TALISN I0URN6YS 2-3 Class "]} Q k }\\ Book 4 c< c"^ PRESENTED BY . ^ Cryyi-Y .^^^^<^^ iSooifcg Bp (il5|^Utatn Dean |)otoeUfi;* VENETIAN LIFE. i2mo, $1.50. The Same. In" Riverside Aldine Series." 2 vols. i6mo, gilt top, ^2.00. First Edition, $3.00. ITALIAN JOURNEYS. i2mo, $1.50. THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY Illustrated. i2nio,$i.50. The Same. Illustrated. i2mo, paper, 50 cents. The Same. " Little Classic " style. i8mo, ^i.oo. A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE. Illustrated. i2mo,$i.so. The Same. Illustrated. i2mo, paper, 50 cents. The Same. " Little Classic "style. i8m&, $1.00. SUBURBAN SKETCHES. Illustrated. i2mo, $1.50. A FOREGONE CONCLUSION. lamo, ;^i.5o. THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK. 12010,^1.50. THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. i2mo, ;f5i.5o. The eight i2mo volumes, $12.00. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. Publishers, Boston and New York. ITALIAN JOURNEYS. BT W. D. HOWELLS, AOTHOBOF "suburban SKETCHES," "VENETIAN UFS," STA NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION. TWELFTH EDITION'. BOSTON: HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street. 1888. ■;o Q^^'^ H ^st Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by W. D. HOWELLS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: BTEREOTTPED AND PRINTED BT H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANT. CONTENTS. FAM The Road to Rome from Venice : I. Leaving Venice 9 II. From Padua to Ferrara ....... 10 III. The Picturesque, the Improbable^ and the Pathetic IN Ferrara 14 IV. Through Bologna to Genoa 43 V. Up and Down Genoa 52 VI. By Sea from Genoa to Naples ..... 65 VII. Certain Things in Naples 75 VIII. A Day in Pompeii . . • ... 89 IX. A Half-hour at Herculaneum . ... 106 X. Capri and Capriotes 116 XI. The Protestant Ragged Schools at Naples . . 136 XII. Between Rome and Naples 147 XIII. Roman Pearls 151 FoRZA Maggiore 178 At Padua 196 A PlLGBI>IAGE TO PeTRARCH'S HoUSE AT ARQUA . . . 216 A Visit to the Cimbri 235 Minor Travels : I. Pisa 251 11, The Ferrara Road 259 III. Trieste 264 IV. Bassano 274 V. POSSAGNO, CaNOVA'S BIRTHPLACE 280 VI. CoMO 285 Stopping at Vicenza, Verona, and Parma .... 293 DucAL Mantua • .32 THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE. I. LEAVING VENICE. We did not know, when we started from home iu Venice, on the 8th of November, 1864, that we had taken the longest road to Rome. We thought that of all the proverbial paths to the Eternal City that leading to Padua, and thence through Ferrara and Bologna to Florence, and so down the sea-shore from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the briefest, and the cheapest. Who could have dreamed that this path, so wisely and carefully chosen, would lead us to Genoa, conduct us on shipboard, toss us four dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void, bat- tered, and bewildered, in Naples ? Luckily, " The moving accident is not my trade," for there are events of this journey (now happily at an end) which, if I recounted them with unsparing sincerity, would forever deter the reader from taking any road to Rome. Tliough, indeed, what is Rome, after all, when you come to it ? n. FROM PADUA TO FERRARA. As far as to Ferrara there was no sign of devia- tion from the direct line in our road, and the com- pany was well enough. We had a Swiss family in the car with us to Padua, and they tv^ld us how they were going home to their mountains from Russia, where they had spent nineteen years of their lives They were mother and father and only daughter and the last, without ever having seen her ancestral country, was so Swiss in her yet childish beauty, that she filled the morning twilight with vague im- ages of glacial height, blue lake, snug chMet, and whatever else of picturesque there is in paint and print about Switzerland. Of course, as the light grew brighter these images melted away, and left only a little frost upon the window-pane. The mother was restively anxious at nearing her country, and told us every thing of its loveliness and happiness. Nineteen years of absence had not robbed it of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it again took nothing from it. We said how glad we should be if we were as near America as she was tc Switzerland. " America ! " she screamed ; " you come from America ! Dear God, the world is wida FROM PADUA TO FERRARA. 11 — the world is wide ! " The thought was so paralyz- ing that it silenced the fat little lady for a moment, and gave her husband time to express his sympathy with us in our war, which he understood perfectly well. He trusted that the revolution to perpetuate slavery must fail, and he hoped that the war would soon end, for it made cotton very dear. Europe is material : I doubt if, after Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there were many upon that continent whose enthusiasm for American unity (which is Eu- ropean freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the ex- pensiveness of cotton. The fabrics were all doubled in price, and every man in Europe paid tribute in hard money to the devotion with which we prose- cuted the war, and, incidentally, interrupted the cul- tivation of cotton. We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted at Padua, where we were to take the diligence for the Po. In the diligence their loss was more than made good by the company of the only honest man in Italy. Of course this honest man had been a great sufferer from his own countrymen, and I wish that all English and American tourists, who think themselves the sole victims of publican rapacity and deceit in Italy, could have heard our honest man's talk. The truth is, these ingenious people prey upon their own kind with an avidity quite as keen as that v\'ith which they devour strangers ; and I am half- persuaded that a ready-witted foreigner fares better among them than a traveller of their own nation. Italians will always pretend, on any occasion, that 12 ITALIAN JOURNEFS. you have been plundered much worse than thej but the reverse often happens. They give little in fees ; but their landlord, their porter, their driver, and their boatman pillage them with the same im- punity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest man in the diligence, he had suffered such enormities at the hands of the Paduans, from which we had just escaped, and at the hands of the Farrarese, into which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles t5cant an hour), that I was almost minded to stop be- tween the nests of those brigands and pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man lived. His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to illustrate the strong municipal spirit which still dom- inates all Italy, and which is more inimical to an effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser has ever been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a foreigner at Padua, twenty-five miles north, and a foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles south ; and throughout Italy the native of one city is an alien in another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or an American with people who consider every stranger as sent them by the bounty of Providence to be eaten alive. Heaven knows w^hat our honest man had paid at his hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the other week he had been made to give five francs apiece for two small roast chickens, besides a fee to the waiter ; and he pathetically warned us to beware how we dealt with Italians. Indeed, I never met a man so thoroughly persuaded of the rascality of his nation and of his own exceptional virtue. He took FROM PADUA TO FERRARA. 13 BnufF with his whole person ; and he volunteered, at sight of a flock of geese, a recipe which I give the reader : Stuff a goose with sausage ; let it hang in the weather during the winter ; and in the spring cut it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and delicate soup. But after all our friend's talk, though constant, became dispiriting, and we were willing when he left us. His integrity had, indeed, been so oppressive that I was glad to be swindled in the charge for our dinner at the Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more fjheerfully on to Ferrara. in. THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND THB PATHETIC IN FERRARA. I. It was one of the fatalities of travel, rather than RTiy real interest in the poet, which led me to visit the prison of Tasso on the night of our arrival, which was mild and moonlit. The portier at the Stella d'Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows which it is sometimes difficult to respect, and I went and paid this homage in the coal-cellar in which was never imprisoned the poet whose works I had not read. The famous hospital of St. Anna, where Tasso was confined for seven years, is still an asylum for the infirm and sick, but it is no longer used as a mad-house. It stands on one of the long, silent Ferrarese streets, not far from the Ducal Castle, and it is said that from the window of his cell the un- happy poet could behold Leonora in her tower. It may be so ; certainly those who can believe in the genuineness of the cell will have no trouble in be- lieving that the vision of Tasso could pierce through several brick walls and a Doric portico, and at last comprehend the lady at her casement in the castle. PERRARA. 15 We entered a modern gateway, and passed into a hall of the elder edifice, where a slim young soldier sat readinor a romance of Dumas. This was the keeper of Tasso's prison ; and knowing me, by the instinct which teaches an Italian custodian to dis- tinguish his prey, for a seeker after the True and Beautiful, he relinquished his romance, lighted a waxen taper, unbolted a heavy door with a dramatic clang, and preceded me to the cell of Tasso. We descended a little stairway, and found ourselves in a sufficiently spacious court, which was still ampler in the poet's time, and was then a garden planted with trees and flowers. On a low doorway to the right was inscribed the legend " Prigione di Tasso," and passing through this doorway into a kind of re- ception-cell, we entered the poet's dungeon. It is an oblong room, with a low wagon-roof ceiling, under which it is barely possible to stand upright. A sin- gle narrow ^vindow admits the light, and the stone casing of this window has a hollow in a certain place, which might well have been worn there by the friction of the hand that for seven years passed the prisoner his food through the small opening. The young custodian pointed to this memento of suffer- ing, without effusion, and he drew my attention to other remarkable things in the cell, without troubling himself to palliate their improbability in the least. They were his stock in trade ; you paid your money, and took your choice of believing in them or not. On the other hand, my portier, an ex- valet de place, pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm j.6 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. and expressed the freshest delight in the inspection of each object of interest. One still faintly discerns among the vast number of names with which the walls of the ante-cell are be- written, that of Lamartine. The name of Byron, which was once deeply graven in the stucco, had been scooped away by the Grand Duke of Tuscany (so the custodian said), and there is only part of a capital B now visible. But the cell itself is still fragrant of associations with the noble bard, who, according to the story related to Valery, caused him- self to be locked up in it, and there, with his head fallen upon his breast, and frequently smiting his brow, spent two hours in pacing the floor with great strides. It is a touching picture ; but its pathos becomes some- what embarrassing when you enter the cell, and see the impossibility of taking more than three generous paces without turning. When Byron issued forth, after this exercise, he said (still according to Valery) to the custodian: "I thank thee, good man! The -thoughts of Tasso are now all in my mind and heart." "A short time after his departure from Ferrara," adds the Frenchman, maliciously, " he composed his ' La- ment of Tasso,' a mediocre result from such inspira- tion." No doubt all this is colored, for the same author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity of the spectacle : he declares that Byron spent part of his time in the cell in writing upon the ceiling Lamartine's verses on Tasso, which he misspelled. The present visitor has no means of judging of the truth concerning this, for the lines of the poet have FERRARA. 17 been so smoked by the candles of successive pil- grims in their efforts to get light on them, that they Are now utterly illegible. But if it is uncertain what were Byron's emotions on visiting the prison of Tasso, there is no doubt about Lady Morgan's : she " experienced a suffocating emotion ; her heart failed her on entering that cell ; and she satisfied a mel- ancholy curiosity at the cost of a most painful sen- sation." I find this amusing fact stated in a translation of her ladyship's own language, in a clever guide-book called II Servitore di Piazza^ which I bought at Fer- rara, and from which, I confess, I have learnt all I know to confirm me in my doubt of Tasso's prison. The Count Avventi, who writes this book, prefaces it by saying that he is a valet de place who knows how to read and write, and he employs these unusual gifls with singular candor and clearness. No one, he says, before the nineteenth century, ever dreamed of calling the cellar in question Tasso's prison, and it was never before that time made the shrine of sen- timental pilgrimage, though it has since been visited by every traveller who has passed through Ferrara. It was used during the poet's time to hold charcoal and lime ; and not long ago died an old servant of the hospital, who remembered its use for that pur- pose. It is damp, close, and dark, and Count Av- venti thinks it hardly possible that a delicate courtier could have lived seven years in a place unwholesome enough to kill a stout laborer in two months ; while t seems to him not probable that Tasso should have 18 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. received there the visits of princes and other dis- tinguished persons whom Duke Alfonso allowed to see him, or that a prisoner who was often permitted to ride about the city in a carriage should have been thrust back into such a cavern on his return to the hospital. "After this," says our valet de place who knows how to read and write, " visit the prison of Tasso, certain that in the hospital of SU Anna that great man was confined for many years ; " and, with this chilly warning, leaves his reader to his emotions. I am afraid that if as frank caution were uttered in regard to other memorable places, the objects of interest in Italy would dwindle sadly in number, and the valets de place^ whether they know how to read and write or not, would be starved to death. Even the learning of Italy is poetic ; and an Italian would rather enjoy a fiction than know a fact — in which preference I am not ready to pronounce him unwise. But this characteristic of his embroiders the stranger's progress throughout the whole land with fanciful im- probabilities ; so that if one use his eyes half as much as his wonder, he must see how much better it would have been to visit, in fancy, scenes that have an in- terest so largely imaginary. The utmost he can make out of the most famous place is, that it is pos- sibly what it is said to be, and is more probably as near that as any thing local enterprise could furnish. He visits the very cell in which Tasso was confined, and has the satisfaction of knowing that it was the charcoal-cellar of the hospital in which the poet dwelt. And the genius loci — - where is that ? Away FERRARA. 19 In the American woods, very likely, whispering some dreamy, credulous youth, — telling him charming fables of its locus, and proposing to itself to abandon him as soon as he sets foot upon its native ground. You see, though I cared little about Tasso, and nothing about his prison, I was heavily disappointed in not being able to believe in it, and felt somehow that I had been awakened from a cherished dream. n. But I have no right to cast the unbroken shadow of my skepticism upon the reader, and so I tell him a story about Ferrara which I actually believe. He must know that in Ferrara the streets are marvel- ous long and straight. On the corners formed by the crossing of two of the longest and straightest of these streets stand four palaces, in only one of which we have a present interest. This palace my guide took me to see, after our visit to Tasso's prison, and, standing in its shadow, he related to me tk"^ occurrence which has given it a sad celebrity. It was, in the time of the gifted toxicologist, the resi- dence of Lucrezia Borgia, who used to make poison- ous little suppers there, and ask the best famihes of Italy to partake of them. It happened on one occasion that Lucrezia Borgia was thrust out of a ball-room at Venice as a disreputable character, and created with peculiar indignity. She determined to aiake the Venetians repent their unwonted accession ^f virtue, and she therefore allowed the occurrence t(f 20 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. be forgotten till the proper moment of her revenge arrived, when she gave a supper, and invited to her board eighteen young and handsome Venetian nobles. Upon the preparation of this repast she bestowed all the resources of her skillful and exquisite knowledge ; and the result was, the Venetians were so felicitously poisoned that they had just time to listen to a speech from the charming and ingenious lady of the house before expiring. In this address she reminded her guests of the occurrence in the Venetian ball-room, and perhaps exulted a little tediously in her present vengeance. She was surprised and pained when one of the guests interrupted her, and, justifying the treatment she had received at Venice, declared himself her natural son. The lady instantly recog- nized him, and in the sudden revulsion of maternal feeling, begged him to take an antidote. This he not only refused to do, but continued his dying re- proaches, till his mother, losing her self-command, drew her poniard and plunged it into his heart. The blood of her son fell upon the table-cloth, and this being hung out of the window to dry, the wall received a stain, which neither the sun nor rain of centuries sufficed to efface, and which was only re- moved with the masonry, when it became necessary to restore the wall under that window, a few month? before the time of my visit to Ferrara. Accordingly, the blood-stain has now disappeared ; but the consci- entious artist who painted the new wall has faithfully restored the tragic spot, by bestowing upon the stuccc I bloody dash of Venetian red. FERARRA. 21 III. It would be pleasant and merciful, I tliink, if old towns, after having served a certain number of cen- turies for the use and pride of men, could be released to a gentle, unmolested decay. I, for my part, would like to have the ducal cities of North Italy, such as Mantua, Modena, Parma, and Ferrara, locked up quietly within their walls, and left to crumble and totter and fall, without any harder presence to vex them in their decrepitude than that of some gray custodian, who should come to the gate with clank- ing keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if he gave signs of a reverent sympathy, to look for a little while upon the reserved and dignified desola- tion. It is a shame to tempt these sad old cities into unnatural activity, when they long ago made their peace with the world, and would fain be mixing their weary brick and mortar with the earth's unbuilded dust ; and it is hard for the emotional traveller to restrain his sense of outrao-e at findino; them inhab- ited, and their rest broken by sounds of toil, traffic, and idleness ; at seeing places that would gladly have had done with history still doomed to be parts of po- litical systems, to read the newspapers, and to expose railway guides and caricatures of the Pope and of Napoleon in their shop windows. Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a liv- ing nation against her will, and I therefore marveled the more that she had become a portion of the pres- ent kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had its 22 ITALIAN JOl/RNEYS. day long before ours ; it had been a republic, and then subject to lords ; and then, its lords becoming dukes, it had led a life of gayety and glory till its fall, and given the world such names and memories as had fairly won it the right to rest forever from making history. Its individual existence ended with that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when the Pope de- clared it reverted to the Holy See ; and I always fancied that it must have received with a spectral, yet courtly kind of surprise, those rights of man which bloody-handed France distributed to the Ital- ian cities in 1796 ; that it must have experienced a ghostly bewilderment in its rapid transformation, thereafter, under Napoleon, into part of the Cispadan Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the Italian Repub- lic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and that it must have sunk back again under the rule of the Popes with gratitude and relief at last — as phantoms are reputed to be glad when released from haunting the world where they once dwelt. I speak of all this, not so much from actual knowledge of facts as from per- sonal feeling ; for it seems to me that if I were a city of the past, and must be inhabited at all, I should choose just such priestly domination, assured that though it consumed my substance, yet it would be well for my fame and final repose. I should like to feel that my old churches were safe from demolition ; that my old convents and monasteries should always shelter the pious indolence of friars and nuns. It would be pleasant to have studious monks exploring quaint corners of my anphilosophized annals, ana PERRARA. 28 gentle, snuff-taking abbes writing up episodes in the history of my noble families, and dedicating them to the present heirs of past renown ; while the thinker and the reviewer should never penetrate my archives. Being myself done with war, I should be glad to have my people exempt, as they are under the Pope, from military service ; and I should hope that if the Legates taxed them, the taxes paid would be as so many masses said to get my soul out of the purgatory of perished capitals. Finally, I should trust that in the sanctified keeping of the Legates my mortal part would rest as sweetly as bones laid in hallowed earth brouMit from Jerusalem ; and that under their serene protection I should be forever secure from being in any way exhumed and utilized by the ruthless hand of Proo:ress. However, as I said, this is a mere personal prefer- ence, and other old cities might feel differently. In- deed, though disposed to condole with Ferrara upon the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, I could not deny, on better acquaintance with her, that she was still almost entirely of the past. She has certainly missed that ideal perfection of non-existence under the Popes which I have just depicted, but she is practically almost as profoundly at rest under the King of Italy. One may walk long through the longitude and rectitude of many of her streets with- out the encounter of a single face : the place, as m whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii, where there are always strangers ; perhaps the only cities in the world w^orthy to compete with Ferrara in point 24 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. of agreeable solitude are Mantua and Herculaneum. It is the newer part of the town — the modern quar- ter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was known — which is loneliest ; and whatever motion and cheerfulness are still felt in Ferrara linger fondly about the ancient holds of life — about the street before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and narrower streets branching away from the piazza of the Duomo, where, on market days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult. In the Ghetto we were almost crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with an enterprise that contrasted strangely wath shop- keeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed, surprise at the presence of strangers spending two days in Ferrara when they could have got away sooner, was the only emotion which the w^liole population agreed in ex- pressing with any degree of energy, but into this they seemed to throw their whole vitality. The Italians are everywhere an artless race, so far as con- cerns the gratification of their curiosity, from which no consideration of decencv deters them. Here in Ferrara they turned about and followed us with their eyes, came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us at street-corners, and openly and audibly debated whether we were Eno;lish or German. We mio-ht have thought this interest a tribute to something pe- culiar in our dress or manner, had it not visibly attended other strangers who arrived with us. It rose almost into a frenzy of craving to know more of as all, when on the third day the whole city assem' bled before our hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of FERRARA. 25 aesperate cry, the departure of the heavy-laden om« nibus which bore us and our luf the poet's fingers, which the p'ous care of Ferrara 30 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. had picked up from his dust (when it was removed from the church to the Library), and neatly bottled and labeled. In like manner, they keep a great deal of sanctity in bottles with the bones of saints in Italy ; but I found very little savor of poesy hanging about this literary relic. As if the melancholy fragment of mortality had marshaled us the way, we went from the Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands at the end of a long, long street, not far from the railway station. There was not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen in all that long street, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing perspective, and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a posthumous meeting in his little reddish brick house, there i.s nothing to prevent their assembly, in broad daylight, from any part of the neighborhood. There was no presence, however, more spiritual than a comely country girl to respond to our summons at the door, and nothing but a tub of corn-meal disputed our passage inside. Directly I found the house in- habited by living people, I began to be sorry that it was not as empty as the Library and the street. In- deed, it is much better with Petrarch's house at Arqua, where the grandeur of the past is never mo- ested by the small household joys and troubles of he present. That house is vacant, and no eyes less Kcnder and fond than the poet's visitors may look down from its windows over the slope of vines and ulives which it crowns ; and it seemed hard, here ir. Ferrara, where the houses are so many and th* FERRARA. 31 people are so few, that Ariosto's house could not be left to him. Parva sed apta mihi^ he has content- edly written upon the front ; but I doubt if he finds it large enough for another family, though his modern housekeeper reserves him certain rooms for visitors. To gain these, you go up to the second story — • there are but two floors — and cross to the rear of the building, where Ariosto's chariiber opens out of an ante-room, and looks down upon a pinched and faded bit of garden.* In this chamber they say the poet died. It is oblong, and not large. I should think the windows and roof were of the poet's time, and that every thing else had been restored ; I am quite sure the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant inventions ; for the poet's burly great arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both preserved in the Library. But the house is otherwise decent and probable ; and I do not question but it was in the hall where we en- countered the meal-tub that the poet kept a copy of his " Furioso^^'' subject to the corrections and advice of his visitors. The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been with- in a few years restored out of all memory and sem- blance *of itself; and my wish to see the place in * In this garden the Doet spent much of his time — chiefly in \ ucking up and transplanting the unlucky shrubbery, which was ■ever suflfered to grow three months in the same place, — such was the poet's rage for revision. It was pmbably never a very arge or splendid garden, for the reason that Ariosto gave when "eproached that he who knew so well how to describe magnificent palaces should have built such a poor little house : " It was easier ^o make verses than houses, and the fine palaces in k's poem coa^ \im no money." 32 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. which the poet was born and spent his childhood re- sulted, after infinite search, in finding a building faced newly with stucco and newly French-win^ dowed. 0\xv portier said it was the work of the late Eng- lish Vice-Consul, who had bought the house. When I complained of the sacrilege, he said : " Yes, it is true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were not one of the noble families of Ferrara." VI. The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which cluster so many sad and splendid memories, stands in the heart of the city. I think that the moonlight which, on the night of our arrival, showed me its massive walls rising from the shadowy moat that sur- ;'ounds them, and its four great towers, heavily but- tressed, and expanding at the top into bulging cor- nices of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on nothing else in all Italy so picturesque, and so full of the proper dread charm of feudal times, as this pile of gloomy and majestic strength. The daylight took nothing of this charm from it ; for the castle stands isolated in the midst of the city, as its founder meant that it should,* and modern civilization has not * The castle of Eerrara was begun in 1885 by Niccolo d'Estc, lo defend himself against the repetition of scenes of tumult, in which his princely rights were invaded. One of his tax-gathererS; Tommaso da Tortona, had, a short time before, made himself so obnoxious to the people by his insolence and severity, that they '^)se against him and demanded his life. He took refuge in the FERRARA . 88 crossed the castle moat, to undignify its extenor with any visible touch of the present. To be sure, when you enter it, the magnificent life is gone out of the old edifice ; it is no stately halberdier who stands on guard at the gate of the drawbridge, but a stumpy Italian soldier in baggy trousers. The castle is full of public offices, and one sees in its courts and on its stairways, not brilliant men-at-arms, nor gay squires and pages, but wliistling messengers going from one office to another with docketed papers, and slipshod serving-men carrying the clerks their coffee in very dirty little pots. Dreary-looking suitors, slowly grmd- ing through the mills of law, or passing in the routine of the offices, are the guests encountered in the cor- ridors ; and all that bright-colored throng of the old days, ladies and lords, is passed from the scene. The melodrama is over, friends, and now we have a play of real life, founded on fact and inculcating a moral, Of course the custodians were slow to admit any change of this kind. If you could have believed \hem, — and the poor people told as many lies as they could to make you, — you would believe that noth- ing had ever happened of a commonplace nature in palace of his master, which was immediately assailed. The prince's own life was threatened, and he was forced to surrender the fugitive to the people, who tore Tortona limb from limb, tnd then, after parading the city with the mutilated remains, 4uietly returned to their allegiance. Niccolo, therefore, caused this castle to be built, which he strengthened with massive walls and towers commanding the whole city, and rendered inaccessible »y surrounding it with a deep and wide canal from the rivef Heno. 3 34 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. this castle. The taking-ofF of Hugo and Parisina they think the great merit of the castle ; and one of them, seeing us, made haste to light his taper and conduct us down to the dungeons where those un- happy lovers were imprisoned. It is the misfortune of memorable dungeons to acquire, when put upon show, just the reverse of those properties which should raise horror and distress in the mind of the beholder. It was impossible to deny that the cells of Parisina and of Hugo were both singularly warm, dry, and comfortable ; and we, who had never been imprisoned in them, found it hard to command, for our sensation, the terror and agony of the miserable ones who suffered there. We, happy and secure in these dungeons, could not think of the guilty and wretched pair bowing themselves to the headsman's stroke in the gloomy chamber under the Hall of Aurora ; nor of the Marquis, in his night-long walk, breaking at last into frantic remorse and tears to know that his will had been accomplished. Nay, there upon its very scene, the whole tragedy faded from us ; and, seeing our wonder so cold, the custodian tried to kindle it by saying that in the time of the event these cells were much dreadfuller than now, which was no doubt true. The floors of the dun- geons are both below the level of the moat, and the narrow windows, or rather crevices to admit the light, were cut in the prodigiously thick wall just above the water, and were defended with four succes- give iron gratings. The dungeons are some distance Impart ; that of Hugo was separated from the outer FERRARA 86 rail of the castle bj a narrow passage-way, while Parisina's window cpened directly upon the moat. When we ascended aojain to the court of the castle, the custodian, abetted by his wife, would have interested us in two memorable wells there, between which, he said, Hugo was beheaded ; and unabashed by the small success of this fable, he pointed out two windows in converging angles overhead, from one ot which the Marquis, looking into the other, discov- ered the guilt of the lovers. The windows are now walled up, but are neatly represented to the credu lous eye by a fresco of lattices. Valery mentions another claim upon the interest of the tourist which this castle may make, in the fact that it once sheltered John Calvin, who was pro- tected by the Marchioness Ren^e, wife of Hercules 11. ; and my Servitore di Piazza (the one who knows how to read and write) gives the following account of the matter, in speaking of the domestic chapel which Renee had built in the castle : " This lady was learned in belles-lettres and in the schismatic doctrines which at that time were insinuating them- selves throughout France and Germany, and with which Calvin, Luther, and other proselytes, agitated the people, and threatened war to the Catholic re- ligion. Nationally fond of innovation, and averse to the court of Roue on account of the dissensions be- tween her fatlier and Pope Julius H., Ren^e began W) receive the teachings of Calvin, with whom she maintained correspondence. Indeed, Calvin him- wlf, under the name of Huppeville, visited her in 56 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. Ferrara, in 1536, and ended by corrupting her mind and seducing her into his own errors, which pro- duced discord between her and her religious hus- band, and resulted in his placing her in temporary seclusion, in order to attempt her conversion. Hence, the chapel is faced with marble, paneled in relief, and studied to avoid giving place to saints or images, which were disapproved by the almost Anabaptist doctrines of Calvin, then fatally imbibed by the princess." We would willingly, as Prostestants, have visited this wicked chapel; but we were prevented from seeing it, as well as the famous frescoes of Dosso Dossi in the Hall of Aurora, by the fact that the prefect was giving a little dinner (^pranzetto) in that part of the castle. We were not so greatly disap- pointed in reality as we made believe ; but our servi- tore di piazza (the unlettered one^ was almost moved to lesa maestd with vexation. He had been full of scorching patriotism the whole morning ; but now electing the unhappy and apologetic custodian rep- resentative of Piedmontese tyranny, he bitterly as- sailed the government of the king. In the times of His Holiness the Legates had made it their pleasure and duty to show the whole castle to strangers. Bui now strangers must be sent away without seeing itf chief beauties, because, forsooth, the prefect was giv Ing a little dinner. Presence of the Devil I FERRARA. 37 vn. In our visits to the different churches in Ferrara ^e noticed devotion in classes of people Avho are devout nowhere else in Italy. Not only came solid- looking business men to say their prayers, but gay young dandies, who knelt and repeated their orisons and then rose and went seriously out. In Venice they would have posted themselves against a pillar, sucked the heads of their sticks, and made eyes at the young ladies kneeling near them. This degree of religion was all the more remarkable in Ferrara, because that city had been so many years under the Pope, and His Holiness contrives commonly to prevent the appearance of religion in young men throughout his dominions. Valery speaks of the delightful society which he met in the gray old town ; and it is said that Ferraia has an unusual share of culture in her wealthy class, which is large. With such memories of learning and literary splendor as belong to her, it would be strange if she did not in some form keep alive the sacred flame. But, though there may be refinement and erudition in Ferrara, she has given no great name to modern Italian literature. Her men of letters seem to be of that race of grubs singularly nbundant in Italy, — men who dig out of archives and abraries some topic of special and momentary interest tnd print it, unstudied and uphilosophized. Their oooks are material, not literature, and it is marvelouj 38 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. how many of ihem are published. A writer on anj given subject can heap together from them a mass of fact and anecdote invahiable in its way ; but it is a mass without life or light, and must be vivified by him. who uses it before it can serve the world, which does not care for its dead local value. It re- mains to be seen whether the free speech and free press of Italy can reawaken the intellectual activity of the cities which once gave the land so many literary capitals. What numbers of people used to write verses in Ferrara ! By operation of the principle which causes things concerning whatever subject you happen to be interested in to turn up in every direction, I found a volume of these dead-and-gone immortals at a book- stall, one day, in Venice. It is a curiously yellow and uncomfortable volume of the year 1703, printed all in italics. I suppose there are two hundred odd rhymers selected from in that book, — and how droll the most of them are, with their unmistakable traces of descent from Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini ! What acres of enameled meadow there are in those pages ! Brooks enough to turn all the mills in the world go purling through them. I should say some thou- sands of nymphs are constantly engaged in weaving garlands there, and the swains keep such a piping on those familiar notes, — Amore, dolore^ crudele^ and miele. Poor little poets ! they knew no other tunes. Do not now weak voices twitter from a hundred books, in unconscious imitation of the hour's grea' lingers ? FERRARA. 89 VIII. I THINK some of the pleasantest people in Italy are the army gentlemen. There is the race's gentleness in their ways, in spite of tlieir ferocious trade, and an American freedom of style. They brag in a manner that makes one feel at home immediately; and met in travel, they are ready to render any little kindness. The other year at Reggio (which is not far from Modena) we stopped to dine at a restaurant where the whole garrison liad its coat off and was playing billiards, with the exception of one or two officers, who were dinincr. These rose and bowed as we entered their room, and when the waiter pretended that such and such dishes were out (in Italy the waiter, for some mysterious reason, always pretends that the best dishes are out), they bullied him for the honor of Italy, and made him bring them to us. Indeed, I am afraid his life was sadly harassed by those brave men. We were in deep despair at find- ing no French bread, and the waiter swore with the utmost pathos that there was none ; but as soon as his back was turned, a tightly laced little captain rose and began to forage for the bread. He opened every drawer and cupboard in the room, and finding none, invaded another room, captured several loaves from the plates laid there, and broaght them back in triumph, presenting them <-o us amii tlie applause of his comrades. The dismay of the waiter, o.u hia ceturn, was meffable. 40 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. Three officers, who dined with us at the tahh d/hote of the Stella d'Oro in Ferrara (and excellent dinners were those we ate there), were visibly anxious to address us, and began not uncivilly, but still in order that we should hear, to speculate on our nationality among themselves. It appeared that we were Germans ; for one of these officers, who had formerly been in the Austrian service at Vienna, recognized the word hitter in our remarks on the heccafichi. As I did not care to put these fine fel- lows to the trouble of hating us for others' faults, I made bold to say that we were not Germans, and to add that hitter was also an English word. Ah ! yes, to be sure, one of them admitted ; when he was with the Sardinian army in the Crimea, he had frequently heard the word used by the English soldiers. He nodded confirmation of what he said to his comrades ; and then was good enough to display what English he knew. It was barely sufficient to impress his comrades ; but it led the way to a good deal of talk in Italian. " I suppose you gentlemen are all Piedmontese ? " T said. " Not at all," said our Crimean. " I am from Como ; this gentleman, il signor Conte, (il signor Conte bowed,) is of Piacenza ; and our friend across the table is Genoese. The army is doing a great deal to unify Italy. We are all Italians now, and you see we speak Italian, and not our dialects, to- gether.'' My cheap remark that it was a fine thing to se« FERRARA. 41 them all united under one flag, after so many ages of mutual hate and bloodshed, turned the talk upon the orimn of the Italian flag: ; and that led our Crimean to ask what was the origin of the English colors. " I scarcely know," I said. " We are Americans." Our friends at once grew more cordial. " Oh, Americani ! " They had great pleasure of it. Did we think Signor Leencolen would be reelected ? I supposed that he had been elected that day, I said. Ah ! this was the election day, then. Cospetto I At this the Genoese frowned superior intelligence, and the Crimean gazing admiringly upon him, said he had been nine months at Nuova York, and that he had a brother living there. Tlie poor Crimean boastfully added that he himself had a cousin in America, and that the Americans generally spoke Spanish. The count from Piacenza wore an air of pathetic discomfiture, and tried to invent a trans- atlantic relative, as I think, but failed. I am persuaded that none of these warriors really had kinsmen in America, but that they all pretended to have them, out of politeness to us, and that they believed each other. It was very kind of them, and we were so grateful that we put no embarrassing questions. Indeed, the conversation presently took another course, and grew to include the whole table. There was an extremely pretty Italian present with her newly wedded husband, who turned out to 06 a retired officer. He fraternized at once with our 42 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. soldiers, and when we left the table they all rose and made military obeisances. Having asked leave to light their cigars, they were smoking — the sweet young bride blowing a fairy cloud from her rosy lips with the rest. " Indeed," I heard an Italian lady once remark, " why should men pretend to deny us the privilege of smoking ? It is so pleasant and innocent." It is but just to the Italians to say that they do not always deny it: and there is, without doubt, a certain grace and charm in a pretty fuma^ trice, I suppose it is a habit not so pleasing in &Z2 ugly or middle-aged woman. ^ IV. THROUGH BOIOGNA TO GENOA. I. We had intended to stay only one day at Ferrara, but just at that time the storms predicted on the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts, by Mathieu de la Drome, had been raging all over Italy, and the rail- way communications were broken in every direction. The magnificent work through and under the Apen- nines, between Bologna and Florence, had been washed away by the mountain torrents in a dozen places, and the roads over the plains of the Romagna had been sapped by the flood, and rendered useless, where not actually laid under water. On the day of our intended departure we left the hotel, with other travellers, gayly incredulous of the landlord's fear that no train would start for Bologna. At the station we found a crowd of people waiting and hoping, but there was a sickly cast of doubt in Bome faces, and the labeled employes of the railway wore looks of ominous importan'^e. Of course the crowd did not lose its temper. It sought information of the officials runnino; to and fro with telem-ams, in a spirit of national sweetness, and consoled itself 44 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. with saying, as Italy has said under all circumstances of difficulty for centuries : Ci vuol pazienza ! At last a blank silence fell upon it, as the CapoStazione advanced toward a well-dressed man in the crowd, and spoke to him quietly. The well-dressed man lifted his forefinger and waved it backand forth before his face : — The Well-dressed Man. — Dunque, non si parte piu ? (No departures, then ?) 27ie OapoStazione (waving his forefinger in like manner.) — Non si parte piii. (Like a mournfui echo.) We knew quite as well from this pantomime o* negation as from the dialogue our sad fate, and sub- mitted to it. Some adventurous spirit demanded whether any trains would go on the morrow. The Capo-Stazione, with an air of one who would not presume to fathom the designs of Providence, re- sponded : " Who knows ? To-day, certainly not. To-morrow, perhaps. But " — and vanished. It may give an idea of the Italian way of doing things to say that, as we understood, this break in the line was only a few miles in extent, that trains could have approached both to and from Bologna, and that a little enterprise on the part of the company could have passed travellers from one side to the other with very small trouble or delay. But the railway company was as much daunted by the in- undation as a peasant going to market, and for twc months after the accident no trains carried passengers from one city to the other. No doubt, however, the THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 46 fine was under process of very solid repair mean- while. For the present the only means of getting to Bologna was by carriage on the old highway, and accordingly we took passage thither in the omnibus of the Stella d'Oro. There was little to interest us in the country over which we rode. It is perfectly flat, and I suppose the reader knows what quantities of hemp and flax are raised there. The land seems poorer than in Lombardy, and the farm-houses and peasants' cottages are small and mean, tliougli the peasants themselves, when we met them, looked well fed, and were cer- tainly well clad. The landscape lay soaking in a dreary drizzle the whole way, and the town of Cento when we reached it, seemed miserably conscious of being too wet and dirty to go in-doors, and was loitering about in the rain. Our arrival gave the poor little place a sensation, for I think such a thing as an omnibus had not been seen there since the railway of Bologna and Ferrara was built. We went into the principal caff'd to lunch, — a caffe much too large for Cento, with immense red-leather cushioned sofas, and a cold, forlorn air of half-starved gentility, a clean, high-roofed cafl*e and a breezy, — and thither the youthful nobility and gentry of the place followed us, and ordered a cup of cofi^ee, that they might sit down and give us the pleasure of their distinguished company. They put on their very finest manners, and took their most captivating attitudes for the ladies' sake ; and the gentlemen of our party fancied 46 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. that it was for them these young men began to dia cuss the Roman question. How loud they were^ and how earnest ! And how often they consulted the newspapers of the cafFe ! (Older newspapers I never saw off a canal-boat.) I may tire some time of the artless vanity of the young Italians, so in- nocent, so amiable, so transparent, but I think I never shall. The great painter Guercino was born at Cento, and they have a noble and beautiful statue of him in the piazza, which the town caused to be erected from contributions by all the citizens. Formerly his house was kept for a show to the public ; it was full of the pictures of the painter and many mementos of him ; but recently the paintings have been taken to the gallery, and the house is now closed. The gallery is, consequently, one of the richest second- rate galleries in Italy, and one may spend much longer time in it than we gave, with great profit. There are some most interesting heads of Christ, painted, as Guercino always painted the Saviour, with a great degree of humanity in the face. It is an excellent countenance, and full of sweet dignity, but quite different from the conventional face of Christ. II. At night we were again in Bologna, of which we had not seen the gloomy arcades for two years. It must be a dreary town at all times : in a rain it is horrible ; and I think the whole race of arcaded cities, THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 47 Treviso, Padua, and Bologna, are dull, blind, and comfortless. The effect of the buildings vaulted above the sidewalks is that of a continuous cellar- way ; your view of the street is constantly interrupted by the heavy brick pillars that support the arches ; the arcades are not even picturesque. Liking always to leave Bologna as quickly as possible, and, on this occasion, learning that there was no hope of crossing the Apennines to Florence, we made haste to take tlie first train for Genoa, meaning to proceed thence directly to Naples by steamer. It was a motley company that sat down in Hotel Brun the mornino; after our arrival in Bologna to a breakfast of murky coffee and furry beefsteaks, as- sociated with sleek, greasy, lukewarm fried potatoes. I am sure that if each of our weather-bound pilgrims had told his story, we had been as well entertained as those at Canterburv. However, no one thought fit to give his narrative but a garrulous old Hebrew from London, who told us how he had been made to pay fifteen guineas for a carriage to cross the Apennines, and had been obliged to walk part of the way at that price. He was evidently proud, now the money w^as gone, of having been cheated of so much ; and in him we saw that there was at least one human being more odious than a purse-proud Englishman — namely, a purse-proud English Jew. He gave his noble name after a w^iile, as something too precious to be kept from the company, when recommendino; one of the travellers to go to the Hotel i'Angleterre in Rome : " The best 'ote' out of Eng^ 48 ' ITALIAN JOURNEYS. land. You may mention my name, if you like — Mr. Jonas." The recipient of this favor noted down the talismanic words in his pocket-book, and Mr, Jonas, conscious of having conferred a benefit on his race, became more odious to it than ever. An Eng- lishman is of a composition so uncomfortably original that no one can copy him, though many may carica- ture, I saw an American in London once who thought himself an Englishman because he wore leg- of-mutton whiskers, declaimed against universal suf- frage and republics, and had an appetite for high game. He was a hateful animal, surely, but he was not the British lion ; and this poor Hebrew at Bologna was not a whit more successful in his imitation of the illustrious brute, though he talked, like him, of nothing but hotels, and routes of travel, and hack- men and porters, and seemed to have nothing to do in Italy but get through it as quickly and abusively as possible. We were very glad, I say, to part from all this at Bologna and take the noon train for Genoa. In our car there were none but Italians, and the exchano-e of " La Perseveranza " of Milan for " IlPopolo " of Tu- rin with one of them quickly opened the way for con- versation and acquaintance. (^En passant : I know of no journal in the United States whose articles are better than those of the " Perseveranza^^ and it was gratifying to an American to read in this ablest jour- nal of Italy nothing but applause and encouragement of the national side in our late war.) My new-made friend turned out to be a Milanese. He was a phy THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 49 sician, and liad served as a surgeon in the late war of Italian independence ; but was now placed in a hospital in Milan. There was a gentle little blonde with him, and at Piacenza, where we stopped for lunch, " You see," said he, indicating the lady, " we are newly married," — which was, indeed, plain enough to any one who looked at their joyous faces, and observed how great disposition that little blonde had to nestle on the young man's broad shoulder. " I have a week's leave from my place," he went on, " and this is our wedding journey. We were to have gone to Florence, but it seems we are fated not to see that famous city." He spoke of it as immensely far off, and herein greatly amused us Americans, who had outgrown distances. " So we are ffoino; to Genoa instead, for two or three days." '' Oh, have you ever been at Genoa ? " broke in the bride. " What magnificent palaces I And then the bay, and the villas in the environs ! There is the Villa Pallavicini, with beautiful gardens, where an artificial shower breaks out from the bushes, and sprinkles the people who pass. Such fun ! " and she continued to describe vividly a city of which she bad only heard from her husband ; and it was easy to see that she walked in paradise wherever he led her. They say that Italian husbands and wives do not long remain fond of each other, but it was impossi- ble in the presence of these happy people not to be- 60 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. b'eve in the eternity of their love, and it was hard to keep from " dropping into poetry " on account of them. Their bliss infected every body in the car, and in spite of the weariness of our journey, and the vexation of the misadventures which had succeeded one another unsparingly ever since we left home, we found ourselves far on the way to Genoa before we thought to grumble at the distance. There was with us, besides the bridal party, a lady travelling from Bologna to Turin, who had learned English in Lon- don, and spoke it much better than most Londoners. It is surprising how thoroughly Italians master a lan- guage so alien to their own as ours, and how frequently you find them acquainted with English. From Russia the mania for this tongue has spread all over the Continent, and in Italy English seems to be prized first among the virtues. As w^e drew near Genoa, the moon came out on purpose to show us the superb city, and we strove eagerly for a first glimpse of the proud capital where Columbus was born. To tell the truth, the glimpse was but slight and false, for railways always enter cities by some mean level, from which any pictur- esque view is impossible. Near the station in Genoa, however, is the w^eak and ugly monument which the municipality has lately raised to Columbus. The moon made the best of this, which stands in a wide open space, and con- trived, with an Italian skill in the arrangement of light, to produce an effect of undeniable splendoj'. THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 61 On the morrow, we found out by the careless candor of the daylight what a uselessly big head Columbus had, and how the sculptor had not very happily thought proper to represent him with his sea-legs on. V. TIP AND DOWN GENOA. I HAD my note-book with me on this journey, and pledged myself to make notes in it. And, indeed, I did really do something of the kind, though the re- sult of my labors is by no means so voluminous as I would like it to be, now when the work of wishing there wei'e more notes is so easy. We spent but one day in Genoa, and I find such a marvelous succinct record of this in my book that I am tempted to give it here, after the fashion of that Historical Heavy- weight who writes the Life of " Frederick the Great." " Genoa, November 13. — Breakfast d lafourchette excellently and cheaply. I buy a hat. We go to seek the Consul, and, after finding every thing else for two hours, find him. Genoa is the most magnifi- cent city I ever saw ; and the new monument to Columbus about the weakest possible monument. Walk through the city with Consul ; Doge's palace ; cathedral ; girl turning somersaults in the street ; blind madman on the cathedral steps. We leave for Naples at twelve midnight." As for the breakfast, it was eaten at one of the many good caffd in Genoa, and perhaps some statis- UP AND DOWN GENOA. 53 tician will like to know that for a beefsteak and pota- toes, with a half-bottle of Ligurian wine, we paid a franc. For this money we had also the society of an unoccupied waiter, who leaned against a marble col- umn and looked on, with that gentle, half-compassion- ate interest in our appetites, which seems native to the tribe of waiters. A slight dash of surprise is in this professional manner ; and there is a faint smile on the solemn, professional countenance, which is perhaps prompted by too intimate knowledge of the mysteries of the kitchen and the habits of the cook. The man who passes his life among beefsteaks can- not be expected to love them, or to regard without wonder the avidity with which others devour them. I imagine that service in restaurants must beget simple and natural tastes in eating, and that tho jaded men who minister there to our pampered ap- petites demand only for themselves — "A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied, And water from the spring." Turning from this thought to the purchase of my Uat, I do not believe that literary art can interest the reader in that purely pez'sonal transaction, though I have no doubt that a great deal might be said about buying hats as a principle. I prefer, therefore, to I ass to our search for the Consul. A former Consul at , whom I know, has told me a good many stories about the pieces of popu- lar mind which he received at different times from the travelling public, in reproof of his difficulty of discovery j and I think it must be one of the most 54 ITALIAN JO-URNEYS. jealously guarded rights of American citizens in for- eign lands to declare the national representative hard to find, if there is no other complaint to lodge against him. It seems to be, in peculiar degree, a quality of consulship at — , to be found remote and inac- cessible. My friend says that even at New York, before setting out for his post, when inquiring into the history of his predecessors, he heard that they were one and all hard to find ; and he relates that on the steamer, going over, there was a low fellow who set the table in a roar by a vulgar anecdote to this effect : — " There was once a consul at , who indi- cated his ofiice-hours by the legend on his door, ' In from ten to one.' An old ship-captain, who kept coming for about a week without finding the Consul, at last furiously wrote, in the terms of wager, under this legend, ' Ten to one you 're out ! ' " My friend also states that one day a visitor of his remarked : " I 'm rather surprised to find you in. As a general rule, I never do find consuls in=" Habitu- ally, his fellow-countrymen entertained him wuth ac- counts of their misadventures in reachins; him. It was useless to represent to them that his house was in the most convenient locality in , where, in- deed, no stranger can walk twenty rods from his hotel without losing himself; that their guide was an ass, or their courier a rogue. They listened to him po- itely, but they never pardoned him in the least ; and neither w^ill I forgive the Consul at Genoa. I had DO earthly consular business with him, but a private UP AND DOWN GENOA. 65 favor to ask. It was Sunday, and I could not reason- ably expect to find him at his office, or any bouy to tell me where he lived ; but I have seldom had so keen a sense of personal wrong and national neglect as in mv search for that Consul's house. In Italy there is no species of fact with which any human being you meet will not pretend to have per- fect acquaintance, and, of course, the driver whose fiacre we took professed himself a complete guide tc the Consul's whereabouts, and took us successively to the residences of the consuls of all the South American repubhcs. It occurred to me that it might be well to inquire of these officials where their col- league was to be found ; but it is true that not one consul of them was at home ! Tlieir doors were opened by vacant old women, in whom a vague intel- ligence feebly guttered, like the wick of an expiring candle, and who, after feigning to throw floods of light on . the object of my search, successively flick- ered out, and left me in total darkness. Till that day, I never knew of what lofty flights stairs were capable. As out-of-doors, in Genoa, it is either all up or down hill, so in-doors it is either aU up or down stairs. Ascending and descending, in one palace after another, those infinite marble steps, it became a question not solved to this hour, whether it was worse to ascend or descend, --each ordeal in its ■,urn seemed so much more terrible than the other. At last I resolved to come to an understanding mih the driver, and I spent what lit:'le breath I had left — it was dry and hot as the simoom — in blow- 66 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. ing up that infamous man. " You are a great driver," I said, " not to know vour own city. What are you good for if you can't take a foreigner to his consul's ? " " Signore," answered the driver pa- tiently, " you would have to get a book in two vol- umes by heart, in order to be able to find every body in Genoa. This city is a labyrinth." Truly, it had so proved, and I could scarcely believe in my good luck when I actually found my friend, and set out with him on a ramble throuo;h its toils. A very great number of the streets in Genoa are footways merely, and these are as narrow, as dark, as full of jutting chimney -places, balconies, and opened window-shutters, and as picturesque as the little alleys in Venice. They wander at will around the bases of the gloomy ola stone palaces, and seem to have a vagabond fondness for creeping down to the port, and losino; themselves there in a certain cavernous arcade which curves round the water with the flection of the shore, and makes itself a twilight at noonday. Under it are clangorous shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling shops of marine cooks, and, looking down its dim perspective, one beholds chiefly sea-legs coming and going, more or less affected by strong waters ; and as the faces to which these sea-legs belong draw near, one discerns sailors from all parts of the world, — tawny men from Sicily and Norway, as diverse in their tawniness as olive and train-oil ; sharp faces from Nantucket and from the Piraeus, likewise might- ily different in tlieir sharpness; blonde Germans and blonde Englislimen ; and now and then a colored UP AND DOWN GENOA. 67 Drother also in the seafaring line, with sea-legs, also, more or less affected by strong waters like the rest. What curious people are these seafarers! They coast the whole world, and know nothing of it, being more ignorant and helpless than children on shore. I spoke with the Yankee mate of a ship one day at Venice, and asked him how he liked the city. Well, he had not been ashore yet. He was told he had better go ashore ; that the Piazza San Marco was worth seeing. Well, he knew it ; he had seen pictures of it ; but he guessed he would n't go ashore. Why not, now he was here ? Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he came to Venice. And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three weeks at Venice with his ship, after a voyage of two months, and he sailed away without ever setting his foot on that enchanted o-round. I should have liked to stop some of those seafarers %nd ask them what they thought of Genoa. It must have been in the little streets — impassable K'tr horses — that the people sat and talked, as Heine fabled, in their doorways, and touched knees with the people sitting and talking on the thresholds of the opposite side. But we saw no gossipers there on our Sunday in Genoa ; and I tliink the domestic race of Heine's day no longer lives in Genoa, for every body we saw on the streets was jravly dressed in the idea of the last fashions, and was to be met chiefly in the public promenades. The fashions were French ; but 68 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. here still lingers the lovely phantom of the old na« tional costume of Genoa, and snow-white veils flut- tered from many a dark head, and caressed many an olive cheek. It is the kindest and charitablest of attirements, this white veil, and, while decking beauty to the most perilous effect, befriends and modifies age and ugliness. The pleasure with which I look at the splendor of an Italian crowd in winter is always touched wath melancholy. I know that, at the time of its noonday promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its stomach ; that it has emerged from a house as cold and dim as a cellar ; and that it will presently go home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I know that chilblains secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid gloves, and I see in the rawness of its faces the an- £^uish of winter-Ions: sufferino; from cold. But I also look at many in this crowd with the eye of the econ- omist, and wonder how people practicing even so great self-denial as they can contrive to make so much display on their little means, — how those clerks of public offices, who have rarely an income of five hundred dollars a year, can dress with such peerless gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct reaches them ways and means unknown to us. The passion for dress is universal : the men are as fond of it as the women ; and, happily, clothes are compara* iively cheap. It is no great harm in itself, this dis- play : it is only a pity that there is often nothing, oi worse than nothing, under the shining surface. We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upoQ UP AND DOWN GENOA. 69 the hill where the public promenade overlooks a land- scape of city and country, houses and gardens, vines and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, it is so faultlessly beautiful. Behind us the fountain was — " Shaking its loosened silver in the sun ; '* the birds w^ere sino-ino; ; and there weie innumerable fair girls going by, about whom one might have made romances if one had not known better. Our friend pointed out to us the " pink jail " in which Dickens lived while at Genoa ; and showed us on the brow of a distant upland the villa, called II JParadiso, which Byron had occupied. I dare say this Genoese joke is already in print : That the Devil reentered Para- dise when Byron took this villa. Though, in loveli- est Italy, one is half-persuaded that the Devil had never left Paradise. After lino-erino; a little lono;er on that delicious height, we turned and went down for a stroll through the city. My note-book says that Genoa is the most magnifi- cent city I ever saw, and I hold by my note-book, though I hardly know how to prove it. Venice is, and remains, the most beautiful city in the world ; but her ancient rival impresses you with greater splendor. I suppose that the exclusively Renaissance architecture, which Ruskin declares the architecture of pride, lends itself powerfully to this effect in Genoa. It is here in its best mood, and there is little gro- tesque Renaissance to be seen, though the palaceg oO ITALIAN JOURNEYS. are, as usual, loaded with ornament. The Via Nu ova is the chief thoroughfare of the city, and the crowd pours through this avenue between long lines of pal- aces. Height on height rise the stately, sculptured faQades, colonnaded, statued, pierced by mighty door- ways and lofty windows ; and the palaces seem to gain a kind of aristocratic hauteur from the fact that there are for the most part no sidewalks, and that the carriages, rolling insolently through the crowd, threaten constantly to grind the pedestrian up against their carven marbles, and immolate him to their stony pride. There is something gracious and gentle in the grandeur of Venice, and much that the heart loves to cling to ; but in Genoa no sense of kindliness is touched by the magnificence of the city. It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to come, on a sudden, upon the Duomo, one of the few Gothic buildings in Genoa, and rest our jaded eyes on that architecture which Heaven seems truly to have put into the thoughts of man together with the Christian faith. O beloved beauty of aspiring arches, of slender and clustered columns, of flowering capi- tals and window-traceries, of many-carven breadths and heights, wherein all Nature breathes and blos- soms again ! There is neither Greek perfection, nor winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent Renaissance ■»pulence, which may compare with this loveliness of yours ! Alas that the interior of this Gothic temple of Genoa should abound in the abomination of rococo restoration ! They say that the dust of St. John the Baptist lies there within a costly shrine ; and T won- UP AND DOWN GENOA. 61 ier that it can sleep in peace amid all that heathen- ish show of bad taste. But the poor saints have to suffer a great deal in Italy. Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was an idle, cruel crowd, amusing itself with the efforts of a blind old man to find the entrance. He had a number of books which he desperately laid down while he ran his helpless hands over the clustered columns, and which he then desperately caught up again, in fear of losino; them. At other times he paused, and wildly clasped his hands upon his eyes, or wildly threw up his arms ; and then began to run to and fro again uneasily, while the crowd laughed and jeered. Doubtless a taint of madness afflicted him ; but not the less he seemed the type of a blind soul that gropes darkly about through life, to find the doorway of some divine truth or beauty, — touched by the heavenly harmonies from within, and misera- bly failing, amid the scornful cries and bitter glee of those Avho have no Avill but to mock aspiration. The girl turning somersaults in another place had far more popular sympathy than the blind madman at ihe temple door, but she was hardly a more cheerful spectacle. For all her festive spangles and fairy-like brevity of skirts, she had quite a work-a-day look upon her honest, blood-red face, as if this were business though it looked like sport, and her part of the diver- sion were as practical as that of the famous captain of the waiters, who gave the act of peeling a sack of potatoes a playful effect by standing on his head. The Door damsel was going over and over, to the sound of 62 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. most dismal drumming and braying, in front of the immense old palace of the Genoese Doges, — a clas* sic building, stilted on a rustic base, and quite worthy of Palladio, if any body thinks that is praise. There was little left of our day when we had dined ; but having seen the outside of Genoa, and not hoping to see the inside, we found even this little heavy on our hands, and were glad as the hour drew near when we were to take the steamer for Naples. It had been one of the noisiest days spent during several years in clamorous Italy, whose voiceful up- roar strikes to the summits of her guardian Alps, and greets the coming stranger, and whose loud Addio would stun him at parting, if he had not meanwhile become habituated to the operatic pitch of her every- day tones. In Genoa, the hotels, taking counsel of the vagabond streets, stand about the cavernous ar- cade already mentioned, and all the noise of the ship- ping reaches their guests. We rose early that Sun- day morning to the sound of a fleet unloading car- goes of wrought-iron, and of the hard swearing of all nations of seafaring men. The whole day long the tumult followed us, and seemed to culminate at last in the screams of a parrot, who thought it fine to cry, ^^ Piove ! piove ! piove ! ^^ — "It rains! it i'ains ! it rains ! " — and had, no doubt, a secret interest in some umbrella-shop. This unprincipled bird dwelt somewhere in the neighborhood of the street where you see the awful tablet in the wall devoting to infamy the citizens of the old republic that were false to their country. The sight of that UP AND DOWN GENOA. 63 pitiless stone recalls with a thrill the picturesque, un- happy past, with all the wandering, half-benighted efforts of the people to rend their liberty from now a foreign and now a native lord. At best, they only knew liow to avenge their wrongs ; but now, let us hope, they have learnt, with all Italy, to prevent them. The will was never wanting of old to the Ligurian race, and in this time they have done their full share to establish Italian freedom. I do not know why it should have been so surpris- incr to hear the boatman who rowed us to the steam- er's anchorage speak English ; but, after his harsh Genoese profanity in getting his boat into open water, it was the last thing we expected from him. It had somehow the effect of a furious beast address- ing you in your native tongue, and telling you it was " Wary poordy wedder ; " and it made us cling to his good-nature with the trembling solicitude of Little Red-Riding-Hood, when she begins to have the first faint suspicions of her grandmother. How- ever, our boatman was no wild beast, but took our six cents of huonamano with the base servility of a Christian man, when he had put our luggage in the cabin of the steamer. I wonder how he should have known us for Americans ? He dii so know us, and said he had been at New York in better days, when he voyaged upon higher seas than those he now nav- igated. On board, we watched with compassion an old gentleman in the cabin making a hearty meal of sar- dines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if he had evei 64 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. been at sea. No,, he said. I could have wept over that innocent old gentleman's childlike confidence of appetite, and guileless trust of the deep. We went on deck, where one of the gentle beings of our party declared that she would remain as long as Genoa was in sight ; and to tell the truth, the scene was worthy of the promised devotion. There, in a half-circle before iis, blazed the lights of the quay; above these twinkled the lamps of the steep streets and climbing palaces ; over and behind all hung the darkness on the heights, — a sable cloud dotted with ruddy points of flame burning in thb windows of invisible houses. " Merrily did we drop " down the bay, and presently caught the heavy swell of the open sea. The other gentle being of our party then clutched my shoulder with a dreadful shudder, and after gasping, " O Mr. Scribbler, why will the ship roll so ? " was meekly hurried below by her sister, who did not return for a last glimpse of Genoa the Proud. In a moment heaven's sweet pity flapped away as with the sea-gull's wings, and I too felt that there was no help for it, and that I must go and lie down m the cabin. With anguished eyes I beheld upon the shelf opposite to mine the innocent old gentleman who had lately supped so confidently on sardines and fruit-pie. He lay upon his back, groaning softly to himself. VI. BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. I. Like the Engllsliman who had no prejudices, I do hate a Frenchman ; and there were many French- men among our passengers on the Messina, in whose company I could hardly have been happy, had I not seen them horribly sea-sick. After the imprudent old gentleman of the sardines and fruit-pie, these wretched Gauls were the first to be seized with the malady, which became epidemic, and were miserable up to the last moment on board. To the enormity of having been born Frenchmen, they added the crime of being; commercial travellers, — a class of fel- low-men of whom we know little at home, but who are met everywhere in European travel. They spend more than half their lives in movement from place to place, and they learn to snatch from every kind of travel its meagre comforts, with an insolent disregard of the rights and feelings of other passengers. They excuse an abominable trespass with a cool '' Pardon ! " take the best seat everywhere, and especially treat ivomen with a savage rudeness, to which an Ameri- can vainly endeavors to accustom his temper. I have 5 66 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. Been commercial travellers of all nations, and I think I must award the French nation the discredit of pro- ducing the most odious commercial travellers in the world. The Englishman of this species wraps him- self in his rugs, and rolls into his corner, defiantly, but not aggressively, boorish ; the Italian is almost a gentleman ; the German is apt to take sausage out of a newspaper and eat it with his penknife ; the Frenchman aggravates human nature beyond endur- ance by his restless ill-breeding, and his evident in- tention not only to keep all his own advantages, but to steal some of yours upon the first occasion. There were three of these monsters on our steamer : one a slight, bloodless young man, with pale blue eyes and an incredulous grin ; another, a gigantic full-bearded animal in spectacles; the third an infamous plump little creature, in absurdly tight pantaloons, with a cast in his eye, and a habit of sucking his teeth at table. When this wretch was not writhing; in the agonies of sea-sickness, he was on deck with his com- rades, lecturing them upon various things, to which the bloodless young man listened with his incredulous grin, and the bearded giant in spectacles attended with a choked look about the eyes, like a suffering ox. They were constantly staggering in and out of their state-room, which, for my sins, was also mine ; •ind opening their abominable commodious travelling bags, or brushing their shaggy heads at the reeling mirror, and since they were born into the world, I think they had never cleaned their finger-nails. They wore their hats at dinner, but always went *way, after soup, deadly pale. BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 67 n. In contrast with these cattle, what polished and courtly gentlemen were the sailors and firemen ! A3 for our captain, he would in any company have won notice for his gentle and high-bred way ; in his place at the head of the table among these Frenchmen, he seemed to me the finest gentleman I had ever seen. He had spent his whole life at sea, and had voyaged in all parts of the world except Japan, where he meant some day, he said, to go. He had been first a cabin-boy on a little Genoese schooner, and he had gradually risen to the first place on a sailing-vessel, and now he had been selected to fill a commander's post on this line of steamers. (It is an admirable line of boats, not belonging I believe to the Italian gov- ernment, but much under its control, leaving Genoa every day for Leghorn, Naples, Palermo, and Ancona, on the Adriatic coast.) The captain had sailed a good deal in American waters, but chiefly on the Pacific coast, trading from the Spanish republican ports to those of California. He had been in that State dur- ing its effervescent days, when every thing foul floated to the top, and I am afraid he formed there but a bad opinion of our people, though he was far too courteous to say outright any thing of this sort. Pie had very fine, shrewd blue eyes, a lean, weather- beaten, kindly face, and a cautious way of saying things. I hardly expected him to turn out so red-hot « Democrat as he did on better acquaintance, but being 88 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. a warm friend of man myself, I was not sorry. Gar- ibaldi was the beginning and ending of his political faith, as he is with every enthusiastic Italian. The honest soul's conception of all concrete evil was brought forth in two words, of odd enough applica- tion. In Europe, and Italy more particularly, true men have suffered chiefly from this form of evil, and the captain evidently could conceive of no other cause of suffering anywhere. We were talking of the American war, and when the captain had asked the usual question, " Quando finird mai questa guerra ? " and I had responded as usual, "AA, ci vuol pazienza .'" the captain gave a heavy sigh, and turning his head pensively aside, plucked his grapes from the cluster a moment in silence. Then he said : " You Americans are in the habit of attributing this war to slavery. The cause is not sufficient." I ventured to demur and explain. " No," said the captain, " the cause is not sufficient. We Italians know the only cause which could produce a war like this." I was naturally anxious to be instructed in the Ital- ian theory, hoping it might be profounder than the English notion that we were fightino; about tariffs. The captain frowned, looked at me carefully, and then said : — " In this world there is but one cause of mischief — the Jesuits." BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 69 III. The first night out, from Genoa to Leghorn, was bad enoiigli, but tliat which succeeded our departure from the latter port was by far the worst of the three we spent in our voyage to Naples. How we envied the happy people who went ashore at Leghorn ! I think we even envied the bones of the Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese who met and slew each other in the long-forgotten sea-figlits, and sank too deeply through the waves to be stirred by their restless tu- mult. Every one has heard tell of how cross and treacherous a sea the Mediterranean is in winter, and my own belief is, that he who has merely been sea- sick on the Atlantic should but in spite of this prophecy the day dawned storm* ily, and at breakfast time we looked out doubtfully on waves lashed by driving rain. The entrance to the Blue Grotto, to visit which we had come to Capri, is by a semicircular opening, some three feet in width and two feet in height, and just large enough to ad- mit a small boat. One lies flat in the bottom of this, waits for the impulse of a beneficent wave, and is carried through the mouth of the cavern, and res- cued from it in like manner bv some recedinp; billow. When the wind is in the wrong quarter, it is impos- sible to enter the grot at all ; and we waited till nine o'clock for the storm to abate before we ventured forth. In the mean time one of the Danish gentle- men, who — after assisting his companion to compel the boatmen to justice the night before — had stayed at Capri, and had risen early to see the grotto, re- turned from it, and we besieged him with a hundred questions concerning it. But he preserved the wise silence of the boy who goes in to see the six-legged calf, and comes out impervious to the curiosity of all die boys who are doubtful whether the monster is worth their money. Our Dane would merely say that it was now possible to visit the Blue Grotto ; that he had seen it ; that he was glad he had seen it. As to its blueness. Messieurs — yes, it is blue. (Te»t i dire The ladies had been amusincr themselves with a perusal of the hotel register, and the notes of admi- ration or disgust with which the different sojourners 130 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. at the inn had filled it. As a rule, the English peo-« pie found fault with the poor little hostelry and the French people praised it. Commander Joshing and Lieutenant Prattent, R. N., of the former nation, *' were cheated by the donkey women, and thought themselves extremely fortunate to have escaped with their lives from the effects of Capri vintage. The landlord was an old Cossack." On the other hand, we read, " J. Cruttard, homme de lettres, a passd quinze jours ici, et n'a eu que des f^licit^s du patron de cet hotel et de sa famille." Cheerful man of let- ters ! His good-natured record will keep green a name little known to literature. Who are G. Brad- shaw, Duke of New York, and Signori Jones and Andrews, Hereditary Princes of the United States ? Their patrician names followed the titles of several English nobles in the register. But that which most interested the ladies in this record was the warning of a terrified British matron against any visit to the Blue Grotto except in the very calmest weather. The British matron penned her caution after an all but fatal experience. The ladies read it aloud to us, and announced that for themselves they would be contented with pictures of the Blue Grotto and our account of its marvels. On the beach below the hotel lav the small boats Df the guides to the Blue Grotto, and we descended to take one of them. " The fixed rate is a franc for tacli person. The boatmen wanted fii^e francs for each of us. We explained that although not indige- nous to Capri, or even Italy, we were not of the svio CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 131 culent growth of travellers, and would not lo eaten We retired to our vantage ground on the herghts. The guides called us to the beach again. They would take us for three francs apiece, or say six francs for both of us. We withdrew furious to the heights again, where we found honest Antonino, who did us the pleasure to yell to his fellow-scoundrels on the beach, " You had better take these signori for a just price. They are going to the syndic to com- plain of you." At which there arose a lamentable outcry among the boatmen, and they called with one voice for us to come down and go for a franc apiece. This fable teaches that common-carriers are roo;ues everywhere ; but that whereas we are helpless in their hands at home, we may bully them into recti- tude in Italy, where they are afraid of the law. We had scarcely left the landing of the hotel in the boat of the patriarch — for I need hardly say he was first and most rapacious of the plundering crew — when we found ourselves in very turbulent waters, in the face of mighty bluffs, rising inaccessible from the sea. Here and there, where their swarthy fronts were softened with a little verdure, goat- paths wound up and down among the rocks ; and midway between the hotel and the grotto, in a sort of sheltered nook, we saw the Roman masonry of certain antique baths — baths of Augustus, says Valery ; baths of Tiberius, Bay the Capriotes, zealous for the honor of their in- Qimous hero. Howbeit, tnis was all we saw on the way to the Blue Gro'ito. Every moment the waves fose higher, emulous of the bluffs, which would no* 132 ITALIAN JOURNEYb. have afforded a foothold, or any thing to cling to, haj we been upset and washed against them — and we began to talk of the immortality of the soul. As we neared the grotto, the patriarch entertained us with stories of the perilous adventures of people who in- sisted upon entering it in stormy weather, — espe- cially of a French painter who had been imprisoned in it four days, and kept alive only on rum, which the patriarch supplied him, swimming into the grotto with a bottle-full at a time. " And behold us ar- rived, gentlemen ! " said he, as he brought the boat skillfully around in front of the small semicircular opening at the base of the lofty bluff. We lie flat on the bottom of the boat, and complete the immersion of that part of our clothing which the driving tor- rents of rain had spared. The wave of destiny rises with us upon its breast — sinks, and we are inside of the Blue Grotto. Not so much blue as gray, how- ever, and the water about the mouth of it green rather than azure. They say that on a sunny day both the water and the roof of the cavern are of the vividest cerulean tint — and I saw the grotto so rep- resented in the windows of the paint-shops at Na- ples. But to my own experience it did not differ from other caves in color or form : there was the customary clamminess in the air ; the sound of drop- ping water ; the sense of dull and stupid solitude, — a little relieved in this case by the mighty music of the waves breaking against the rocks outside. The grot is not great in extent, and the roof in the rear shelves gradually down to the water. Valery sayi CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 133 that some remains of a gallery have caused the sup- position that the grotto was once the scene of Tibe- rius's pleasures ; and the Prussian painter who dis- covered the cave was led to seek it by something he had read of a staircase by which Barbarossa used to descend into a subterranean retreat from the town of Anacapri on the mountain top. The slight frag- ment of ruin which we saw in one corner of the cave might be taken in confirmation of both theories ; but the patriarch attributed the work to Barbarossa, being probably tired at last of hearing Tiberius so much talked about. We returned, soaked and disappointed, to the ho- tel, where we found Antonino very doubtful about the possibility of getting back that day to Sorrento, and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of bad weather, to revive the fiction of a prohibitory consul. He was staying in Capri at our expense, and the honest fellow would willingly have spent a fortnight there. We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he came with all his household to present the account, — each one full of visible longing, yet restrained from asking huonamano by a strong sense of previous contract. It was a deadly struggle with them, but they conquered themselves, and blessed us as we departed. The pretty muletress took leave of U3 on the beach, and we set sail for Sorrento, the ladies srouching in the bottom of the boat, and taking their gea-sickness in silence. As we drew near the beau- tiful town, we saw how it lay on a plateau, at th« 134 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. foot of the mountains, but high above the sea. An- tonino pointed out to us the house of Tasso, — in which the novehst Cooper also resided when in Sor* rento, — a white house not handsomer nor uglier than the rest, with a terrace looking out over the water. The blufts are pierced by numerous arched caverns, as I have said, giving shelter to the fisher- men's boats, and here and there a devious stairway mounts to their crests. Up one of these we w^alked, noting how in the house above us the people, wdth that puerility usually mixed with the Italian love of beauty, had placed painted busts of terra-cotta in the windows to simulate persons looking out. There was nothing to blame in the breakfast we found ready at the Hotel Rispoli ; and as for the grove of slender, graceful orange-trees in the midst of -which the hotel stood, and which had lavished the fruit in every di- rection on the ground, why, I would willingly give for it all the currant-bushes, with their promises of jelly and jam, on which I gaze at this moment. Antonino attended us to our carriage when we went away. He had kept us all night at Capri, it is true, and he had brought us in at the end for a pro- digious huonamano ; yet I cannot escape the convic- tion that he parted from us with an unfulfilled pur- pose of greater plunder, and I have a compassion, which I here declare, for the strangers who fell next into his hands. He was good enough at the last moment to say that his name, Silver-Eye, w^as a nickname given him according to a custom of the Sorrentines ; and he made us a farewell bow tha^ could not be bought in America for money. CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 136 At the station of Castellamare sat a curious cripple Dn the stones, — a man with Httle, short, withered legs, and a pleasant face. He showed us the ticket- office, and wanted nothing for the politeness. After we had been in the waiting-room a brief time, he came swinging himself in upon his hands, followed by another person, who, when the cripple had planted himself finally and squarely on the ground, whipped out a tape from his pocket and took his measure for a suit of clotlies, the cripple twirling and twisting himself about in every way for the tailor's conven- ience. Nobody was surprised or amused at the sight, and when his measure was thus pubHcly taken, the cripple gravely swung himself out aa he had swung himself in. XI. THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. I HAD the pleasure one day of visiting nearly ali the free schools which the wise philanthropy of the Protestant residents of Naples has established in that city. The schools had a peculiar interest for me, be- cause I had noticed (in an uncareful fashion enough, no doubt) the great changes which had taken place in Italy under its new national government, and was desirous to see for myself the sort of progress the Italians of the south w^ere making in avenues so long closed to them. I believe I have no mania for mis- sionaries ; I have heard of the converted Jew-and-a- half, and I have thought it a good joke ; but I cannot help offering a very cordial homage to the truth that the missionaries are doing a vast deal of good in Na- ples, where they are not only spreading the gospel, but the spelling-book, the arithmetic, and the geography. It is not to be understood from the word mission- aries, that this work is done by men especially sent from England or America to perform it. The free Protestant schools in Naples are conducted under the auspices of the Evangelical Aid Committee, — com- posed of members of the English Church, the Swiss Church, and the Presbyterian Church ; the Presi PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 137 dent of this committee is Dr. Strange, an English- man, and the Treasurer is Mr. Rogers, the American banker. The missionaries in Naples, therefore, are n;en who have themselves found out their work and appointed themselves to do it. The gentleman by whose kindness I was permitted to visit the schools was one of these men, — the Rev. Mr. Buscarlet, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Naples, a Swiss by birth, who had received his education chiefly in Scotland. He accompanied me to the different schools, and as we walked up the long Toledo, and threa:led our way through the sprightly Neapolitan crowd, he told me of the origin of the schools, and of the peculiar difficulties encountered in their foundation and main- tenance. They are no older than the union of Na- ples with the Kingdom of Italy, when toleration of Protestantism was decreed by law ; and from the first, their managers proceeded upon a principle of perfect openness and candor with the parents who wished to send their children to them. They an- nounced that the children would be taught certain Oranches of learning, and that the whole Bible would be placed in their hands, to be studied and under- stood. In spite of this declaration of the Protestant character of the schools, the parents of the chil- dren were so anxious to secure them the benefits of education, that they willingly ran the risk of their becoming heretics. They w^ere principally people of llie lower classes, — laborers, hackmen, fishermen, domestics, and very small shopkeepers, but occasion- 138 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. ' ally among them were parents able to send their children to other schools, yet preferring the thorough and conscientious system practiced in these. So the children came, and thanks to the peaceful, uncom- bative nature of Italian boys, who get on with much less waylaying and thumping and bullying than boys of northern blood, they have not been molested by their companions who still live the wild life of the streets, and they have only once suffered through in- terference of the priests. On complaint to the au* thorities the wrong was promptly redressed, and was not again inflicted. Of course these poor little peo- ple, picked up out of the vileness and ignorance of a city that had suflPered for ages the most degrading op- pression, are by no means regenerate yet, but there seems to be great hope for them. Now at least they are taught a reasonable and logical morality — and who can tell what wonders the novel instruction may not work ? They learn for the first time that it is a foolish shame to lie and cheat, and it would scarcely be surprising if some of them were finally persuaded that Honesty is the best Policy — a maxim that few Italians believe. And here lies the trouble, — in the unfathomable, disheartening duplicity of the race. The chiklren are not quarrelsome, nor cruel, nor brutal ; but the servile def'^ct of falsehood fixed by long generations of slavery in the Italians, is almost ineradicable. The fault is worse in Naples than else- where in Italy ; but how bad it is everywhere, no* merely travellers, but all residents in Italy, must bear witness PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 13& The first school which we visited was a girls' school, in which some forty-four Httle women of alJ ages, from four to fifteen years, were assembled un- der the charge of a young Corfute girl, an Italian Protestant, who had delegated her authority to dif- ferent children under her* The small maidens gathered around their chiefs in groups, and read from the book in which they were studying when we appeared. Some allowance must be made for differ- ence of the languages, Italian being logically spelled and easily pronounced ; but I certainly never heard American children of their age read nearly so well. They seemed also to have a lively understanding of what they read, and to be greatly interested in the scriptural stories of which their books were made up. They repeated verses from the Bible, and stanzas of poetry, all very eagerly and prettily. As bashfulness is scarcely known to their race, they had no hesita- tion in showing off their accomplishments before a stranger, and seemed quite delighted with his a[>- plause. They were not particularly quiet ; perhaps with young Neapolitans that would be impossible, I saw their copy-books, in which the writing was very good, (I am sure the printer would like mine to be as legible,) and the books were kept neat and clean, as were the hands and faces of the children. Taking the children as one goes in the streets of Na- ples, it would require a day perhaps to find as many dean ones as I saw in these schools, where cleanli- ness is resolutely insis'ied upon. Many of the chil- dren were ragged ; here and there was one hideous 140 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. with ofMhalmia; but there was not a clouded coun- tenance, nor a dirty hand among them. We should have great hopes for a nation of which the children can be taught to wash themselves. There were fourteen pupils in the boys' superior school, where geography, mathematics, linear draw- ing, French, Italian history, and ancient history w^ere taught. A brief examination sho',ved the boys to be well up in their studies ; — indeed they furnished some recondite information about Baffin's Bay for w^hich I should not myself have liked to be called on suddenly. Their drawing-books were prodigies of neatness, and betrayed that aptness for form and facility of execution -which are natural to the Ital- ians. Some of these boys had been in the schools nearly three years ; they w^ere nearly all of the class which must otherwise have grown up to hope- less vagabondage ; but here they were receiving gratis an education that would fit them for em- ployments wherein trained intellectual capacity is required. If their education went no higher than this, what an advance it would be upon their origi- nal condition ! In the room devoted to boys of lower grade, I en- tangled myself in difficulties with a bright-eyed young gentleman, whom I asked if he liked Italian history better than ancient history. He said he liked the latter, especially that of the Romans, much Detter. " Why, that is strange. I should think an Italian boy would like Italian history best." " But Ivere not the Romans also Italians, Signore ? " * PBOTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 141 blush to say that I basely sneaked out of this trouble by answering that they were not like the Italians of the present day, — whatever that meant. But in- deed all these young persons were startlingly quick with their information, and knowing that I knew very little on any subject with certainty, I think I was wise to refuse all offers to examine them in their studies. We left this school and returned to the Toledo by one of those wonderful little side streets already men- tioned, which are forever tumultuous with the oddest Neapolitan life — with men quarreling themselves purple over small quantities of fish — with asses braving loud and clear above their discord — with women roasting pine-cones at charcoal fires — with children in the ao;onies of havino; their hair combed — with degraded poultry and homeless dogs — with fruit-stands and green groceries, and the little edifices of ecclesiastical architecture for the sale of lemonade — with wandering bag-pipers, and herds of noncha- lant goats — with horses, and grooms currying them — and over all, from vast heights of balcony, with people lazily hanging upon rails and looking down on the riot. Reentering the stream of the Toledo, it carried us almost to the Museo Borbonico before we again struck aside into one of the smaller streets, whence we climbed quite to the top of one of those incredibly high Neapolitan houses. Here, crossing an open terrace on the ro(f, we visited three small rooms, in which there were altoo-ether some hundred boys in the first stages of reclamation. They were 142 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. nnder the immediate superintendence of Mr. Buscar* let, and he seemed to feel the fondest interest in them. Indeed, there was sufficient reason for this : up to a certain point, the NeapoHtan children learn so rapidly and wilHngly that it can hardly be other than a pleasure to teach them. After tliis, tlieir zeal flags ; they know enough ; and their parents and friends, far more ignorant than they, are perfectly satisfied w^ith their progress. Then the difficulties of their teachers begin ; but here, in these lowest grade schools, they had not yet begun. The boys were still eager to learn, and were ardently following the lead of their teachers. They were little fellows, nearly all, and none of them had been in school more than a year and a half, while some had been there only three or four months. They rose up with " Buon giorno, signori^^^ as we entered, and could hardly be persuaded to lapse back to the duties of life during our stay. They had very good faces, indeed, for the most part, and even the vicious had intellectual brightness. Just and consistent usage has the best influence on them ; and one boy was pointed out as quite docile and manageable, whose parents had given him up as incorrigible before he entered the school. As it was, there was sometliing almost pathetic in his good behavior, as being pos- sible to him, but utterly alien to his instincts. The boys of these schools seldom play truant, and they are never severely beaten in school ; when quite in- tractable, notice is given to their parents, and they Usually return in a more docile state. It sometimes PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 143 hapytens that the boys are taken away by their parents, from one motive or anotlier ; but they find tlieir way back again, and are received as if nothing had happened. The teacher in the first room here is a handsome young Calabrian, with the gentlest face and manner, — one of the most eflicient teachers under Mr. Buscarlet. The boys had out their Bibles when we entered, and one after another read passages to us. There were children of seven, eight, and nine years, who had been in the school only three months, and who read any part of their Bibles with facility and correctness ; of course, before coming to school they had not known one letter from another. The most accomplished scholar was a youngster, named Sag- giomo, who had received eighteen months' schooling* He was consequently very quick indeed, and wanted to answer all the hard questions put to the other boys. In fact, all of them were ready enough, and there was a great deal of writhing and snapping of fino-ers amono; those who lono-ed to answer some hesitator's question — just as you see in schools at home. They were examined in geography, and then in Bible history — particularly Joseph's story. They responded in chorus to all demands on this part of study, and could hardly be quieted sufficiently to give Saggiomo's little brother, aged five, a chance to tell why Joseph's brethren sold him. As soon as he could be heard he piped out : " Perche Giuseppe aveva del sogni I " (Because Joseph had dreams.) It was not exactly the right answer, but nobody L44 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. laughea at the little fellow, though they all roared out in correction when permitted. In the next room, boys somewhat older were ex- amined in Italian history, and responded correctly and promptly. They were given a sum which they performed in a miraculously short time ; and their copy-books, when shown, were equally creditable to them. Their teacher was a Bolognese, — a natural- ized Swiss, — who had been a soldier, and who maintained strict discipline among his irregulars, without, however, any perceptible terrorism. The amount of work these teachers accomplish in a day is incredible : the boys' school opens at eight in the morning and closes at four, with intermission of an hour at noon. Then in the evening the same men teach a school for adults, and on Sunday have their classes in the Sunday-schools. And this the whole year round. Their pay is not great, being about twenty dollars a month, and they are evidently not wholly self-interested from this fact. The amount of good they accomplish under the direction of their superiors is in proportion to the work done. To appreciate it, the reader must consider that they take the children of the most io-norant and degraded uf all the Italians ; that they cause them to be washed corporeally, first of all, and then set about cleansing them morally ; and having cleared away as much of the inherited corruption of ages as possible, they begin to educate them in the various branches of learning. There is no direct proselyting in the schools, but the Bible is the first study, and the chil* PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 145 dren are constantly examined in it ; and the result is at Jeast not superstition. The advance upon the old condition of things is incalculably great ; for till the revolution under Garibaldi in 1860, the schools of Naples vy^ere all in the hands of the priests or their creatures, and the little learning there imparted was as dangerous as it could well be made. Now these schools are free, the children are honestly and thor- oughly taught, and if they are not directly instructed in Protestantism, are at least instructed to associate religion with morality, probably for the first time in their lives. Too much credit cannot be given to the Italian government which has acted in such good faith with the men engaged in this work, protecting them from all interruption and persecution ; but af- ter all, the great praise is due to their own wise, unflagging zeal. They have worked unostenta- tiously, making no idle attacks on time-honored prej- udices, but still having a purpose of enlightenment which they frankly avowed. The people whom they seek to benefit judge them by their works, and che result is that they have quite as much before them as they can do. Their discouragements are great. The day's teaching is often undone at home; the boys forget as aptly as they learn ; and from the fact that only the baser feelings of fear and interest have ever been appealed to before in the Neapolitans, ihey have often to build in treacherous places with- out foundation of good faith or gratitude. Embar- rassments for want of adequate funds are sometimes 30 146 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. '*elt also. But no one can study their operations without feeling that success must attend their efforts, with honor to them, and with inestimable benefits to the generation which shall one day help to govern fr©3 Italy. XII. BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLE8. One day it became plain even to our reluctance that we could not stay in Naples forever, and the next mornino; we took the train for Rome. The Villa Reale put on its most alluring charm to him that ran down before breakfast to thrid once more its pathways bordered with palms and fountains and statues ; the bay beside it purpled and twinkled in the light that made silver of the fishermen's sails ; far away rose Vesuvius with his nightcap of mist still hanging about his shoulders ; all around rang and rat- tled Naples. The city was never so fair before, nor could ever have been so hard to leave ; and at the last moment tlie landlord of the Hotel Washington jQust needs add a supreme pang by developing into a poet, and presenting me with a copy of a comedy he had written. The reader who has received at part- ing from the gentlemanly proprietor of one of our palatial hotels his " Ode on the Steam Elevator," will conceive of the shame and regret with which I thought of having upbraided our landlord about our rooms, of having stickled at small preliminaries con- i^erning our contract for board, and for having alto- gether treated him as one of the uninspired. Let me 148 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. do him the tardy justice to say that he keeps, afteif the Stella d'Oro at Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, and that his comedy was really very sprightly. It is no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we know, and a poet who does it ought to have a double acclaim. Nobody who cares to travel with decency and comfort can take the second-class cars on the road between Naples and Rome, though these are per- fectly good everywhere else in Italy. The Papal city makes her influence felt for shabbiness and un- cleanliness wherever she can, and her management seems to prevail on this railway. A glance into the second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class, — which in themselves were bad, — and we took our places almost contentedly. The road passed through the wildest country we had seen in Italy ; and presently a rain began to fall and made it drearier than ever. The land was much grown up with thickets of hazel, and was here and there sparsely wooded with oaks. Under these, hogs were feeding upon the acorns, and the wet swine- herds were steaming over fires built at their roots. In some places the forest was quite dense ; in other places it fell entirely away, and left the rocky hill- Bides bare, and solitary but for the sheep that nibbled at the scanty grass, and the shepherds that leaned npon their crooks and motionlessly stared at us as we ••ushed by. As we drew near Rome, the scenery grew lonelier yet ; the land rose into desolate, ster- ile, stony heights, without a patch of verdure on their BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES. 149 nakedness, and at last abruptly dropped into the gloomy expanse of the Campagna. The towns along the route had little to interest us in their looks, though at San Germano we caught a glimpse of the famous old convent of Monte-Cassino, perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of the rock on which it was built. Fancy now loves to climb that steep acclivity, and wander through the many-volumed library of the ancient Benedictine re- treat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and cer- tainly less expensive than actual ascent and acquaint- ance with the monastery would have been. Two Croatian priests, who shared our compartment of the railway carriage, first drew our notice to the place, and were enthusiastic about it for many miles after it was out of sight. What gentle and pleasant men they were, and how hard it seemed that they should be priests and Croats ! They told us all about the city of Spalato, where they lived, and gave us such a glowing account of Dalmatian poets and poetry that we becran to doubt at last if the seat of literature were not somewhere on the east coast of the Adri- atic ; and I hope we left them the impression that he literary centre of the world was not a thousand \iiiles from the horse-car office in Harvard Square. Here and there repairs were going forward on the .'ailroad, and most of the laborers were women. They were straight and handsome girls, and moved with a stately grace under the baskets of earth bal- anced on their heads. Brave black eyes they had. such as love to look and to be looked at ; they were not in the least hurried by their work, but desisted 150 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. from it to gaze at the passengers whenever the train stopped. They all wore their beautiful peasant cos- tume, — the square white linen head-dress falling ty which Italian waiters, in veroally presenting your account, ap nve at six as the product of two and two 198 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. against the defenses and stacrsrerinor headloncj into the moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters, but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from museums of armor and from cabi- nets of antiquities ; but they were very vivid for all that. I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to divest myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay waiting admission on the out- side. For an instant they masked again the Vene- tian troops that, in the War of the League of Cam- bray, entered the city in the hay-carts, shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and, uniting with the citizens, cut the German garrison to pieces. But it was a thing long past. The German garrison was here again ; and the heirs of the landsknechts went clanking through the gate to the parade-ground, with that fierce clamor of their kettle-drums which is so much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of fifes. Once more now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust, forever ; but when I saw them, there seemed little hope of their going. They had a great Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up the altars of their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city. I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on BULih a spring day as this in the arcaded Paduai? streets, I should catch glimpses, through the gate- AT PADUA. 199 ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom^ and of fountains that tinkle there forisver. If it were autumn, and I were in the great market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I should hear the baskets of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with the murmur of multitudinous bees, and makino; a music as if the wine itself were already singing in their gentle hearts. It is a great field of succulent verdure, that wide old market-place ; and fancy loves to browse about among its gay stores of fruits and vegetables, brought thither by the world-old peasant- women who have been brincrino; fruits and veo-etables to the Paduan market for so many centuries. They Bit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit and doze, and wake up with a drowsy '-'- Coman- dala .^ " as you linger to look at their grapes. They have each a pair of scales, — the emblem of Injus- tice, — and will w^eigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if you like. Their faces are yellow as parch- ment, and Time has written them so full of wrinkles Jiat there is not room for another line. Doubtless these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole history of Padua if you could get at each succcssiv^e inscription. Among their primal records there must be some account of the Roman city, as each little contadinella remembered it on market-days ; and one might read of the terror of Attila's sack, a little later, with the peasant-maid's personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper who ate up the grapes in her basket, and kissed her bard, round red cheeks, — for in that time she was a 200 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. blooming girl, — and paid nothing for either privi- lege. What wild and confused reminiscences on the wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the fierce republican times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of the Venetian rule ! And is it not sad to think of systems and peoples all passing away, and these an- cient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in front of the Palazzo della Rapione ? What a Ion or mortality ! The youngest of their number is a thousand years older than the palace, which was begun in the twelfth century, and which is much the same now as it was when first completed. I know that, if I entered it, I should be sure of finding the great hall of the pal- ace — the vastest hall in the world — dim and dull and dusty and delightful, with nothing in it except at one end Donatello's colossal marble-headed wooden horse of Troy, stared at from the other end by the two dog-faced Egyptian women in basalt placed there by Belzoni. Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should have the Court of the University all to myself, and might study unmolested the blazons of the noble youth who have attended the school in different cen- turies ever since 1200, and have left their escutch- eons on the walls to commemorate them. At the foot of the stairway ascending to the schools from the court is the statue of the learned lady who was once a professor in the University, and who, if her rikeness belie not her looks, must have given a greaC charm to student life in other times. At presen* AT PADUA. 201 there are no lady professors at Padua any more than at Harvard ; and during late years the schools have suffered greatly from the interference of the Austrian goverinnent, which frequently closed them for months, on account of political demonstrations amono; the students. But now there is an end of this and many other stupid oppressions ; and the time-honored University will doubtless regain its an- cient importance. Even in 1864 it had nearly fif- teen hundred students, and one met them every- where under the arcades, and could not well mistake them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy which these studious young men loved to assume. They were to be seen a good deal on the prome- nades outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are driven in their carriaires in the afternoon, and where one sees the blood-liorses and fine equipages for which Padua is famous. There used once to be races in the Prato della Valle, after the Italian no- tion of horse-races ; but these are now discontinued, and there is nothino; to be found there but the stat- ues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen, posted in a circle around the old race-course. If you strolled thitlier about dusk on such a day as this, you might see the statues unbend a little from their stony rigid- ity, and in tlie faihng light nod to eacli other very pleasantly through the trees. And if you stayed in Padua over nioht, wliat could be better to-morrow moining than a stroll througl: the great Botanical Garden, — the oldest botanical garden in the world, «— the garden which first received in Europe the 202 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. strange and splendid growths of our hemisphere, — the garden where Doctor Rappaccini doubtless founG the germ of his mortal plant ? On the whole, I believe I would rather go this mo- ment to Padua than to Lowell or Lawrence, or even to Worcester ; and as to the disadvantage of having seen Padua, I begin to think the whole place has now assumed so fantastic a character in my mind that I am almost as well qualified to write of it as if I had merely dreamed it. Tlie day that w^e first visited the city was very rainy, and we spent most of the time in viewing the churches. These, even after the churches of Ven- ice, one finds rich in art and historic interest, and they in no instance fall into the maniacal excesses of the Renaissance to which some of the temples of the latter city abandon themselves. Their architecture forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The su- perb domes of St. Anthony's emulate those of St. Mark's ; and the porticos of other Paduan churches rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards that fascinate with their mystery and beauty. It was the wish to see the attributive Giottos in the Chapter which drew us first to St. Anthony's, and we saw them with the satisfaction naturally at- tending the contemplation of frescos discovered only since 1858, after having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many centuries ; but we could aot believe that Giotto's ^ame was destined to gain much by their rescue from oblivion. They are ic AT PADUA. 203 nowise to be compared with this master's frescos in the Chapel of the Annunziata, — which, indeed, is in every way a place of wonder and delight. You reach it by passing through a garden lane bordered with roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with clinking keys, and lets you into the chapel, where there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as a sacred place should be ; a blessed bench- ing goes round the walls, and you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in which the talk of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their contemporaries and yours are cor- dial in their gay companionship : through the half- open door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sun- shine that they saw lie there ; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the garden trees ; it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hun- dred years ago that breathes through all the lovely garden grounds. But in the midst of this pleasant communion with the past, you have a lurking pain ; for you have hired your brougham by the hour ; and you pres«» ently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account. We had chosen our driver from amono; manv other drivers of broughams in the vicinity of Pedrocchi's, because he had such an honest look, and was not likely, we thought, to deal unfairly with us. " But first," said the slgnor who had selected him, *'how much is your brougham an hour? " E04 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. So and so. " Show me the tariff of fares." " There is no tariff." "There is. Sliow it to me." " It is lost, signor." " I think not. It is here in this pocket. Get it out." The tariflt* appears, and with it the fact Hiat he had demanded just what the boatman of the ballad received in gift, — thrice his fee. The driver mounted his seat, and served us so faithfully that day in Padua that we took him the next day for Arqua. At the end, when he had re- ceived his due, and a handsome maneia besides, he was still unsatisfied, and referred to the tariff in proof that he had been under-paid. On that con- fronted and defeated, he thanked us very cordially, gave us the number of his brougham, and begged us to ask for him when we came next to Padua and needed a carriage. From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us to the Church of Santa Giustina, where is a very famous and noble picture by Roman i no. But as this writing has nothing in the world to do with art, I here dismiss that subject, and with a gross and idle delight follow the sacristan down under the church to the prison of Santa Giustina. Of all the faculties of the mind there is none so little fatiguing to exercise as mere wonder ; and, for my own sake, I try always to wonder at things with- out the least critical reservation. I therefore, in the AT PADUA. 205 sense of deglutition, bolted this prison at oiice, though subsequent experiences led Uie to look with grave indigestion upon the whole idea of prisons, their authenticity, and even their existence. As far as mere dimensions are concerned, the prison of Santa Giustina was not a hard one to swal- low, being only three feet wide by about ten feet in length. In this limited space, Santa Giustina passed five years of the paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous and a long-suffering prince, whom, singularly enough, no historic artist has yet arisen to whitewash), and was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining, to suffer a blessed martyrdom. I am not sure now whether the sacristan said she was dashed to death on the stones, or cut to pieces with knives ; but whatever the form of martyrdom, an iron ring in the ceiling was employed in it, as I know from seeing the ring, — a curiously well-preserved piece of iron- mongery. Within the narrow prison of the saint, and just under the grating, through which the sacris- tan thrust his candle to illuminate it, was a mountain of candle-drippings, — a monument to the fact that faith still largely exists in this doubting world. My own credulity, not only with regard to this prison, but also touchino; the coffin of St. Luke, which I saw .n the church, had so wrought upon the esteem of the sacristan, that he now took me to a well, into %'hich, he said, had been cast the bones of three thousand Christian martyrs. He lowered a lantern iito the well, and assured me that, if I looked through t certain screen work there, I could see the bones. 206 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. On experiment I could not see the bones, but this circumstance did not cause me to doubt their pres- ence, particularly as I did see upon the screen a great number of coins offered for the repose of the martyrs' souls. I threw down some soldi^ and thus enthralled the sacristan. If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the driver must take him to those of Ecelino, at present the property of a private gentleman near by. As I had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great bar- gain, from a second-hand book-stall, and had a lively interest in all the enormities of that nobleman, I sped the driver instantly to the villa of the Signor P . It depends here altogether upon the freshness or mustiness of the reader's historical reading whether he cares to be reminded more particularly who Ece- lino was. He flourished balefully in the early half of the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and Brescia, and was defeated and hurt to death in an attempt to possess himself of Milan. He was in every respect a remarkable man for that time, — fearless, abstemious, continent, avaricious, hardy, and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He survived and suppressed innumerable conspiracies, escaping even the thrust of the assassin whom the fame of his enormous wickedness had caused the Old Man of the Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua he was more incredibly severe and bloody in his rule Jian as lord of the other cities, for the Paduans had oeen latest free, and conspired the most frequentljr AT PADUA. 207 against him. He extirpated wliole families on sus- picion that a single member had been concerned in a meditated revolt. Little children and helpless women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his hands. Six prisons in Padua were constantly filled by his arrests. The whole country was traversed by witnesses of his cruelties, — men and women de- prived of an arm or leg, and begging from door to door. He had long been excommunicated ; at last the Church proclaimed a crusade against him, and his lieutenant and nephew — more demoniacal, if possible, than himself — was driven out of Padua while he was operating against Mantua. Ecelino retired to Verona, and maintained a struggle against the crusade for nearly two years longer, with a cour- ao-e which never failed him. Wounded and taken prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious army gathered about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon him ; and one furious peasant, whose brother's feet had been cut off bv Ecelino's command, dealt the helpless monster four blows upon the head with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of these wounds alone ; but by others it is related that his death was a kind of suicide, inasmuch as he him- self put the case past surgery by tearing off the bandages from his hurts, and refusing all medicines. II. Entering at the enchanted portal of the Villa P— — , we found ourselves in a realm of wonder. 208 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. It was our misfortune not to see the magician whc compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mor- tuary effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscrip- tions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety of all ages concerning life and death ; we began with Confucius, and we ended with Benja- mino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality were not sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor P had collected into earthen ampJiorce the ashes of the most famous men of ancient and modern times, and arranged them so that a sense of their number and variety should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was conspicuously labeled with the name its il- lustrious dust had borne in life ; and if one escaped with comparative cheerfulness from the thought that Seneca had died, there were in the very next pot the cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense of his mortality. We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of these objects broken by the custodian, who ap- proached to ask if we wished to see the prisons of Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the raia out of our sepulchral shelter. Between the vestibule and the towers of the ty *^nt lay that garden already mentioned, and our guide AT PADUA 209 led us through ranks of weeping statuary, and rainy bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we reached tlie door of his cottage. While he entered to fetch the key to the prisons, we noted that the towers were freshly painted and in perfect repair; and indeed the custodian said frankly enough, on re- appearing, that they were merely built over the pris- ons on the site of the original towers. The storied stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps through the grounds, and now, swollen by the rainfall, it roared, a yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The towers rise from masses of foliage, and form no un- pleasing feature of what must be, in spite of Signor P , a deligiitful Italian garden in sunny weather. The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and this inequality gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. But as we were come in search of hor- rors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and has- tened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. The custodian, lighting a candle, (which ought, we ^•elt, to have been a torch,) went before. We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not uncomfortable, and the guide conceded that they had undergone some repairs since Ecelino's time. But all the horrors for which we had come were there in perfect grisliness, and labeled by the ingenious Signor P— with Latin inscriptions. In the first cell was a shrine of the Virgin, set in the wall. Beneath this, while the wretched prisoner knelt in prayer, a trap-door opened and precipitated Um upon the points of knives, fropi which his br)dy 14 210 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. fell into the Bacchiglione below. In the next cell, held by some rusty iron rings to the wall, was a skel- eton, hanging by the wrists. " This," said the guide, " was another punishment of which Ecelino was very fond." A dreadful doubt seized my mind. " "Was this skeleton found here ? " I demanded. Without faltering an instant, without so much as winking an eye, the custodian replied, ^^Appunto.^^ It was a great relief, and restored me to confi- dence in the establishment. I am at a loss to ex- plain how my faith should have been confirmed afterwards by coming upon a guillotine — an awful instrument in the likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure under its blade — which the custodian confessed to be a modern improvement placed there by Signor P . Yet my credulity was so strengthened by his candor, that I accepted without hesitation the torture of the water-drop when we came to it. The water-jar was as well pre- served as if placed there but yesterday, and the skeleton beneath it — found as we saw it — was en- tire and perfect. In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton — found as we Baw it — with its neck in the clutch of the garrote, which was one of Ecelino's more merciful punish- ments ; while in still another cell the ferocity of the tyrant appeared in the penalty inflicted upon the wretch whose skeleton had been hanging for ages — RS we saw it — head downwards from the ceiling. Beyond these, in a yet darker and drearier dun AT PADUA. 211 geon, stood a heavy oblong wooden box, with two apertures near the top, peering through which we found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets of a skull. Within this box Ecelino had immured the victim we beheld there, and left him to perish in view of the platters of food and goblets of drink placed just beyond the reach of his hands. The food we saw was of course not the orio-inal food. At last we came to the crowninor horror of Villa P , the supreme excess of Ecelino's cruelty. The guide entered the cell before us, and, as we gained the threshold, threw the light of his taper vividly upon a block that stood in the middle of the floor. Fixed to the block by an immense spike driven throuo-h from the back was the little slender hand of a woman, which lay there just as.it had been struck from the living arm, and which, after the lapse of so many centuries, w^as still as perfectly preserved as if it had been embalmed. The sio-ht had a most cruel fascination ; and while one of the horror-seekers stood helplessly conjuring to his vision that scene of unknown dread, — the shrinking, shrieking woman dragged to the block, the wild, shrill, horrible screech following the blow that drove in the spike, the mer- ciful sw'oon after the mutilation, — his companion, with a sudden pallor, demanded to be taken instantly away. In their swift withdrawal, they only glanced at a few detached instruments of torture, — all original Ecelinos, but intended for the infliction of minor and comparatively unimportant torments, — and thee they passed fi-om that place of fear. 212 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. III. In the evening we sat talking at the Caffe Pe* drocchi with an abbate, an acquaintance of ours, who was a Professor in the University of Padua. Pe« drocchi's is the great caffe of Padua, a granite edifice of Egyptian architecture, which is the mausoleum of the proprietor's fortune. The pecuniary skeleton at the feast, however, does not much trouble the guests. They begin early in the evening to gather into the elegant saloons of the caffe, — somewhat too large for so small a city as Padua, — and they sit there late in the night over their cheerful cups and their ices, with their newspapers and their talk. Not so many ladies are to be seen as at the caffe in Venice, for it is only in the greater cities that they go much to these public places. There are few students at Pedrocchi's, for they frequent the cheaper caff^ ; but you may nearly always find there some Professor of the University, and on the evening of which I speak there were two present besides our abbate. Our friend's great passion was the English language, which he understood too well to venture to speak a great deal. He had been translating from that tongue into Italian certain American poems, and our talk was of these at first. Then we began to talk of distinoruished American writers, of whom intelli- gent Italians always know at least four, in this suc- cession, — Cooper, Mrs. Stowe, Longfellow, and Ir* ring. Mrs. Stowe's Qapanna di Zio Tom is, of course AT PADUA. 213 jniversally read ; and my friend had also read 11 Fiore di Maggio^ — "The May-fiower." Of Long* fellow, the " Evangeline " is familiar to Italians, through a translation of the poem ; but our abbate knew all the poet's works, and one of the other pro fessors present that evening had made such faithful study of them as to have produced some translations rendering the original with remarkable fidelity and spirit. I have before me here his brochure^ printed last year at Padua, and containing versions of " En- celadus," " Excelsior," " A Psalm of Life," '' The Old Clock on the Stairs," " Sand of the Desert in an Hour-Glass," " Twilight," " Daybreak," '' The Quadroon Girl," and " Torqueniada," — pieces which give the Italians a fair notion of our poet's lyrical range, and which bear witness to Professor Messadaglia's sympathetic and familiar knowledge of his works. A young and gifted lady of Parma, now unhappily no more, lately published a translation of " The Golden Legend ; " and Professor Messadaglia, m his Preface, mentions a version of another of our poet's longer works on which the translator of the *' Evancreline " is now enfrao-ed. At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the gentle abbate of our day's adventures, and eagerly related that of the Ecelino prisons. To have seen them was the most terrific pleasure of our lives. " Eh ! " said our friend, " I believe you." " We mean those under the Villa P- ■ , ** *' Exactly." 214 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. There was a tone of politely suppressed amuse- ment in the abbate's voice ; and after a moment's pause, in which we felt our awful experience slip- ping and sliding away from us, we ventured to say, " You don't mean that those are not the veritable Ecelino prisons ? " " Certainly they are nothing of the kind. The Ecelino prisons were destroyed when the Crusaders took Padua, with the exception of the tower, which the Venetian Republic converted into an observa- tory." " But at least these prisons are on the site of Ece- lino's castle ? " " Nothing of the sort. His castle in that case Would have been outside of the old city walls." " And those tortures and the prisons are all " — " Things got up for show. No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P cannot conceive. But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and what he can do to realize them he has done in his prisons." " But the custodian — how could he lie so ? " Our friend shrugged his shoulders. " Eh ! easily. And perhaps he even believed what he said." The world began to assume an aspect of bevvilder- uio; uno-enuineness, and there seemed to be a treach- prous quality of fiction in the ground under our feet. Even the play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale^ tvhere we went to pass the rest of the evemng AT PADUA. 215 appeared hollow and improbable. We thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience and goodness ; and as for the heroine, pursued by the at- tentions of the rich profligate, we doubted if she were any better than she should be. A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUA. I. We said, during summer days at Venice, when every campo was a furnace seven times heated, and every canal was filled with boiling bathers, " As soon as it rains we will go to Arqua." Remembering the ardors of an April sun on the long, level roads of plain, we could not think of them in August with- out a sense of dust clogging every pore, and eyes that shrank from the vision of their blinding white- ness. So we stayed in Venice, waiting for rain, until the summer had almost lapsed into autumn ; and as the w^eather cooled before any rain reached us, we took the moisture on the main-land for granted, and set out under a cloudy and windy sky. We had to go to Padua by railway, and take car- riage thence to Arqua upon the road to Ferrara. I believe no rule of human experience was violated when it began to rain directly after we reached Padua, and continued to rain violently the whole day. We gave up this day entirely to the rain, and did not leave Padua until the following morning when we count that our pilgrimage to Petrarch's house actually began. A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH S HOUSE, 217 The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it was already too late in the season for the summer to recover herself with the elastic brilliancy that follows the rain of July or early August ; and there was I know not what vao;ue sentiment of autumn in the weather. There was not yet enough of it to stir the " Tears from the depth of some divine despair ; '* but in here and there a faded leaf (for in Europo death is not glorified to the foliage as in our own land), in the purple of the ripening grapes, and in the tawny grass of the pastures, there was autumn enough to touch our spirits, and while it hardly affected the tone of the landscape, to lay upon us the gentle and pensive spell of its presence. Of all the days in the year I would have chosen this to go pilgrim to the house of Petrarch. The Euganean Hills, on one of which the poet's house is built, are those mellow heights which you see when you look southwest across the lagoon at Venice. In mist}^ weather they are blue, and in clear weather silver, and the October sunset loves them. They rise in tender azure before you as you issue from the southern gate of Padua, and grow in loveliness as you draw nearer to them from the rich plain that washes their feet with endless harvests of oil and wine. Oh beiuty that will not let itself be told I Could I not take warning from anoi^her, and refrain from this fruitless eftbrt of description ? A friend in Padua had lent me Disraeli's " Venetia," because a passage 218 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. of the story occurs in Petrarch's house at Arqua, and we carried the volumes with us on our pilgrim- age. I would here quote the description of the vil- lage, the house, and the hills from this work, as fault- lessly true, and as affording no just idea of either ; but nothing of it has remained in my mind except the geological fact that the hills are a volcanic range. To tell the truth, the landscape, as we rode along, continually took my mind off the book, and I could not give that attention either to the elegant language of its descriptions, or the adventures of its well-born characters, which they deserved. I was even more interested in the disreputable-looking person who mounted the box beside our driver directly we got out of the city gate, and who invariably commits this infringement upon your rights in Italy, no matter how strictly and cunningly you frame your contract that no one else is to occupy any part of the carriage but yourself. He does not seem to be the acquaint- ance of the driver, for they never exchange a word, and he does not seem to pay any thing for the ride. He got down, in this instance, just before we reached the little town at which our driver stopped, and asked us if we wished to drink a glass of the wine of the country. We did not, but his own thirst seemed to answer equally well, and he slaked it cheerfully at our cost. The fields did not present the busy appearance which had delighted us on the same road in the bpring, but they had that autumnal charm already mentioned. Many of the vine-leaves were sear ; the A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 21S •ed grapes were already purple, and the white grapes pearly ripe, and they formed a gorgeous neck- lace for the trees, around which they clung in opu- lent festoons. Then, dearer to our American hearts than this southern splendor, were the russet fields of Indian corn, and, scattered among the shrunken stalks, sreat nuo-o-ets of the " harmless gold " of pumpkins. At Battaglia (the village just beyond which you turn off to go to Arqua) there was a fair, on the blessed occasion of some saint's day, and there were many booths full of fruits, agricultural implements, toys, clothes, wooden ware, and the like. There was a great crowd and a noise, but, according to the mysterious Italian custom, nobody seemed to be buy- ing or selling. I am in the belief that a small pur- chase of grapes we made here on our return was the great transaction of the day, unless, indeed, the neat operation in alms achieved at our expense by a men- dicant villager may be classed commercially. When we turned off from the Rovioro road at Bat- CD iaglia we were only three miles from Arqu^. u. Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of the hill on which the village was stretched asleep in the tender sunshine, there was on either side of the road a stream of living water. There was no other barrier than this between the road and the fields (^unless the vines swinging from tree to tree formed 220 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. a barrier), and, as if in graceful excuse for tlie inter- position of even these slender streams, Nature had lavished such growth of wild flowers and wild berries on the banks that it was like a garden avenue, through the fragrance and beauty of which we rolled, delighted to silence, almost to sadness. When we began to climb the hill to Arqu^, and the driver stopped to breathe his horse, I got out and finished the easy ascent on foot. The great marvel to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on which, turning back, I feasted my vision, should be there yet, and always. It had the rare and sadden- ing beauty of evanescence, and awoke in me the memory of all beautiful scenery, so that I embroid- ered the landscape with the silver threads of west- ern streams, and bordered it with Ohio hills. Ohio hills ? When I looked again it was the storied Eu- ganean group. But what trans-oceanic bird, voyag- ing hither, dropped from its mouth the blackberry which took root and grew and blossomed and ripened, that I might taste Home in it on these classic hills ? I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road from his house just above ? I figured him coming to meet me with his book in his hand, in his rever- end poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that curious kind of bandaging which he seems to have been fond of — looking, in a word, for all the worlcs like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures. * Drawing nearer, I discerned the apparition to be a robeless, laureless lout, who belonged at the village »nn. Yet this lout, though not Petrarch, had merits^ A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH's HOUSE. 221 His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from his 5:nees down, had the tone of the richest bronze ; he wore a mountain cap with a long tasseled fall to the back of it ; his face was comely and his eye beauti- ful ; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing that a colt or young bullock could not have been bet- ter company. He merely offered to guide us to Pe« trarch's house, and was silent, except when spoken to, from that instant. I am here tempted to say : Arqua is in the figure of a man stretched upon the hill slope. The head, which is Petrarch's house, rests upon the summit. The carelessly tossed aims lie abroad from this in one direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter. It is a very lank and shambling figure, without ele- gance or much proportion, and the attitude is the last wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout up the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in the general likeness of a street. World-old stone cottages crouch on either side ; here and there is a more ambitious house in decay ; trees wave over the street, and down its distance comes an occasional donkey-cart very musically and leisurely. By all odds, Arqua and its kind of villages are to be pre- ferred to those hamlets of the plain which in Italy cling to the white-hot highway without a tree to shelter them, and bake and burn there in the merci- less sun. Their houses of stuccoed stone are crowded IS thickly together as city houses, and these wretched little villacres do their worst to unite the discomforts sf town and country with a success dreadful to think 222 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. of. In all countries villages are hateful to the heart of civilized man. In the Lombard plains I wonder that one stone of them rests upon another. We reached Petrarch's house before the custodian had arrived to admit us, and stood before the high stone wall which shuts in the front of the house, and quite hides it from those without. This wall bears the inscription, Casa Petrarca^ and a marble tablet lettered to the following effect : — SE Tl AGITA SACRO AMOEE DI PATEIA, t'inchina a QUESTE MURA OVE SPIEO LA GRAND' ANIMA, IL CANTOR DEI SCIPIONI E DI LAURA. Which may be translated : " If thou art stirred by love of country, bow to these walls, whence passed the great soul, the singer of the Scipios and of Laura." Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the youths of Arqua, who had kindly attended our prog- ress in gradually increasing numbers from the moment we had entered the village. They were dear little girls and boys, and mountain babies, all with sunburnt iaces and the gentle and the winning ways native to this race, which Nature loves better than us of the North. The blonde pilgrim seemed to please them, and they evidently took us for Tedeschi. You learn to submit to this fate in Northern Italv, however un- gracefully, for it is the one that constantly befalls you outside of the greatest cities. The people know but two varieties of foreigners — the Englishman A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH's HOUSE. 223 and the German. If, therefore, you have not roihif expressed m every lineament of your countenance ; if the soles of your boots are less than an inch thick, and your clotlies are not reduced in color to the in- variable and maddening tone of the English tweed, — you must resign yourself to be a German. All this is grievous to the soul which loves to spread its eagle in every land and to be known as American, with star-spangled conspicuousness all over the world : but it cannot be helped. I vainly tried to explain the geographical, political, and natural difference between Tedeschi and Americani to the custodian of Petrarch's house. She listened with amiability, shrugged her shoulders hopelessl}', and said, in her rude Venetian, '•''Mi no so miga^^ (I don't know at all). Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celeb- rity of a poet on the spot where he lived and died, — on his very hearthstone, as it were. So I asked the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, — "When did Petrarch live here? * " Ah ! I don't remember him." "Who was he?" *' A poet, signor." Certainly the first response was not encouraging, but the last revealed that even to the heavy and clouded soul of this lout the divine fame of the poet had penetrated — ana he a lout :n the village where Petrarch lived and ought to be first forgotten. He iid not know when Petrarch had lived there, — a 224 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. year ago, perhaps, or many centuries, — but he knew that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of doubt was lifted from my spirit, and I responded cheerfully to some observations on tlie weather offered by a rustic matron who was pitching manure on the little hill- slope near the house. When, at last, the custodian came and opened the gate to us, we entered a little grassy yard from which a flight of steps led to Pe- trarch's door. A few flowers grew wild among the grass, and a fig-tree leaned its boughs against the wall. The figs on it were green, though they hung ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arqua. Some ivy clung to the stones, and from this and the fig-tree, as we came away, we plucked memorial leaves, and blended them with flowers which the youth of Arqua picked and forced upon us for re- membrance. A quaint old door opened into the little stone house, and admitted us to a kind of wide passage-way with rooms on either side ; and at the end opposite to which we entered, another door opened upon a balcony. From this balcony we looked down on Pe- trarch's garden, which, presently speaking, is but a narrow space with more fruit than flowers in it. Did Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden ? For me I should better have liked a chair on the balcony, with the further and lovelier prospect on every hand of village-roofs, sloping hills all gray with olives, and the broad, blue Lombard plain, sweeping from heaven to heaven below. The walls of the passage-way are frescoed (no"W A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH's HOUSE. 225 very faintly) in illustration of the loves of Petrarch and Laura, with verses from the sonnets inscribed to explain the illustrations. In all these Laura prevails as a lady of a singularly long waist and stiff move- ments, and Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily in his hand, contemplates the flower in mingled bot- any and toothache. There is occasionally a startling literalness in the way the painter has rendered some of the verses. I remember with peculiar interest the illustration of a lachrymose passage concerning a river of tears, wherein the weeping Petrarch, stretched beneath a tree, had already started a small creek of tears, which was rapidly swelling to a flood with the torrent from his eyes. I attribute these frescos to a later date than that of the poet's resi- dence, but the portrait over the door of the bedroom inside of the chamber, was of his own time, and taken from him — the custodian said. As it seemed to look like all the Petrarchian portraits, I did not remark it closely, but rather turned my attention to the walls of the chamber, which were thickly over- scribbled with names. They were nearly all Italian, and none English so far as I saw. This passion for allying one's self to the great, by inscribing one's name on places hallowed by them, is certainly veiy odd ; and (I reflected as I added our names to the rest) it is, without doubt, the most impertinent and idiotic custom in the world. People have thus writ- ten themselves down, to the contempt of sensible ^iturity, all over Petrarch's house. The custodian insisted that the bedroom was just 15 226 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. as in the poet's time ; some rooms beyond it had been restored ; the kitchen at its side was also re- paired. Crossing the passage-way, we now entered the dining-room, which was comparatively large and lofty, with a mighty and generous fire-place at one 3nd, occupying the whole space left by a balcony- window. The floor was paved with tiles, and the window-panes were round and small, and set in lead — like the floors and window-panes of all the other rooms. A gaudy fresco, representing some indeli- cate female deity, adorned the front of the fire-place, which sloped expanding from the ceiling and termi- nated at the mouth without a mantel-piece. The chimney was deep, and told of the cold winters in the hills, of which, afterward, the landlady of the village inn prattled less eloquently. From this dining-room opens, to the right, the door of the room which they call Petrarch's library ; and above the door, set in a marble frame, with a glass before it, is all that is mortal of Petrarch's cat, except the hair. Whether or not the fur was found incompatible with the process of embalming, and therefore removed, or whether it has slowly dropped away with the lapse of centuries, I do not know ; but it is certain the cat is now quite hairless, and has the effect of a wash-leather invention in the likeness of a young lamb. On the marble slab below there \s a Latin inscription, said to be by the great poet himself, declaring this cat to have been " second only to Laura." We may, therefore, believe its virtues to have b(^en rare enough ; and cannot well figure te A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH's HOUSE. 227 ourselves Petrarch sitting before that wide-moutlied fire-place, without beholding also the gifted cat that purrs softly at his feet and nestles on his knees, or, with thickened tail and lifted back, parades loftily round his chair in the haughty and disdainful manner of cats. In the library, protected against the predatory en- thusiasm of visitors by a heavy wire netting, are the desk and chair of Petrarch, which I know of no form of words to describe perfectly. The front of the desk is of a kind of mosaic in cubes of wood, most of which have been carried away. The chair is wide-armed and carved, but the bottom is gone, and it has been rudely repaired. The custodian said Pe- trarch died in this chair while he sat writing at his desk in the little nook lighted by a single window opening on the left from his library. He loved to sit there. As I entered I found he had stepped out for a moment, but I know he returned directly after I withdrew. On one wall of the library (which is a simple ob- long room, in nowise remarkable) was a copy of verses in a frame, by Cesarotti, and on the wall opposite a tribute from Alfieri, both manu proprid. Over and above these are many other scribblings ; and hang- ing over the door of the poet's little nook was a crim- inal French lithograph likeness of " Pdtrarque " when young. Alfieri's verses are written in ink on the w^all, while those of Cesarotti are on paper, and framed. t do not remember any reference to his visit to Pe- 228 ITALIAN JOUKNEYS. trarcli's house in Alfieri's autobiography, though the visit must have taken place in 1783, when he so- journed at Padua, and " made the acquaintance of the celebrated Cesarotti, with whose lively and court- eous manners he was no less satisfied than he had always been in reading his (Cesarotti's) most mas- terly version of ' Ossian.' " It is probable that the friends visited the house together. At any rate, I care to believe that while Cesarotti sat " composing " his tribute comfortably at the table, Alfieri's impetu- ous soul was lifting his tall body on tiptoe to scrawl its inspirations on the plastering. Do you care, gentle reader, to be reminded that just before this visit Alfieri had heard in Venice of the " peace between England and the United Colo- nies," and that he then and there " wrote the fifth ode of the ' America Libera,' " and thus finished that poem ? After copying these verses we returned to the dining-room, and while one pilgrim strayed idly through the names in the visitor's book, the other sketched Petrarch's cat, before mentioned, and Pe^ trarch's inkstand of bronze — a graceful little thing, having a cover surmounted by a roguish cupid, while the lower part is supported en three lion's claws, and just above the feet, at either of the three corners, is an exquisite little female bast and head. Tims sketching and idling, we held spell-bound our friends the youth of Arqua, as well as our driver, who, hav ing brought innumerable people to see the house of Petrarch, now for the first time, with great astonisb cient, beheld the inside of it himself. A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 229 As to the authenticity of the house I think there can be no doubt, and as to the genuineness of the reHcs there, nothing in the world could shake my faith in them, though Muratori certainly characterizes them as " superstitions." The great poet was sixty- five years old when he came to rest at Arqua, and when, in his own pathetic words, " there remained to him onlv to consider and to desire how to make a t/ good end." He says further, at the close of his au- tobiography : "In one of the Euganean hills, near to ten miles from the city of Padua, I have built me a house, small but pleasant and decent, in the midst of slopes clothed with vines and olives, abundantly sufficient for a family not large and discreet. Here I lead my life, and although, as I have said, infirm of body, yet tranquil of mind, without excitements, without distractions, without cares, reading always, and writing and praising God, and thanking God as well for evil as for good ; which evil, if I err not, is trial merely and not punishment. And all the while I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my life, and have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even forget my youthful sins ; wherefore, in this solitude, no words are so sweet to my lips as these of the psalm : ' Delicta Juventutis mece, et ignorantias meas ne memineris.^ And with every feeling of the heart I pray God, when it please Him, to bridle my thoughts, Bo long unstable and erring ; and as they have vainly wandered tD many things, to turn them all to Him — only true, certain, immutable Good." I venerate the house at Arqua because these 230 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. sweet and solemn words were written in it. We left its revered shelter (after taking a final look from tne balcony down upon '' the slopes clothed with vines and olives ") and returned to the lower village, where, in the court of the little church, we saw the tomb of Petrarch — " an ark of red stone, upon four columns likewise of marble.*' The epitaph is this : — Frigida Francisci lapis hie tegit ossa Petrarcae ; Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam ; sate Yirgine, parce Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce." A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. The housekeeper of the parish priest, who ran out to enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me a wild lo- cal tradition of an attempt on the part of the Flor- entines to steal the bones of Petrarch away from Arqu^, in proof of which she showed me a block of marble set into the ark, whence she said a fragment had been removed by the Florentines. This local tradition I afterwards found verified, with names and dates, in a little " Life of Petrarch," by F. Leoni, published at Padua in 1843. It appears that this curious attempt of the Florentines to do doubtful honor to the great citizen whose hereditary civic rights they restored too late (about the time he was .Irawing nigh his " good end " at Arqu^), was made for them by a certain monk of Portagruaro named Tommaso Martinelli. He had a general instruction from his employers to bring away from Arqu^ " any important thing of Petrarch's " that he could ; and it occurred to this ill-advised friar to " move his bones." He succeeded on a night of the year 163(1 A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH's HOUSE. 231 in stealing the dead poet's arm. The theft being at once discovered, the Venetian RepubHc rested not till the thief was also discovered ; but what became of the arm or of the sacrilegious monk neither the Signor Leoni nor the old women of Arqua give any account. The Republic removed the rest of Pe- trarch's body, which is now said to be in the Royal Museum of Madrid. I was willing to know more of this quaint village of Arqua, and I rang at the parish priest's door to beg of him some account of the place, if any were printed. But already at one o'clock he had gone to bed for a nap, and must on no account be roused till four. It is but a quiet life men lead in Arqua, and their souls are in drowsy hands. The amount of sleep which this good man gives himself (if he goes to bed at 9 p. M. and rises at 9 a. m., with a nap of three hours dur- ing the day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a good di- gestion, and uneventful days. As I turned this notion over in my mind, my longing to behold his reverence increased, that I might read life at Arqua in the smooth curves of his well-padded countenance. I thought it must be that his " bowels of compas- sion were well-rounded," and, making sure of abso- lution, I was half-minded, if I got speech with him, to improve the occasion by confessing one or two of pay blackest sirs. Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a sec- ond visit to Arqua, I succeeded in finding this cxcel- ent ecclesiastic wide awake at two o'clock in the ifternoon, and that he granted me an interview at 232 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. that hour ? Justice to him, I think, demands this admission of me. He was not at all a fat priest, as I had prefigured him, but rather of a spare person, and of a brisk and lively manner. At the village inn, after listening half an hour to a discourse on nothing but white wine from a young priest, who had stopped to drink a glass of it, I was put in the way of seeing the priest of Arqua by the former's court- esy. Happily enough, his reverence chanced to have the very thing I wanted to see — no other than Leoni's " Life of Petrarch," to which I have already referred. Courtesy is the blood in an Italian's veins, and I need not say that the ecclesiastic of Arqua, seeing my interest in the place, was very polite and obliging. But he continued to sleep throughout our first stay in Arqua, and 1 did not see him then. I strolled up and down the lazy, rambling streets, and chiefly devoted myself to watching the young women who were washing clothes at the stream run- ning from the " Fountain of Petrarch." Their arms and legs were bronzed and bare, and they chattered and laughed gayly at their work. Their wash-tubs were formed by a long marble conduit from the foun- tain ; their wash-boards, by the inward-sloping con- duit-sides ; and they thrashed and beat the garments clean upon the smooth stone. To a girl, their waists were broad and their ankles thick. Above their fore- heads the hair was cut short, and their " back hair " Was gathered into a mass, and held together by a converging circle of silver pins. The Piazza della Fontana, in Arqua, is a place A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH's HOUSE. 233 Bome fifty feet in length and breadth, and seems to be a favorite place of public resort. In the evening, doubtless, it is alive with gossipers, as now with workers. It may be that then his reverence, risen from his nap, saunters by, and pauses long enough to chuck a pretty girl under the chin or pinch an ur- chin's cheek. Our dinner was ready by the time I got back to the inn, and we sat down to a chicken stewed in oil and a stoup of the white wine of Arqua. It was a modest feast, but, being a friend to oil, I found it savory, and the wine was both good and strong. While we lingered over the repast we speculated somewhat carelessly whether Arqua had retained among its simplicities the primitive Italian cheap- ness of w^hich you read much. When our landlord leaned over the table and made out our account on it with a bit of chalk, the bill was as follows : — Soldi. Chicken • .... 70 Bread . . ... 8 Wine 20 Total , • . ,98 It surely was not a costly dinner, yet I could have bought the same chicken in Venice for half the oioney ; wdiich is but another proof that the demand of the producer is often much larger than the supply vf the consumer, and that to buy poultry cheaply fou must not purchase it where raised, — 234 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. ..." On misty mountain ground, Its own vast shadow glory crowned," — but rather in a large city after it has been transported forty miles or more. Not that we begrudged the thrifty inn-keeper his fee. We paid it cheerfully, as well for his own sake as for that of his pleasant and neat little wife, who kept the whole inn so sweet and clean ; and w^e bade them a most cordial farewell as we drove away from their door. III. Returning, we stopped at the great castle of the Obizzi (now the property of the Duke of Modena), through which we were conducted by a surly and humorous custode, w^hose pride in life was that castle and its treasures, so that he resented as a personal affront the shghtest interest in any thing else. He stopped us abruptly in the midst of the museum, and, regarding the precious antiques and curiosities around him, demanded : " Does this castle please you ? " Then, with a scornful glance at us, " Your driver tells me you have been at Arqua ? And what did you see at Arqua ? A shabby little house and a cat without any hair on. I would not," said this disdainful euS' tode, "go to Arqua if you gave me a lemonade." A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. I HAD often heard in Venice of that ancient peo- ple, settled in the Alpine hills about the pretty town of Bassano, on the Brenta, whom common fame de-« clares to be a remnant of the Cimbrian invaders of Rome, broken up in battle, and dispersed along the borders of North Italy, by Marius, many centuries ago. So when the soft September weather came, last year, we sallied out of Venice, in three, to make conquest of whatever was curious in the life and tra- ditions of these mountaineers, who dwell in seven villages, and are therefore called the people of the Sette Comrouni among their Italian neighbors. We went fully armed with note-book and sketch-book, and prepared to take literary possession of our con- quest. From Venice to the city of Vicenza by railroad, it is two hours ; and thence one must take a carriage to Bassano (which is an opulent and busy little grain mart, of some twelve thousand souls, about thirty \niles north of Venice). We were very glad of the ride across the country. By the time we reached the town it was nine o'clock, and moonlight, and as we glanced out of our windows we saw the quaint up-and-down-hill streets peopled with promenaders, 236 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. and every body in Bassano seemed to be making love. Young girls strolled about the picturesque ways with their lovers, and tender couples were cooing at the doorways and windows, and the scene had all that surface of romance with which the Italians contrive to varnish the real commonplaceness of their life. Our ride through the twilight landscape had pre- pared us for the sentiment of Bassano ; we had pleased ourselves with the spectacle of the peasants returning from their labor in the fields, led in troops of eight or ten by stalwart, white-teethed, bare- legged maids ; and we had reveled in the moment- ary lordship of an old walled town we passed, which at dusk seemed more Gothic and Middle-Age than any thing after Verona, with a fine church, and tur- rets and battlements in great plenty. What town it was, or what it had been doing there so many ages, I have never sought to know, and I should be sorry to learn any thing about it. The next morning we began those researches foi preliminary information concerning the Cimbri which turned out so vain. Indeed, as we drew near the lurking-places of that ancient people, all knowledge relating to them diffused itself into shadowy conject- ure. The barber and the bookseller differed as to the best means of getting to the Sette Communi, and the caffetiere at whose place we took breakfast knew nothing at all of the road, except that it was up the mountains, and commanded views of scenery which, verily, it would not grieve us to see. As to th^ Cimbri, he only knew that they had their own Ian A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 237 guage, which was yet harder than the German. The German was hard enough, but the Cimbrian ! Corpo ! At last, hearing of a famous cave there is at Oli- ero, a town some miles further up the Brenta, we determined to go there, and it was a fortunate thought, for there we found a nobleman in charge of the cave who told us exactly how to reach the Sette Communi. You pass a bridge to get out of Bassano — a bridge which spans the crystal swift- ness of the Brenta, rushing down to the Adriatic from the feet of the Alps on the north, and full of voluble mills at Bassano. All along the road to Oliero was the finest mountain scenery, Brenta- washed, and picturesque with ever-changing lines. Maize grows in the bottom-lands, and tobacco, which is guarded in the fields by soldiers for the monopo- list government. Farm-houses dot the valley, and now and then we passed villages, abounding in blonde girls, so rare elsewhere in Italy, but here so numer- ous as to give Titian that type from which he painted. At Oliero we learned not only which was the road to the Sette Communi, but that we were in it, and it was settled that we should come the next day and continue in it, with the custodian of the cave, who for his breakfast and dinner, and what else we pleased, offered to accompany us. We were early at Oliero on the following morning, and found our friend in waiting ; he mounted beside our driver, ^nd we rode up the Brenta to the town of Valstagna where our journey by wheels ended, and where we 238 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. were to take mules for the mountain ascent. Our guide, Count Giovanni Bonato (for I may as weL give him his title, though at this stage of our prog- ress we did not know into what patrician care we had fallen), had already told us what the charge for mules would be, but it was necessary to go through the ceremony of bargain with the muleteer before taking the beasts. Their owner was a Cimbrian, with a broad sheepish face, and a heavy, awkward accent of Italian which at once more marked his northern race, and made us feel comparatively se- cure from plunder in his hands. He had come down from the mountain top the night before, bringing three mules laden with charcoal, and he had waited for us till the morning. His beasts were furnished with comfortable pads, covered with linen, to ride upon, and with halters instead of bridles, and we were prayed to let them have their heads in the ascent, and not to try to guide them. The elegant leisure of Valstagna (and in an Ital- ian town nearly the whole population is elegantly at leisure) turned out to witness the departure of our expedition ; the pretty little blonde wife of our inn- keeper, who was to get dinner ready against our re- turn, held up her baby to wish us houn viaggio^ and waved us adieu with the infant as with a handker- chief; the chickens and children scattered to right and left before our advance ; and with Count Gio- vanni going splendidly ahead on foot, and the Cim* brian bringing up the rear, we struck on the broad cocky valley between the heights, and presently A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 2S\) began tlie ascent. It was a lovely morning ; the sun was on the heads of the hills, and the shadows clothed them like robes to their feet ; and I should be glad to feel here and now the sweetness, fresh- ness, and purity of the mountain air, that seemed to bathe our souls in a childlike delio;ht of life. A noisy brook gurgled through the valley ; the birds sang from the trees ; the Alps rose, crest on crest, around us ; and soft before us, among the bald peaks showed the wooded height where the Cimbrian vil- lage of Fozza stood, with a white chapel gleaming from the heart of the lofty grove. Along the moun- tain sides the smoke curled from the lonely huts of shepherds, and now and then we came upon one of those melancholy refuges which are built in the hills for such travelers as are belated in their ways, or are overtaken there by storms. The road for the most part winds by the brink of precipices, — walled in with masonry of small stones, where Nature has not shored it up with vast mono- liths, — and is paved with limestone. It is, of course, merely a mule-path, and it was curious to see, and thrilling to experience, how the mules," vain of the safety of their foothold, kept as near the border of the precipices as possible. For my own part, I abandoned to my beast the entire responsibility in- volved by this line of conduct ; let the halter hang loose upon his neck, and gave him no aid except such slight service as was occasionally to be rendered by shutting my eyes and holding my breath. The mule of the fairer traveler behind mc was not only ambi- 240 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. tious of peril like my own, but was envious of my beast's captaincy, and continually tried to pass him on the outside of the path, to the great dismay of the gentle rider ; while half-suppressed wails of ter- ror from the second lady in the train gave evidence of equal vanity and daring in her mule. Count Giovanni strode stolidly before, the Cimbrian came behind, and we had little coherent conversation until we stopped under a spreading haw-tree, half-way up the mountain, to breathe our adventurous beasts. Here two of us dismounted, and while one of the ladies sketched the other in her novel attitude of cav- alier, I listened to the talk of Count Giovanni and the Cimbrian. This Cimbrian's name in Italian was Lazzaretti, and in his own tongue Brlick, which, pro- nouncing less regularly, we made Brick, in compli- ment to his qualities of good fellowship. His broad, honest visage was bordered by a hedge of red beard, and a light of dry humor shone upon it : he looked, we thought, like a Cornishman, and the contrast be- tween him and the viso sciolto, pensieri stretti expres- sion of Count Giovanni was curious enough. Concerning his people, he knew little ; but the Capo-gente of Fozza could tell me every thing. Va- rious traditions of their origin were believed among them ; Brick himself held to one that they had first come from Denmark. As we sat there under the spreading haw-tree. Count Giovanni and I made him give us the Cimbrian equivalent of some Italian phrases, which the curious may care to see in cor- respondence with English and German. Of course, German pronunciation must be 2;iven to the words : -— A yiSIT TO THE CIMBRI. 241 English. I go, Thou goe»i, lie goes, We go, You go, They go, I went. Thou wentest, He went, Good day, Good night, How do you do ? How goes it 1 I, Thou, He, she. We, You, They, The head. Breast, Face, Arm, Foot, Finger, Hand, Tree, Hat, God, Heaven, Earth, Mountain, Valley, Man, Woman, Lady, Child, Brother, Father, Cimbrian. I gehe, Du gehst, Ar geht, Hamish gehen, Hamish setender Dandern gehnt, I bin gegehnt, Du bist gegehnt, Der iganget, Uter tag, Uter nast, Bie estater ? Bie gehts ? I, Du, Di, Borandern, Ihrt, Dandern, Da kof, Petten, Denne, Arm, Vuss, Vinger, Hant, Pom, Hoit, Got, Debelt, Erda, Perk, Tal, Mann, Beip, Vrau, Hint, Pruder, Vada, 16 German. Ich gehe. Du gehst. Er geht. Wir gehen. gehnt, Hir geht. Sie gehen. Ich bin gegangen. Du bist gegangen. Er ist gegangen. Guten Tag. Gute Nacht. Wie steht's ? Wie geht's 1 Ich. Du. Er, sie. Wir. Hir. Sie. Der Kopf. Brust {Italian petto; Gesicht. Arm. Fuss. Finger. Hand. Baum. Hut. Gott. Himmel. Erde. Berg. Thai. Mann. Weib. Frau, Kind. Bruder. Vater. 242 ITALIAN JOURNErS. English, Cimbrian. German, Mother, Muter, Mutter. Sister, Schwester, Schwester. Stone, Stone, Stein. A general resemblance to German and English will have been observed in these fragments of Cim- brian, while other words will have been noticed as qm'te foreign to either. There was a poor little house of refreshment be- side our spreading haw, and a withered old woman came out of it and refreshed us with clear spnng water, and our guides and friends with some bitter berries of the mountain, which they admitted were unpleasant to the taste, but declared were very good for the blood. When they had sufficiently improved their blood, we mounted our mules again, and set out with the journey of an hour and a quarter still between us and Fozza. As we drew near the summit of the mountain our road grew more level, and instead of creeping along by the brinks of precipices, we began to wind through bits of meadow and pleasant valley walled in by lofty heights of rock. Though September was bland as June at the foot of the mountain, we found its breath harsh and cold on these heights ; and we remarked that though there were here and there breadths of wheat, the land was for the most part in sheep pasturage, and the grass looked poor and stinted of summer warmth. We met, at times, the shepherds, who seemed to be of Italian race, and were of the conventional type of shepherds, with regular faces, and two elaborate A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 243 turls trained upon their cheeks, as shephtrds are always represented in stone over the gates of villas. They bore staves, and their flocks went before them. Encountering us, they saluted us courteously, and when we had returned their greeting, they cried with one voice, — " Ah, lords ! is not this a miserable country ? The people are poor and the air is cold. It is an unhappy land ! " And so passed on, pro- foundly sad ; but we could not help smiHng at the vehement popular desire to have the region abused. We answered cheerfully that it was a lovely country. If the air w^as cold, it was also pure. We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last moment, just before parting with Brick, we learned that he had passed a whole year in Venice, where he had brouo-ht milk from the main-land and sold it in the city. He declared frankly that he counted that year worth all the other years of his life, and that he would never have come back to his native heights but that his father had died, and left his mother and young brothers helpless. He was an honest soul, and I gave him two florins, which I had tacitly ap- pointed him over and above the bargain, with some- thing for the small Brick-bats at home, whom he presently brought to kiss our hands at the house of the Capo-gente. The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong plain on the crest of the mountain, which declines from it on three sides, and on the north rises high above it into the mists in bleaker and rugoreder ac- rlivities. There are not more than thirty houses in 244 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. the village, and I do not think it numbers more than S. hundred and fifty souls, if it numbers so many. Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette Com- muni, of which the capital, Asiago, contains some thousands of people, and lies not far from Vicenza. The poor Fozzatti had a church, however, in their village, in spite of its littleness, and they had just completed a fine new bell tower, which the Capo- gente deplored, and was proud of when I praised it. The church, like all the other edifices, was built of stone ; and the village at a little distance might look like broken crags of rock, so well it consorted with the harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadow- lands, pathetic with tufts of a certain pale-blue, tear- ful flower, stretched about the village and southward as far as to that wooded point which had all day been our landmark in the ascent. Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo- gente (in Fozza all dcors are alike humble), and, leaving our mules, we entered by his wife's invita- tion, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of the kitchen — welcome, though we knew that all the imnny Lombard plain below was purple with grapes and black with figs. Again came from the women here the wail of the shepherds : " Ah, lords ! is it not «i miserable land ? " and I began to doubt whether the love which I had heard mountaineers bore to their inclement heights was not altogether fabulous. They made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before as with some unhappy wine, and while we were eat- ing, the Capo-gente came in. A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 245 He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of eourse, the hashfulness naturally resulting from lonely life at that altitude, where contact with the world must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens seemed to regard him with a kind of aifectionate deference, and some of them came in to hear him talk with the strangers. He stood till we prayed him to sit down, and he presently consented to take some wine with us. After all, however, he could not tell us much of his people which we had not heard before. A tradi- tion existed among them, he said, that their ances- tors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that they had dwelt for a long time in the hollows and caves of the mountains, living and burying their dead in the same secret places. At what time they had been converted to Christianity he could not tell ; they had, up to the beginning of the present century, had little or no intercourse with the Italian popula- tion by which they were surrounded on all sides. Formerly, they did not intermarry with that race, and it was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its lan- guage. But now intermarriage is very frequent ; both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling into disuse. They still, however, have books of re- ligious instruction in their ancient dialect, and until ?ery lately the services of their church were per* «brmed in Cimbrian. I begged the Capo to show us some of their books 246 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. Bnd he brought us two, — one a catechism for chil dren, entitled '' Dar Kloane Catechism vor i Belose- land vortraghet in z' gaprecht von siben Komiinen, un vier Halghe Gasang. 1842. Padova." The other book it grieved me to see, for it proved that I was not the only one tempted in recent times to visit these ancient people, ambitious to bear to them the relation of discoverer, as it were. A High-Dutch Columbus, from Vienna, had been before me, and I could only come in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered glory. This German savant had dwelt a week in these lonely places, patiently compiling a dictionary of their tongue, which, when it was printed, he had sent to the Capo. I am magnanimous enough to give the name of his book, that the curious may buy it if they like. It is called " Johann Andreas Schweller's Cimbrisches Worterbuch. Joseph Berg- man. Vienna, 1855." Concerning the present Cimbri, the Capo said that in his community they were chiefly hunters, wood- cutters, and charcoal-burners, and that they prac- ticed their primitive crafts in those gloomier and wilder heights we saw to the northward, and de- scended to the towns of the plain to make sale of their fagots, charcoal, and wild-beast skins. In Asi- Rgo and the larger communities they were farmers and tradesmen like the Italians ; and the Capo be- lieved that the Cimbri, in all their villages, num- oered near ten thousand. He could tell me of nc particular customs or usages, and believed they die A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 247 not differ from the Italians now except in race and language.* They are, of course, subject to the Aus* trian Government, but not so strictly as the Italians are ; and though they are taxed and made to do mili- tary service, they are otherwise left to regulate their affairs pretty much at their pleasure. The Capo ended his discourse with* much polite re- gret that he had nothing more worthy to tell us ; and, as if to make us amends for having come so far to learn so little, he said there was a hermit living near, whom we might like to see, and sent his son to conduct us to the hermitao-e. It turned out to be the white object which we had seen gleaming in the wood on the mountain from so great distance below, and the wood turned out to be a pleasant beechen grove, in which we found the hermit cutting fagots. * The English traveler Rose, who (to my further discomfiture, I find) visited Asiago in 1817, mentions that the Cimbri have the Celtic custom of wakiny the dead. " If a traveler dies by .the way, they plant a cross upon the spot, and all who pass by cast a Btone upon his cairn. Some go in certain seasons in the year to high places and woods, where it is supposed they worshiped their divinities, but the origin of the custom is forgot amongst them- selves." If a man dies by violence, they lay him out with his hat and shoes on, as if to give him the appearance of a wayfarer, and •* symbolize one surprised in the great journey of life." A woman dying in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal ornaments. Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people are Cim- bri, and holds that it is " more consonant to all the evidence of history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders at different periods deposited this backwater 3f barbarians " in the iistrict they now inhabit. " The whol« "pace, which in addition ♦o the seven burghs contains twenty-four villages, is bounded by rivers, alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are Ihe Brenta to the east, and the Astico to the west." 248 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. He was warmly dressed in clothes without rent, and wore the clerical knee-breeches. He saluted us with a cricket-like chirpiness of manner, and was greatly amazed to hear that we had come all the way from America to visit him. His hermitage was built upon the side of a white-washed chapel to St. Francis, and contained three" or four little rooms or cupboards, in which the hermit dwelt and meditated. They opened into the chapel, of which the hermit had the care, and which he kept neat and clean like himself. He told us proudly that once a year, on the day of the titular saint, a priest came and said mass in that chapel, and it was easy to see that this was the great occasion of the old man's life. For forty years, he said, he had been devout ; and for twenty-five he had dwelt in this place, where the goodness of God and the charity of the poor people around had kept him from want. Altogether, he was a pleasant enough hermit, not in the least spiritual, but gentle, simple, and evidently sincere. We gave some small yoins of silver to aid him to continue his life of devo- tion, and Count Giovanni bestowed some coppers fvith the stately blessing, " Iddio vi henedica^ padre, mio ! " So we left the hermitage, left Fozza, and started Jown the mountain on foot, for no one may ride down those steeps. Long before we reached the bot- tom, we had learned to loathe mountains and to long for dead levels during the rest of life. Yet the de- scent was picturesque, and in some things even mere interesting than the ascent had been. We met mor* A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 249 people : now melancholy shepherds with their flocks ; now swine-herds and swine-herdesses with herds of wild black pigs of the Italian breed ; now men driv- ing asses that brayed and woke long, loud, and most musical echoes in the hills ; now whole peasant fam- ilies driving cows, horses, and mules to the plain3 below. On the w^ay down, fragments of autobiog- raphy began, with the opportunities of conversation, to come from the Count Giovanni, and we learned that he was a private soldier at home on that permesso which the Austrian Government frequently gives its less able-bodied men in times of peace. He had been at home some years, and did not expect to be afljain called into the service. He liked much better to be in charge of the cave at Oliero than to carry the musket, though he confessed that he liked to see the world, and that soldiering brought one acquainted with many places. He had not many ideas, and the philosophy of his life chiefly regarded deportment to- ward strangers who visited the cave. He held it an error in most custodians to show discontent when travelers gave them little ; and he said that if he re- ceived never so much, he believed it wise not to be- tray exultation. " Always be contented, and nothing more," said Count Giovanni. " It is what you people always promise beforehand,' r said, " when you bargain with strangers, to do them \ certain service for what they please ; but after- ward they must pay what you please or have trouble. I know you will not be content with what I give 70U." 250 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. "If I am not content," cried Count Giovanni, " call me the greatest ass in the world ! " And I am bound to say that, for all I could see through the mask of his face, he was satisfied with what I gave him, though it was not much. He had told us casually that he was nephew of a nobleman of a certain rich and ancient family in Ven- ice, who sent him money while in the army, but this made no great impression on me ; and though I knew there was enough noble poverty in Italy to have given rise to the proverb, Un conte die non con- ta, non conta niente, yet I confess that it was with a shock of surprise I heard our guide and servant sa- luted by a lounger in Valstagna with '^ Sior conte, servitor suo ! " I looked narrowly at him, but there w^as no ray of feeling or pride visible in his pale, lan- guid visage as he i^esponded, " Buona sera, caroJ'^ Still, after that revelation we simple plebeians, who had been all day heaping shawls and guide-books upon Count Giovanni, demanding menial offices from him, and treating him with good-natured slight, felt un- comfortable in his presence, and welcomed the ap- pearance of our carriage with our driver, who, hav- ing started drunk from Bassano in the morning, had kept drunk all day at Valstagna, and who now drove us back wildly over the road, and almost made us sigh for the security of mules ambitious of the brinks of precipices. MINOR TRAVELS. I. PISA. I AM afraid that the talk of the modern railway traveler, if he is honest, must be a great deal of the custodians, the vetturini, and the facchini, whose agree- able acquaintance constitutes his chief knowledge of the population among which he journeys. We do not nowadays carry letters recommending us to citizens of the different places. If we did, consider the calamity we should be to the be-traveled Italian com munities we now bless ! No, we buy our through- tickets, and we put up at the hotels praised in the hand-book, and are very glad of a little conversation with any native, however adulterated he be by con- tact with the world to which we belong. I do not blush to own that I love the whole rascal race which ministers to our curiosity and preys upon us, and I am not ashamed to have spoken so often in this book of the lowly and rapacious but interesting porters who opened to me the different gates of that great realm of w^onders, Italy. I doubt if they can be aiuch known to the dwellers in the land, though they 252 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers ; and if I have any regret in the matter, it is that I did not more diligently study them when I could. The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs ; they are all but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself I remember that years ago when I first visited Cam- bridge, there was an old man appeared to me in the character of Genius of the College Grounds, who showed me all the notable things in our city, — its treasures of art, its monuments, — and ended by taking me into his wood-house, and sawing me off from a wind-fallen branch of the Washington Elm a bit of the sacred wood for a remembrancer. Where now is that old man ? He no longer exists for me, neither he nor his wood-house nor his dwell- in2:-house. Let me look for a month about the College Grounds, and I shall not see him. But some- where in the regions of traveler's faery he still lives, und he appears instantly to the new-comer ; he has an understanding with the dryads, who keep him supplied with boughs from the Washington Elm, and his wood-house is full of them. Among memorable custodians in Italy was one whom we saw at Pisa, where we stopped on our way from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma, and spent an hoar in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. The beautiful old town, which every one knows from the report of travelers, one yet finds possessed of the incommunicable charm which keeps it forever novel to the visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad Arno, it. mirrors in the flood architecture almost aa PISA. 25S fair and noble as that glassed in the Canalazzo, and its other streets seemed as tranquil as the canals of Venice. Those over which we drove, on the day of our visit, were paved with broad flag-stones, and gave out scarcely a sound under our wheels. It was Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet the empty and silent city inspired us with no sense of desolation. The palaces were in perfect repair; the pavements were clean ; behind those windows we felt that there must be a good deal of easy, comfortable life. It is said that Pisa is one of the few places in Europe where the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness — everywhere pursued by Railways — still lingers, and that you find cheap apartments in those well-pre- served old palaces. No doubt it would be worth more to live in Pisa than it would cost, for the history of the place would alone be to any reasonable sojourner a perpetual recompense, and a princely income far exceeding his expenditure. To be sure, the Tower of Famine, with which we chiefly associate the name of Pisa, has been long razed to the ground, and built piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but you may still visit the dead wall which hides from view the place where it stood ; and you may thence drive on, as we did, to the great Piazza where stands the un- /ivaledest group of architecture in the world, after that of St. Mark's Place in Venice. There is the wonderful Leaning Tower, there is the old and beautiful Duomo, there is the noble Baptistery, there IS the lovely Campo-Santo, and there — somewhere iurking in portal or behind pillar, and keeping out 254 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger — is the much-experienced cicerone who shows you through the edifices. Yours is the fourteen-thousandth Amer- ican family to which he has had the honor of acting as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfac- tion in thus becoming a contribution to statistics. We entered the Duomo, in our new friend's cus- tody, and we saw the things which it was well to see. There was mass, or some other ceremony, transacting ; but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as possi- ble, and there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship with which travelers view objects of interest. Then w^e ascended the Leaning Tower, skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to the tower's inclination, but perhaps not receiving a full justification of the Campanile's appearance in pict- ures, till we stood at its base, and saw its vast bulk and height as it seemed to sw^ay and threaten in the blue sky above our heads. There the sensation was too terrible for endurance, — even the architectural beauty of the tower could not save it from being monstrous to us, — and we were glad to hurry away from it to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the Campo Santo. Here are the frescos painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and ready against the time of your arrival in 1864, and you feel that you are the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade who peers through her fingers at the shameful condi- don of deboshed father Noah, and seems to wink one PISA. 255 eye of wicked amusement at you. Turning after- ward to any book written about Italy during the time specified, you find your impression of exclusive possession of the frescos erroneous, and your muse naturally despairs, where so many muses have labored in vain, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo. Yet it is most worthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched and traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim cypresses out of the sainted earth of Jerusalem ; and those old paintings, made when Art was — if ever — a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce more effectively than their authors conceived the lessons of life and death ; for they are themselves becoming part of the triumphant decay they repre- sent. If it was awful once to look upon that strange scene where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly upon three dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet more tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardly discernible in their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy bliss. Alas I Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears and hopes : with dust he w^ipes out dust, and with decay he blots the image of decay. I assure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in the Campo Santo at Pisa, but have writ- ten them out this morning in Cambridge because there happens to be an east wind blowing. No one could have been sad in the company of our cheerful and patient cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get 266 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. h?s fourteen-thousandth American family away, still would not so till he had shown us that monument to a dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo, This is the mighty chain which the Pisans, m their old wars with the Genoese, once stretched across the mouth of their harbor to prevent the entrance of the hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great trouble carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till 1860, when Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored to the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo, an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient foes.* It is not a very good world, — e pur si muove. The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our guide ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in reserve his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he waited till we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures by Nicolo Pisano before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious species of howl. While we stood in some amazement at this, the conscious structure of the dome caught the sound and prolonged it with a variety and sweetness of vliich I could not have dreamed. The man poured * I read in Mr. Norton's Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, that he saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, " the chains that marked the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is of course pos« lible that our cicerone may have emploj-ed one of those chains for the different historical purpose I have mentioned. It would be a thousand ^;>ities, I think, if a monument of that sort should be limited to the conif nemoration of one fact only. PISA. 257 out in quick succession his musical wails, and then ceased, and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in response. There was a supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I despair of giving any true idea : they were of such tender and exalted rapture that we might well have thought them the voices of young- eyed cherubim, singing as they passed through Para- dise over that spot of earth where we stood. They seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and soothed, and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and penitent and humbled. We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of which the marvelous echo made eloquence. " Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had left the building, " hear such music as that ? " " The papal choir does not equal it," we answered with one voice. The cicerone was not to be silenced even with sach a tribute, and he went on : '' Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the President ? No ? Ah, what a fine man ! You saw that he had his heart actually in his nand ! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told him of the Baptistery echo, * We have the finest echo in the world in the Hall cf Congress.' I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a lattle, — thus ! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said he, ' There is no other echo in the world besides this. You are right.' I am unique," pursued the cicerone, "for makincj this echo. But," he ailded 258 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. with a sigh, " it has been my ruin. The Enghsh have put me in all the guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl tw^enty times a day. When our Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the church, the tower, and the Campo Santo. Says the king, ' Pfui ! ' " — here the cicerone gave that sweeping outward motion with both hands by which Italians dismiss a trifling subject — " ' make me the echo ! ' I was forced," concluded the cicerone with a strong sense of injury in his tone, " to howl half an hour without ceasing.'* n. IHE FERRARA ROAD. The delight of one of our first journeys over the road between Padua and Ferrara was a Roman cameriere out of place, who got into the diligence at Ponte Lagoscuro. We were six in all : The Eng- lishman who thought it particularly Italian to say "Si" three times for every assent ; the Veneto (as the citizen of the province calls himself, the native of the city being Veneziano) going home to his farm near Padua ; the German lady of a sour and dreadful countenance ; our two selves, and the Roman came^ riere. The last was worth all the rest — beino; a man of vast general information acquired in the course of service with families of all nations, and agreeably communicative. A brisk and lively little man, with dancing eyes, beard cut to the mode of the Emperor Napoleon, and the impressive habit of tapping him- self on the teeth with his railroad-guide, and lifting his eyebrows when he says any thing specially worthy of remark. He, also, long after the conclusion of an observation, comes back to himself approvingly, w^ith ''Sir' " Vahene!'' '' Ecco !'' He speaks beauti- ful Italian and constantly, and in a little while we know that he was born at Ferrara, bred at Venice, 260 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. and is now a citizen of Rome. " St. Peter's, Signori, — have vou ever seen it ? — is tho first church of the world. At Ferrara lived Tasso and Ariosto. Venice is a lovely city. Ah ! what beauty ! But unique. My second country. Si, Signori, la mia seconda fatria.''^ After a pause, " Va hene^ We hint to him that he is extremely fortunate in having so many countries, and that it will be difficul to exile so universal a citizen, which he takes as a tribute to his worth, smiles and says, " Ecco ! " Then he turns to the Veneto, and describes to him the English manner of living. " Wonderfully well they eat — the English. Four times a day. With rosbif at the dinner. Always, always, always ! And tea in the evening, with rosbif cold. Mangiano sempre. Ma bene, dicoP After a pause, " Si I " " And the Venetians, they eat well, too. Whence the proverb : ' Sulla Riva degli Schiavoni, si mayigiano hei boccofd.^ Q On the Riva degli Schiavoni, you eat fine mouthfuls.') Signori, I am going to Venice," concludes the cameriere. He is the politest man in the world, and the most attentive to ladies. The German lady has not spoken a word, possibly not knowing the language. Our good cameriere cannot bear this, and commiserates her weariness with noble elegance and originality. " La Signora si trova un poco sagrijicata ? " (" The lady feels slightly sacrificed ! ") We all smile, and the little man very gladly with us. "An elegant way of expressing it,*' we venture to suggest. The Veneto roars and roars again, and we THE FERRARA ROAD. 261 all shriek, none louder than the Roman himself. We never can get over that idea of being slightly sacrificed, and it lasts us the whole way to Padua ; and when the Veneto gets down at his farm-gate, he first " reverences " us, and then says, " I am very sorry for you others who must be still more slightly sacrificed." At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our came- riere. He is not so gay, quite, as he was, and I fan- cy that he has not found so many hei hocconi on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine temperament led him to expect. Do I happen to know, he asks, any American family going to Rome and desiring a cameriere ? As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and I cannot help thinking, with a little heartache, of how the Spring came to meet us once as we rode south- ward from Venice toward Florence on that road from Padua to Ferrara. It had been May for some time in Tuscany, and all through the wide plains of Venetia this was the railroad landscape : fields tilled and tended as jealously as gardens, and waving in wheat, oats, and grass, with here and there the hay cut already, and here and there acres of Indian corn. The green of the fields was all dashed with the bloody red of poppies ; the fig-trees hung full of half-grown fruit ; the orchards were garlanded with vines, which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, but train from tree to tree, leaving them to droop in festoons and sway in the wind, with the slender na- 262 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. tive grace of vines. Huge stone farm-houses slieltei under the same roof the family and all the live stock of the farm ; thatched cottages thickly dotting the fields, send forth to their cultivation the most pictur- esque peasants, — men and women, pretty young girls in broad hats, and wonderful old brown and crooked crones, who seem never to have been younger nor fairer. , Country roads, level, straight, and white, stretch away on either hand, and the con- stant files of poplars escort them wherever they go. All about, the birds sing, and the butterflies dance. The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn up their patient heads, with wide-spreading horns and mellow eyes, at the passing train ; the sunburnt lout behind them suspends the application of the goad ; unwonted acquiescence stirs in the bosom of the firm- minded donkey, and even the matter-of-fact locomo- tive seems to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may along these plains of Spring. At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, and having fought the customary battle with the vet- turino before arriving at the terms of contract ; having submitted to the successive pillage of the man who had held our horses a moment, of the man who tied on the trunk, and of the man who hovered obligingly about the carriage, and desired to drink our health — with prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of wheels, we rattle out of the Stella d'Oro, and set forth from the gate of the old city. I confess that I like posting. There is a freedom and a fine sense of proprietorship in that mode o' THE FERRARA ROAD. 263 travel, combined with sufficient speed, which you do not feel on the railroad. For twenty francs and buona mano. I had bouo-ht mv carriao:e and horses and dri- ver for the journey of forty miles, and I began to look round on the landscape with a cumulative feel- ing of ownership in every thing I saw. For me, old women spinning in old-world fashion, with distaff and spindle, flax as white as their own hair, came to road- side doors, or moved back and forth under orchard trees. For me, the peasants toiled in the fields to- gether, wearing for my sake wide straw hats, or gay ribbons, or red caps. The white oxen were willing to mass themselves in effective groups, as the ploughman turned the end of his furrow ; young girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to springs as we passed ; children had larger eyes and finer faces and played more about the cottage doors, on account of our posting. As for the vine-garland- ed trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the end- less fertile plain ; the white distance of the road be- fore us with its guardian poplars, — I doubt if people in a diligence could have got so much of these things as we. Certainly they could not have had all to themselves the lordly splendor with which we dashed through gaping villages, taking the street from every body, and fading magnificently away upon the road. m. TRIESTE. If you take the midnight steamer at Venice yen reach Trieste by six o'clock in the morning, and the hills rise to meet you as you enter the broad bay dotted with the sail of fishing-craft. The hills are bald and bare, and you find, as you draw near, that the city lies at their feet under a veil of mist, or climbs earlier into view along their sides. The pros- pect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing feat- ures, and looking at those rugged acclivities, with their aspect of continual bleakness, you readily believe all the stories you have heard of that fierce wind called the Bora which sweeps from them through Trieste at certain seasons. While it blows, ladies walking near the quays are sometimes caught up and set afloat, involuntary Galateas, in the bay, and people keep in-doors as much as possible. But the Bora, though so sudden and so savage, does give warning of its rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this characteristic. They station a man 'on one of the mountain tops, and when he feels the first breath of the Bora, he sounds a horn, which is a signal for all within hearing to lay hold of something that canno* be blown away, and cling to it till the wind falls TRIESTE. 265 This may happen in three days or in nine, according to the popular proverbs. " The spectacle of the sea,'* says Dair Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, " while the Bora blows, is sublime, and when it ceases the prospect of the surrounding hills is delightful. The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them with a rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly softened, even in the heart of winter." The city itself, as you penetrate it, makes good w^ith its stateliness and picturesqueness your loss through the grimness of its environs. It is in great part new, very clean, and full of the life and move- ment of a prosperous port ; but, better than this, so far as the mere sight-seer is concerned, it wins a novel charm from the many public staircases by which you ascend and descend its hillier quarters, and which are made of stone, and lightly railed and balustraded with iron. Something of all this I noticed in my ride from the landing of the steamer to the house of friends in the suburbs, and there I grew better disposed tow^ard the hills, w^hich, as I strolled over them, I found dotted with lovely villas, and everywhere trav- ersed by perfectly- kept carriage-roads, and easy and pleasant foot-paths. It was in the spring-time, and the peach-trees and almond- trees hung full of blos- soms and bees, the lizards lay in the walks absorbing the vernal sunshine, the violets and cowslips sweet- ened all the grassy borders. The scene did not want a human interest, for the peasant girls were going to market at that hour, and I met them everywhere, 266 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. bearing heavy burdens on their own heads, or hurry- ing forward with their wares on the backs of donkeys. They were as handsome as heart could wish, and they wore that Itahan costume which is not to be seen anywhere in Italy except at Trieste and in the Ro- man and Neapolitan provinces, — a bright bodice and gown, with the head-dress of dazzling white linen, square upon the crown, and dropping lightly to the shoulders. Later I saw these comely maidens crouch- ing on the ground in the market-place, and selling their wares, with much glitter of eyes, teeth, and ear- rings, and a continual babble of bargaining. It seemed to me that the average of good looks was greater among the women of Trieste than among those of Venice, but that the instances of striking and exquisite beauty were rarer. At Trieste, too, the Italian type, so pure at Venice, is lost or contin- ually modified by the mixed character of the popula- tion, which perhaps is most noticeable at the Mer- chants' Exchange. This is a vast edifice roofed with glass, where are the offices of the great steam naviga- tion company, the Austrian Lloyds, — which, far more than the favor of the Imperial government, has contributed to the prosperity of Trieste, — and where the traffickers of all races meet daily to gossip over the news and the prices. Here a Greek or Dalmat talks with an eager Italian or a slow, sure English- man ; here the hated Austrian button-holes the Ve- netian or the Magyar ; here the Jew meets the Gen- tile on common ground ; here Christianity encounters the hoary superstitions of the East, and makes a good TRIESTE. 267 thing out of them in cotton or grain. All costume? are seen here, and all tongues are heard, the native Triestines contributing almost as much to the variety of the latter as the foreigners. *' In regard to lan- guage," says Cantu, " though the country is peopled by Slavonians, yet the Italian tongue is spreading into the remotest villages where a few years since it was not understood. In the city it is the common and famil- iar lanojuao-e ; the Slavonians of the North use the German for the language of ceremony ; those of the South, as well as the Israelites, the Italian ; while the Protestants use the German, the Greeks the Hellenic and Illyric, the employes of the civil courts the Ital- ian or the German, the schools now German and now Italian, the bar and the pulpit Italian. Most of the inhabitants, indeed, are bi-lingual, and very many tri-lingual, without counting French, which is under- stood and spoken from infancy. Italian, German, and Greek are w^'itten, but the Slavonic little, this having remained in the condition of a vulgar toncrue. But it would be idle to distinguish the population accord- ing to language, for the son adopts a language differ- ent from the father's, and now prefers one language and now another ; the women incline to the Italian ; but those of the upper class prefer now German, now French, now English, as, from one decade to another, affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the sa- lons ; in the squares and streets, the Venetian dialect is heard.'' And with the introduction of the Venetian dialect, Venetian discontent seems also to have crept in, and i68 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. I once heard a Triestlne declaim against the Imperial government quite in the manner of Venice. It struck me that this desire for union with Italy, which he declared prevalent in Trieste must be of very recent growth, since even so late as 1848, Trieste had re- fused to join Venice in the expulsion of the Austrians. Indeed, the Triestines have fought the Venetians from the first ; they stole the Brides of Venice in one of their piratical cruises in the lagoons ; gave aid and comfort to those enemies of Venice, the Visconti, the Carraras, and the Genoese ; revolted from St. Mark whenever subjected to his banner, and finally, rather than remain under his sway, gave themselves five centuries ago to Austria. ^ The objects of interest in Trieste are not many. There are remains of an attributive temple of Jupiter under the Duomo, and there is near at hand the Museum of Classical Antiquities founded in honor of Winckelmann, murdered at Trieste by that ill-advised Pistojese, Ancangeli, who had seen the medals be- stowed on the antiquary by Maria Theresa and Believed him rich. There is also a scientific museum founded by the Archduke Maximilian, and, above all, there is the beautiful residence of that ill-starred prince, — the Miramare, where the half-crazed Era- press of the Mexicans vainly waits her husband's re^ turn from the experiment of paternal government in the New World. It would be hard to tell how Art ha" charmed rock and wave at Miramare, until the spur of one of those rugged Triestine hills, jutting 'nto the sea, has been made the seat of ease and TRIESTE. 269 uxurv, but the visitor is aware of the ma^ic as soon its he passes the gate of the palace grounds. These jire in great part perpendicular, and are over clam- bered with airy stairways climbing to pensile arbors. Where horizontal, they are diversified with mimic seas for swans to sail upon, and summer-houses for people to lounge in and look at the swans from. On the point of land furthest from the acclivity stands the Castle of Miramare, half at sea, and half adrift in the clouds above : — " And fain it would stoop downward To the mirrored wave below ; And fain it would soar upward In the evening's crimson glow." I remember that a little yacht lay beside the pier at the castle's foot, and lazily flapped its sail, while the sea beat inw^ard with as languid a pulse. That was some years ago, before Mexico was dreamed of at Miramare : now, perchance, she who is one of the most unhappy among women looks dow^n distraught from those high windows, and finds in the helpless sail and impassive w^ave the images of her baffled hope, and that immeasurable sea which gives back its mariners neither to love nor sorrow. I tliink though she be the wife and daughter of princes, we may pity this poor Empress at least as much as we city the Mexicans to whom her dreams have brought %o many woes. It was the midnight following my ■'"isit to Mira- mare when the fiacre in which I had quitted my 6:iend's house was drawn up by its greatly bewil- 270 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. dered driver on the quay near the place where the steamer for V^enice should be lying. There was no steamer for Venice to be seen. The driver swore a little in the polyglot profanities of his native city, and descending from his box, w^ent and questioned different lights — blue lights, yellow lights, green lights — to be seen at different points. To a light, they were ignorant, though eloquent, and to pass the time, we drove up and down the quay, and stopped at the landings of all the steamers that touch at Trieste. It w^as a snug fiacre enough, but I did not care to spend the night in it, and I urged the driver to farther inquiry. A w^anderer whom we met, de- clared that it was not the night for the Venice steamer ; another admitted that it might be ; a third conversed with the driver in low tones, and then leaped upon the box. We drove rapidly away, and before I had, in view of this mysterious proceeding, composed a fitting paragraph for the Fatti Diversi of the Osservatore Triestino, descriptive of the state in which the Guardie di Polizia should find me floating in the bay, exanimate and evidently the prey of a triste evvenimento — the driver pulled up once more, und now beside a steamer. It was the steamer for Venice, he said, in precisely the tone which he would have used had he driven me directly to it without blundering. It was breathing heavily, and was just iibout to depart, but even in the hurry of getting on board, I could not help noticing that it seemed to nave grown a great deal since I had last voyaged in it. There was not a soul to be seen except the mute TRIESTE. 271 itewaid who took my satchel, and guiding me below into an elegant saloon, instantly left me alone. Here again the steamer was vastly enlarged. These were not the narrow quarters of the Venice steamer, noi was this lamp, shedding a soft liglit on cushioned seats and paneled doors and wainscotings the sort of illumination usual in that humble craft. I rang the small silver bell on the long table, and the mute steward appeared. Was this the steamer for Venice ? Sicuro ! All that I could do in comment was to sit down ; and in the mean time the steamer trembled, groaned, choked, cleared its throat, and we were under way. " The other passengers have all gone to bed, I sup- pose," I argued acutely, seeing none of them. Never- theless, I thought it odd, and it seemed a shrewd means of relief to ring the bell, and pretending drowsiness, to ask the steward which was my state- room. He replied with a curious smile that I could have any of them. Amazed, I yet selected a state-room, and while the steward was gone for the sheets and pillow-cases, I occupied my time by opening the doors of all the other state-rooms. They were empty. " Am I the only passenger ? " I asked, when he leturned, with some anxietv, " Precisely," he answered, I could not proceed and ask if he composed the intire crew — it seemed too fearfully probable that ae did. 272 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. I now suspected that I had taken passage with the Olandese Yolante. There was nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and there ^ with the accession of a shght sea-sickness, my views of the situation underwent a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom with the Ancient Mariner — I was a Manuscript Found in a Bottle ! Coming to the surface about six o'clock A. m., I found a daylight as cheerful as need be upon the appointments of the elegant cabin, and upon the good- natured face of the steward when he brought me the caffe latte, and the buttered toast for my break fast. He said ^'Servitor suo!^^ in a loud and com- fortable voice, and I perceived the absurdity of hav- ing thought that he was in any way related to the Nightmare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man's-blood-with- cold. " This is not the regular Venice steamer, I sup- pose," I remarked to the steward as he laid my breakfast in state upon the long table. No. Properly, no boat should have left for Venice JsLst night, which was not one of the times of the tri- weekly departure. This was one of the steamers of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it was going at present to take on an extraordinary freight at Venice for Egypt. I had been permitted to come on board because my driver said I had a return ticket, and would go. Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever mysterious in the management of the steamer. The captain met me with a bow in the gangway ; seameR TRIESTE. " 273 were coiling wet ropes at different points, as they always are ; the mate was promenading the bridge, and taking the rainy weather as it came, with his oil-cloth coat and hat on. The wheel of the steamer was as usual chewing the sea, and finding it unpala- table, and making vain efforts at expectoration. We were in sioht of the breakwater outside Mala- mocco, and a pilot-boat was making us from the land. Even at this point the innumerable fortifications of the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we drew near Venice, till we entered the lagoon, and found it a nest of fortresses one with another. Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not spring resplendent from the sea, as I had always read she would. She rose slowly and languidly from the water, — not like a queen, but like the gray, slover ly, bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was 18 IT. BASSANO. I HAVE already told, in recounting the story of our visit to the Cimbri, how full of courtship we found the little city of Bassano on the evening of our arrival there. Bassano is the birthplace of the painter Jacopo da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to treat scriptural story as accessory to mere land- scape, and who had a peculiar fondness for painting Entrances into the Ark, for in these he could indulge without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired from observation of local customs in his native town. This was the theory offered by one who had imbibed the spirit of subtile speculation from Ruskin, and I think it reasonable. At least it does not conflict with the fact that there is at Bassano a most excel- lent gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the works of Jacopo da Ponte, and his four sons, who are here to be seen to better advantage than anywhere else. As few strangers visit Bassano, the gallery is little frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man, who will not allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown them the adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that ^^ou assure him of your indifference to these scientific &eccature ; he is deaf BASSANO. 275 and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a hundred questions, and understood nothing in re{)ly, insomuch that when he came to his last inquiry, *' Have the Protestants the same God as the Catholics ? " we were rather glad that he should he obliged to settle the fact for himself. Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom as we entered we heard hummino; over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to gather from the opening flowers of orthograpliy. When we passed out, the master gave these poor busy bees an atom of holiday, and they all swarmed forth together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a long, lank man, in a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap — exactly like the schoolmaster in " The Deserted Village." We made a pretense of asking him our way to somewhere, and w^ent wrong, and came by accident upon a wide flat space, bare as a brick-yard, beside which was lettered on a fragment of the old city wall, " Giuoco di Palla." It was evidently the playground of the whole city, and it gave us a pleas- anter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet con- ceived, to think of its entire population playing ball there in the spring afternoons. We respected Bas- sano as much for this as for her diligent remembrance of her illustrious dead, of whom she has very great numbers. It appeared to us that nearly every other house bore a tablet announcing ihat " Here was born," or " Here died," some great or good man of whom no one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough ce- lebrity in Bassano to supply the world ; but as laurel 276 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. is a thing that grows anywhere, I covet rather from Bassano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where visible, is seen to be of a pebbly rough-cast, but it is clad almost from the ground in glossy ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast shoul- ders of some giant warrior. The moat beneath is turned into a lovely promenade bordered by quiet vil- las, with rococo shepherds and shepherdesses in mar- ble on their gates ; where the wall is built to the verge of the high ground on wliich the city stands, there is a swift descent to the wide valley of the Brenta waving in corn and vines and tobacco. We went up the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, to visit the famous cavern already mentioned, out of which, from the secret heart of the hill, gushes one of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached by Dassing through a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through a sort of ante-grot, whence stepping- stones are laid in the brawlino; current through a sue- cession of natural compartments with dome-hke roofs. From the hill overhead hang stalactites of all gro- tesque and fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is embroidered with fantastic designs wrought by the water in the silence and darkness of the endless night. At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cav- ern is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging to the centre of the pool your attention is drawn to the dome above you, which contracts into a shaft lising upward to a height as yet unmeasured and sven unpierced by light. From somewhere in itg BASSANO. 277 ttiysterlous ascent, an auroral boy, with a tallow can- dle, produces a so-called effect of sunrise, and sheds a sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the cav- ern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind creatures of subterranean waters are to those of waves that laugh and dance above ground. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy influ- ences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on the surface of the earth, why do peop^ visit them ? I do not know that this is more di?pn'it- ing or its stream more Stygian than another. The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives everywhere in this part of Italy, and near the en- trance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the hill something like the apsis of a church, which is popu- larly believed to have been the hiding-place of Ce- cilia da Baone, one of the many unhappy wives of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino family. It is not quite clear when Cecilia should have employed this as a place of refuge, and it is certain that she was not the wife of Ecelino da Ro- mano, as the neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ece- lino il Monaco, his father ; yet since her name is asso- ciated with the grot, let us have her story, which is curiously illustrative of the life of the best society in Italy during the thirteenth century. She was the only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to the guardianship of Spinabello da Xendrico. When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello cast ibout him to find a suitable h»isband for her, and it 278 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. appeared to him that a match with the son of Tiso du Camposampiero promised the greatest advantages. Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon so important a matter, he confided it for advice to his brother-in-law and closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. It had just happened that Balbo's son, Ecelino il Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having been recently divorced from his first wife, the lovely but light Speronella ; and Balbo falsely went to the greedy guardian of Cecilia, and offering him better terms than he could hope for from Tiso, secured Cecilia for his son. At this treachery the Camposampieri were furious ; but they dissembled their anger till the moment of revenge arrived, when Cecilia's re- jected suitor encountering her upon a journey be- yond the protection of her husband, violently dis- honored his successful rival. The unhappy lady returning to Ecelino at Bassano, recounted her wrong, and was with a horrible injustice repudiated and sent home, while her husband arranged schemes of vengeance in due time consummated. Cecilia next married a Venetian noble, and being in due time divorced, married yet again, and died the mother of a large family of children. This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was an habitue of the caff^ in Bassano who could have given some of its particulars from personal recollec- tion. He was an old and smoothly shaven gentle- man, in a scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we saw every evening in a corner of the caii<§ playing 3ASSAN0. 279 solitaire. He talked with no one, saluted no one. He drank his glasses of water with anisette, and silently played solitaire. There is no good reason to doubt that he had been doing the same thing every evening for six hundred years. POSSAGNO, CANOYA's BIRTHPLACE, It did not take a long time to exhaust the interest of Bassano, but we were sorry to leave the place because of the excellence of the inn at which we tarried. It was called " II Mondo," and it had every thing in it that heart could wish. Our rooms were miracles of neatness and comfort ; they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair, and they opened into the dining-hall, where we were served with indescribable salads and risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed the house ; when we were come away we wondered that so much perfection of hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano. It is one of the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that you are everywhere introduced in character, that you become fictitious and play a part as in a novel. To this inn of TJie World, our driver had brought us with a clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee re- ceived from us, and when, in response to his haughty summons, the cameriere, who had been gossiping with the cook, tlu'ew open the kitchen door, and stood out to welcome us in a broad square of forth- streaming ruddy light, amid the lovely odors of broil- \ng and roasting, our driver saluted him with, " Re* POSSAGNO, CANOVa'S BIRTHPLACE. 281 ceive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very best. They are worthy of any thing." This at once put us back several centuries, and we never ceased to be lords and ladies of the period of Don Quixote as long as we rested in that inn. It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left " II Mondo," and gayly journeyed toward Treviso, intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace of Canova, on our way. The road to the latter place passes through a beautiful country, that gently undulates on either hand till in the distance it rises into pleasant hills and green mountain heights. Possagno itself lies upon the brink of a declivit}'', down the side of which drops terrace after terrace, all planted with vines and figs and peaches, to a watercourse below. The ground on which the village is built, with its quaint and antiquated stone cottages, slopes gently northward, and on a little rise upon the left hand of us coming from Bassano, we saw that stately edi- fice with which Canova has honored his humble birthplace. It is a copy of the Pantheon, and. it cannot help being beautiful and imposing, but it would be utterly out of place in any other than an Italian village. Here, however, it consorted well enough with the lingering qualities of the old pagan civilization still perceptible in Italy. A sense of that past was so strong with us as we ascended ^he broad stairway leading up the slope from the village to the level on which the temple stands at Jlie foot of a mountain, that we might well have Oelieved we approached an altar devoted to the eldef 282 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. worship: through the open doorway and between the columns of the portico we could see the priests moving to and fro, and the voice of their chant- ing came out to us like the sound of hymns to some of the deities long disowned ; and I remembered how Padre L had said to me in Venice, '' Our blessed saints are only the old gods baptized and christened anew." Within as without, the temple resembled the Pantheon, but it had little to show us. The niches designed by Canova for statues of the saints are empty yet ; but there are busts by his own hand of himself and his brother, the Bishop Canova. Among the people was the sculptor's niece, whom our guide pointed out to lis, and who was evidently, used to being looked at. She seemed not to dislike it, and stared back at us amiably enough, being a good-natured, plump, comely dark-faced lady of perhaps fifty years. Possagno is nothing if not Canova, and our guide, a boy, knew all about him, — how, more especially, he had first manifested his wonderful genius by modeling a group of sheep out of the dust of the nighway, and how an Inglese happening along in his carriage, saw the boy's work and gave him a plate- ful of gold napoleons. I dare say this is as near the truth as most facts. And is it not better for the his- toric Canova to have begun in this way than to have poorly picked up the rudiments of his art in the Workshop of his father, a maker of altar-pieces and the like for country churches ? The Canova family has intermaiTied with the Venetian nobility, and wili POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE. 283 not credit those stories of Canova's beginnings which his townsmen so fondly cherish. I believe they would even distrust the butter-hon with which the boy- Bculptor is said to have adorned the table of the noble Falier, and first won his notice. Besides the temple at Possagno, there is a very pretty gallery containing casts of all Canova's works. It is an interesting place, where Psyches and Cupids flutter, where Venuses present themselves in every variety of attitude, where Sorrows sit upon hard, straight-backed classic chairs, and mourn in the society of faithful Storks ; where the Bereft of this century surround death-beds in Greek costume appro- priate to the scene ; where Muses and Graces sweetly pose themselves and insipidly smile, and Avhere the Dancers and Passions, though nakeder, are no wick- eder than the Saints and Virtues. In all, there are a hundred and ninety-five pieces in the gallery, and among the rest the statue named George Washing- ton, which was sent to America in 1820, and after- wards destroyed by fire in the Capitol. The figure is in a sitting posture ; naturally, it is in the dress of a Roman general ; and if it does not look much like George Washington, it does resemble Julius Csesar. The custodian of the gallery had been Canova's body-servant, and he loved to talk of his master. He had so far imbibed th'^ family spirit that he did not like to allow that Canova had ever been other than rich and o;rand, and he beo:o:ed us not to believe the idle stories of his first essays in art. He was jelighted with our interest in the imperial Washing- 284 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. ton, and our pleasure in the whole gallery, which we viewed with the homage due to the man who had rescued the world from Swaggering in sculpture. When we were satisfied, he invited us, with his mistress's permission, into the house of the Canovas adjoining the gallery ; and there we saw many paint- ings by the sculptor, — pausing longest in a lovely little room decorated after the Pompeian manner with scherzi in miniature panels representing the jocose classic usualities : Cupids escaping from cages, and being sold from them, and playing many pranks and games with Nymphs and Graces. Then Canova was done, and Possagno was fin- ished ; and we resumed our way to Treviso, a town nearly as much porticoed as Padua, and having a memory and hardly any other consciousness. The Duomo, which is perhaps the ugliest duomo in the world, contains an " Annunciation," by Titian, one of his best paintings ; and in the Monte di Pietd is the grand and beautiful " Entombment," by which Giorgione is perhaps most worthily remembered. The church of San Nicolo is interesting from its quaint and pleasing frescos by the school of Giotto. At the railway station an admirable old man sells the tnost delicious white and purple grapes. TI. COMO. My visit to Lake Como has become to me a dream of summer, — a vision that I'emains faded the whole year round, till the blazing heats of July bring out the sympathetic tints in which it was vividly painted. Then I behold myself again in burning Milan, amidst noises and fervors and bustle that seem intolerable after my first six months in tranquil, cool, mute Ven- ice. Looking at the great white Cathedral, with its infinite pinnacles piercing the cloudless blue, and gathering the fierce sun upon it, I half expect to see the whole mass calcined by the heat, and crumbHng, statue by statue, finial by finial^ arch by arch, into a vast heap of lime on the Piazza, with a few charred English tourists blackening here and there upon the ruin, and contributing a smell of burnt leather and Scotch tweed to the horror of the scene. All round Milan smokes the great Lombard plain, and to, the north rises Monte Rosa, her dark head coifed with tantalizing snows as with a peasant's white linen'*ker- chief. And I am walking out upon that fuming plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which the bronze horses may melt any minute ; or I am swel- tering through the city's noonday streets, in search 286 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. of Sant' Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo of Da Vinci, or what know I ? Coming back to our hotel, " Alia Bella Venezia," and greeted on entering by the im- mense fresco which covers one whole side of the court, it appeared to my friend and me no wonder that Garibaldi should look so longingly from the prow of a gondola toward the airy towers and bal- loon-like domes that swim above the unattainable la- goons of Venice, where the Austrian then lorded it in coolness and quietness, while hot, red-shirted Italy was shut out upon the dusty plains and stony hills. Our desire for water became insufferable ; we paid our modest bills, and at six o'clock we took the train for Como, where we arrived about the hour when Don Abbondio, walking down the lonely path with his book of devotions in his hand, gave himself to the Devil on meeting the bravos of Don Rodrigo. I counsel the reader to turn to I Promessi Sposi, if he would know how all the lovely Como country looks at that hour. For me, the ride through the evening landscape, and the faint sentiment of pen- siveness provoked by the smell of the ripening maize, which exhales the same sweetness on the way to Como that it does on any Ohio bottom-land, have given me an appetite, and I am to dine before woo- ing the descriptive Muse. After dinner, we find at the door of the hotel an English architect whom we know, and we take a boat together for a moonlight row upon the lake, and voyage far up the placid water through air that bathes our heated senses like dew. How far we have COMO. 287 .eft Milan behind ! On the lake lies the moon, but the hills are held by mysterious shadows, which for the time are as substantial to us as the hills them- selves. Hints of habitation appear in the twinkling liglits along the water's edge, and we suspect an ala- baster lamp in every casement, and in every invisible house a villa such as Claude Melnotte described to Pauline, — and some one mouths that well-worn fus- tian. The rags of sentimentality flutter from every crag and olive-tree and orange-tree in all Italy — like the wilted paper collars which vulgar tourists leave by our own mountains and streams, to commemorate their enjoyment of the landscape. The town of Como lies, a swarm of hghts, behind us ; the hills and shadows gloom around ; the lake is a sheet of tremulous silver. There is no telling how we get back to our hotel, or with what satisfied hearts we fall asleep in our room there. The steamer starts for the head of the lake at eio;ht o'clock in the morning, and we go on board at that hour. There is some pretense of shelter in the awning stretched over the after part of the boat ; but we do not feel the need of it in the fresh morning air, and \ve get as near the bow as possible, that we may be the very first to enjoy the famous beauty of the scenes opening before us. A few sails dot the water, and everywhere there are small, canopied row-boats, such as we went pleasuring in last night. We reach a bend in the lake, and all the roofs and towers of the city of Como pass from view, as if they had been so much architecture painted on a scene and 288 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. shifted out of sight at a theatre. But other roofs and towers constantly succeed them, not less lovely and picturesque than they, with every curve of the many- curving lake. We advance over charming expanses of water lying between lofty hills ; and as the lake is narrow, the voyage is like that of a winding river, — like that of the Ohio, but for the primeval wild- ness of the acclivities that guard our Western stream, and the tawniness of its current. Wherever the hills do not descend sheer into Como, a pretty town nest- les on the brink, or, if not a town, then a villa, or else a cottage, if there is room for nothing more. Many little towns climb the heights half-way, and where the hills are green and cultivated in vines or olives, peasants' houses scale them to the crest. They grow loftier and loftier as we leave our start- ing-place farther behind, and as we draw near Col* ico they wear light wreaths of cloud and snow. So cool a breeze has drawn down between them all the way that we fancy it to have come from them till we stop at Colico, and find that, but for the efforts of our honest engine, sweating and toiling in the dark below, we should have had no current of air. A burning calm is in the atmosphere, and on the broad, flat valley, — out of which a marshy stream oozes into the lake, — and on the snow-crowned hills upon the left, and on the dirty village of Colico upon the right, and on the indolent beggars waiting to wel- come us, and sunning their goitres at the landing. The name Colico, indeed, might be literally taken m English as descriptive of the local insalubrity COMO. 289 The place was once large, but it has fallen away much from sickness, and we found a bill posted in its public places inviting emigrants to America on the part of a German steamship company. It was the only advertisement of the kind I ever saw in Italy, and I judged that the people must be notoriously discontented there to make it worth the while of a steamship company to tempt from home any of the home-keeping Italian race. And yet Colico, though undeniably hot, and openly dirty, and tacitly un- healthy, had merits, though the dinner we got there was not among its virtues. It had an accessible country about it ; that is, its woods and fields were not impenetrably walled in from the vagabond foot ; and after we had dined we went and lay down under some greenly waving trees beside a field of corn, and heard the plumed and panoplied maize talking to itself of its kindred in America. It alwavs has a welcome for tourists of our nation wherever it finds us in Italy ; and sometimes its sympathy, expressed in a rustling and clashing of its long green blades, or in its strong sweet perfume, has, as already hinted, made me homesick, though I have been uniformly unaffected by potato-patches and tobacco-fields. If only the maize could impart to the Italian cooks the beautiful mystery of roasting-ears ! Ah ! then indeed it might claim a full and perfect fraternization from its compatriots abroad. From where we lay beside the corn-field, we could see, through the twinkhng leaves and the twinkling atmosphere, the great hills across the lake, taking 19 290 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. their afternoon naps, with their clouds drawn like handkerchiefs over their heads. It was very hot, and the red and purple ooze of the unwholesome river below " burnt like a witch's oils." It was in- deed but a fevered joy we snatched from Nature there ; and I am afraid that we got nothing more comfortable from sentiment, when, rising, we wan- dered off through the unguarded fields toward a ruined tower on a hill. It must have been a relic of feudal times, and I could easily believe it had been the hold of one of those wicked lords who used to rule in the terror of the people beside peaceful and happy Como. But the life, good or bad, was utterly gone out of it now, and what was left of the tower was a burden to the sense. A few scrawny blackberries and other brambles grew out of its fallen stones ; harsh, dust-dry mosses painted its weather-worn walls with their blanched gray and yellow. From its foot, looking out over the valley, we saw the road to the Splugen Pass lying white-hot in the valley ; and while we looked, the diligence ap- peared, and dashed through the dust that rose like a flame before. After that it was a relief to stroll in dirty by-ways, past cottages of saffron peasants, and poor stony fields that begrudged them a scanty veg- etation, back to the steamer blistering in the sun. Now indeed we were glad of the awning, under which a silent crowd of people with sunburnt faces waited for the departure of the boat. The breeze rose again as the engine resumed its unappreciated 'abors, and, with our head toward Como, we pusheo COMO. 291 out into the lake. The company on board was such as might be expected. There was a German land- scape-painter, with three heart's-friends beside him ; there were some German ladies ; there were the un- failing Americans and the unfailing Englishman ; there were some French people ; there were Italians from the meridional provinces, dark, thin, and enthu- siastic, with fat silent wives, and a rhythmical speech ; there were Milanese with their families, out for a holiday, — round-bodied men, with blunt square feat- ures, and hair and vowels clipped surprisingly short , there was a young girl whose face was of the exact type affected in rococo sculpture, and at whom one gazed without being able to decide whether she was a nymph descended from a villa gate, or a saint come from under a broken arch in a Renaissance church. At one of the little towns two young Englishmen in knickerbockers came on board, who were devoured by the eyes of their fellow-passengers, and between whom and our kindly architect there was instantly ratified the tacit treaty of non-intercourse which traveling Englishmen observe. Nothing further interested us on the way to Como, wxcept the gathering coolness of the evening air ; the shadows creeping higher and higher on the hills ; the songs of the girls winding yellow silk on the reels that hummed through the open windows of the fac- tories on the shore ; and the appearance of a flag that floated from a shallop before the landing of a stately villa. The Itahans did not know this banner, ind the Germans loudly debated its nationality. 292 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. The Englishmen grinned, and the Americans blushed in silence. Of all my memories of that hot day on Lake Como, this is burnt the deepest ; for the flag was that insolent banner which in 1862 pro- claimed us a broken people, and persuaded willing Europe of our ruin. It has gone down long ago from ship and fort and regiment, as well as from the shallop on the fair Italian lake. Still, I say, it made Como too hot for us that afternoon, and even breath- less Milan was afterwards a pleasant contrast. STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. I. It was after sunset when we arrived in the birth- place of Palladio, which we found a fair city in the lap of caressing hills. There are pretty villas upon these slopes, and an abundance of shaded walks and drives about the houses which were pointed out to us, by the boy who carried our light luggage from the railway station, as the property of rich citizens " but little less than lords " in quality. A lovely grove lay between the station and the city, and our guide not only took us voluntarily by the longest route through this, but, after reaching the streets, led us by labyrinthine ways to the hotel, in order, he af- terwards confessed, to show us the city. He was a poet, though in that lowly walk of life, and he had done well. No other moment of our stay would have served us so well for a first general impression >f Vicenza as that twilight hour. In its uncertain glimmer we seemed to get quite back to the dawn of feudal civilization, when Theodoric founded the great Basilica of the city ; and as we stood before the fa- mous Clock Tower, which rises light and straight aa a mast eighty-two metres into the air from a base o^ 294 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. seven metres, the wavering obscurity enhanced the effect by half concealing the tuwer's crest, and let- ting it soar endlessly upward in the fancy. The Ba- silica is greatly restored by Palladio, and the cold hand of that friend of virtuous poverty in architect- ure lies heavy upon his native city in many places. Yet there is still a great deal of Lombardic architect- ure in Vicenza ; and we walked through one street of palaces in which Venetian Gothic prevailed, so that it seemed as if the Grand Canal had but just shrunk away from their bases. When we threw open our window at the hotel, we found that it over- looked one of the city gates, from which rose a Ghi- belline tower with a great bulging cornice, full of the beauty and memory of times long before Palladio. They were rather troublous times, and not to be recalled here in all their circumstance ; but I think it due to Vicenza, which is now little spoken of, even in Italy, and is scarcely known in America, where her straw-braid is boitght for that of Leghorn, to remind the reader that the city was for a long time a republic of very independent and warlike stomach. Before she arrived at that state, however, she had mdergone a great variety of fortunes. The Gauls •'ounded the city (as I learn from " The Chronicles i>f Vicenza," by Battista Pagliarino, published at Vi- cenza in 1563) when Gideon was Judge in Israel, and were driven out by the Romans some centuries !ater. As a matter of course, Vicenza was sacked by Attila and conquered by Alboin ; after which she was ruled by some lords of her own, until sh? VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 295 was made an imperial city by Henry I. Then she had a government more or less republican in form till Frederick Barbarossa burnt her, and " wrapped her in ashes," and gave her to his vicar Ecelino da Romano, who " held her in cruel tyranny " from 1236 to 1259. The Paduans next ruled her forty years, and the Veronese seventy-seven, and the Mi- lanese seventeen years ; then she reposed in the arms of the Venetian Republic till these fell weak and helpless from all the Venetian possessions at the threat of Napoleon. Vicenza belonged again to Venice during the brief Republic of 1848, but the most memorable battle of that heroic but unhappy epoch gave her back to Austria. Now at last, and for the first time, she is Italian. Vicenza is " Of kindred that have greatly expiated And greatly wept," an 1 but that I so long foucrht against Ecelino da Ro- mano, and the imperial interest in Italy, I could read- ily forgive her all her past errors. To us of the Lom- bard League, it was grievous that she should remain 30 doggishly faithful to her tyrant ; though it is to be granted that perhaps fear had as much to do with her devotion as favor. The defense of 1848 was greatly to her honor, and she took an active part in that demonstration against the Austrians which en- dured from 1859 till 1866. Of the demonstration vfe travelers saw an amus- 4ig phase at the opera which we attended the evening of our arrival in Vicenza. " Nabucodonosor " was the 296 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. piece to be given in the new open-air theatre outside the city walls, whither we walked under the starlight. It was a pretty structure of fresh white stucco, oval in form, with some graceful architectural pretensions without, and within very charmingly galleried ; while overhead it was roofed with a blue dome set with such starry mosaic as never covered temple or thea- tre since they used to leave their houses of play and worship open to the Attic skies. The old Hebrew story had, on this stage brought so near to Nature, effects seldom known to opera, and the scene evoked from far-off davs the awful interest of the Bible his- tories, — the vague, unfigured oriental splendor — the desert — the captive people by the waters of the river of Babylon — the shadow and mystery of the prophecies. When the Hebrews, chained and toil- ing on the banks of the Euphrates, lifted their voices in lamentation, the sublime music so transfigured the commonplaceness of the words, that they meant all deep and unutterable affliction, and for a while swept away whatever was false and tawdry in the show, and thrilled our hearts with a rapture rarely felt. Yet, as but a moment before we had laughed to see Nebuchadnezzar's crown shot off his head by a squib visibly directed from the side scenes, — at the point when, according to the libretto, " the thunder roars, And a bolt descends upon the head of the king," — so but a moment after some new absurdity marred the llusion, and we began to look about the theatre at the audience. We then beheld that act of dimostrazione which I have mentioned. In one of the few boxes* VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 297 lat a young and very beautiful woman in a dress of white, with a fan which she kept in constant move- ment. It was red on one side, and green on the other, and gave, with the white dress, the forbidden Italian colors, while, looked at alone, it was innocent of oiFense. I do not think a soul in the theatre was ignorant of the demonstration. A satisfied conscious- ness was reflected from the faces of the Italians, and I saw two Austrian officers exchanore looks of good- natured intelhgence, after a glance at the fair patriot. I wonder what those poor people do, now they are free, and deprived of the sweet, perilous luxury of defying their tyrants by constant acts of subtle dis- dain ? Life in Venetia must be very dull : no more explosion of pasteboard petards ; no more treason in bouquets ; no more stealthy inscriptions on the walls — it must be insufferably dull. Ehhene^ pazienza! Perhaps Victor Emanuel may betray them yet. A spirit of lawless effrontery, indeed, seemed to pervade the whole audience in the theatre that night at Vicenza, and to extend to the ministers of the law themselves. There were large placards everywhere posted, notifying the people that it was forbidden to imoke in the theatre, and that smokers were liable to expulsion ; but except for ourselves, and the fair patriot in the box, I think every body there was smoking, and the policemen set the example of an- irchy by smoking the longest and worst cigars of all. I am sure that the captive Hebrews all held lighted cigarettes behind their backs, and that Nebuchadnez- ear, condemned to the grass of the field, conscien £98 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. tiously gave himself up to the Virginia weed behind the scenes. Before I fell asleep that night, the moon rose over the top of the feudal tower, in front of ou? hotel, and produced some very pretty effects with the battlements. Early in the morning a regiment of Croats marched through the gate below the tower, their band plaving " The Young Recruit." These advantages of situation were not charged in our bill ; but, even if they had been, I should still advise my reader to go, w^hen in Vicenza, if he loves a pleasant landlord and a good dinner, to the Hotel de la Ville, which he will find almost at his sole disposition for however long time he may stay. His meals will be served him in a vast dining-hall, as bare as a barn or a palace, but for the pleasant, absurd old paintings on the wall, repre- senting, as I suppose, Cleopatra applying the Asp, Susannah and the Elders, the Roman Lucrezia, and other moral and appetizing histories. I take it there is a quaint side-table or two lost midway of the wall, and that an old woodcut picture of the Most Noble City of Venice hangs over each. I know that there is a screen at one end of the apartment behind which the landlord invisibly assumes the head waiter ; and ^ suspect that at the moment of sitting down at r:eat, you hear two Englishmen talking — as they pass along the neighboring corridor — of wine, in iissatisfied chest-tones. This hotel is of course built '•ound a court, in which there is a stable and — ex- Dosed to the weather — a diligence, and two or three VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 299 ;jarriages and a driver, and an ostler chewing straw, and a pump and a grape-vine. Why the hotel, there- fore, does not smell like a stable, from garret to cellar, I am utterly at a loss to know. I state the fact that it does not, and that every other hotel in Italy does smell of stable as if cattle had been immemorially pastured in its halls, and horses housed in its bed- chambers, — or as if its only guests were centaurs on their travels. From the Museo Civico, whither we repaired first in the morning, and where there are some beautiful Montagnas, and an assortment of good and bad works by other masters, we went to the Campo Santo, which is worthy to be seen, if only because of the beautiful Laschi monument by Vela, one of the greatest modern sculptors. It is nothing more than a very simple tomb, at the door of which stands a figure in flowing drapery, with folded hands and up- lifted eyes in an attitude exquisitely expressive of grief. The figure is said to be the portrait statue of the widow of him w^ithin the tomb, and the face is very beautiful. We asked if the widow was still young, and the custodian answered us in terms that ought to endear him to all women, if not to our whole mortal race, — " Oh quite young, yet. She is perhaps fifty years old." After the Campo Santo one ought to go to that tneatre which Palladio built for the representation of classic tragedy, and which 'is perhaps the perfectest reproduction of the Greek theatre in the world. Al- fieri is the only poet of modern times, whose works 300 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. have been judged worthy of this stage, and no drama has been given on it since 1857, when the " OEdipus Tyrannus " of Sophocles was played. We found it very silent and dusty, and were much sadder as we walked through its gayly frescoed, desolate ante- rooms than we had been in the Campo Santo. Here used to sit, at coffee and bassett, the merry people who owned the now empty seats of the theatre, — lord, and lady, and abb^, — who affected to be en- tertained by the scenes upon the stage. Upon my word, I should like to know what has become, in the other world, of those poor pleasurers of the past whose memory makes one so sad upon the scenes of their enjoyment here ! I suppose they have something quite as unreal, yonder, to satisfy them as they had on earth, and that they still play at happiness in the old rococo way, though it is hard to conceive of any fiction outside of Italy so per- fect and so entirely suited to their unreality as this classic theatre. It is a Greek theatre, for Greek tragedies ; but it could never have been for popular imusement, and it was not open to the air, though it had a sky skillfully painted in the centre of the roof. The proscenium is a Greek facade, in three stories, Buch as never was seen in Greece ; and the architect- ure of the three streets running back from the prosce- nium, and forming the one unchangeable scene of all the dramas, is — like the statues in the niches and jn the gallery inclosing the auditorium — Greek in the most fashionable Vicentine taste. It must have Wn but an operatic chorus that sang in the semi VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 801 circular space just below the stage and in front of the audience. Admit and forget these small blem ishes and aberrations, however, and what a marvel- ous thing Palladio's theatre is ! The sky above the stage is a wonderful trick, and those three streets — one in the centre and serving as entrance for the royal persons of the drama, one at the right for the nobles, and one at the left for the citizens — present unsurpassed effects of illusion. They are not painted, but modeled in stucco. In perspective they seem each half a mile long, but entering them you find that they run back from the proscenium only some fifteen feet, the fronts of the houses and the statues upon them decreasing in recession with a well-or- dered abruptness. The semicircular gallery above the auditorium is of stone, and forty statues of mar- ble crown its colonnade, or occupy niches between the columns. n. It was curious to pass, with the impression left by this costly and ingenious toy upon our minds, at once to the amphitheatre in Verona, which, next to the Coliseum, has, of all the works bequeathed us by the ancient Roman world, the greatest claim upon the wonder and imagination. Indeed, it makes even a stronger appeal to the fancy. We know who built the Coliseum, but in its unstoried origin, the Veronese tLrena has the mystery of the Pyramids. Was its r.junder Augustus, or Vitellius, or Antoninus, or Maximian, or the Republic of Verona ? Notliing is 302 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. certain but that it was conceived and reared by some mighty prince or people, and that it yet remains in such perfection that the great shows of two thousand years ago might take place in it to-day. It is so sug- gestive of the fierce and splendid spectacles of Ro- man times that the ring left by a modern circus on the arena, and absurdly dwarfed by the vast space of the oval, had an impertinence which we hotly re- sented, looking down on it from the highest grade of the interior. It then lay fifty feet below us, in the middle of an ellipse five hundred feet in length and four hundred in breadth, and capable of holding fifty thousand spectators. The seats that the multitudes pressed of old are perfect yet ; scarce a stone has been removed from the interior ; the aedile and the prefect might take their places again in the balus- traded tribunes above the great entrance at either end of the arena, and scarcely see that they were changed. Nay, the victims and the gladiators might return to the cells below the seats of the people, and not know they had left them for a day ; the wild beasts might leap into the arena from dens as secure and strong as when first built. The ruin within seems only to begin with the aqueduct, which was used to flood the arena for the naval shows, but which is now choked with the dust of ages. With- out, however, is plain enough the doom which is written against all the work of human hands, and which, unknown of the builders, is among the memor- Able things placed in the corner-stone of every edi- fice. Of the outer wall that rose high over the high VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 303 sst seats of the amphitheatre, and encircled it with stately corridors, giving it vaster amplitude and grace, the earthquake of six centuries ago spared only a fragment that now threatens above one of the narrow Veronese streets. Blacksmiths, wagon-mak" ers, and workers in clangorous metals have made shops of the lower corridors of the old arena, and it is friends and neighbors with the modern life about it, as such things usually are in Italy. Fortunately for the stranger, the Piazza Bra flanks it on one hand, and across this it has a magnificent approach. It is not less happy in being little known to senti- ment, and the traveler who visits it by moonlight, has a full sense of grandeur and pathos, without an}'' of the sheepishness attending homage to that bat- tered old coquette, the Coliseum, which so many emotional people have sighed over, kissing and after- wards tellino;. But he who would know the innocent charm of a ruin as yet almost wholly uncourted by travel, must go to the Roman theatre in Verona. It is not a fa- vorite of the hand-books ; and we were decided to see it chiefly by a visit to the Museum, where, besides an admirable gallery of paintings, there is a most in- teresting collection of antiques in bronze and marble found in excavating the theatre. The ancient edi- fice had been completely buried, and a quarter of tlie town was built over it, as Portici is built ovei Herculaneum, and on the very top stood a Jesuit convent. One day, some children, playing in the garden of one of the shabby houses, suddenly van- 304 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. ished from sight. Their mother ran like one mad (I am telling the story in the words of the peasant who related it to me) to the spot where they had last been seen, and fell herself into an opening of the earth there. The outcry raised by these unfortu- nates brought a number of men to their aid, and in digging to get them out, an old marble stairway was discovered. This was about twenty-five years ago. A certain gentleman named Monga owned the land, and he immediately began to make excavations. He was a rich man, but considered rather whimsical (if my peasant represented the opinion of his neigh- bore), and as the excavation ate a great deal of money (mangiava molti soldi) ^ his sons discontinued the work after his death, and nothing has been done for some time, now. The peasant in charge was not a person of imaginative mind, though he said the theatre (supposed to have been built in the time of Augustus) was completed two thousand years before Christ. He had a purely conventional admiration of the work, which he expressed at regular intervals, by stopping short in his course, waving both hands »ver the ruins, and crying in a sepulchral voice, " QuaV opera !^^ However, as he took us faithfully into every part of it, there is no reason to complain of him. We crossed three or four streets, and entered at several different gates, in order to see the uncovered parts of the work, which could have been but a smal. proportion of the whole. The excavation has been carried down thirty and forty feet below the found* VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 305 cions of the modern houses, revealing the stone seats of the auditorium, the corridors beneath them, and the canals and other apparatus for naval* shows, as in the great Amphitheatre. These works are even more stupendous than those of the Amphitheatre, for in many cases they are not constructed, but hewn out of the living rock, so that in this light the theatre is a gigantic sculpture. Below all are cut channels to collect and carry off the water of the springs in which the rock abounds. The depth of one of these channels near the Jesuit convent must be fifty feet below the present surface. Only in one place does the ancient edifice rise near the top of the ground, and there is uncovered the arched front of what was once a family-box at the theatre, with the owner's name graven upon the arch. Many poor little houses have of course been demolished to carrv on the excavations, and to the walls that joined them cling memorials of the simple life that once inhabited them. To one of the build- ings hung a melancholy fire-place left blackened with smoke, and battered with use, but witnessing that it had once been the heart of a home. It was far more touching than any thing in the elder ruin ; and I think nothing could have so vividly expressed the difference which, in spite of all the resemblances noticeable in Italy, exists between the ancient and modern civilization, as that family-box at the theatre und this simple fireside. I do not now remember what fortunate chance it t^ras that discovered to us the house of the Capu- 20 306 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. lets, and I incline to believe that we gravitated to- ward it by operation of well-known natural principles which bring travelers acquainted w^ith improbabili- ties wherever they go. We found it a very old and time-worn edifice, built round an ample court, and we knew it, as we had been told we should, by the cap carven in stone above the interior of the grand portal. The family, anciently one of the principal of Verona, has fallen from much of its former great- ness. On the occasion of our visit, Juliet, very dowdily dressed, looked down from the top of a long, dirty staircase which descended into the court, and seemed interested to see us ; while her mother ca- ressed with one hand a large yellow mastiff, and distracted it from its first impulse to fly upon us poor children of sentiment. There was a great deal of stable litter, and many empty carts standing about in the court ; and if I might hazard the opinion formed upon these and other appearances, I should say that old Capulet has now gone to keeping a hotel, united with the retail liquor business, both in a small way. Nothing could be more natural, after seeing the house of the Capulets, than a wish to see Juliet's Tomb, which is visited by all strangers, and is the common property of the hand-books. It formerly stood in a garden, where, up to the beginning of this century, it served, says my " Viaggio in Italia," " for the basest uses," — just as the sacred prison of Tasso was used for a charcoal bin. We found the sarcophagus under a shed in one corner of the gar VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARIMA. 307 lien of the Orfanotrono delle Franceschine, and had to confess to each other that it looked Hke a horse- trough roughly hewn out of stone. The garden, said the boy in charge of the moving monument, had been the burial-place of the Capulets, and this tomb being found in the middle of the garden, was easily recog- nized as that of Juliet. Its genuineness, as well as its employment in the ruse of the lovers, was proven beyond cavil by a slight hollow cut for the head to rest in, and a hole at the foot " to breathe through," as the boy said. Does not the fact that this relic has to be protected from the depredations of travelers, who could otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak eloquently of a large amount of vulgar and rapacious innocence drifting about the world ? It is well to see even such idle and foolish curiosi- ties, however, in a city like Verona, for the mere go- ing to and fro in search of them through her streets is full of instruction and delight. To my mind, no city has a fairer place than she that sits beside the eager Adige, and breathes the keen air of moun- tains white with snows in winter, green and purple vith vineyards in summer, and forever rich with mar- ble. Around Verona stretch those gardened plains of Lombardy, on which Nature, who dotes on Italy, and seems but a step-mother to all transalpine lands, has lavished every gift of beauty and fertility. Within the city's walls, what store of art and his- tory ! Her market-places have been the scenes of a *;housand tragic or ridiculous dramas ; her quaint and narrow streets are ballad? and legends full o^ 808 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. love-making and murder ; the empty, grass-grown piazzas before her churches are tales that are told of municipal and ecclesiastical splendor. Her nobles sleep in marble tombs so beautiful that the dust in them ought to be envied by living men in Verona ; her lords lie in perpetual state in the heart of the city, in magnificent sepulchres of such grace and op* ulence, that, unless a language be invented full of lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch and finial, flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can never be described. Sacred be their rest from pen of mine, Yerona ! Nay, w^hile I w^ould fain bring the whole city before my reader's fancy, I am loath and afraid to touch any thing in it with my poor art : either the tawny river, spanned with many beautiful bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat and turned by the rapid current ; or the thoroughfares with their passengers and bright shops and catf(^s ; or the grim old feudal towers ; or the age-embrowned pal- aces, eloquent in their haughty strength of the times when they were family fortresses ; or the churches with the red pillars of their porticos resting upon the backs of eagle-headed lions ; or even the white-coated garrison (now there no more), with its heavy-footed rank and file, its handsome and resplendent oflicers, its bristling fortifications, its horses and artillery, crowding the piazzas of churches turned into barracks. All these things haunt my memory, but I could only jit best thinly sketch them in meagre black and white, Verona is an almost purely Gothic city in her archi- tecture, and her churches are more worthy to be VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 309 leen than any others in North Italy, outside of Ven- ice. San Zenone, with the quaint bronzes on its doors representing in the rudeness of the first period of art the incidents of the Old Testament and the miracles of the saints — with the allegorical sculptures surrounding the interior and exterior of the portico, and illustrating, among other things, the creation of Eve with absolute literalness — with its beautiful and solemn crypt in which the dust of the titular saint lies entombed — with its minute windows, and its vast columns sustaining the roof upon capitals of every bizarre and fantastic device — is doubtless most abundant in that Gothic spirit, now grotesque and now earnest, which somewhere appears in all the churches of Verona ; which has carven upon the fa- 9ade of the Duomo the statues of Orlando and Ollivi- ero, heroes of romance, and near them has placed the scandalous figure of a pig in a monk's robe and cowl, with a breviary in his paw ; which has reared the ex- quisite monument of Guglielmo da Castelbarco before the church of St. Anastasia, and has produced the tombs of the Scaligeri before the chapel of Santa Maria Antica. I have already pledged myself not to attempt any description of these tombs, and shall not fall now. But I bought in the Ensilish tono-ue, as written at Verona, some " Notices," kept for sale by the sacris- tan, *' of the Ancient Churg of Our Lady, and of the Tombs of fhe most illustrious Family Della-Scala,'* %nd from tnese I think it no dereliction to quote ver- hatim. First is the tomb of Can Francesco, who was SIO ITALIAN JOURNEYS. ** suruamed the Great by reason of his valor." " With him the Great Alighieri and other exiles took refuge. 'We see his figure extended upon a bed, and above his statue on horsebac with the vizor down, and his crest faUing behind his shoulders, his horse covered with mail. The columns and capitals are wonderful." " Within the Cemetery to the right leaning against the walls of the church is the tomb of John Scaliger." " In the side of this tomb near the wall of Sacristy, you see the urn that en- closes the ashes of Martin I.," " who was traitor- ously killed on the 17th of October 1277 by Scara- mello of the Scaramelli, who wished to revenge the honor of a young lady of his family." " The Mau- soleum that is in the side facing the Place encloses the Martin II.'s ashes. . . . This building is sumpt- uous and wonderful because it stands on four col- umns, each of which has an architrave of nine feet. On the beams stands a very large square of marble that forms the floor, on which stands the urn of the Defunct. Four other columns support the vault that covers the urn ; and the rest is adorned by facts of Old Testament. Upon the Summit is the eques- trian statue as large as life." Of " Can Signo- rius," whose tomb is the most splendid of all, the " Notices " say : *' He spent two thousand florins of gold, in order to prepare his own sepulchre while he was yet alive, and to surpass the magnificence of his predecessors. The monument is as magnificent as the contracted space allows. Six columns support Uie floor of marble on which it stands (covered witli VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 311 figures. Six other columns support the top, on that is the Scaliger's statues. . . . The monument is sur- rounded by an enclosure of red marble, with six pil- lars, on which are square capitols with armed Saints. The rails of iron with the Arms of the Scala, are worked with a beauty wonderful for that age," or, I may add, for any age. These " rails " are an exqui- site net-work of iron wrought by hand, with an art emulous of that of Nicolo Caparra at Florence. The chief device employed is a ladder Qseala) constantly repeated in the centres of quatre-foils ; and the whole fabric is still so flexible and perfect, after the lapse of centuries, that the net may be shaken throughout by a touch. Four other tombs of the Scaligeri are here, among which the " Notices " par- ticularly mention that of Alboin della Scala : " He was one of the Ghibelline party, as the arms on his urn schew, that is a staircase risen by an eagle — where- fore Dante said. In sulla Scala porta il santo Uccelhr I should have been glad to meet the author of these delightful histories, but in his absence we fared well enough with the sacristan. When, a few hours before we left Verona, we came for a last look at the beautiful sepulchres, he recognized us, and see- mg a sketch-book in the party, he invited us within the inclosure again, and then ran and fetched chairs for us to sit upon — nay, even placed chairs for us to rest our feet on. Winning and exuberant courtesy of the Italian race ! If I had never acknowledged *t before, I must do homage to it now, remembering .812 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. the sweetness of the sacristans and custodians of Verona. They were all men of the most sympa- thetic natures. He at San Zenone seemed never tc have met with real friends till we expressed pleasure in the magnificent Mantegna, which is the pride of his church. " What coloring ! " he cried, and then triumphantly took us into the crypt : " What a mag- nificent crypt ! What works they executed in those days, there ! " At San Giorgio Maggiore, where there are a Tintoretto and a Veronese, and four hor- rible swindling big pictures by Romanino, I discov- ered to my great dismay that I had in my pocket but five soldi, which I offered with much abasement and many apologies to the sacristan ; but he received them as if they had been so many napoleons, prayed me not to speak of embarrassment, and declared that his labors in our behalf had been nothing but pleas- ure. At Santa Maria in Organo, where are the wonderful intagli of Fra Giovanni da Verona, the sacristan fully shared our sorrow that the best pict- ures could not be unveiled as it was Holy Week. He was also moved Vv^_ ^is at the gradual decay of the intagli^ and led us to believe that, to a man of so much sensibility, the general ruinous state of the church was an inexpressible afiliction ; and we re- joiced for his sake that it should possess at least onf piece of art in perfect repair. This was a modern work, that day exposed for the first time, and it rep- resented in a group of wooden figures The Death of St. Joseph. The Virgin and Christ supported the dying saint on either hand ; and as the whole was VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 313 rividly colored, and rays of glory in pink and yellow gauze descended upon Joseph's head, nothing could have been more impressive. III. Parma is laid out with a regularity which may be called characteristic of the great ducal cities of Italy, and which it fully shares with Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna. The signorial cities, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso, are far more picturesque, and Parma excels only in the number and beauty of her fountains. It is a city of gloomy aspect, says Valery, who possibly entered it in a pensive frame of mind, for its sadness did not impress us. We had just come from Modena, where the badness of our hotel enveloped the city in an atmosphere of profound melancholy. In fact, it will not do to trust to trav- elers in any thing. I, for example, have just now spoken of the many beautiful fountains in Parma be- cause I think it right to uphold the statement of M. Richard's hand-book ; but I only remember seeing one fountain, passably handsome, there. My Lord Corke, who was at Parma in 1754, says nothing of fountains, and Richard Lasells, Gent., who was there a century earlier, merely speaks of the foun- tains in the Duke's gardens, which, together with his Grace's " wild beasts" and " exquisite coaches," and " admirable Theater to exhibit Operas in," " the Domo, whose Cupola was painted by the rare hand s>f Corregio," and the church of the Capuchins, where 314 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. Alexander Farnese is buried, were " the Chief things to be seen in Parma " at that day. The wild beasts have long ago run away with the exquisite coaches, but the other wonders named by Master Lasells are still extant in Parma, together with some things he does not name. Our minds, in going thither, were mainly bent upon Correggio and his works, and while our dinner was cooking at the admirable Albergo della Posta, we went off to feast upon the perennial Hash of Frogs in the dome of the Cathedrah This is one of the finest Gothic churches in Italy, and vividly recalls Verona, while it has a quite unique and most beautiful feature in the three light-columned galleries, that traverse the fa9ade one above another. Close at hand stands the ancient Bap- tistery, hardly less peculiar and beautiful ; but, after all, it is the work of the great painter which gives the temple its chief right to wonder and reverence. We found the fresco, of course, much wasted, and at first glance, before the innumerable arms and legs had time to order and attribute themselves to their respective bodies, we felt the justice of the undying spite which called this divinest of frescos a guazzetto di rane. But m another moment it ap- peared to us the most sublime conception of the As- sumption ever painted, and we did not find Carac- ci's praise too warm where he says : '* And I still remain stupefied with the sight of so grand a work — every thing so well conceived — so well seen from below — with so much severity, yet with so mucli judgment and so much grace ; with a coloring whick VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 315 IS of very flesh." The height of the fresco above the floor of the church is so vast that it might well appear like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense of the spectator. Brain, nerve, and muscle were strained to utter exhaustion in a very few minutes, and we came away with our admiration only half- satisfied, and resolved to ascend the cupola next day, and see the fresco on something like equal terms. In one sort we did thus approach it, and as we looked at the gracious floating figures of the heavenly company through the apertures of the dome, they did seem to adopt us and make us part of the paint- ing. But the tremendous depth, over which they drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to look into ; and I am not certain that I should counsel travelers to repeat our experience. Where still perfect, the fresco can only gain from close inspection, — it is painted with such exquisite and jealous perfection, — yet the whole effect is now better from below, for the decay is less apparent ; and besides, life is short, and the stairway by which one ascends to the dome is in every way too exigent. It is with the most astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the Assumption to the contemplation of that other famous roof frescoed by Correggio, in the Monastero di San Paolo. You might almost touch the ceiHng with your .\and, it hovers so low with its counterfeit of vine- clambered trellis-work, and its pretty boys looking roguishly through the embowering leaves. It is alto- gether the loveliest room in the world ; and if the Diana in her cpj- on the chimney is truly a portrait of 516 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. the abbess for whom the chamber was decorated, she was altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think of her enjoying life in the fashion amiably permit- ted to nuns in the fifteenth century. What curious fecenes the gayety of this little chamber conjures up, and what a vivid comment it is upon the age and peo- ple that produced it ! This is one of the things that makes a single hour of travel worth whole years of historic study, and which casts its light upon all fu- ture reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little ab- bess, with the noblest and prettiest of her nuns about her, received the polite world, and made a cheerful thing of devotion, while all over trans- alpine Europe the sour-hearted Reformers were de- stroying pleasant monasteries like this. The light- hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen friends looked on heresy as a deadly sin, and they had little reason to regard it with favor. It certainly made life harder for them in time, for it made reform within the Church as well as without, so that at last the lovely Chamber of St. Paul was closed against the public for more than two centuries. All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of Titian and Tintoretto, as Naples of Spagnoletto, as Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of Palladio, ws Bassano of Da Ponte, as Bologna of Guido Reni. I have elsewhere noticed how ineffaceably and exclu- sively the manner of the masters seems to have stamped itself upon the art of the cities where they severallj' wrought, — how at Parma Correggio yet lives in all the sketchy mouths of all the pictures VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 317 painted there since his time. One might almost be- lieve, hearing the Parmesans talk, that his manner had infected their dialect, and that they fashioned their lazj, incomplete utterance with the careles? lips of his nymphs and angels. They almost en- tirely suppress the last syllable of every word, and not with a quick precision, as people do in Venice or Milan, but with an ineffable languor, as if lan- guage were not worth the effort of enunciation ; while they rise and lapse several times in each sen- tence, and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the closing vocable that tiie listener can scarcely repress his tears. In this melancholy rhythm, one of the citi- zens recounted to me the whole story of the assassin- ation of the last Duke of Parma in 1850 ; and left me as softly moved as if I had been listening to a tale of hapless love. Yet it was an ugly story, and after the enchantment of the recital passed away, I perceived that when the Duke was killed justice was done on one of the maddest and wickedest tyrants ihat ever harassed an unhappy city. The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napo- loon's wife, with pleasant enough feelings, and she seems to have been good to them after the manner of sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beau- tifying it in many ways, besides doing works of pri- vate charity and beneficence. Her daughter by a second marriage, the Countess Sanvitali, still lives in Parma ; and in one of the halls of the Academy of Fine Arts the Duchess herself survives in the marble >£ Canova. It was she who caused the two ^reat 318 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. pictures of Correggio, the St. Jerome and the Ma- donna della Scodella, to be placed alone in separate apartments hung with silk, in which the painter's initial A is endlessly interwoven. " The Night," to which the St. Jerome is '' The Day," is in the gal- lery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing more representative of her great painter's power than this " Day." It is " the bridal of the earth and sky," and all sweetness, brightness, and tender shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of Correggio, Caracci, Parmigianino, and masters of different schools are in this gallery, but it is the good fortune of travelers, who have to see so much, that the memory of the very best alone distinctly remains. Nay, in the presence of prime beauty nothing else exists, and we found that the church of the Steccata, where Parmigianino's sublime " Moses breaking the Tables of the Law " is visible in the midst of a mul- titude of other figures on the vault, really contained nothing at last but that august and awful presence. Undoubtedly the best gallery of classical antiquities in North Italy is that of Parma, which has derived all its precious relics from the little city of Valleja alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii and the wonders of the Museo Borbonico at Naples, with its antique frescos, and marble, and bronzes. I think nothing better has come out of Herculaneum than the comic statuette of " Hercules Drunk." He is in bronze, and the drunkest man who has descended to us from the elder world; he reels backward, »nd leers knowingly upon you, while one hand VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 319 hangs stiffly at his side, and the other faintly clasps a wine-cup — a burly, worthless, disgraceful demigod. The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, admired by Lasells ; but Lord Corke found it a " useless structure " though immense. " The same spirit that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, " raised the theatre at Parma ; that insatiable spirit and lust of Fame which would brave the Almighty by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable being." If it was indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it did not build so wisely at Parma as at Rhodes. The play-house that Ranuzio I. constructed in 1628, to do honor to Cosmo II. de' Medici (pausing at Parma on his way to visit the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), and that for a century afterward was the scene of the most brilliant spectacles in the world, is now one of the dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This Theatrum orhis miraeulum was built and ornamented with the most perishable materials, and even its size has shrunken as the imaginations of men have contracted under the strons; hVht of later davs. When it was first opened, it was believed to hold fourteen thousand spectators ; at a later fete it held only ten thousand ; the last published description fixes its capacity at five thousand ; and it is certain that for many and many a year it has held only the stray tourists who have looked in upon its desolation. The gay paintings hang in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is Uiick upon the seats and in the boxes, and on the *eads that line the space once flooded for naval games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and B20 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. forlorn amid the ruin of which they are part ; and the great stage, from which the curtain has rotted away, yawns dark and empty before the empty au- ditorium. DUCAL MANTUA. In that desperate depth of Hell where Dante beholds the Diviners doomed to pace with back- ward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the past the rainy eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet guide of the Tuscan poet points out among the damned the daughter of a Theban king, and discourses to his charge : — Manto was she : through many lands she went Seeking, and paused where I was bom, at last. Therefore I choose thou be on me intent A little. When from life her father passed, And they of Bacchus' city became slaves, Long time about the world the daughter cast. Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves The feet of Alps that lock in Germany : Benaco called And Peschiera in strong harness sits To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques, Where one do'svii-curving shore the other meets. There all the gathered waters outward flow That may not in Benaco's bosom rest. And do^vn through pastures green a river go. As far as to Govemo, where, its quest Ended at last, it falls into the Po. But far it has not sought lef ire a plain It finds and floods, out-creeping vnde and slow To be the steaming summer's offense and bane. 21 322 ITALIAN JOUENEYS. Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid Saw land in the middle of the sullen main, Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid Of human neighborhood, she made her lair, Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade, And lived, and left her empty body there. Then the sparse people that were scattered near Gathered upon that island, everywhere Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear. They built their city above tlio witch's grave, And for her sake that first made dwelling there The name of Mantua to their city gave. To this account of the first settlement of Mantua, Virgil adds a warning to his charge to distrust all other histories of the city's foundation ; and Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that he de- clares all other histories shall be to him as so many lifeless embers. Nevertheless, divers chroniclers of Mantua reject the tradition here given as fabulous ; and the carefuUest and most ruthless of these traces the city's origin, not to the unfriendly maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise date of its foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand five hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after the flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. '' And whoever," says the compiler of the " Flower of the Mantuan Chroniclers" (it is a very dry and musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities for all his facts and figures, — " whoever wishes to understand this more curiously, let him read the laid authors, and he will be satisfied." But I am as little disposed to unsettle the reader's DUCAL MANTUA. 323 faith in the Virgilian tradition, as to part with my own ; and I therefore uncandidly hold back the names of the authorities cited. This tradition was in fact the only thing concerning Mantuan history present to my thoughts as I rode toward the city, one afternoon of a pleasant Lombard spring ; and when I came in sight of the ancient hold of sor- cery, with the languid waters of its lagoons lying sick at its feet, I recognized at least the topo- graphical truth of Virgil's description. But old and mighty walls now surround the spot which Manto found sterile and. lonely in the heart of the swamp formed by the Mincio, no longer Benaco ; and the dust of the witch is multitudinously hidden under the edifices of a city whose mighty domes, towers, and spires make its approach one of the stateliest in the world. It is a prospect on which you may dwell long as you draw toward the city, for the road from the railway station winds through some two miles of flat meadow-land before it reaches the gate of the stronghold which the ItaHans call the first hope of the winner of the land, and the last hope of the loser of Italy. Indeed, there is no haste in any of the means of access to Mantua. It Ues scarce forty miles south of Verona, and you are three hours in journeying tliis distance in the placid railway train, — a distance wliich Romeo, returning to Verona from his exile in Mantua, no doubt travelled in less time. There is abundant leisure to study the scen- ery on the way ; but it scarcely repays the perusal, for it lacks the beauty of the usual Lombard land- 824 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. Bcape. The soil is red, stony, and sterile ; the or- chard-trees are scant and slender, and not wedded with the caressing vines which elsewhere in North Italy garland happier trees and stretch gracefully from trunk to trunk. Especially the landscape looks Bad and shabby about the httle village of Villafranca, where, in 1864, the dejected prospect seemed inca- pable of a smile even in spring ; as if it had lost all hope and cheerfulness since the peace was made which confirmed Yenetia to the ahen. It said as plainly as real estate could express the national sen- timent, '' Come si fa ? Ci vuol pazienza I " and crept sullenly out of sight, as our pensive train resumed its meditative progress. No doubt this poor landscape was imbued, in its dull, earthy way, with a feeling that the coming of Garibaldi would irrigate and fer- tilize it into a paradise ; as at Venice the gondoliers believed that his army would bring in its train cheap wine and hordes of rich and helpless Enghshmen bent on perpetual tours of the Grand Canal without understanding as to price. But within and without Mantua was a strong ar- gument against possibility of change in the pohtical condition of this part of Italy. Compassed about by the corruption of the swamps and the sluggish breadth of the river, the city is no less mighty in her artificial defenses than in this natural strength of her position ; and the Croats of her garrison were &s frequent in her sad, handsome streets, as the priests in Rome. Three lakes secure her from ap- proach upon the east, north, and south ; on the west DUCAL MANTUA. 825 is a vast intrenched camp, wliich can be flooded at pleasure from one of the lakes ; while the water runs three fathoms deep at the feet of the solid brick walls all round the city. There are five gates giv- ing access by drawbridges from the town to the for- tressed posts on every side, and commanding with their guns the roads that lead to them. The outly- ing forts, with the citadel, are four in number, and are each capable of holding from two to three thou- sand men. The intrenched camp, for cavalry and artillery, and the barracks of the city itself, can re- ceive a garrison of from thirty to forty thousand men ; and the measureless depths of the air are full of the fever that fights in defense of Mantua, and serves with equal zeal whoever is master of the place, let him be French, Italian, or Austrian, so only that he have an unacclimated enemy before him. I confess that little of this formidable military knowledge burdened me on the occasion of my visit to Mantua, and I have already confessed that I was but very imperfectly informed of the history of the city. But indeed, if the reader dealt candidly with himself, how much could he profess to know of Man- tuan history ? The ladies all have some erudite associations with the place as giving the term of mantua-mahing to the art of dress, and most persons have heard that Mantua's law was once death to any he that uttered mortal drugs there, and that the ^.lace was till a few years since an Austrian fortress in the Mincio. Of Giulio Romano, and his works in Mantua, a good many havt> heard ; and there 19 826 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. Bometliing known to the reader of the punctuated edition of Browning about Bordello. But of the Gonzagas of Mantua, and their duchy, what do you know, gentle reader ? For myself, when in Mantua, I tried to make a virtue of my want of information, and fancied that a sort of general ignorance was more favorable to my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough accquaintance with the city's history would have been. It certainly enabled me to accept all the poetic fiction of the custodians, and to embroider with their pleasing improbabilities the business-like succinctness of the guide-books ; to make out of the twilight which involved all impressions a misty and heroic picture of the Mantuan past, wherein her great men appeared with a stately and gigantic un- certainty of outline, and mixed with dim scenes of battle, intrigue, and riot, and were gone before Fact could lay her finger on any shape, and swear that it was called so, and did so and so. But even if there had been neither pleasure nor profit in this igno- rance, the means of dispelling it are so scant in mod- em literature that it might well have been excused in a far more earnest traveller. The difficulty, in- deed, which I afterwards experienced in trying to learn something of Mantua, is m.y best excuse for writing of its history here. I fancy that the few recent books on the subject are not in the hands of most readers, and I have a comforting behef that scarcely a reader of mine has been a reader of the " Grande lUustrazione de? DUCAL MANTUA. 327 Lombard 0-Veneto." ^ Yet I suppose that lie forms some notion of this work from its title, and figures to himself a physical bulli of six volumes, — large, abounding in ill-printed wood-cuts, and having the appalling features which repel our race from picto- rial history-books generally. The " Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Ve- neto " inckides notice of all those dear and famous cities of North Italy which we know, — of Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, Bergamo, and the rest ; but here we have only to do with the part which concerns Mantua. This is writ- ten by the advocate Bartolomeo Arrighi, whose in- genious avoidance of all that might make his theme attractive could not be sufficiently celebrated here, and may therefore be left to the reader's fancy. There is little in his paper to leaven statistical heavi- ness ; and in recounting one of the most picturesque histories, he contrives to give merely a list of the events and a diagram of the scenes. Whatever illustrated character in princes or people he carefully excludes, and the raciness of anecdote and the flavor of manner and epoch distil not into his compilation from the elder historiographers. I have therefore to go back, in my present purpose, to the authors whose substance he has desiccated ; and with their help, and that of one or two antiquated authors 1 Maiitova e Sua Provincia, per V Awocato Bartolomeo Arrighi: Jrande Illustrazione del Lovibardo-Veneto, oss'a Storia delle Citia, de% Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., Jinn ai Tempi moderni. Per Cvra d% Sesare Cantu, e d' altri Literati. Milano, 1859. 828 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. of this century, I sliall try to rehabilitate the du3al state of Mantua, " Which was an image of the mighty world," and present some shadow of its microcosmal hfe. The story has the completeness of a tragedy ; but it runs over many centuries, and it ends like a farce, though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed, al- most as great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the Mantuans themselves, who terminated their national existence and parted from their last Duke with something hke exultation. As I recall my own impressions of the city, I doubt if any good or bad fortune could rouse her to such positive emotion now. She seemed sunken, that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding lethargy ; as if perfect repose, and oblivion from the many-troubled past, — from the renown of all for- mer famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and sack, — were to be preferred by the ghost of a once popu- lous and haughty capital to the most splendid mem- ories of national life. Certainly, the phantom of oygone Mantuan greatness did not haunt the idle tourists who strolled through her vdde streets, en- joying their quiet beauty and regularity, and find- ing them, despite their empty, melancholy air, full of something that reminded of home. Coming from a land where there is a vast deal of length, breadth, and rectitude in streets, as well as human nature, they could not, of course, feel that wonder in the Mantuan avenues which inspired a Venetian am- Dassador, two centuries since, to write the Serenes! DUCAL MANTUA. 329 Senate in praise of their marvelous extent an(i Btraightness ; but they were still conscious of a cer- tain expansive difference from Gothic Verona and narrow Venice. The windows of the ground-floors were grated to the prison-Hke effect common throughout Italy ; but people evidently Hved upon the ground-floors, and at many of the iron-barred windows fair young prisoners sat and looked out upon the streets, or laughed and chatted together. About the open doorways, moreover, people lounged gossiping ; and the interiors of the entry-halls, as they appeared to the passing glance, were clean, and had not that forbidding, inhospitable air char- acteristic of most house-entrances in North Italy. But sculptured Venice and Verona had unfitted the travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua ; and they had an immense scorn for the large and beau- tiful palaces of which the before-quoted ambassa- dor speaks, because they found them faced with cunningly-moulded plaster instead of carven stone. Nevertheless, they could not help a kind of half- tender respect for the old town. It shares the do- mestic character of its scenes with the other ducal cities, Modena, Parma, and Ferrara ; and this char- acter is, perhaps, proper to all long and intensely nunicipahzed communities. But Mantua has a gnostly calm wholly its own ; and this was not in the least broken that evening by chatters at thresh- olds, and pretty laughers at grated windows. It was very, very quiet. Perhaps half a score of car- riages rumbled by us in our long walk, and we met B30 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. some scattered promenaders. But for the most part the streets were quite empty ; and eyen in the chief piazza, where there was still some belated show of buying and selling, and about the doors of the caffes, ^here there was a good deal of languid loafing, there was no indecency of noise or bustle. There were visibly few people in the place, and it was in decay ; but it was net squalid in its lapse. The streets were scrupulously neat and clean, and the stuccoed houses were all painted of that pale saffron hue which gives such unquestionable respec- tability to New England towns. Before we re- turned to our lodgings, Mantua had turned into twilight ; and we walked homeward through a placid and dignified gloom, nowhere broken by the flare of gas, and only remotely affected, here and there, by the light of lamps of oil, faintly twinkling in a disheartened Mantuan fashion. If you turn this pensive light upon the yellow pages of those old chronicles of which I spoke, it reveals pictures fit to raise both pity and wonder for the past of this city, — pictures full of the glory of struggles for freedom, of the splendor of wise princes, of the comfort of a prosperous and con- tented people, of the grateful fruits of protected arts and civilization ; but hkewise stained with im* ages of unspeakable filth and wickedness, baseness and cruelty, incredible shame, suffering, and sin. Long before the birth of Christ, the Gauls drive out the Etruscans from Mantua, and aggrandize and beautify the city, to be in their turn expelled DUCAJ. MANTUA. 331 by the Romans, under whom Mantua again waxes strong and fair. In this time, the mfe of a farmer not far from the city dreams a marvelous dream of bringing forth a laurel-bough, and in due time bears into the world the chiefest of all Mantuans, with a smile upon his face. This is a poet, and they call his name Virgil. He goes from his native city to Rome, when ripe for glory, and has there the good fortune to mn back his father's farm, which the greedy veterans of Augustus, then settled in the Cremonese, had annexed to the spoils bestowed upon them by the Emperor. Later in this Roman time, and only three years after the death of Him whom the poet all but prophesied, another grand event marks an epoch in Mantuan history. Ac- cording to the pious legend, the soldier Longinus, who pierced the side of Christ as he hung upon the cross, has been converted by a miracle ; wiping away that costly blood from his spear-head, and then drawing his hand across liis eyes, he is sud- denly healed of his near-sightedness, and stricken with the full wonder of conviction. He gathers anxiously the precious drops of blood from his weapon into the phial from which the vinegar mixed with gall was poured, and, forsaking his life of soldier, he wanders with his new-won faith and ftis priceless treasure to Mantua, where it is destined to work famous miracbs, and to be the most valued possession of the city to all after-time. The saint himself, preachmg the Gospel of Clirist, suffers mart}Tdom under Tiberius ; his tongue is cut out. ^32 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. and liis body is burnt ; and his ashes are buried at Mantua, forgotten, and found again in after ages with due signs and miraculous portents. The Ro- mans give a civil tranquillity to Mantua ; but it is not till three centuries after Christ that the perse- cutions of the Christians cease. Then the temj>les of the gods are thrown down, and churches are built ; and the city goes forward to share the desti- nies of the Christianized empire, and be spoiled by the barbarians. In 407 the Goths take it, and the Vandals in their turn sack and waste it, and scatter its people, who return again after the storm, and rebuild their city. Attila, marching to destroy it, is met at Governo (as you see in Raphael's fresco in the Vatican) by Pope Leo I., who conjures him to spare the city, and threatens him with Divine vengeance if he refuse ; above the pontiff's head two wrathful angels, bearing drawn swords, menace the Hun with death if he advance ; and, thus mi- raculously admonished, he turns aside from Mantua and spares it. The citizens successfully resist an attack of Alboin ; but the Longobards afterwards, unrestrained by the visions of Attila, beat the Man- kuans and take the city. From the Lombards the Greeks, sent thither by the Exarch of Ravenna, captured Mantua about the end of the sixth cen- tury ; and then, the Lombards turning immediately to besiege it again, the Greeks defend their prize long and valiantly, but in the end are overpowered. They are allowed to retire with their men and arms to Ravenna, and the Lombards dismantle the city. DUCAL MANTUA. 333 Concerning our poor Mantua under Lombard rule there is but little kno^vn, except that she went to war with the Cremonese ; and it may be fairly sup- posed that she was, Uke her neighbors, completely involved in foreign and domestic discords of every kind. That war with the Cremonese was about the possession of the river Ollio ; and the Mantuans came off victors in it, slaying immense numbers of the enemy, and taking some thousands of them prisoners, whom their countrymen ransomed on con- dition of building one of the gates of Mantua with materials from the Cremonese territory, and mortar mixed with water from the disputed Ollio. The reader easily conceives how bitter a pill this must have been for the high-toned Cremonese gentlemen of that day. When Charlemagne made himself master of Italy, the Mantuan lands and Mantuan men were divided up among the brave soldiers who had helped to en- slave the country. These warriors of Charlemagne became counts ; and the contadini, or inhabitants of each contado (county), became absolutely depend- ent on their will and pleasure. It is recorded (to the confusion of those who think primitive barbar- ism is virtue) that the corruption of those rude and brutal old times was great, that all classes were sunk in vice, and that the clergy were especially venal and abominable. After the death of Charlemagne, in the fiinth century, wars broke out all over Italy between the factions supporting different aspirants to his power ; and we may be sure that Mantua had some 334 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. share in tlie common quarrel. As I hitVQ found no explicit record of this period, I distribute to the city, as her portion of the calamities, at least two sieges, one capture and sack, and a decima^tion by famine and pestilence. We certainly read that, fifty years later, the Emperor Rudolph attacked it with his Hungarians, took it, pillaged it, and put great part of its people to the sword. During the siege, some pious Mantuans had buried (to save them from the religious foe) the blood of Christ, and part of the sponge which had held the gall and vinegar, to- gether with the body of St. Longinus. Most un- luckily, however, these excellent men were put to the sword, and all knowledge of the place of sepul- ture perished with them. At the end of these wars Mantua received a lord, by appointment of the Emperor, and the first lord's son married the daughter of the Duke of Lorraine, from which union was born the great Countess Ma- tilda. Boniface was the happy bridegroom's name, and the wedding had a wild splendor and profuse barbaric jollity about it, which it is pleasant enough to read of after so much cutting and slashing. The viands were passed round on horseback to the guests, and the horses were shod with silver shoes loosely nailed on, that they might drop off and be scram- bled for by the people. Oxen were roasted whole, as at a Kentucky barbecue ; and wine was drawn from wells vd.th buckets hung on silver chains. It was the first great display of that magnificence of which after princes of Mantua were so fond; and DUCAL MANTUA. 335 the wretclied hinds out of whose sweat it came no doubt thought it very fine. Of course Lord Boniface had his wars. There was a plot to depose him discovered in Mantua, and the plotters fled to Verona. Boniface demanded them ; but the Veronese answered stoutly that theirs was a free city, and no man should be taken from it against his will. Boniface marched to attack them ; and the Veronese were such fools as to call the Duke of Austria to their aid, promising submission to his government in return for his help. It was then that Austria first put her finger into the Itahan 'pasticcio^ where she kept it so many centuries. But the Austrian governor whom the Duke set over the Veronese made himself intolerable, — the Austrian governor always does, — and they drove him out of the city. On this the Duke turns about, unites with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks it. An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface's domination was the miraculous discovery of the sacred rehcs, buried and lost during the sack of Mantua by the Hungarians. The place of sepulture was revealed thrice to a bhnd pauper in a dream. People dug where he bade them and found the rel- ics. Immediately on its exhumation the Blood wrought innumerable miracles ; and the fame of it grew so great, that the Pope came to see it, attended by such concourse of the people that they were obHged to sleep in the streets. It was an age that threw the mantle of exterior devotion and laborious penances and pilgrimages over the most hideous 336 ITALIAN JOUKNEYS. 3rlmes and unnatural sins. But perhaps tlie poot believers who slept in the streets of Mantua on that occasion were none the worse for their faith when the Pope pronounced the Blood genuine and blessed it. I am sure that for some days of enthusiasm they abstained from the violence of war, and paused a little in that career of vice and wickedness of which one reads in Itahan history, with the full conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts, and not merely allegory. I have no doubt that the blind beggar beheved that Heaven had revealed to him the place where the Blood was buried, that the Pope believed in the verity of the rehc, and that the devout multitudes were helped and uplifted in their gross faith by this visible witness to the truth that Christ had died for them upon the bloody tree. Poor souls ! they had much to contend with in the way to any good. The leaven of the old pleasure- Giaking pagan civilization was in them yet (it is in the Itahans to this day) ; and centuries of Northern invasion had made them fierce and cruel, without teaching them Northern virtues. Nay, I question much if their invaders had so many rugged virtues to teach as some people would have us think. They seem to have liked well the sweet corruptions of the land, and the studied debaucheries of ages of sin, and to have enjoyed them as furiously and clumsily ^s bears do the hoarded honey of civiHzed bees. After the death of Boniface the lordship of Man- tua fell to his famous daughter, Matilda, of whom most have heard. She was a woman of strong wiL DUCAL MANTUA. 83T and strong mind ; she held her own, and rent from others with a mighty hand, till she had united nearly all Lombardy under her rule. She was not much given to the domestic affections ; she had two husbands (successively), and, if the truth must be told, divorced them both : one because he wished to share her sovereignty, perhaps usurp it ; and the other because he was not warm enough friend of re- Hgion. She had no children, and, indeed, in her last marriage contract it was expressly provided that the spouses were to live in chastity together, and aa much asunder as possible, Matilda having scruples. She was a great friend to learning, — founded Hbra- ries, estabhshed the law schools at Bologna, caused the codification of the canon law, corresponded with distant nations, and spoke all the different languages of her soldiers. More than Hterature, however, she loved the Church ; and fought on the side of Pope Gregory VII. in his wars with the Emperor Henry IV. Henry therefore took Mantua from her in 1091, and up to the year 1111 the city enjoyed a kuid of republican govermnent under his protection. In that year Henry made peace with Matilda, and appointed her his vice-regent in Italy ; but the Man- tuans, after twenty years of freedom, were in no hu- mor to feel the weight of the mailed hand of this strong-minded lady. She was then, moreover, nigh to her death ; and, hearing that her physicians had given her up, the Mantuans refused submission. The great Countess rose irefully from her death- bed, and, gathermg her army, led it in person, as 22 838 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. she always did, laid siege to Mantua by laud and water, entered the city in 1114, and did not die till a year after. Such is female resolution. The Mantuans now founded a republican govern- ment, having unlimited immunities and privileges from the Emperor, whose power over them ex- tended merely to the investure of their consuls. Their republic was democratic, the legislative coun oil of nine rectors and three curators being elective by the whole people. This government, or some- thing like it, endured for more than a century, dur* ing which period the Mantuans seem to have done nothing but war with their neighbors in every di- rection, — with the Veronese chiefly, with the Cre- monese a good deal, with the Paduans, with the Ferrarese, with the Modenese and the Bolognese : indeed, we count up twelve of these wars. Like the Enghsh of their time, the Mantuans were famous bowmen, and their shafts took flight aU over Lombardy. At the same time they did not omit to fight each other at home ; and it must have been a dullish kind of day in Mantua when there was no street-battle between famihes of the factious nobility. Dante has peopled' his HeU. from the Italy of this time, and he might have gone farther and fared worse for a type of the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little Italian pow- ers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, ag- gression, and disorder, within and without, — full of intrigue, anguish, and shame, — each with its petty chief or victorious faction making war upon the DUCAL MANTUA. 339 other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, per- sonal rivalries, and lusts, — is a spectacle whicli the traveller of to-day, passing over the countless for- gotten battle-fields, and hurried from one famous city to another by railroad, can scarcely conjure up. Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Mantua Vicenza, Verona, Bassano, — all are now at peace with each other, and firmly united in the national sentiment that travellers were meant to be eaten ahve by Italians. Poor old cities ! it is hard to con- ceive of their bygone animosities ; still harder to believe that all the villages squatting on the long white roads, and waking up to beg of you as your diligence passes, were once embroiled in deadly and incessant wars. Municipal pride is a good thing, and discentralization is well ; and we have to thank these intensely local little states for genius triply crowned with the glories of Uterature, art, and sci- imce, which Italy might not have produced if she had been united, and if the Httle states had loved themselves less and Italy more. Though, after all, there is the doubt whether it is not better to bless one's obscure and happy children with peace and safety, than to give to the world a score of great names at the cost to millions of incalculable misery. Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the M;jJituans had troubles on a much larger scale, — troubles, indeed, which the Emperor Barbarossa uiid out for all Italy. In Carlyle's Histoiy of i?ieaerick the Great you can read a pleasanter ac- count of the Emperor's business at Roncaglia about 340 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. bhis time than our Italian chroniclers will give you, Carlyle loves a tyrant ; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully, and especially a German, there are hardly any lengths to which that historian will not go m praise of him. Truly, one would hardly guess, from that picture of Frederick Redbeard at Ron- caglia, with the standard set before his tent, invit- ing all men to come and have justice done them, that the Emperor was actually at Roncaglia for the pur- pose of conspiring with his Diet to take away every vestige of liberty and independence from miserable Italy. Among other cities Mantua lost her free- dom at this Diet, and was ruled by 8.n imperial gov- ernor and by consuls of Frederick's nomination till 1167, when she joined the famous Lombard League against him. The leagued cities beat the Emperor at Legnano, and received back their liberties by the treaty of Costanza in 1183 ; after which, Freder- ick having withdrawn to Germany, they fell to fighting among themselves again mth redoubled zeal, and rent their league into as many pieces as there had been parties to it. In 1236 the Germans again invaded Lombardy, under Frederick II. ; and aided by the troops of the Ghibelline cities, Verona, Padua, Vicenza, and Treviso, besieged Mantua, which surrendered to this formidable union of forces, thus becoming once more an imperial city, And irreparably fracturing the Lombard League. It does not appear, however, that her ancient hbertiea were withdrawn by Frederick IL ; and we read that the local wars went on after this with as little in* DUCAL MANTUA. 341 fcerruption as before. The wars went on as usual, and on the old terms with Yerona and Cremona^ and there is little in their history to interest us. But in 1256 the famous tyrant of Padua, Ecce- lino da Romano, who aspired to the dominion of Lombardy, gathered his forces and went and sat down before Mantua. The Mantuans refused to surrender at his summons ; and Eccehno, who had very little notion of what the Paduans were doing in his absence, swore that he would cut down the vines in those pleasant Mantuan vineyards, plant new ones, and drink the wine of their grapes before ever he raised the siege. But meantime that con- spiracy which ended in Eccehno's ruin had declared itseK in Padua, and the tyrant was forced to aban- don the siege and look to his dominion of other cities. After which there was something hke peace in Mantua for twenty years, and the city waxed pros- perous. Indeed, neither industry nor learning had wholly perished during the wars of the repubhc, and the people built grist-mills on the Mincio, and cultivated belles-lettres to some degree. Men of heavier science likewise flourished, and we read of jurists and astronomers born in those troublous days, as well as of a distinguished physician, who wrote a ponderous dictionary of simples, and dedi- cated it to King Robert of Naples. But by far the greatest Mantuan of this time was he of whom readers have heard something from a modern poet. He is the haughty Lombard soul, " in the move- 342 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. ment of the eyes honest and slow," whom Dante^ ascending the inexphcable heights of Purgatory, be held ; and who, summoning all himself, leaped to the heart of Virgil when he named Mantua : " O Mantuan ! I am Sordello, of thine own land ! " Of Yirgil the superstition of the Middle Ages had made a kind of wizard, and of Sordello the old writers fable all manner of wonders ; he is both knight and poet, and has adventures scarcely less surprising than those of Amadis of Gaul. It is pretty nearly certain that he was born in 1189 of the Visconti di Goito, in the Mantuan country, and that he married Beatrice, a sister of Eccelino, and had amours with the youngest sister of this tyrant, the pretty Cunizza, whom Dante places in his " Par- adiso." This final disposition of Cunizza, whom we should hardly think now of assigning a place among the blest, surprised some people even in that day, it seems ; for an old commentator defends it, saying : " Cunizza was always, it is true, tender and amo- rous, and properly called a daughter of Yenus ; but she was also compassionate, benign, and merciful toward those unhappy ones whom her brother cru- tUy tormented. Therefore the poet is right in feigning to find her in the sphere of Venus. For ij the gentle Qyprians deified their Venus^ and the 'Romans their Flora^ how much more honestly may a Christian poet save Qunizza.^'' The lady, whose galvation is on these grounds inexpugnably accom- phshed, was married to Count Sanbonifazio ol Padua, in her twenty-fourth year ; and Sordello DUCAL MANTUA. 343 v^as early called to this nobleman's court, having ah'cady given proofs of his poetic genius. He fell in love Avith Cunizza, whom her lord, becoming the enemy of the Eccehni, began to ill-treat. A curi- ous glimpse of the manners and morals of that day is afforded by the fact, that the brothers of Cunizza conspired to effect her escape Avith Sordello Ci'om her husband's court, and that, under the pro- tection of Eccehno da Romano, the lovers were left unmolested to their amours. Eccehno, indeed, loved this weak sister with extraordinary tender- ness, and we read of a marvelous complaisance to her amorous intrigues by a man who cared nothing himself for women. Cunizza lived in one of her brother's palaces at Verona, and used to receive there the visits of Sordello after Eccelino had deter- mined to separate them. The poet entered the palace by a back door, to reach which he must pass through a very filthy alley ; and a servant was sta- tioned there to carry Sordello to and fro upon his back. One night Eccehno took the servant's place, bore the poet to the palace door, and on his return carried him back to the mouth of the alley, where he revealed himself, to the natural surprise and pain of Sordello, who could have reasonably expected anything but the mild reproof and warning given him by his truculent brother-in-iaw : '' Ora ti basti, Sordello. Non venir piu per qaesta vile strada ad opere ancor piu vih." — " Let this suffice thee, Sor- dello. Come no more by this vile path to yet viler Jeeds." 444 ITALIAN JOUKNEYS. It was probably after this amour ended that Sor- dello sat out upon his travels, visiting most courts, and dwelling long in Provence, where he learned to poetize in the Provengal tongue, in which he there- after chiefly wrote, and composed many songs. He did not, however, neglect his Lombard language, but composed in it a treatise on the art of defending towns. The Mantuan historian, Yolta, says that some of Sordello's Proven9al poems exist in manu- script in the Vatican and Chigi libraries at Rome, in the Laurentian at Florence, and the Estense at Modena. He was versed in arms as well as letters, and he caused Mantua to be surrounded with fosses five miles beyond her walls ; and the republic hav- ing lodged sovereign powers in his hands when Ec- celino besieged the city, Sordello conducted the de- fense with great courage and ability, and did not at all betray the place to his obliging brother-in-law, as the latter expected. Verci, from vv^hos'e " His- tory of the Eccelini " we have drawn the account of Sordello's intrigue with Cunizza, says : " The writers represent this Sordello as the most poHte, the most gentle, the most generous man of his time, of middle stature, of beautiful aspect and fine per- son, of lofty bearing, agile and dexterous, instructed ji letters, and a good poet, as his Provencal poems manifest. To these qualities he united military valor in such degree that no knight of his time could stand before him." He was properly the first lord of Mantua, and the republic seems to have diecj vdth him in 1284. DUCAL MANTUA. 345 The madness which comes upon a people about to be enslaved commonly makes them the agents of their own undoing. The time had now come for the destruction of the last vestiges of liberty in Mantua, and the Mantuans, in their assembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full power into the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bona- colsi whom Dante mentions in the twentieth cantc of the " Inferno," had been elected captain of the republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from the Marquis of Ferrara, he demanded of the people the right to banish all enemies of the state. This rea- sonable demand was granted, and the captain ban- ished, as is well kno^vn, all enemies of Pinamonte Bonacolsi. After that, having things his own way, he began to favor public tranquillity, abolished family feuds and the ancient amusement of street- battles, and led his enslaved country in the paths of material prosperity ; for which he was no doubt auded in his day by those who thought the Man- tuans were not prepared for freedom. He resolved to make the captaincy of the repubhc hereditary in the Bonacolsi family ; and when he died, in 1293, his power descended to his son Bordellone. This Bordellone seems to have been a generous and mer- ciful captain enough, but he loved ease and pleas- 'ire; and a rough nephew of his, Guido Bntticella, conspired against him to that degree that Bordel- lone thought best, for peace and quietness' sake, to abdicate in his favor. Guido had the customary war with the Marquis of Ferrara, and then died, 346 ITALIAN JOUENEYS. and was succeeded by his brother Passermo, a very bad person, whose son at last brought his whole family to grief. The Emperor made him vicar of Modena ; and he used the Modenese very cruelly, and shut up Francesco Pico and his sons in a tower, where he starved them, as the Pisans did Ugolina In those days, also, the Pope was living at Avignon, and people used to send him money and other com- forts there out of Italy. An officer of Passerino^s, being of Ghibelluie politics, attacked one of these richly laden emissaries, and took his spoils, dividing them -with Passerino. For this the Pope naturally excommunicated the captain of Mantua, and there- upon his neighbors made a great deal of pious war upon him. But he beat the Bolognese, the most pious of his foes, near Montevogho, and with his Modenese took from them that famous bucket, about which Tassoni made his great Bernesque epic, " The Rape of the Bucket " (Xa Seechia Rapita)^ and which still hangs in the tower of the Duomo at Mo- dena. Meantime, while Passerino had done every- thing to settle himseK comfortably and permanently in the tyranny of Mantua, his worthless son Fran- cesco fell in love with the wife of FiHppino Gon- saga. According to the old Mantuan chronicles the Gonzagas were of a royal German line, and had fixed themselves in the Mantuan territory in 770 where they built a castle beyond Po, and began at mice to take part in public affairs. They had now grown to be a family of such consequence that they DUCAL MANTUA. 347 could not be offended mth impunity, and it was a great misfortune to the Bonacolsi that Francesco happened to covet Fihppino Gonzaga's wife. As to the poor hidy herself, it is of infinite consequence to her eternal health whether she was guilty or no , but to us still on earth, it seems scarcely worth while to inquire, after so great lapse of time. His- tory, however, rather favors the notion of her inno- cence ; and it is said that Francesco, unable to over- come her virtue, took away her good fame by evil reports. At the same time he was greatly wroth — it is scarcely possible to write seriously of these ridiculous, wicked old shadows — that this lady's husband should have fallen in love \vith a pretty concubine of his, Bonacolsi's ; and, after publicly defaming Filippino's wife, he threatened to kill him for this passion. The insult and the menace sank deep into the bitter hearts of the Gonzagas ; and the head of that proud race, Fihppino's micle, Luigi Gonzaga, resolved to avenge thf* family dis- honor. He was a secret and taciturn man, and a pious adulator of his hne has praised him for the success with which he dissembled his hatred of the Bonacolsi, Awhile conspiring to sweep them and their dominion away. He won over adherents among the Mantuans, and then made a league with Can Grande of Verona to divide the spoils of the Bo- nacolsi ; and so, one morning, having bribed the guards to open the city gates, he entered Mantua %t the head of the banded forces. The population was roused with patriotic cries of " Long Hve the 348 ITALIAN JOURNErS. Mantuan people ! " and, as usual, believed, poor Bouls, that some good was meant them by those who came to overthrow their tyrants. The Bona- colsi were dreaming that pleasant morning of any- thing but ruin, and they offered no resistance to the insurrection till it burst out in the great square be- fore the Castello di Corte. They then made a fee- ble sally from the castle, but were swiftly driven back, and Passerino, wounded to death under the great Gothic archway of the palace, as he retreated, dropped from his languid hands the bridle-rein of his charger and the reins of that government with which he had so long galled Mantua. The un- happy Francesco fled to the cathedral for protec- tion ; but the Gonzagas slew him at the foot of the altar, with tortures so hideous and incredible, thab I am glad to have our friend, the advocate Ar- righi, deny the fact altogether. Passerino's brother, a bishop, was flung into a tower to starve, that the Picos might be avenged ; and the city of Mantua was liberated. In that day, when you freed a city from a tyrant, you gave it up to be pillaged by the army of liber- ation ; and Mantua was now sacked by her deliv- erers. Can Grande's share of the booty alone amounted to a hundred thousand gold florins (about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars). The Mantuans, far from imitating the ungrateful Pa- duans, who, when the Crusaders liberated them from Eccelin:, grudged these brave fellows three days' pillage of their city, and even wished baclj DUCAL MANTUA. 343 their old tyrant, — the Mantuans, we say, seemed not in the least to mind being devoured, but grate- full}'- elected the Gonzaga their captain-general, and purchased him absolution from the Pope for his crimes committed in the sack. They got this absolution for twenty thousand gold florins ; and the Pope probably sold it cheap, remembering his old grudge against the Bonacolsi, whom the Gon- zaga had overthrown. All this was in the year of grace 1328. I confess that I am never weary of reading of these good, heroic, virtuous old times in Italy, and that I am here tempted to digress into declamation about them. There is no study more curious and interesting, and T am fond of tracing the two ele- ments of character visible in Italian society, and every individual Italian, as they flow down from the remotest times to these : the one element, that capacity for intellectual culture of the highest degree ; the other element, that utter untamable- ness of passion and feehng. The presence of these contradictory elements seems to influence every relation of Italian life ; — to make it capable of kjplendor, but barren of comfort ; to endear beauty, but not goodness, to the Itahan ; to lead him to re'. cognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice them ; to produce a civilization of the mind, and not of the soul. When Luigi Gonzaga was made lord of Mantua, he left his castle beyond Po, to dwell in the city. In this castle he had dwelt, Like other lords of hia 350 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. time, in the likeness of a king, spending regally, and- keeping state and open house in an edifice strongly built about with walls, encircled with ditches passable by a single drawbridge, and guarded day and night, from castle moat to castle crest, by armed vassals. Hundreds ate daily at his board, which was heaped with a rude and rich profusion, and furnished with carven goblets and plate of gold and silver. In fair weather the banquet-hall stood open to all the winds that blew ; in foul, the guests were tiheltered from the storm by curtains of oiled linen, and the place was lighted with torches borne by splendidly attired pages. The great saloons of the castle were decked with tapestries of Flanders and Damascus, and the floor was strewn with straw or rushes. The bed in which the lord and lady slept was the couch of a monarch ; the household herded together in the empty chambers, and lay upon the floor like swine. The garden-fields about the castle smiled with generous harvests ; the peas- ant lay down after his toil, at night, in deadly fear of invasion from some neighboring state, which should rob him of everything, dishonor his wife and daughters, and slay him upon the smoking ruins of his home. In the city to which this lord repaired, the houses were built here and there at caprice, without num. bers or regularity, and only distinguished by the figure of a saint, or some pious motto painted above ^he door. Cattle wandered at will through the crooked, iiarrow, and filthy streets, which rang with DUCAL MANTUA. 351 the clamor of frequent feud, and reeked with the blood of the embattled citizens ; over all the squalor and wickedness rose the loveUest temples that ever blossomed from man's love of the beautiful, to the honor and glory of God. In this time Crusaders went to take the Lord's sepulchre from the infidel, while their brothers left at home rose against one another, each petty state against its neighbor, m unsparing wars of rapine and devastation, — wars that slew, or, less merci- fully, mutilated prisoners, — that snatched the babe from the embrace of its violated mother, and dashed out its brains upon the desolated hearth. A hope- less, helhsh time of sack, plunder, murder, fam- ine, plague, and unnatural crime ; a glorious age, in which floiu'ished the gentlest and sweetest poet that ever sang, and the grimmest and grandest that ever upbraided a godless generation for its sins, — in which Petrarch was crowned with laurel at Rome, and Dante wandered in despair from court to court, learning in the bitterness of his ex* He's heart, "come sa di sale Lo pane altrui, e come 6 duro calle Lo scendere e il salir per 1' altrui scale." It was a time ignorant of the simplest comfort, but debauched with the vices of luxury ; in which cities repressed the hcense of their people by laws regu- lating the length of women's gowns and the outlays at weddings and funerals. Every wild misdeed and ^thy cri me was committed, and punished by terri- 352 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. ble penalties, or atoned for by fines. A fierce de- mocracy reigned, banishing nobles, razing their pal- aces, and ploughing up the salt-sown sites ; till at last, in the uttermost paroxysm of madness, it de- livered itself up to lords to be defended from itself, and was crushed into the abjectest depths of slavery. Literature and architecture flourished, and the sis- ter arts were born amid the struggles of human na- ture convulsed with every abominable passion. For nearly four hundred years the Gonzagas con- tinued to rule the city, which the first prince of their line, having well-nigh destroyed, now rebuilt and restored to greater splendor than ever ; and it is the Mantua of the Gonzagas which travellers of this day look upon when they visit the famous old city. Their pride and their wealth adorned it * their wisdom and prudence made it rich and pros- perous ; their valor glorified it ; their crimes stain its annals with infamy ; their wickedness and weak- ness ruined it and brought it low. They were a race full of hereditary traits of magnificence, but one reads their history, and learns to love, of all their long succession, only one or two in their pride, learns to pity only one or two in their fall. They were patriotic, but the patriotism of despotic princes is self-love. They were liberal — in spend- ing the revenues of the state for the glory of tlieir family. They were brave, and led many nameless Mantuans to die in forgotten battles for alien quar tels which they never understood. The succession of the Gonzagas was of four cap DUCAL MANTUA. 353 tains, ending in 1407 ; four marquises, ending in 1484 ; and ten dukes, ending in 1708. The first of the captains was Luigi, as we know. In his time the great Gothic fabric of the Castello di Corte was built; and having rebuilt the portions of the city wasted by the sack, he devoted himself, as far as might be in that age, to the arts of peace ; and it is remembered of him that he tried to cure the Mantuan air of its feverish unwholesomeness by draining the swampy environs. During his time, Petrarch, making a sentimental journey to the birthplace of Virgil, was splendidly entertained and greatly honored by him. For the rest. Can Grande of Verona was by no means content with his hun- dred thousand golden florins of spoil from the sack of the city, but aspired to its seigniory, declaring that he had understood Gonzaga to have promised him it as the condition of alliance against the Bo- nacolsi. Gonzaga construed the contract differ- ently, and had so Httle idea of parting with his opinion, that he fought the Scaligero on this point of difference till he died, which befell tHrty years after his election to the captaincy. Him his son Guido succeeded, — a prince already old at the time of his father's death, and of feeble spirit. He shared his dominion with his son Ugo- lino, excluding the younger brothers from the do- minion. These, indignant at the partiality, one night slew their brother UgoHno at a supper he wag giving ; and being thereupon admitted to a share in tlieir father's government, had no trouble in obtain- 23 B54 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. ing the pardon of the Pope and Emperor. One of the murderers died before the father ; the other, named Ludovico, was, on the death of Guido, in 1370, elected to the captaincy, and ruled long, wisely, and well. He loved a peaceful life ; and though the Emperor confirmed him in the honors conferred on him by the Mantuans, and made him Vicar imperial, Ludovico declined to take part with Ghibelhnes against Guelphs, remained quietly at home, and spent himself much in good works, as if he would thus expiate his bloody crime. He gath- ered artists, poets, and learned men about him, and did much to foster all arts. In his time, Mantua had rest from war, and grew to have twenty-eight thousand inhabitants ; but it was not in the nature of a city of the Middle Ages to be long without a calamity .of some sort, and it is a kind of rehef to know that Mantua, under this peaceful prince, was well-nigh depopulated by a pestilence. In 1381 he died, and with his son Francesco the blood-letting began again. Indeed, this captain spent nearly his whole hfe in war with those pleas- ant people, the Yisconti of Milan. He had mar- ried the daughter of Barnabo Yisconti, but discov- ering her to be unfaithful to him, or beheving hei so, he caused her to be put to death, refusing all her family's intercessions for mercy. After that, a heavy sadness fell upon him, and he wandered aim- lessly about in many Italian cities, and at last mar- ried a second time, taking to wife Margherita Mala^ fcesta. He was a prince of high and generous soul DUCAL MANTUA. 355 and of manly greatness rare in liis time. There came once a creature of the Visconti to him, with a plot for secretly taking off his masters ; but the Gonzaga (he must have been thought an eccentric man by his neighbors) dismissed the wretch with scornful horror. I am sure the reader ^vill be glad to know that he finally beat the Visconti in fair fight, and (the pest still raging in Mantua) Hved to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. When he returned, he compiled the city's statutes, divided the town into four districts, and named its streets. So he died. And after this prince had made his end, there came another Francesco, or Gianfrancesco, who was created Marquis of Mantua by the Emperor Sigis- mund. He was a friend of war, and having been the ward of the Venetian Repubhc (Venice was fond of this kind of trust, and sometimes adopted princely persons as her children, among whom the reader will of course remember the Queen of Cyprus, and the charming Bianca Capello, whose personal attrac- tions and singularly skillful knowledge of the use .of poisons made her Grand Duchess of Tuscany some years after she eloped from Venice), he became the deader of her armies on the death of Carmagnola, who survived the triumphal reception given him by the Serenest Senate only a very short time.^ 1 It seems scarcely worth whUe to state the fact that Carmagnola, suspected of treasonable con-espondenca with the Visconti, was recalled lO Venice to receive distinguished honors from the republic. The Sen- »te was sitting in the hall of the Gra*id Council wh en he appeared, and they detained him there with various compliments till night fell. The'i 356 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. The Gonzaga took Yerona and Padua for the re- public, and met the Milanese in many battles, Venice was then fat and insolently profuse with the spoils of the Orient, and it is probable that the Marquis of Mantua acquired there that taste for splendor which he introduced into his hitherto fru- gal httle state. We read of his being in Venice in 1414, when the Jewelers and Goldsmiths' Guild gave a tournament in the Piazza San Marco, offering as prizes to the victorious lances a collar enriched with pearls and diamonds, the work of the jewelers, and two helmets excellently Avrought by the gold- smiths. On this occasion the Gonzaga, with two hundred and sixty Mantuan gentlemen, mounted on superb horses, contested the prizes with the Marquis of Ferrara, at the head of two hundred Ferrarese, equally mounted, and attended by their squires and pages, magnificently dressed. There were sixty thousand spectators of the encounter. " Both the Marquises," says Mutinelli in his " Annali Urbani," " being each assisted by fourteen well-armed cava- liers, combated valorously at the barrier, and were both judged worthy of the first prize : a Mantuan cavalier took the second." The Marquis Gonzaga was the first of his line ,v^ho began that royal luxury of palaces with which Mantua was adorned. He commenced the Ducal Palace ; but before he went far with the work, he instead of lights, the Sbirri appeared, and seized Carmagnola. " I am ft dead man," he exclaimed, on beholding them. And so indeed h« *ras ; for, three days after, he wailed out of priso/i, and beheaded b© •ween the pillars of the Piazzetta. DUCAL MANTUA. .357 fell a prey to the science then much affected by Italian princes, but still awaiting its last refinement from the gifted Lucrezia Borgia. The poor Mar- quis was poisoned by his wife's paramour, and died in the year 1444. Against this prince, our advo- cate Arrighi records the vandalism of causing to be thrown down and broken in pieces the antique statue of Virgil, which stood in one of the public places of Mantua, and of which the head is still shown in the Museum of the city. In all times, the Mantuans had honored, in divers ways, their great poet, and at certain epochs had coined money bear- ing his face. With the common people he had a kind of worship (more likely as wizard than as poet), and they celebrated annually some now-for- gotten event by assembling with songs and dances about the statue of Virgil, which was destroyed by the uncle of the Marquis, Malatesta, rather than by the Marquis's own order. This ill-conditioned per- son is supposed to have been " vexed because our Mantuan people thought it their highest glory to be fellow-citizens of the prince of poets." We can bet- ter sympathize with the advocate's indignation at this barbarity, than with his blame of Francesco for having consented, by his acceptance of the marquis- ate, to become a prince of the Roman Empire. Mantua was thus subjected to the Emperors, but liberty had long been extinguished ; and the volun- tary election of the CouncD, which bestowed the captaincy on each succeeding generation of the Gon tagas, was a mere matter of form, and of course. 358 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. The next prince, Lodovico Gonzaga, was an aus* fcere man, and had been bred in a hard school, if 1 may believe some of our old chroniclers, whom, in deed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether faithful. It is said that his father loved his younger brother better than him, and that Lodovico ran away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his father's hereditary enemies, the Visconti. To make dates agree, it must have been the last of these, for the line failed during Lodovico's time, and he had wars with the succeeding Sforza. In the day of his escapade, Milan was at war with Mantua and ^vith Venice, and the Marquis Gonzaga was at the head of the united armies, as we have already seen. So the father and son met in several battles ; though the Visconti, out of love for the boy, and from a sentiment of piety somewhat amazing in them, con- trived that he should never actually encounter his parent face to face. Lodovico came home after the wars, wearing a long beard ; and his mother called her son " the Turk," a nickname that he never lost. II Turco was a lover of the arts and of letters, and he did many works to enrich and beautify the city. He established the first printing-office in Mantua, where the firsb book printed was the " Decamerone " of Boccaccio. He founded a col- lege of advocates, and he dug canals for irrigation ; and the prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers in his time may be inferred from the fact that, when the King of Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the merchants decked their shops with five thousanc pieces of fine Mantuan cloth. DUCAL MANTUA. 359 The Marqiiis made his brilliant little court the resort of the arts and letters ; and hither from Flor- ence came once the elegant Politian, who composed his tragedy of " Orfeo " in Mantua, and caused it to be first represented before Lodovico. But it must be confessed that this was a soil in which ai*t flourished better than literature, and that even born Mantuan poets went off, after a while, and blos- somed in other air. The painter Mantegna, whom the Marquis invited from Padua, passed his whole life here, painting for the Marquis in the palaces and churches. The prince loved hun, and gave him a house, and bestowed other honors upon him ; and Mantegna executed for Lodovico his famous pictures representing the Triumph of Juhus Caesar.^ It was divided into nine compartments, and, as a frieze, went round the upper part of Lodovico's newly erected palace of San Sebastian. Mantegna also painted a hall in the Castello di Corte, called the Stanza di Mantegna, and there, among other sub- jects of fable and of war, made the portraits of Lodovico and his wife. It was partly the wish to see such works of Mantegna as still remained in Mantua that took us thither; and it was chiefly this wish that carried us, the morning after our ar- rival, to the Castello di Corte, or the Ducal Palace. Our thirst for Mantegnas was destined to be in no degree satisfied in this pile, but it was full of things to tempt us to forget Mantegna, and to make us more and more interested in tlie Gronzagas and their Mantua. 1 Now at Hamptou Court, in England. 360 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. It is taken for granted that no human behig ever yet gained an idea of any building from the most artful description of it ; but if the reader cares to fancy a wide piazza, or open square, with a church upon the left hand, immense, uninteresting edifices on the right, and an ugly bishop's palace of Renais- sance taste behind him, he may figure before him as vastly and magnificently as he pleases the superb Gothic front of the Castello di Corte. This facade is the only one in Italy that reminds you of the most beautiful building in the world, the Ducal Pal- ace at Venice ; and it does this merely by right of its short pillars and deep Gothic arches in the ground story, and the great breadth of wall that rises above them, unbroken by the second line of columns which relieves and lightens this wall in the Venetian palace. It stands at an extremity of the city, upon the edge of the broad fresh-water lagoon, and is of such extent as to include within its walls a whole court-city of theatre, church, stables, play- ground, course for riding, and several streets. There is a far older edifice adjoining the CasteUo di Corte, which Guido Bonacolsi began, and which witnessed the bloody end of his fine, when Louis Gonzaga sur- prised and slew his last successor. But the palace itseK is all the work of the Gonzagas, and it remaius the monument of their kingly state and splendid pride. It was the misfortune of the present writer to be recognized by the employe (formerly of Venice) who gives the permissions to travellers to visit the DUCAL MANTUA. 361 palace, and to be addressed in the presence of the Oust ode by the dignified title to which his presence did so little honor. Tliis circumstance threw upon the Custode, a naturally tedious and oppressive old man, the responsibility of being doubly prolix and garrulous. He reveled in his office of showing the palace, and did homage to the visitor's charge and nation by an infinite expansion upon all possible points of interest, lest he should go away imper- fectly informed of anytliing. By dint of frequent encounter with strangers, this Custode had picked up many shreds and fragments of many languages, and did not permit the travellers to consider them- selves as having at all understood him until he had repeated everything in Italian, English, French, and German. He led the way with his polyglot babble through an endless number of those magnifi- cent and uninteresting chambers which palaces seem specially built to contain, that men may be con- tent to dwell in the humbler dullness of their own houses ; and though the travellers often prayed him to show them the apartments containing the works of Mantegna, they really got to see nothing of this painter's in the Ducal Palace, except, here and there, some evanescent frescoes, which the Cus- tode would not go beyond a si crede in attributing to him. Indeed, it is known that the works of Man- tegna suffered grievously in the wars of the last century, and his memory has faded so dim in this palace where he wrought, thau the guide could not understand the curiosity of the foreigners concern * 362 ITALIAN JOUKNEYS. hag the old painter ; and certainly Giulio Romanc has stamped hiniseK more ineffacea,blj than Man- tegiia upon Mantua. In the Ducal Palace are seen yividly contrasted the fineness and strength, the delicacy and courage of the fancy, which, rather than the higher gift of imagination, characterize Giulio's work. There is Buch an airy refinement and subtile grace in the pretty grotesques with which he decorates a cham- ber ; there is such daring luxury of color and design in the pictures for which his grand halls are merely the frames. No doubt I could make fine speeches about these paintings ; but who, not seeing them, would be the wiser, after the best description and the choicest critical disquisition ? In fact, our travel- lers themselves found it pleasanter, after a while, to yield to the guidance of the Custode, and to enjoy the stupider marvels of the place, than to do the set and difficult admiration of the works of art. So, passing the apartments in good preservation (the Austrian Emperors had taken good care of some parts of the palace of one of their first Italian pos- sessions), they did justice to the splendor of the satin beds and the other upholstery work ; they admired rich carpentering and costly toys ; they dwelt on marvelous tapestries (among which the tapestry copies of Raphael's cartoons, woven at Mantua in the fifteenth century, are certainly worthy of wonder) ; and they expressed the propel amazement at the miracles of art which caused fig- ures frescoed in the ceihngs to turn with them, and DUCAL MANIUA. 863 follow and face tliem from whatever j^art of the room they chose to look. Nay, they even enjoyed the Hall of the Rivers, on the sides of which the usual river-gods were painted, in the company of the usual pottery, from wliich they pour their founts, and at the end of which there was an abominable little grotto of what people call, in modern land- scape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with which its unmeaning ugliness fills them. There were busts of several Mantuan duchesses in the gallery, which were interesting, and the pictures were so bad as to molest no one. There was, be- sides all this, a hanging garden in this small Baby- lon, on which the travellers looked with a doleful regret that they were no longer of the age when a hanging garden would have brought supreme com- fort to the soul. It occupied a spacious oblong, had a fountain and statues, trees and flowers, and would certainly have been taken for the surface of the earth, had not the Custode proudly pointed out that it was on a level with the second floor, on which they stood. After that they wandered through a series of un- ased, dismantled apartments and halls, melancholy with faded fresco, dropping stucco, and mutilated statues of plaster, and came at last upon a balcony overlooking the Cavallerizza, which one of the early iukes built after a desigr by the inevitable Giulio Romano. It is a large square, and was meant for the diversion of riding on horseback. Balconies go all round it between those thick columns, finely twisted, 364 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. as we see them in that cartoon of Raphael, '' The Healing of the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate ol the Temple" ; and here once stood the jolly dukes and the jolly ladies of their light-hearted court, and there below rode the gay, insolent, intriguing court- iers, and outside groaned the city under the heav^' extortions of the tax-gatherers. It is all in weather- worn stucco, and the handsome square is planted with trees. The turf was now cut and carved by the heavy wheels of the Austrian baggage-wagons con- stantly passing through the court to carry munitions to the fortress outside, whose black guns grimly over- look the dead lagoon. A sense of desolation had crept over the sight-seers, with that strange sickness of heart which one feels in the presence of ruin not to be lamented, and which deepened into actual pain as the Custode clapped his hands and the echo buf- feted itseK against the forlorn stucco, and up from the trees rose a score of sullen, slumberous owls, and Happed heavily across the lonesome air with melan- choly cries. It only needed, to crush these poor strangers, that final touch which the Custode gave, fts they passed from the palace through the hall in which are painted the Gonzagas, and in which he pointed out the last Duke of Mantua, saying he was deposed by the Emperor for felony, and somehow conveying the idea of horse-stealing and counter- feiting on the part of his Grace. A very different man from this rogue was our old friend Lodovico, who also, however, had his troubles. He was an enemy of the Ghibellines, and fought DUCAL MANTUA. 365 ihem a great deal. Of course he had the habitual wars with Milan, and he was obliged to do battle with his own brother Carlo to some extent. This Gonzaga had been taken prisoner by Sforza ; and Lodovico, having paid for him a ransom of sixty thousand florins of gold (which Carlo was scarcely worth), seized the fraternal lands, and held them in pledge of repayment. Carlo could not pay, and tried to get back his possessions by war. Vexed with these and other contentions, Lodovico was also unhappy in his son, whose romance I may best tell in the words of the history, ^ from which I take it : " Lodovico Gonzaga, having agreed with the Duke of Bavaria to take his daughter Margherita as wife for his (Lodovico's) first-born, Federico, and the young man having refused her, Lodovico was so much enraged that he sought to imprison him ; but the Marchioness Barbara, mother of Federico, caused him to fly from the city till his father's anger should be abated. Federico departed with six attendants ; ^ but this flight caused still greater dis- pleasure to his father, who now declared him banished, and \hreatened with heavy penalties any one who should give dim help or favor. Federico, therefore, wandered about with these six attendants in divers places, and finally ar- rived in Naples ; but having already spent all his sub- stance, and not daring to make himself known for fear of his father, he fell into great want, and so into severe sick- aess. His companions having nothing wherewith to live, >nd not knowing any trade by which to gain their bread; 1 Volta : Storia di Mantova. 2 The Fioretto deUe Cronache says " persons of gentle condition.' 366 ITALIiJ? JOURNEYS. iid menial services fit for day-laborers, and sustained their lord with their earnings, he remaining hidden in a poor woman's house where they all dwelt. " The Marchioness had sent many messengers in divers provinces with money to find her son, but they never heard any news of him ; so that they thought him dead, not hear- ing anything, either, of his attendants. Now it happened that one of those who sought Federico came to Naples, and presented himself to the king with a letter from the said lady, praying that he should make search in his ter- ritory for a company of seven men, giving the name and description of each. The king caused this search to be made by the heads of the district ; and one of these heads told how in his district there were six Lombard men (not knowing of Federico, who lay ill), but that they were labor- ers and of base condition. The king determined to see them ; and they being come before him, he demanded who chey were, and how many ; as they were not willing to discover their lord, on being asked their names they gave others, so that the king, not being able to learn anything, would have dismissed them. But the messenger sent by the Marchioness knew them, and said to the king, ' Sire, ihese are the attendants of him whom I seek ; but they have changed their names.' The king caused them to be separated one from another, and then asked them of their lord ; and they, finding themselves separated, minutely narrated everything ; and the king immediately sent for Federico, whom his ofiicers found miserably ill on a heap of straw. He was brought to the palace, where the king ordered him to be cared for, sending the messenger back tc hi= mother to advise her how the men had been found, and in what great misery. The Marchioness went to he? tiusband, and, having cast herself at his feet, besought him DUCAL MANTUA. S(ol 5f a grace. The Marquis answered that he would grant everything, so it did not treat of Federico. Then the lady opened him the letter of the king of Naples, which had such effect that it softened the soul of the Marquis, showing him in how great misery his son had been ; and so, givmg the letter to the Marchioness, he said, ' Do that which pleases you.' The Marchioness straightway sent the prince money, and clothes to clothe him, in order that he should return to Mantua; and having come, the son cast himself at his father's feet, imploring pardon for him- self and for his attendants ; and he pardoned them, and gave those attendants enough to live honorably and like noblemen, and they were called The Faithful of the House of Gonzaga, and from them come the Fedeli of Mantua. " The Marquis then, not to break faith, caused Federico to take Margherita, daughter of the Duke of Bavaria, for his wife, and celebrated the nuptials splendidly ; so that there remained the greatest love between father and son." The son succeeded to the father's dominion in 1478 ; and it is recorded of him in the " Flower of the Chronicles," that he was a hater of idleness, and a just man, greatly beloved by his people. They chiefly objected to him that he placed a Jew, Euse- bio Malatesta, at the head of civil affairs ; and this Tew was indeed the cause of great miscliief ; for RidoKo Gonzaga coming to reside with his wife for a time at the court of his brother, the INIarquis, Malatesta fell in love with her. She repelled him , and the bitter Jew thereupon so poisoned her hus- band's mind with accusations against her chastity, Uiat he took her home to his town of Lazzaro, and 368 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. there put the unhappy and innocent lady to death by the headsman's hand in the great square of the city. Federico was Marquis only six years, and died in 1484, leaving his marquisate to his son Francesco, the most ambitious, warlike, restless, splendid prince of his magnificent race. This Gonzaga wore a beard, and brought the custom into fashion in Italy again. He founded the famous breed of Mantuan horses and gave them about free-handedly to other sover- eigns of his acquaintance. To the English king he presented a steed which, if we may trust history, could have been sold for almost its weight in gold. He was so fond of hunting that he kept two hundred dogs of the chase, and one hundred and fifty birds of prey. Of course this Gonzaga was a soldier, and indeed he loved war better even than hunting, and dehghted so much in personal feats of arms that, concealing his name and quality, in order that the combat should be in all things equal, he was wont to challenge re- Liowned champions wher.ever he heard of them, and to meet them in the lists. Great part of his life was spent in the field ; and he fought in turn on nearly all sides of the political questions then agitating Italy. In 1495 he was at the head of the Venetian and other Italian troops when they beat the French under Charles VIII. at Taro, and made so little use of their victory as to let their vanquished invaders escape from them after all. Nevertheless, if the Goiizaga did not here show himself a great general DUCAL MANTUA. 369 ae did great feats of personal valor, penetrating to the midst of the French forces, wounding the king, and with his own hand taking prisoner the great Bastard of Bourbon. Venice paid him ten thousand ducats for gaining the victory, such as it was, and when peace was made he went to visit the French king at VercelH ; and there Charles gave his guest a present of two magnificent horses, which the Gon- zaga returned yet more splendidly in kind. About five years later he was again at war with the French, and helped the Aragonese drive them out of Naples. In 1506, Pope Julius II. made him leader of the armies of the Church (for he had now quitted the Venetian service), and he reduced the city of Bo- logna to obedience to the Holy See. In 1509 he joined the League of Cambray against Venice, and, being made Imperial Captain-General, was taken prisoner by the Venetians. They Hberated him, however, the following year ; and in 1513 we find him at the head of the league against the French. A curious anecdote of this Gonzaga's hospitaUty U also illustrative of the anomalous hfe of those times, when good faith had as Httle to do with the intercourse of nations as at present ; but good for- tune, when she appeared in the world, liked to put on a romantic and melodramatic guise. An ambas- sador from the Grand Turk on his way to Rome was taken by an enemy of the Pope, despoiled of all his money, and left planted, as the Italians expressiv^^ly Aay, at Ancona. This an.bassador was come to concert with Alexander VI. the death of Bajazet's 24 370 ITALIAN JOUENEYS. brother, prisoner in the Pope's hands, and he bore the Pope a present of 50,000 gold ducats. It was Gian Delia Rovere who seized and spoiled him, and Bent the papers (letters of the Pope and Sultan) to Charles VIII. of France, to whom Alexander had been obliged to give the Grand Turk's brother. The magnificent Gonzaga hears of the Turk's em- barrassing mischance, sends and fetches him to Mantua, clothes him, puts abundant money in his purse, and dispatches him on his way. The Sultan, in reward of this courtesy to his servant, gave a number of fine horses to the Marquis, who, possibly being tired of presenting his own horses, returned the Porte a ship-load of excellent Mantuan cheeses. This interchange of compliments seems to have led to a kind of romantic friendship between the Gon- zaga and the Grand Turk, who did occasionally in- terest himseK in the affairs of the Christian dogs ; and who, when Francesco lay prisoner at Venice, actually wrote to the Serenest Senate, and asked his release as a personal grace to him, the Grand Turk. And Francesco was, thereupon, let go ; the canny republic being wiUing to do the Sultan any Bort of cheap favor. This Gonzaga, being so much engaged in war, iieems to have had little time for the adornment of his capital. The Church of Our Lady of Victory is the only edifice which he added to it ; and this was merely in glorification of his own triumph over the French at Taro. Mantegna painted an altar liece for it, representing the Marquis and his wif^ DUCAL MANTUA. 371 on tlieir kiiees before the Virgin, in act of rendering her thanks for the victory. The French nation avenged itself for whatever wrong was done its pi'ide in this picture by steahng it aAvay from Man- tua in Napoleon's time ; and it now hangs in tho gallery of the Louvre. Francesco died in 1519 ; and after him his son, Federico II., the first Duke of Mantua, reigned some twenty-one years, and died in 1540. The marquisate in his time was made a duchy by the Emperor Charles V., to whom the Gonzaga had given efiicient aid in his wars against the French. This was in the year 1530 ; and three years later, when the Duke of Monferrato died, and the inherit- ance of his opulent little state was disputed by the Duke of Savoy, by the Marquis of Saluzzo, and by the Gonzaga, who had married the late Duke's daughter, Charles's influence secured it to the Man- tuan. The dominions of the Gonzagas had now reached their utmost extent, and these dominions were not curtailed till the deposition of Fernando Carlo in 1708, when Monferrato was adjudged to the Duke of Savoy, and afterwards confirmed to him by treaty. It was separated from the capital of the Gonzagas by a wide extent of alien territory, but they held it with a strong hand, embellished the city, and founded there the strongest citadel in Italy. Federico, after his wars for the Emperor, appears to have reposed in peace for the rest of his days, and to have devoted hirr^self to the adornment of 572 \TALIAN JOURNEYS. Mantua and the aggrandizing of Ms family. His court was the home of many artists ; and Titian painted for him the Twelve Cassars, T^hich the Ger- mans stole when they sacked the city in 1630. But his great agent and best beloved genius was GiuHo Pippi, called Romano, who was conducted to Man- tua by pleasant Count Baldassare Castighone. Pleasant Count Baldassare Castighone ! whose in- comparable book of the " Cortigiano " succeeded in teaching his countrymen every gentlemanly grace but virtue. He was born at Casatico in the Man- tovano, in the year 1476, and went in his boyhood to be schooled at Milan, where he learnt the prO" fession of arms. From Milan he went to Rome, where he exercised his profession of arms till the year 1504, when he was called to gentler uses at the court of the elegant Dukes of Urbino. He lived there as courtier and court-poet, and he returned to Rome as the ambassador from Urbino. Meantime his Hege, Francesco Gonzaga, was but poorly pleased that so briUiant a Mantuan should spend his life in the service and ornament of other princes, and Castiglione came back to his native country about the year 1516. He married in Mantua, and ■'here finished his famous book of " The Courtier,'* ijid succeeded in winning back the favor of his prince. Federico, the Duke, made him ambassador to Rome in 1528 ; and Baldassare did his master two signal services there, — he procured him to be named head of all the Papal forces, and he found him Giulio Romano. So the Duke suffered him ta DUCAL MANTUA. 373 go as the Pope's Nuncio to Spain, and Baldassare finished his courtly days at Toledo in 1529. The poet made a detour to Mantua on his way to Spain, taking with him the painter, whom the Duke received with many caresses, as Vasari says, pre- sented him a house honorably furnished, ordered provision for him and his pupils, gave them certain brave suits of velvet and satin, and, seeing that Giuho had no horse, called for his own favorite Luggieri, and bestowed it on him. Ah ! they knew how to receive painters, those fine princes, who had merely to put their hands into their people's pocket, and take out what florins they liked. So the Duke presently set the artist to work, riding out with him through the gate of San Bastiano to some stables about a bow-shot from the walls, in the midst of a flat meadow, where he told Giuho that he would be glad (if it could be done without destroying the old walls) to have such buildings added to the stables as would serve him for a kind of lodge, to come out and merrily sup in when he hked. Whereupon Giuho began to think out the famous Palazzo del T. This painter is an unlucky kind of man, to whom Jl criticism seems to have agreed to attribute great power and deny great praise. Castighone had found him at Rome, after the death of his master Raphael, when his genius, for good or for ill, began for the first time to find original expression. At Mantua, where he spent all the rest of his busy life it is impossible not to feel in some degree the force of this genius. As in Venice all the Madonnas in B74 ITALIAN JOUENEYS. the street-comer shrines have some touch of color to confess the painter's subjection to Titian or Tin- toretto ; as in Vicenza the edifices are all in Greek- ish taste, and stilted upon pedestals in honor and homage to Palladio ; as in Parma Correggio has never died, but lives to this day in the mouths and chiaroscuro effects of all the figures in all the pic- tures painted there ; — so in Mantua Giulio Romano is to be found in the lines of every painting and every palace. It is wonderful to see, in these little Itahan cities which have been the homes of great men, how no succeeding generation has dared to wrong the memory of them by departing in the least from their precepts upon art. One fancies, for instance, the immense scorn with which the Yicen- tines would greet the audacity of any young archi- tect who dared to think Gothic instead of Palladian Greek, and how they would put him to shame by asking him if he knew more than Palladio about architecture ! It seems that original art cannot arise in the presence of the great virtues and the great errors of the past ; and Itahan art of this day seems incapable of even the feeble, mortal life of other modern art, in the midst of so much immor- tality. Giulio Eomano did a Httle of everything for the Dukes of Mantua, — from painting the most deli- cate and improper Httle fresco for a bed-chamber, to restraining the Po and the Mincio with immense dikes, restoring ancient edifices and building new >nes, draining swamps and demolishing and • r©» DUCAL MANTUA. 375 constructing whole streets, painting palaces and cliurches, and designing the city slaughter-house. He grew old and very rich in the service of the Gonzagas ; but though Mrs. Jameson says he com- manded respect by a sense of his own dignity as an artist, the Bishop of Casale, who wrote the " Annali di Mantova," says that the want of nobihty and purity in his style, and his " gallant inventions, were conformable to his own sensual Ufe, and that he did not disdain to prostitute himself to the infa- mies of Aretino." His great architectural work in Mantua is the Palazzo del T, or Te, as it is now written. It was first called Palazzo del T, from the convergence of roads there in the form of that letter ; and the mod- ern Mantuans call it Del Te, from the superstition, transmitted to us by the Custode of the Ducal Pal- ace, that the Gonzagas merely used it on pleasant afternoons to take tea in ! so curiously has latter- day guidemanship interpreted the jolly purpose expressed by the Duke to Giuho. I say nothing to control the reader's choice between T and T^, and merely adhere to the elder style out of rever- ence for the past. It is certain that the air of the plain on which the palace stands is most unwhole- some, and it may have been true that the dukes never passed the night there. Federico did not intend to build more than a lodge in this place ; but fascinated with the design offered him by Giu- lio, he caused the artist to go on, and contrive him a palace instead. It stands, as Vasari says, about 876 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. a good bow-shot from one of the city's gates ; and going out to see the palace on our second day in Mantua, we crossed a drawbridge guarded by Aus- trian soldiers. Below languished a bed of sullen ooze, tangled and thickly grown with long, villa- nous grasses, and sending up a damp and deathly stench, which made all the faces we saw look fever- ish and sallow. Already at that early season the air was foul and heavy, and the sun, faintly making himseK seen through the dun sky of the dull spring day, seemed sick to look upon the place, where indeed the only happy and lively things were the clouds of gnats that danced before us, and wel- comed us to the Palazzo del T. Damp ditches sur- round the palace, in which these gnats seemed to have peculiar pleasure ; and they took possession of the portico of the stately entrance of the edifice as we went in, and held it faithfully till we re- turned. In one of the first large rooms are the life-siza Dortraits of the six finest horses of the Gonzaga Btud, painted by the pupils of GiuHo Romano, after the master's designs. The paintings attest the beauty of the Mantuan horses, and the pride and fondness of their ducal owners ; and trustworthy critics have praised their eminent truth. But it is only the artist or the hippanthrop who can delight in them long ; and we presently left them for the other chambers, in which the invention of Giulic tad been used to please himself rather than his master. I scarcely mean to name the wonders oi DUCAL MANTUA. 377 fcho palace, having, indeed., general associations with them, rather than particular recollections of them. One of the most famous rooms is the Chamber of Psyche (the apartments are not of great size), of which the ceiling is by Giulio and the walls are by his pupils. The whole illustrates, with every variety of fantastic invention, the story of Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and deserves to be curiously Btudied as a part of the fair outside of a superb and corrupt age, the inside of which was full of rotten- ness. The civilization of Italy, as a growth from the earliest Pagan times, and only modified by Christianity and the admixture of Northern blood and thought, is yet to be carefully analyzed ; and until this analysis is made, discussion of certain features must necessarily be incomplete and unsat- isfactory. No one, however, can stand in this Chamber of Psyche, and not feel how great reality the old mythology must still have had, not only for the artists who painted the room, but for the people who inhabited it and enjoyed it. I do not say that they believed it as they beheved in the vital articles of Christian faith, but that they ac- cepted it with the same spirit as they accepted the martyrology of the Church ; and that to the fibe gentlemen and ladies of the court, those jolly satyrs and careless nymphs, those Cupids and Psyches, and Dianas and Venuses, were of the same verity as the Fathers of the Desert, the Devil, and the great body of the saints. If they did not pray to them, they swore by them, and their names weie 378 ITALIAN JOUENEYS. much, oftener on their lips ; and the art of the time was so thoroughly Pagan, that it forgot all Christian holiness, and clung only to heathen beauty. When it had not actually a mythologic subject to deal with, it paganized Christian themes. St. Sebastian was made to look like Apollo, and Mary Magdalene was merely a tearful, triste Yenus. There is scarcely a ray of feeling in Italian art since Raphael's time which suggests Christianity in the artist, or teaches it to the beholder. In confessedly Pagan subjects it was happiest, as in the' life of Psyche, in this room ; and here it inculcated a gay and spirited license, and an elegant absence of delicacy, which is still ob- servable in Italian hfe. It would be instructive to know in what spirit the common Mantuans of his day looked upon the inventions of the painter, and how far the courtly circle which frequented this room went in discussion and comment on its subjects ; they were not nice people, and probably had no nasty ideas about the unspeakable indecency of some of the scenes.^ Returning to the city we visited the house of Giu- lio Romano, which stands in one of the fine, lone- some streets, and at the outside of which we looked. The artist designed it himself ; and it is very pretty, 1 Tte ruin in the famous room frescoed with the Fall of the Giants commences on the very door-jambs, which are painted in broken and rumbling brick-work ; and throughout there is a prodigiousness whicli does not surprise, and a bigness which does not impress ; and the treat- ment of the subject can only be expressed by the Westemism poW' trfully weak. In Kugler's Hand-iooh of Italian Painting are tw» alustrations, representing parts of the fresco, which give a fair idea o? the \^hole. DUCAL MANTUA. 379 with delicacy of feeling in the fine stucco oinamen- tation, but is not otherwise interesting. We passed it, continuing our way toward the Arsenal, near which we had seen the women at work washing the linen coats of the garrison in the twihght of the evening before ; and we now saw them again from the bridge, on which we paused to look at a picturesque bit of modern Hfe in Mantua. The washing-machine (when the successful instrument is invented) may do its work as well, but not so charmingly, as these Mantuan girls did. They washed the hnen in a clear, swift-running stream, diverted from the dam of the Mincio to furnish mill- power witliin the city wall ; and we could look down the watercourse past old arcades of masonry half submerged in it, past pleasant angles of houses and a lazy mill-wheel tm-ning slowly, slowly, till our view ended in the gallery of a time-worn palace, through the columns of which was seen the blue sky. Under the bridge the stream ran very strong and lucid, over long, green, undulating water-grasses, which it loved to dimple over and play with. On the right were the laundresses under the eaves of a wooden shed, each kneeling, as their custom is, in a three- sided box, and leaning forward over the washboard that sloped down into the water. As they washed they held the linen in one hand, and rubbed it with the other ; then heaped it into a mass upon the board and beat it with gi*eat two-handed blows of a stick. They sang, meanwhixe, one of those plain- Uve airs of which the Itahan peasants are fond, and 380 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. wliicli rose in indescribable patbos, pulsing with tbeir blows, and rhythmic with the graceful movement of their forms. Many of the women were young, — though they were of all ages, — and the prettiest among them was third from where we stood upon the bridge. She caught sight of the sketch-book which one of the travellers carried, and pointed it out to the rest, who could hardly settle to their work to be sketched. Presently an idle baker, whose shop adjoined the bridge, came out and leaned upon the parapet, and bantered the girls. " They are draw- ing the prettiest," he said, at which they all bridled a little ; and she who knew herself to be prettiest hung her head and rubbed furiously at the Hnen. Long before the artist had finished the sketch, the lazy, good-humored crowd which the public prac- tice of the fine arts always attract in Italy, had sur- rounded the strangers, and were applauding, com- menting, comparing, and absorbing every stroke as it was made. When the book was closed and they walked away, a number of boys straggled after them some spaces, inspired by a curious longing and regret, like that which leads boys to the eager in- spection of fireworks when they have gone out. "We lost them at the first turning of the street, whither the melancholy chorus of the women's song had also followed us, and where it died pathetically away In the evening we walked to the Piazza Virgil- iana, the beautiful space laid out and planted with trees by the French, at the beginning of this century 'in honor of the great Mantuan poet. One of it» DUCAL MANTUA. 381 bounds is tlie shore of the lake which surrounds the city,. and from which now rose ghostly vapors on the Btill twilight air. Down the slow, dull current moved one of the picturesque black boats of the Po ; and beyond, the level landscape had a pleasant des- olation that recalled the scenery of the Middle Mis- sissippi. It might have been here in this very water that the first-born of our first Duke of Mantua fell from his boat while hunting water-fowl in 1550, and took a fever of which he died only a short time after his accession to the sovereignty of the duchy. At any rate, the fact of the accident brings me back from lounging up and down Mantua to my grave duty of chronicler. Francesco's father had left him in childliood to the care of his uncle, the Cardinal Hercules, who ruled Mantua with a firm and able hand, increasing the income of the state, spending less upon the ducal stud, and cutting down the number of mouths at the ducal table from eight hundred to three hundred and fifty-one. His justice tended to severity rather than mercy ; but reformers of our own time will argue well of his heart, that he founded in that time a place of refuge and retirement for abandoned women. Good Cathohcs will also be pleased to know that he was very efficient in sup- pressing the black heresy of Calvin, which had crept into Mantua in his day, — probably from Ferrara, iv^here the black heretic liimself was then, or about chen, in hiding under the protection of the ill-advised Marchioness Ren^e. The good Cardinal received the Pope's applause for his energy in this matter, 382 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. and I doubt not liis hand fell heavily on the Calvin- ists. Of the Duke who died so young, the Vene- tian aiiibassador thought it worth while to write what I tliink it worth while to quote, as illustrating the desire of the Senate to have careful knowledge of its neighbors : '' He is a boy of melancholy com- plexion. His eyes are full of spirit, but he does not dehght in childish things, and seems secretly proud of being lord. He has an excellent memory, and shows much inchnation for letters." His brother Guglielmo, who succeeded him in 1550, seems to have had the same affection for learning ; but he was willful, harsh, and cruelly am- bitious, and cared, an old writer says, for nothing BO much as perpetuating the race of the Gonzagas in Mantua. He was a hmichback, and some of his family (who could not have understood his charac- ter) tried to persuade him not to assume the ducal dignity ; but his haughty temper soon righted him in their esteem, and it is said that all the courtiers put on humps in honor of the Duke. He was not a great warrior, and there are few picturesque inci- dents in his reign. Indeed, nearly the last of these in Mantuan history was the coronation at Mantua of the excellent poet Lodovico Ariosto, by Charles v., in 1532, Federico H. reigning. But the Man- tuans of Guglielmo's day were not without their sensations, for three Japanese ambassadors passed through their city on the way to Rome. They were also awakened to religious zeal by the reappearance of Protestantism among them. The heresy was DUCAL MANTUA. 383 happily suppressed by the Inquisition, acting under Pius v., though with small thanlis to Duke Wil- liam, who seems to have taken no fervent part in the persecutions. " The proceedings," says Cantu, wi'iting before slavery had been aboHshed, " were marked by those punishments which free America inflicts upon the negroes to-day, and which a high conception of the mission of the Church moves us to deplore." The Duke must have made haste after this to reconcile himself with the Church ; for we read that two years later he was permitted to take a particle of the blood of Christ from the church of St. Andrea to that of Sta. Barbara, where he de- posited it in a box of crystal and gold, and caused his statue to be placed before the shrine in the act of adoring the rehc. Duke Wilham managed his finances so well as to leave his spendthrift son Vincenzo a large sum of money to make away with after his death. Part of this, indeed, he had earned by obedience to his father's wishes in the article of matrimony. The prince was in love with the niece of the Duke of Bavaria, very lovely and certainly high-bom enough, but having unhappily only sixty thousand crowns to Qer portion. So she was not to be thought of, and Vincenzo married the sister of the Duke of Parma, of whom he grew so fond, that, though two years of marriage brought them no children, he could scarce be persuaded to suffer her divorce on account of sterility. This happened, however, and the prince's affections were next engaged by the daughter of the 384 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. Grand Duke of Tuscany. The lady had a portion of three hundred thousand crowns, which entirely charmed the frugal-minded Duke William, and Vincenzo married her, after certain diplomatic pre- liminaries demanded by the circumstances, which scarcely bear statement in English, and which the present history would blush to give even in Italian. Indeed, he was a great beast, this splendid Vin- cenzo, both by his own fault and that of others ; but it ought to be remembered of him, that at his solicitation the most clement lord of Ferrara liber- ated frora durance in the hospital of St. Anna his poet Tasso, whom he had kept shut in that mad- house seven years. On his delivery, Tasso addressed Ms " Discorso " to Yincenzo's kinsman, the learned Cardinal Scipio Gonzaga ; and to this prelate he submitted for correction the " Gerusalemme," as did Guarini his " Pastor Fido." When Vincenzo came to power he found a fat treasury, which he enjoyed after the fashion of the time, and which, having a princely passion for every costly pleasure, he soon emptied. He was crowned in 1587 ; and on his coronation day rode through the streets throwing gold to the people, after the manner of the Mantuan Dukes. He kept up an army of six thousand men, among a population of eighty thousand all told ; and maintained as his guard " fifty archers on horseback, who also served with the arquebuse, and fifty light-horsemen for the guard of his own person, who were all excellently mounted, the Duke possessing such a noble sti'd o DUCAL MAl^TUA. 385 horses that he always had five hundred at his ser- vice, and kept in stable one hundred and fifty of marvelous beauty." He lent the Spanish king two hundred thousand pounds out of his father's spar- ings ; and when the Archduchess of Austria, Mar- gherita, passed through Mantua on her way to wed Philip II. of Spain, he gave her a diamond ring worth twelve thousand crowns. Next after women, he was madly fond of the theatre, and spent im- mense sums for actors. He would not, indeed, cede in splendor to the greatest monarchs, and in his reign of fifteen years he squandered fifty million crowns ! No one will be surprised to learn from a contemporary writer in Mantua, that this excellent prince was adorned with all the Chi'istian virtues ; nor to be told by a later historian, that in Vin- cenzo's time Mantua was the most corrupt city in Europe. A satu-e of the year 1601, which this writer (Maffei) reduces to prose, says of that pe- riod : " Everywhere in Mantua are seen feasts, jousts, masks, banquets, plays, musicj balls, delights, dancing. To these, the young girls," an enormity in Italy, " as well as the matrons, go in magnificent dresses ; and even the churches are scenes of love- making. Good mothers, instead of teaching their daughters the use of the needle, teach them the arts of rouging, dressing, singing, and dancing. Naples and Milan scarcely produce silk enough, or India and Peru gold and gems enough, to deck out female impudence and pride. Courtiers and warriors per- fume themselves as delicately as ladies ; and 8ven 25 386 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. the food is scented, that the mouth may exha.e hn grance. The galleries and halls of the houses are painted full of the loves of Mars and Venus, Leda and the Swan, Jove and Danae, while the devout solace themselves with such sacred subjects as Su- sannah and the Elders. The flower of chastity seems withered in Mantua. No longer in Lydia nor in Cyprus, but in Mantua, is fixed the realm of pleasure." The Mantuans were a different peo- ple in the old repubhcan times, when a fine was imposed for blasphemy, and the blasphemer put into a basket and drowned in the lake, if he did not pay within fifteen days ; which must have made profan- ity a luxury even to the rich. But in that day a man had to pay twenty soldi (seventy-five cents) if he spoke to a woman in church; and women were not allowed even the moderate diversion of going to funerals, and could not wear silk lace about the neck, nor have dresses that dragged more than a yard, nor crowns of pearls or gems, nor belts worth more than ten livres (twenty-five dollars), uor purses worth more than fifteen soldi (fifty cents.) Possibly as an antidote for the corruption brought into the world with Vincenzo, there was another Gonzaga born about the same period, who became in due time Saint Louis Gonzaga, and remains to this day one of the most powerful friends of virtue to whom a good Catholic can pray. He is par- ticularly recommended by his biographer, the Je* Buit Father Cftsari, in cases of carnal temptation DUCAL MANTUA. 387 aud improving stories are told Italian youth of the miracles he works under such circumstances. Ht vowed chastity for his own part at an age when most children do not know good from evil, and he carried the fulfillment of this vow to such extreme, that, being one day at play of forfeits with other boys and girls, and being required to kiss — not one of the httle maidens — but her shadow on the wall, he would not, preferring to lose his pawn. Everybody, I think, v^ll agree with Father Cesari that it would be hard to draw chastity finer than this. San Luigi Gonzaga descended from that RidoKo who put his wife to death, and his father was Mar- quis of Castiglione delle Stivere. He was born in 1568, and, being the first son, was heir to the mar- quisate ; but from his earliest years he had a call to the Church. His family did everything possible to dissuade liim — his father with harshness, and his uncle, Duke William of Mantua, with tenderness — from his vocation. The latter even sent a " bishop of rare eloquence " to labor with the boy at Castig- lione ; but everything was done in vain. In due time Luigi joined the Company of Jesus, renounced this world, and died at Rome in the odor of sanctity, fifter doing such good works as surprised every one. His brother Ridolfo succeeded to the marquisate, and fell into a quarrel with Duke William about 'ands, which dispute Luigi composed before his death. About all which the reverend Jesuit Father Tolomei has shown how far heaviness can go in thfl d88 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. dramatic form, and lias written a pitiless play, wherein everybody goes into a convent with the fall of the curtain. Till the reader has read this pla,y, he has never (properly speaking) been bored. Fol the happiness of mankind, it has not been translated out of the original Italian. From the time of the first Yincenzo's death, there are only two tragic events which lift the character of Mantuan history above the quaUty of chronique seandaleu»e, namely, the Duke Ferdinand's repudia- tion of Camilla Faa di Casale, and the sack of Man- tua in 1630. The first of these events followed close upon the demise of the splendid Vincenzo ; for his son Francesco reigned but a short time, and died, leaving a little daughter of three years to the guardianship of her imcle, the Cardinal Ferdinand. The law of the Mantuan succession excluded fe- .nales ; and Ferdinand, dispensed from his ecclesi- astical functions by the Pope, ascended the ducal throne. In 1615, not long after his accession, as the chronicles relate, in passing through a chamber oi the palace he saw a young girl playing upon a cithern, and being himseM young, and of the ardent temper of the Gonzagas, he fell in love with the fair minstrel. She was the daughter of a noble servant of the Duke, who had once been his ambassador to the court of the Duke of Savoy, and was called (Jount Ardizzo Faa Monf errino di Casale ; but his Grace did not on that account hesitate to attempt corrupting her ; indeed, a courtly father of that day might well be supposed to have few scruples that DUCAL MANTUA. 389 would interfere with a gracious sovereign's designs upon his daughter. Singularly enough, the chastity of Camilla was so well guarded that the ex-cardinal was at last forced to propose marriage. It seems that the poor girl loved her ducal wooer ; and be- sides, the ducal crown was a glittering temptation, and she consented to a marriage which, for state and family reasons, was made secret. When the fact was bruited, it raised the wrath and ridicule of Ferdinand's family, and the Duke's sister Margaret, Duchess of Ferrara, had so lofty a disdain of his mesalliance with an inferior, that she drove him to desperation with her sarcasms. About this time Camilla's father died, with strong evidences of poi- soning ; and the wife being left helpless and friend- less, her noble husband resorted to the artifice of feigning that there had never been any marriage, and thus sought to appease his family. Unhappily, however, he had given her a certificate of matri- mony, which she refused to surrender when he put her away, so that the Duke, desiring afterwards to espouse the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was obliged to present a counterfeit certificate to his bride, who believed it the real marriage contract, and destroyed it. When the Duchess discovered the imposition, she would not rest till she had wrung the real document from Camilla, under the threat of putting her son to death. The miserable mother then retired to a convent, and died of a bro- ken heart, while Ferdinand bastardized his only legitimate son, a noble boy, whom his mother had 890 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. prettily called Jacinth. After tHs, a kind of retri- bution, amid all his political successes, seems to have pursued the guilty Duke. His second wife was too fat to bear children, but not to bear mahce ; and she never ceased to distrust and reproach the Duke, whom she could not believe in anything since the affair of the counterfeit marriage contract. She was very rehgious, and embittered Ferdinand's days with continued sermons and reproofs, and made him order, in the merry Mantuan court, all the devotions commanded by her confessor. So Ferdinand died childless, and, it is said, in sore remorse, and was succeeded in 1626 by his brother Vincenzo, another hope of the faith and light of the Church. His brief reign lasted but one year, and was ignoble as it was brief, and fitly ended the direct line of the Gonzagas. Vincenzo, though an ecclesiastic, never studied anything, and was dis- gracefully ignorant. Lacking the hereditary love of letters, he had not the warlike boldness of his race ; and resembled his ancestors only in the love he bore to horses, hunting, and women. He was enamored of the widow of one of his kinsmen, a woman no longer young, but of still agreeable per- son, strong will, and quick wit, and of a fascinating presence, which Vincenzo could not resist. The excellent prince was wooing her, with a view to se- duction, when he received the nomination of car- dinal from Pope Paul V. He pressed his suit, but ^e lady would consent to nothing but marriage ind Vincenzo bundled up the cardinal's purple and DUCAL MANTUA. 391 sent it back, Avith a very careless and ill-mannered letter to the ireful Pope, who swore never to make another Gonzaga cardinal. He then married the widow, but soon wearied of her, and spent the rest of his days in vain attempts to secure a divorce, in order to be restored to his ecclesiastical benefices. And one Christmas morning he died childless ; and three years later the famous sack of Mantua took place. The events leading to this crime are part of one of the most complicated episodes of ItaUan his- tory. Ferdinand, as guardian of his brother's daughter Maria, claimed the Duchy of Monferrato as part of his dominion ; but his claim was disputed by Maria's grandfather, the Duke of Savoy, who contended that it reverted to him, on the death of his daughter, as a fief which had been added to Mantua merely by the intermarriage of the Gonzagas -with his family. He was supported in this claim by the Spaniards, then at Milan. The Venetians and the German Emperor supported Ferdinand, and the French ad- vanced the claim of a third, a descendant of Lodo- vico Gonzaga, who had left Mantua a century before, and entered upon the inheritance of the Duchy of Xevers-Rethel. The Duke of Savoy was one of the boldest of his warlike race; and the Italians had great hopes of him as one great enough to drive the barbarians out of Italy. But nearly three cen- turies more were wanted to raise his family to the magnitude of a national purpose ; and Carlo Eman- ael spent his greatness in disputes with the petty 392 ITALIAN JOUENEYS. princes about him. In this dispute for MonfeiTatus and amiable prince ; and, though a shameless profligate, was beloved by his subjects, with whom, no doubt, his profligacy was not a reproach. 396 ITALIAN JOITENEYS. Ferdinand Carlo, whose ignoble reign lasted from 1665 to 1708, was the last and basest of his race. The histories of his country do not attribute a sin- gle virtue to this unhappy prince, who seems to liave united in himself all the yices of all the Gon- zagas. He was licentious and depraved as the first Vincenzo, and he had not Vincenzo's courage ; he was luxurious as the second Francesco, but had none of his generosity ; he taxed his people heavily that he might meanly enjoy their substance without making them even the poor return of national glory ; he was grasping as Gughelmo, but saved nothing to the state ; he was as timid as the second Vincenzo, and yet made a feint of making war, and went- to Hungary at one time to fight against the Turk. But he loved far better to go to Venice in his gilded barge, and to spend his Carnivals amid the infinite variety of that city's dissoluteness. He was so igno- rant as scarcely to be able to write his name ; but he knew all vicious things from his cradle, as if, in- deed, he had been gifted to know them by instinct through the profligacy of his parents. It is said that even the degraded Mantuans blushed to be ruled by so dull and ignorant a wretch ; but in his time, nevertheless, Mantua was all rejoicings, promenades, pleasure-voyages, and merry-makings. " The Duke recruited women from every country to stock his palace," says an Italian author, " where they played, sang, and made merry at his will and theirs." " In Venice," says Volta, " he surren- dered himseK to such diversions without shame, of DUCAL MANTUA. 391 stint of expense. He not only took part, in all pub- lic entertainments and pleasures of that capital, but he held a most luxurious and gallant court of his own ; and all night long liis pahice was the scene of theatiical representations by dissolute women, with music and banqueting, so that he had a worse name than Sardanapalus of old." He sneaked away to these gross delights in 1700, while the Emperor was at war with the Spaniards, and left his Duchess (a brave and noble woman, the daughter of Ferrante Gonzaga, Duke of Guastalla) to take care of the duchy, then in great part occupied by Spanish and French forces. This was the War of the Spanish Succession; and it used up poor Ferdinand, who had not a shadow of interest in it. He had sold the fortress of Casale to the French in 1681, feign- ing that they had taken it from him by fraud ; and now he declared that he was forced to admit eight thousand French and Spanish troops into Mantua. Perhaps indeed he was, but the Emperor never would believe it ; and he pronounced Ferdinand guilty of felony against the Empire, and deposed him from his duchy. The Duke appealed against this sentence to the Diet of Ratisbon, and, pending the Diet's decision, made a journey of pleasure to France, where the Grand Monarch named him gen- erahssimo of the French forces in Italy, though he never commanded them. He came back to Mantua after a little, and built himself a splendid theatre, — the cheerful Duke. But his end was near. The French and A lis- 898 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. crians made peace in 1707 ; and next year, Monfer rato having fallen to Savoy, the Austrians entered Mantua, whence the Duke promptly fled. The Austrians marched into Mantua on the 29th of Feb ruary, that being leap-year, and Ferdinand came back no more. Indeed, trusting in false hopes of restoration held out to him by Venice and France, he died on the 5th of the July following, at Padua, — it was said by poison, but more probably of sin and sorrow. So ended Ducal Mantua. The Austrians held the city till 1797. The French Revolution took it and kept it till 1799, and then left it to the Austrians for two years. Then the Cisalpine Republic possessed it till 1802 ; and then it was made part of the Kingdom of Italy, and so continued twelve years ; after which it fell again to Austria. In 1848, there was a revolution, and the Austrian soldiers stole the precious silver case that held the phial of the true blood. Now at last, it belongs to the Kingdom of Italy, with the other forts of the Quadrilateral — thanks to the Prussian needle-gjun. ^tanbarD anti ^i^opular Hibrarp 25oDfe^ SELECTED FROM •THE CATALOGUE OF HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. A Club of One. An Anonymous Volume, i6mo, ^1.25. Brooks Adams. The Emancipation of Massachusetts, crown 8vo, $1.50. John Adams and Abigail Adams. Familiar Letters of, during the Revolution, i2mo, $2.00. Oscar Fay Adams. Handbook of English Authors, i6mo, 75 cents; Handbook of American Authors, i6mo. 75 cents. Louis Agassiz. 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