tables in the ship. He went back and complained in a high-handed way to Capt. ![]() As he approached the table one morning he saw the transparent edge-by means of his extraordinary vision long before he got to his seat. He said it was so weak that it was transparent an inch in depth around the edge of the cup. The coffee had been steadily growing more and more execrable for the space of three weeks, till at last it had ceased to be coffee altogether and had assumed the nature of mere discolored water-so this person said. “I am reminded, now, of one of these complaints of the cookery made by a passenger. I love them for their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability to bore, for their delightful asinine vanity, for their luxuriant fertility of imagination, for their startling, their brilliant, their overwhelming mendacity!” They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions they laugh unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of foreign lands they brand the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest absurdities they deride your most trusted authors and demolish the fair images they have set up for your willing worship with the pitiless ferocity of the fanatic iconoclast! But still I love the Old Travelers. Then they open their throttle valves, and how they do brag, and sneer, and swell, and soar, and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth! Their central idea, their grand aim, is to subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory! They will not let you know anything. They always throw out a few feelers they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual and know that he has not traveled. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie. "Oh, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?” I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said. Look at the grande Doumo of Florence - a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet. ![]() It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred - and rags and vermin to match. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery. “As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it.
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