I NEW AND REVISED EDITION OF "OLIVER TWIST," IN TEN MONTHLY PARTS. Publishing in Monthly Parts, price One Shilling each, toith Two Illustrations on Steel, (uniform with " The Pickwick Papers,") OLIVER TWIST. BY CHARLES DICKENS. ILLUSTKATED BY GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. ^* - This Edition has been carefully corrected by the Author thi-oughout, and it will contain the whole of the original Illustrations. A NEW ENGLISH STORY, BY MR. DICKENS, In Twenty Monthly Parts, price One Shilling each, uniform with "Martin Chuzzlewit," &c. IS NOW IN PREPARATION. No. I. icill be published on the First of October. PICTURES FROM ITALY. PICTURES FROM ITALY.c BY CHARLES DICKENS. The Vignette Illustrations on Wood, ty Samuel Palmer. The Street of the Tombs: Pompeii. LONDON: PUBLISHED FOR THE AUTHOR, BY BRADBURY & EVANS, WHITEFRIARS. iwncccxLvr. LONDON : BRADBURY AND EVANS, PniNTERr, WHITErRIARS. CONTENTS. PAGE THE reader's passport 1 GOING THROUGH FRANCE ....... 5 LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON . 17 AVIGNON TO GENOA . 30 GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD . . . .38 TO PARMA, MODENA, AND BOLOGNA 84 THROUGH BOLOGNA AND FERRARA . . . .98 AN ITALIAN DREAM . . „ . . ' . . . 107 BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE SIMPLON INTO SWITZERLAND . . . . 120 TO ROME BY PISA AND SIENA 144 ROME 165 A RAPID DIORAMA TO NAPLES 233 NAPLES 237 POMPEII — HERCULANEUM 243 P.ESTUM 247 VESUVIUS 248 RETURN TO NAPLES 255 MONTE CASSINO 261 FLORENCE 265 FTi a (nl ¥\ t: ^^ ^' w i^'id ^s^aj< ;'5rSJ i^eatret^is passport. ^^ If the readers of this vokime will be so kind as to take their credentials for the different places ^Yhich are the subject of its author's reminiscences, from the Author himself, perhaps they may visit them, in fancy, the more agreeably, and with a better understanding of what they are to expect. Many books have been written upon Italy, affording many means of studying the history of that interesting coimtn-, and the in- numerable associations entwined m i rii^^^ ^.m ,i: -'?"-; THE VILLA D\tSlE &.J IIVOLI FROM THE CYPRESS AVENUE. 2 THE header's passport. about it. I make but little reference to that stock of information ; not at all regarding it as a necessaiy con- sequence of my lia\ing had recourse to the storehouse for my own benefit, that I should reproduce its easily accessible contents before the eyes of my readers. Neither will there be fomid, in these pages, any grave examination into the government or misgovemment of any portion of the country. No visiter of that beautiful land can fail to have a strong conviction on the subject ; but as I chose when residing there, a Foreigner, to abstain from the discussion of any such questions with any order of Italians, so I would rather not enter on the inquiry now. During my twelve months' occupation of a house at Genoa, I never found that authorities consti- tutionally jealous, were distrustful of me ; and I should be Sony to give them occasion to regret their free cour- tesy, either to myself or any of my countrymen. There is, probably, not a famous Pictm'e or Statue in all Italy, but could be easily bmied under a mountain of prmted paper devoted to dissertations on it. I do not, therefore, though an earnest admirer of Painting and Sculptm"e, expatiate at any length on famous Pictures and Statues. This Book is a series of faint reflections — mere shadows in the water — of places to which the ima- ginations of most people are attracted in a gi'eater or less degree, on which mine had dwelt for years, and which have some interest for all. The greater part of the descriptions were written on the spot, and sent home, from time to time, in private letters. I do not THE EEADEr's passport. mention the circumstance as an excuse for any defects they may present, for it would be none; but as a guarantee to the Reader that they were at least penned in the fulness of the subject, and with the liveliest impressions of novelty and freshness. If they have ever a fanciful and idle air, perhaps the reader will suppose them written in the shade of a Sunny Day, in the midst of the objects of which they treat, and will like them none the worse for having such influences of the country upon them. I hope I am not likely to be misunderstood by Pro- fessors of the Roman Catholic faith, on account of any- thing contained in these pages. I have done my best, in one of my former productions, to do justice to them ; and I trust, m this, they will do justice to me. When I mention any exhibition that impressed me as absurd or disagreeable, I do not seek to connect it, or recognise it as necessarily connected, with, any essentials of their creed. When I treat of the ceremonies of the Holy Week, I merely treat of their effect, and do not chal- lenge the good and learned Dr. Wiseman's intei^reta- tion of their meaning. When I hint a dislike of nunneries for young girls who abjure the world before they have ever proved or known it; or doubt the ex officio sanctity of all Priests and Friars ; I do no more than many conscientious Catholics both abroad and at home. ' I have hkened these Pictures to shadows in the water, and would fain hope that I have, nowhere, stirred the water so roughly, as to mar the shadows. I could B 2 4 THE READERS PASSPORT. never desire to be on better terms with all my friends than now, when distant mountains rise, once more, in my path. For I need not hesitate to avow, that, bent on correcting a brief mistake I made, not long ago, in disturbing the old relations between myself and my readers, and departing for a moment from my old pm'suits, I am about to resume them, joyfully, in Switzerland : where, during another year of absence, I can at once work out the themes I have now in my mind, without interruption : and, while I keep my English audience within speaking distance, extend my knowledge of a noble country, inexpressibly attractive to me. This book is made as accessible as possible, because it would be a great pleasure to me if I could hope, through its means, to compare impressions with some among the multitudes who will hereafter visit the scenes described, with interest and delight. And I have only now, in passport wise, to slietch my reader s portrait, which I hope may be thus suppositi- tiously traced for either sex : — Complexion Eyes Nose Mouth . Visage General Expression Fair. Very cheerful. Not supercilious. Smiling. Beaming. Extremely agreeable. THE COLOSSEUM OF ROMS. GOING THROUGH FRANCE. N a fine Sunday morning in the Midsummer time and weather of eighteen hundred and forty-foui', it was, my good friend, when — don't be alarmed; not when two travellers might have been observed slowly making their way over that picturesque and broken ground by which the first chapter of a Middle Aged novel is usually attained — but when an English travelling car- riage of considerable proportions, fresh fi'om the shady halls of the Panteclniicon near Belgrave-square, London, 6 PICTURES FEOM ITALY. was observed (by a very small French soldier; for I saw him look at it) to issue from the gate of the Hotel Memice in the Rue PJvoli at Paris. I am no more bound to explain why the English family travelling by this carriage, inside and out, should be starting for Italy on a Sunday morning, of all good days in the week, than I am to assign a reason for all the little men in France being soldiers, and all the big men postilions: which is the invariable rule. But, they had some sort of reason for what they did, I have no doubt ; and their reason for being there at all, was, as you know, that they were going to live in fair Genoa for a year ; and that the head of the family purposed, in that space of time, to stroll about, wherever his restless humour carried him. And it would have been small comfort to me to have explained to the population of Paris generally, that I was that Head and Chief; and not the radiant embodiment of good-humour who sat beside me in the person of a French Courier — best of servants and most beaming of men ! Truth to say, he looked a great deal more patriarchal than I, who, in the shadow of his portly presence, dwindled down to no account at all. There was, of course, very little in the aspect of Paris — as we rattled near the dismal Morgue and over the Pont Neuf — to reproach us for our Sunday travelling. The wine-shops (every second house) were driving a roaring trade ; awnings were spreading, and chairs and tables arranging, outside the cafes, preparatory to the eating of ices, and drinking of cool liquids, later in the DEPAETUEE FEOM PAEIS. day ; shoe-blacks were busy on the bridges ; shops were open ; carts and waggons clattered to and fro ; the narrow, up-hill, funnel-like streets across the Paver, were so many dense perspectives of crowd and bustle, parti-coloured night-caps, tobacco-pipes, blouses, large boots, and shaggy heads of hair ; nothing at that hour denoted a day of rest, unless it were the appearance, here and there, of a family pleasure-party, crammed into a bulky old lumbering cab ; or of some contemplative holiday maker in the freest and easiest dishabille, leaning out of a low garret window, watching the drying of his newly polished shoes on the little parapet outside (if a gentleman), or the airing of her stockings in the sun (if a lady), with calm anticipation. Once clear of the never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven pavement which surrounds Paris, the first three days of travelling towards Marseilles, are quiet and monotonous enough. To Sens. ToAvallon. To Chalons. A sketch of one day's proceedings is a sketch of all three ; and here it is. We have four horses, and one postilion, who has a yerj long whip, and drives his team, something like the Cornier of Saint Petersburgh in the circle at Astley s or Franconi's : only he sits his own horse instead of standing on him. The immense jack-boots worn by these postilions, are sometimes a centmy or two old ; and are so ludicrously disproportionate to the wearer's foot, that the spur, which is put where his own heel comes, is generally halfway up the leg of the boots. The man often comes out of the stable-yard, with his whip in his hand and his shoes on, and brings out, in both 8 PICTURES FROM ITALY. hands, one boot at a time, which he plants on the ground by the side of his horse, with great gravity, until every- thing is ready. When it is — and oh Heaven! the noise they make about it ! — he gets into the boots, shoes and all, or is hoisted into them by a couple of friends ; adjusts the rope-hamess, embossed by the labom's of innumerable pigeons in the stables ; makes all the horses kick and plunge ; cracks his whip like a madman ; shouts "En route — Hi! " and away we go. He is sure to have a contest with his horse before we have gone very far ; and then he calls him a Thief, and a Brigand, and a Pig, and what not ; and beats him about the head as if he were made of wood. There is little more than one variety in the appear- ance of the countiy, for the first two days. From a dreary plain, to an interminable avenue ; and from an interminable avenue, to a dreary plain again. Plenty of vines there are, in the open fields, but of a short low kind, and not trained in festoons, but about straight sticks. Beggars innumerable there are, everywhere; but an extraordinarily scanty population, and fewer children than I ever encountered, I don't believe we saw a hundred children between Paris and Chalons. Queer old towns, draw-bridged and walled : with odd little towers at the angles, like grotesque faces, as if the wall had put a mask on, and were staring, down into the moat ; other strange little towers, in gardens and fields, and down lanes, and m farm-yards : all alone, and always romid, with a peaked roof, and never used for any pm-pose at all ; niinous buildmgs of all TO CH.\LONS. 9 sorts : sometimes an hotel de villa, sometimes a guard- house, sometimes a dwelling-house, sometimes a chateau with a rank garden, prolific in dandelion, and watched over by extinguisher-topped tm'rets, and hlink-eyed little casements ; are the standard objects, repeated over and over again. Sometimes, we pass a village inn, with a crumbling wall belonging to it, and a perfect town of out-houses : and painted over the gateway, " Stabling for Sixty Horses;" as indeed there might be stabHng for sixty score, were there any horses to be stabled there, or anybody resting there, or anything stirring about the place but a danglmg bush, indicative of the wine inside : which flutters idly in the wind, in lazy keeping with everything else, and certainly is never in a green old age, though always so old as to be dropping to pieces. And all day long, strange little narrow waggons, in strings of six or eight, bringing cheese from Switzerland, and frequently in charge, the whole line, of one man or even boy — and he veiy often asleep in the foremost cart — come jinglmg past : the horses di'owsily ringing the bells upon their harness, and looking as if they thought (no doubt they do) their great blue woolly furniture, of immense weight and thick- ness with a pair of grotesque horns growing out of the collar, very much too warm for the Midsummer weather. Then, there is the Diligence, twice or thrice a-day; with the dusty outsides in blue frocks, like butchers ; and the insides in white nightcaps ; and its cabriolet head on the roof, nodding and shaking, like an idiot's head ; and its Young-France passengers staring out of \Nindow, 10 PICTURES FROM ITALY. with beards down to their waists, and blue spectacles awfully shading their warlike eyes, and very big sticks clenched in their National grasp. Also the Malle Poste, with only a couple of passengers, tearing along at a real good dare-devil pace, and out of sight in no time. Steady old Cures come jolting past, now and then, in such ramshackle, rusty, musty, clatteriug coaches as no Englishman would believe in ; and bony women daudle about in solitary places, holding cows by ropes while they feed, or digging and hoeing, or doing field-work of a more laborious kind, or representing real shepherdesses with their flocks — to obtain an adequate idea of which pursuit and its followers, in any countr}'', it is only necessary to take any pastoral poem, or pictm'e, and imagine to your- self whatever is most exquisitely and widely unlike the descriptions therein contained. You have been travelling along, stupidly enough, as you generally do in the last stage of the day ; and the ninety-six bells upon the horses — twenty-four apiece — have been ringing sleepily in your ears for half an hour or so ; and it has become a veiy jog-trot, mono- tonous, tiresome sort of business ; and you have been thinking deeply about the dinner you will have at the next stage ; when, down at the end of the long avenue of trees through which you are travellmg, the first indi- cation of a town appears, in the shape of some straggling cottages : and the carriage begins to rattle and roll over a horribly uneven pavement. As if the equipage were a great firework, and the mere sight of a smoking cottage chimney had lighted it, instantly it begins to crack and TO CHALONS. 11 splutter, as if the veiy devil were in it. Crack, crack, crack, crack. Crack-crack-crack. Crick-crack. Crick-crack. Helo ! Hola ! Vite ! Voleur ! Brigand ! Hi hi hi ! En r-r-r-r-r-route ! Whip, wheels, driver, stones, beggars, children ; crack, crack, crack ; helo ! hola ! charite pour I'amour de Dieu ! crick-crack-crick-crack; crick, crick, crick ; bump, jolt, crack, bump, crick-crack ; round the comer, up the narrow street, down the paved hill on the other side ; in the gutter; bump, bump; jolt, jog, crick, crick, crick ; crack, crack, crack ; into the shop-windows on the left hand side of the street, preliminary to a sweeping turn into the wooden archway on the right; rumble, rumble, iiimble ; clatter, clatter, clatter ; crick, crick, crick ; and here we are in the yard of the Hotel de I'Ecu d'Or; used up, gone out, smoldng, spent, exhausted ; but sometimes making a false start unex- pectedly, with nothing coming of it — like a firework to the last ! The landlady of the Hotel de I'Ecu d'Or is here ; and the landlord of the Hotel de I'Ecu d'Or is here ; and the femme de chambre of the Hotel de I'Ecu d'Or is here ; and a gentleman in a glazed cap, mth a red beard like a bosom friend, who is staying at the Hotel de I'Ecu d'Or is here ; and Monsieur le Cure is walking up and down in a corner of the yai'd by himself, with a shovel hat upon his head, and a black gown on his back, and a book in one hand, and an umbrella in the other ; and everybody, except Monsieur le Cm^e, is open-mouthed and open-eyed, for the opening of the carriage-door. The landlord of the Hotel de I'Ecu d'Or, dotes to that 12 PICTURES FEOM ITALY. extent upon the Courier, that he can hardly wait for his coming down from the box, but embraces his very legs and boot-heels as he descends. "My Courier! My brave Cornier ! My friend I My brother ! " The land- lady loves him, the femme de chambre blesses him, the gar^on worships him. The Courier asks if his letter has been received? It has, it has. Are the rooms prepared? They are, they are. The best rooms for my noble Courier. The rooms of state for my gallant Comder ; the whole house is at the service of my best of friends ! He keeps his hand upon the carriage-door, and asks some other question to enhance the expectation. He carries a green leathern purse outside his coat, suspended by a belt. The idlers look at it ; one touches it. It is full of five-franc pieces. Murmm-s of admiration are heard among the boys. The landlord falls upon the Courier's neck, and folds him to his breast. He is so much fatter than he was, he says ! He looks so rosy and so well ! The door is opened. Breathless expectation. The lady of the family gets out. Ah sweet lady ! Beautiful lady ! The sister of the lady of the family gets out. Great Heaven, Ma'amselle is charming! Fkst little boy gets out. Ah, what a beautiful little boy ! First little gui gets out. Oh, but this is an enchantmg cliild ! Second little girl gets out. The landlady, pelding to the finest impulse of our common natm'e, catches her up in her arms ! Second little boy gets out. Oh, the sweet boy ! Oh, the tender little family ! The baby is handed out. Angelic baby ! The baby has topped TO CHALONS. 13 everything. All the rapture is expended on the baby ! Then the two nui'ses tumble out ; and the enthusiasm swelling into madness, the whole family are swept up stairs as on a cloud; while the idlers press about the carriage, and look into it, and walk round it, and touch it. For it is something to touch a carriage that has held so many people. It is a legacy to leave one's children. The rooms are on the first floor, except the nursery for the night, which is a great ramblmg chamber, with four or five beds in it : through a dark passage, up two steps, down fom% past a pump, across a balcony, and next door to the stable. The other sleeping apartments are large and lofty; each with two small bedsteads, tastefully hung, like the wuidows, with red and w^hite drapery. The sitting-room is famous. Dinner is already laid in it for three ; and the napldns are folded in cocked-hat fashion. The floors are of red tile. There are no cai'pets, and not much furniture to speak of ; but there is abmidance of looking-glass, and there are large vases mider glass shades, filled with artificial flowers ; and there are plenty of clocks. The whole party are in motion. The brave Cornier, in particular, is everywhere : looking after the beds, ha^dng ^vuie pom'ed down his thi'oat by his dear brother the landlord, and picking up green cucumbers — always cucumbers ; Heaven Imows where he gets them — with which he walks about, one in each hand, like tnmcheons. Dinner is announced. There is very thin soup ; there are very large loaves — one apiece ; a fish ; four dishes 14 PICTURES FROM ITALY. afterwards ; some poultry afterwards ; a dessert afterwards ; and no lack of wine. There is not much in the dishes ; but they are very good, and always ready instantly. When it is nearly dark, the brave Courier, having eaten the two cucumbers, sliced up in the contents of a pretty large decanter of oil, and another of vinegar, emerges from liis retreat below, and proposes a visit to the Cathedral, whose massive tower frowns down upon the courtyard of the inn. Off we go ; and very solemn and grand it is, m the dim light : so dim at last, that the polite, old, lanthorn-jawed Sacristan has a feeble little bit of candle in his hand, to grope among the tombs with — and looks among the grim columns, very like a lost ghost who is searching for his own. Underneath the balcony, when we return, the inferior servants of the inn are supping in the open air, at a great table ; the dish a stew of meat and vegetables, smoking hot, and served in the iron cauldron it was boiled in. They have a pitcher of thin wine, and are very merry ; merrier than the gentleman with the red beard, who is pla3dng billiards in the light room on the left of the yard, where shadows, with cues in their hands, and cigars in their mouths, cross and recross the window, constantly. Still the tliin Cure walks up and down alone, with his book and umbrella. And there he walks, and there the billiard-balls rattle, long after we are fast asleep. We are astir at six next mornmg. It is a delightful day, shaming yesterday's mud upon the carriage, if any- thing could shame a carriage, in a land where carriages TO CHALONS. 15 are never cleaned. Everj^body is brisk ; and as we finish breakfast, the horses come jinghng into the yard from the Post-house. Everj^thing taken out of the carriage is put back again. The brave Cornier announces that all is ready, after walldng into eveiy room, and looking all round it, to be certain that nothing is left behind. Eveiy- body gets in. Everybody connected with the Hotel de I'Ecu d'Or is again enchanted. The brave Cornier runs into the house for a parcel containing cold fowl, sliced ham, bread, and biscuits, for Imich ; hands it into the coach ; and rmis back agam. What has he got in his hand now? More cucum- bers ? No. A long strip of paper. It 's the bill. The brave Courier has two belts on, this morning : one supportmg the purse : another, a mighty good sort of leathern bottle, filled to the throat with the best light Bordeaux wine in the house. He never pays the bill till this bottle is full. Then he disputes it. He disputes it now, violently. He is still the land- lord's brother, but by another father or mother. He is not so nearly related to him as he was last night. The landlord scratches his head. The brave Cornier points to certam figures in the bill, and intimates that if they remain there, the Hotel de I'Ecu d"Or is thenceforth and for ever an hotel de I'Ecu de cuivre. The landlord goes into a httle countmg-house. The brave Cornier follows, forces the bill and a pen into his hand, and tallvs more rapidly than ever. The landlord takes the pen. The Courier smiles. The landlord makes an 16 PICTURES FROM ITALY. alteration. The Courier cuts a joke. The landlord is affectionate, but not weakly so. He bears it like a man. He shakes hands with his brave brother, but he don't hug him. Still, he loves his brother; for he knows that he will be returning that way, one of these fine days, with another family, and he foresees that his heart will yearn towards him again. The brave Courier traverses all round the carriage once, looks at the drag, inspects the wheels, jumps up, gives the word, and away we go ! It is market morning. The market is held in the little square outside, in front of the cathedral. It is crowded with men and women, in blue, in red, in green, in white ; with canvassed stalls ; and fluttering mer- chandise. The country people are grouped about, with their clean baskets before them. Here, the lace-sellers; there, the butter and egg-sellers ; there, the fruit-sellers ; there, the shoe-makers. The whole place looks as if it were the stage of some great theatre, and the curtain had just run up, for a picturesque ballet. And there is the cathedral to boot : scene-Hke : all grim, and swarthy, and mouldering, and cold : just splashmg the pavement in one place with faint pm^^le drops, as the morning smi, entering by a little mndow on the eastern side, struggles through some stained glass panes, on the western. In five minutes we have passed the iron cross, with a little ragged kneeling-place of tmf before it, in the outsldrts of the town ; and are again upon the road. LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON. Chalons is a fair resting-place, in right of its good inn on the bank of the river, and the little steam-boats, gay with green and red paint, that come and go upon it : which make up a pleasant and refreshing scene, after the dusty roads. But, unless you would like to dwell on an enormous plain, with jagged rows of irregular poplars on it, that look in the distance like so many combs with broken teeth : and unless you would like to pass yom' life without the possibility of going up-hill, or going up anything but stairs : you would hai'dly approve of Chalons as a place of residence. You would probably like it better, however, than Lyons : which you may reach, if you will, in one of the before-mentioned steam-boats, in eight hours. What a city Lyons is ! Talk about people feelmg, at certain milucky times, as if they had tumbled from the clouds ! Here is a whole town that has tumbled, anyhow, out of the sky; having been first caught up, like other stones that tumble down from that region, out of fens and barren places, dismal to behold ! The two great streets through which the two great rivers c 18 PICTURES FROM ITALY. dash, and all the little streets whose name is Legion, were scorching, blistering, and sweltering. The houses, high and vast, dirty to excess, rotten as old cheeses, and as thickly peopled. All up the hills that hem the city in, these houses swarm ; and the mites in- side were lolling out of the wuidows, and drjdng their ragged clothes on poles, and crawling in and out at the doors, and coming out to pant and gasp upon the pave- ment, and creeping in and out among huge piles and bales of fusty, musty, stifling goods ; and living, or rather not dying till their time should come, in an exhausted receiver. Every manufacturing town, melted into one, would hardly convey an impression of Lyons as it presented itself to me : for all the imdrained, un- scavengered, qualities of a foreign town, seemed grafted, there, upon the native miseries of a manufacturing one ; and it bears such fniit as I would go some miles out of my way to avoid encomitering again. In the cool of the evenmg : or rather in the faded heat of the day : we went to see the Cathedral, where divers old women, and a few dogs, were engaged in contemplation. There was no difference, in pomt of cleanliness, between its stone pavement and that of the streets ; and there was a wax saint, in a little box like a berth aboai'd ship, with a glass front to it, whom Madame Tussaud would have nothing to say to, on any terms, and which even Westminster Abbey might be ashamed of. If you w^ould Imow all about the architecture of this church, or any other, its dates, dimensions, endowments, and history, is it not written m Mr. Murray's LYONS. 19 Guicle-Book, and may you not read it there, with thanks to him, as I did ! For this reason, I should abstain from mentioning the curious clock in Lyons Cathedral, if it were not for a small mistake I made, in connection with that piece of mechanism. The keeper of the church was very anxious it should be shown ; partly for the honom- of the esta- blishment and the town ; and partly, perhaps, because of Jais demdng a per-centage from the additional consider- ation. However that may be, it was set in motion, and thereupon a host of little doors flew open, and innumerable little figm'es staggered out of them, and jerked themselves back again, ^Nith that special unstea- diness of pm-pose, and hitching in the gait, which usually attaches to figures that are moved by clock-work. Mean^ while, the Sacristan stood explaining these wonders, and pomting them out, severally, with a wand. There was a centre puppet of the Virgin Maiy ; and close to her, a small pigeon-hole, out of which another and a veiy ill-looking puppet made one of the most sudden plunges I ever saw accomplished : instantly flopping back again at sight of her, and banging his little door, violently, after him. Taking this to be emblematic of the \dctoiy over Sin and Death, and not at all un- willing to show that I perfectly miderstood the subject, in anticipation of the showman, I raslily said, " Aha I The E\dl Spirit. To be sm'e. He is veiy soon disposed of." " Pardon Monsiem'," said the Sacristan, -uith a polite motion of his hand towards the little door, as if introducing somebody — " The Angel Gabriel ! "' c -2 20 PICTURES FROM ITALY. Soon after day-break next morning, we were steaming down the Arrowy Rhone, at the rate of twenty miles an hour, in a very dirty vessel full of merchandise, and with only three or four other passengers for our com- panions : among w^hom, the most remarkable was a silly, old, meek-faced, garlic-eating, immeasurably-polite Che- valier, with a dirty scrap of red ribbon hanging at his button-hole, as if he had tied it there, to remind himself of something : as Tom Noddy, in the farce, ties knots in his pocket-handkerchief. For the last two days, we had seen great sullen hills, the first indications of the Alps, lowering in the distance. Now, we were rushing on beside them : sometimes close beside them : sometimes with an intervening slope, covered with vineyards. Villages and small towns hang- ing in mid-air, with great woods of olives seen through the light open towers of their churches, and clouds moving slowly on, upon the steep acclivity behind them; ruined castles perched on every eminence ; and scattered houses in the clefts and gullies of the hills; made it very beautiful. The great height of these, too, making the buildings look so tiny, that they had all the charm of elegant models; their excessive whiteness, as con- trasted with the brown rocks, or the sombre, deep, dull, heavy green of the olive-tree ; and the puny size, and little slow walk of the Lilliputian men and women on the bank; made a charming picture. There were fer- ries out of number, too ; bridges ; the famous Pont d'Esprit, with I don't Imow how many arches ; to^\•ns where memorable wines are made ; Vallence, where AVIGNON. 21 Napoleon studied ; and the noble river, biinging, at every winding turn, new beauties into view. There lay before us, that same afternoon, the broken bridge of Avignon, and all the city baking m the sun ; yet with an under-done-pie-crust, battlemented, wall, that never will be brown, though it bake for centuries. The grapes were hanging in clusters in the streets, and the brilliant Oleander was in full bloom everywhere. The streets are old and very naiTow, but tolerably clean, and shaded by awnings stretched from house to house. Bright stuffs and handkerchiefs, curiosities, ancient frames of carved wood, old chairs, ghostly tables, saints, virgins, angels, and staring daubs of portraits, being exposed for sale beneath, it was veiy quaint and lively. All this was much set off, too, by the glimpses one caught, through rusty gates standing ajar, of quiet sleepy courtyards, having stately old houses within, as silent as tombs. It was all veiy like one of the descriptions in the Arabian Nights. The three one- eyed Calenders might have knocked at any one of those doors till the street rang again, and the porter who persisted in asldng questions — the man who had the delicious purchases put into his basket in the morning — might have opened it quite naturally. After breakfast next morning, we sallied forth to see the lions. Such a delicious breeze was blowing in, from the north, as made the walk delightful : though the pavement-stones, and stones of the walls and houses, were far too hot to have a hand laid on them comfortably. We went, first of all, up a rocky height, to the 22 PICTURES FROM ITALY. cathedral : where Mass was performing to an auditory . veiy like that of Lyons, namely, several old women, a baby, and a very self-possessed dog, who had marked out for himself a little course or platform for exercise, beginning at the altar-rails and ending at the door, up and down which constitutional walk, he trotted, during the sersdce, as methodically and calmly, as any old gentleman out of doors. It is a bare old church, and the paintings in the roof are sadly defaced by time and damp weather ; but the sun was shining in, splendidly, through the red cmlains of the windows, and glittering on the altar furniture ; and it looked as bright and cheerful as need be. Going apart, in this Chmxh, to see some painting which was bemg executed in fresco by a French artist and his pupil, I was led to obsei^ve more closely than I might otherwise have done, a great number of votive offerings with which the walls of the different chapels were profusely limig. I will not say decorated, for they were very roughly and comically got up : most likely by poor sign-painters, who eke out their living in that way. They were all little pictures : each representing some siclmess or calamity from which the person placing it there, had escaped, through the intei-position of his or her patron saint, or of the Madonna ; and I may refer to them as good specimens of the class generally. They are abundant in Italy. In a grotesque squareness of outline, and impossibility of perspective, they were not unlike the woodcuts in old books ; but they were oil-paintings, and the artist, like AVIGNON. 23 the painter of the Primrose family, had not been sparing of his colonics. In one, a lady was having a toe ampu- tated — an operation which a saintly personage had sailed into the room, upon a cloud, to superintend. In another, a lady was l)^ng in bed, tucked up veiy tight and prim, and staring with much composure at a tripod, with a slop-basin on it : the usual form of washing-stand, and the only piece of furniture, besides the bedstead, in her chamber. One would never have supposed her to be labouiing under any complaint, beyond the inconvenience of being miraculously wide awake, if the painter had not hit upon the idea of putting all her family on their knees in one comer, with their legs sticking out behind them on the floor, like boot-trees. Above whom, the Virgin, on a kind of blue divan, promised to restore the patient. In another case, a lady was in the very act of being run over, immediately outside the city walls, by a sort of piano-forte van. But the Madonna was there again. Whether the supernatural appearance had startled the horse (a bay griffin), or whether it was invisible to him, I don't know; but he was gallopping away, ding-dong, without the smallest reverence or compunction. On every picture "Exvoto" was painted in yellow capi- tals in the sky. Though votive offerings were not unknown in Pagan Temples, and are evidently among the many compromises made between the false religion and the true, when the true was in its infancy, I could wish that all the other compromises were as harmless. Gratitude and Devotion are Christian qualities ; and a grateful, humble. Christian spirit may dictate the observance. Q4 PICTURES FROM ITALY. Hard by the cathedral, stands the ancient Palace of the Popes, of which one portion is now a common jail, and another a noisy barrack: while gloomy suites of state apartments, shut up and deserted, mock their own old state and glor}% like the embalmed bodies of kings. But we neither went there, to see state-rooms, nor soldiers' quarters, nor a common jail, though we dropped some money into a prisoner's box outside, whilst the prisoners, themselves, looked through the iron bars, high up, and watched us eagerly. We went to see the ruins of the dreadful rooms in which the Inquisition used to sit. A little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black eyes, — proof that the world hadn't conjm'ed down the devil withm her, though it had had between sixty and seventy years to do it in, — came out of the Barrack Cabaret, of which she was the keeper, with some large keys in her hands, and marshalled us the way that we should go. How she told us, on the way, that she was a Government Officer {concierge du ^jrtZazs cqwstoliqne), and had been, for I don't know how many years ; and liow she had shown these dungeons to princes ; and how she was the best of dungeon demonstrators ; and how she had resided in the palace from an infant, — had been bom there, if I recollect right, — I needn't relate. But such a fierce, little, rapid, sparkling, energetic, she-devil I never beheld. She was alight and flaming, all the time. Her action was violent in the extreme. She never spoke, without stopping expressly for the purpose. She stamped her feet, clutched us by the arms, flung herself into attitudes, hammered against walls with her AVIGNON. 25 keys, for mere emphasis : now whispered as if the Inquisition were there still : now shrieked as if she were on the rack herself; and had a mysterious, hag-like way with her forefinger, when approaching the remains of» some new horror — looldng back and walking stealthily, and making horrible grimaces — that might alone have qualified her to walk up and down a sick man's counter- pane, to the exclusion of all other figm-es, through a whole fever. Passing through the com't-yard, among groups of idle soldiers, we turned off by a gate, which this She-Goblin unlocked for our admission, and locked again behind us : and entered a narrow court, rendered narrower by fallen stones and heaps of rubbish ; part of it choldng up the mouth of a ruined subterranean passage, that once communicated (or is said to have done so) with another castle on the opposite bank of the river. Close to this court-yard, is a dungeon — we stood within it, in another minute — hi the dismal tower cles oubliettes, where Rienzi was imprisoned, fastened by an iron chain to the very wall that stands there now, but shut out from the sky which now looks down into it. A few steps brought us to the Cachots, in wliich the prisoners of the Inquisition were confined for forty-eight hom'S after their captm'e, without food or drink, that their constancy might be shaken, even before they were confronted with their gloomy judges. The day has not got in there yet. They are still small cells, shut in by fom' unyielding, close, hard walls ; still profomidly dark ; still massively doored and fastened, as of old. Gobhn, looking back as I have described, went softly 26 PICTURES FEOM ITALY. on, into a vaulted chamber, now used as a store-room : once the chapel of the holy office. The place where the tribunal sat, was plain. The platfoim might have been removed but yesterday. Conceive the parable of the Good Samaritan havhig been painted on the wall of one of these Inquisition chambers ! But it was, and may be traced there yet. High up in the jealous wall, ai'e niches where the faltering replies of the accused were heard and noted down. Many of them had been brought out of the very- cell we had just looked into, so awfully ; along the same stone passage. We had trodden in their veiy footsteps. I am gazing romid me, mth the horror that the place inspires, when Goblin clutches me by the wrist, and lays, not her skinny finger, but the handle of a key, upon her lip. She invites me, with a jerk, to follow her. I do so. She leads me out into a room adjoining — a rugged room, with a funnel-shaped, contracting roof, open at the top, to the bright day. I ask her what it is. She folds her arms, leers hideously, and stares. I ask agam. She glances round, to see that all the little company are there ; sits down upon a mound of stones ; throws up her arms, and yells out, like a fiend, " La Salle de la Question ! " The Chamber of Torture ! And the roof was made of that shape to stifle the victim's cries ! Oh Goblin, Goblin, let us think of this awhile, in silence. Peace, Goblin ! Sit with your short arms crossed on your short legs, upon that heap of stones, for only five minutes, and then flame out again. Minutes ! Seconds are not marked upon the Palace AVIGNON. 27 clock, when, with her eyes flashing fire, GobHu is up, in the middle of the chamber, describmg, with her sun- burnt arms, a wheel of heavy blows. Thus it ran round ! cries Goblin. Mash, mash, mash ! An endless routine of heavy hammers. Mash, mash, mash ! upon the sufferer's limbs. See the stone trough ! says Goblin. For the water torture ! Gm'gle, swill, bloat, burst, for the Redeemer s honour ! Suck the bloody rag, deep down into yom* mibelieving body. Heretic, at evei'}' breath you draw ! And when the executioner plucks it out, reeking with the smaller mysteries of God s own Image, know us for His chosen servants, true believers in the Sermon on the Mount, elect disciples of Him who never did a miracle but to heal : who never struck a man with palsy, blindness, deafness, dumbness, mad- ness, any one affliction of mankind ; and never stretched His blessed hand out, but to give relief and ease ! See I cries Goblin. There the fmiiace was. There they made the irons red-hot. Those holes supported the sharp stake, on which the tortured persons hung poised : dangling with their whole weight from the roof. " But ; " and Goblin whispers this ; " Monsiem' has heard of this tower ? Yes ? Let Monsieur look down, then ! " A cold air, laden with an earthy smell, falls upon the face of Monsieur; for she has opened, while speaking, a trap-door in the wall. Monsiem- looks in. Downward to the bottom, upward to the top, of a steep, dark, lofty tower : very dismal, veiy dark, very cold. The Execu- tioner of the Inquisition, says Goblin, edging in her head to look down also, flung those who were past all 28 PICTUEES FEOM ITALY. further torturing, down here. " But look ! does Mon- sieur see the black stains on the wall?" A glance, over his shoulder, at Goblin's keen eye, shows Mon- sieur — and would without the aid of the directing-key — where they are. " What are they ? " " Blood ! " In October, 1791, when the Revolution was at its height here, sixty persons : men and women (" and priests," says Goblin, "priests"): were murdered, and hurled, the dying and the dead, into this dreadful pit, where a quantity of quick-lime was tumbled down upon their bodies. Those ghastly tokens of the mas- sacre were soon no more ; but while one stone of the strong building in which the deed was done, remains upon another, there they will lie in the memories of men, as plain to see as the splashing of their blood upon the wall is now. Was it a portion of the great scheme of Retribution, that the cruel deed should be committed in this place I That a part of the atrocities and monstrous mstitutions, which had been, for scores of years, at work, to change men's nature, should in its last service, tempt them with the ready means of gratifying their furious and beastly rage ! Should enable them to show themselves, in the height of their frenzy, no worse than a great, solenm, legal establishment, in the height of its power ! No worse ! Much better. They used the Tower of the Forgotten, in the name of Liberty — their liberty; an earth-born creature, nursed in the black mud of the Bastille moats and dungeons, and necessarily betraying many evidences of its unwholesome bringing-up — but the Inquisition used it in the name of Heaven. AVIGNON. 29 Goblin's finger is lifted; and she steals out again, into the Chapel of the Holy Office. She stops at a certain part of the flooring. Her great effect is at hand. She waits for the rest. She darts at the brave Courier, who is explaming something ; hits him a somiding rap on the hat with the largest key ; and bids him be silent. She assembles us all, round a little trap-door in the floor, as romid a grave. " Voila!" she darts down at the ring, and flings the door open with a crash, in her goblin energy, though it is no light weight. " Voila les oubli- ettes ! Voila les oubliettes ! Subterranean ! Frightful ! Black ! Terrible ! Deadly ! Les oubliettes de 1 Inqui- sition!" My blood ran cold, as I looked from Goblin, down into the vaults, where these forgotten creatures, with recollections of the world outside : of wives, friends, children, brothers : starved to death, and made the stones ring with their miavailing groans. But, the thrill I felt on seeing the accursed wall below, decayed and broken through, and the sun shining in through its gaping wounds, w^as like a sense of victory and triumph. I felt exalted with the proud delight of living, in these degenerate times, to see it. As if I were the hero of some high achievement ! The light in the doleful vaults was t}^ical of the light that has streamed in, on all persecution in God's name, but which is not yet at its noon ! It cannot look more lovely to a blind man newly restored to sight, than to a traveller who sees it, calmly and majestically, treading down the darkness of that Infernal Well. AVIGNON TO GENOA. Goblin, having shown les oubliettes, felt that her great coup was struck. She let the door fall with a crash, and stood upon it with her arms a-ldmbo, sniffing prodigiously. Wlien we left the place, I accompanied her into her house, under the outer gateway of the fortress, to buy a little history of the building. Her cabaret, a dark low room, lighted by small windows, sunk in the thick wall — m the softened light, and with its forge-like chimney ; its little comiter by the door, with bottles, jars, and glasses on it; its household implements and scraps of dress against the walls ; and a sober-looking woman (she must have a congenial life of it, with Goblin,) knitting at the door — looked exactly like a picture by Ostade. I walked round the building on the outside, in a sort of dream, and yet with the delightful sense of having awakened from it, of which the light, down in the vaults, had given me the assm^ance. The immense thickness and giddy height of the walls, the enormous strength of the massive towers, the great extent of the building, its gigantic proportions, frowning aspect, and barbarous AVIGNON. 31 irregularity, awaken awe and wonder. The recollection of its opposite old uses : an impregnable fortress, a luxurious palace, a horrible prison, a place of torture, the court of the Inquisition : at one and the same time, a house of feasting, fighting, religion, and blood : gives to every stone in its huge form a fearful interest, and im- parts new meaning to its incongruities. I could think of little, however, then, or long aftei*wards, but the sun in the dungeons. The palace commg down to be the lounging-place of noisy soldiers, and being forced to echo their rough talk, and common oaths, and to have their garments fluttering from its dirty windows, was some reduction of its state, and something to rejoice at ; but the day in its cells, and the sky for the roof of its chambers of cruelty — that was its desolation and defeat ! If I had seen it in a blaze from ditch to rampart, I should have felt that not that light, nor all the light in all the fire that bmns, could waste it, like the sunbeams in its secret council-chamber, and its prisons. Before I quit this Palace of the Popes, let me trans- late from the little histoiy I mentioned just now, a short anecdote, quite appropriate to itself, connected with its adventm'es. " An ancient tradition relates, that in 1441, a nephew of Pierre de Lude, the Pope s legate, seriously insulted some distinguished ladies of A\dgnon, whose relations, in revenge, seized the young man, and honibly muti- lated him. For several years the legate kept his revenge within his own breast, but he was not the less resolved upon its gratification at last. He even made, in the 32 PICTURES FROM ITALY. fulness of time, advances towards a complete reconcilia- tion ; and when their apparent sincerity had prevailed, he invited to a splendid banquet, in this palace, certain families, whole families, whom he sought to exterminate. The utmost gaiety animated the repast; but the mea- sures of the legate were well taken. When the dessert was on the board, a Swiss presented himself, ^ith the announcement that a strange ambassador solicited an extraordinary audience. The legate, excusing himself, for the moment, to his guests, retired, followed by his officers. Within a few moments afterwards, five hun- dred persons were reduced to ashes : the whole of that whig of the building having been blown into the air with a terrible explosion ! " After seeing the churches, (I \\'ill not trouble you with churches just now,) we left Avignon that after- noon. The heat being veiy great, the roads outside the walls were stre^^n with people fast asleep in ever)' little slip of shade, and with lazy groups, half asleep and half awake, who were waiting until the sun should be low enough to admit of their playing bowls among the bunit-up trees, and on the dusty road. The han^est here, was already gathered in, and mules and horses were treading out the com in the fields. We came, at dusk, upon a wild and hilly comitr}% once famous for brigands : and travelled slowly up a steep ascent. So we went on, until eleven at night, when we halted at the town of Aix (within two stages of Marseilles) to sleep. The hotel, mth all the blinds and shutters closed to keep the light and heat out, was comfortable and aiiy ItARSEILLES. 33 next moming, and the town -was very clean ; but so hot, and so intensely light, that when I walked out at noon it was like coming suddenly from the darkened room into crisp blue fii'e. The air was so veiy clear, that distant hills and rocky points appeared within an hour's walk : while the town immediately at hand — with a kind of blue wind between me and it — seemed to be white hot, and to be throwing off a fieiy air from its surface. We left this town towards evening, and took the road to Marseilles. A dusty road it was; the houses shut up close; and the vines powdered white. At nearly all the cottage doors, women were peeling and slicing onions into earthen bowls for supper. So they had been doing last night all the way from Avignon. We passed one or two shady dark chateaux, surrounded by trees, and embellished with cool basins of water : which were the more refreshing to behold, from the great scai'city of such residences on the road we had travelled. As we approached Marseilles, the road began to be covered with hohday people. Outside the public-houses were parties smoking, drinking, playing draughts and cards, and (once) dancing. But dust, dust, dust, everywhere. We went on, thi'ough a long, straggling, dirty suburb, thronged with people ; having on our left a dreaiy slope of land, on which the countiy-houses of the Marseilles merchants, always staring white, are jumbled and heaped without the slightest order: backs, fronts, sides, and gables towards all points of the compass ; until, at last, we entered the tovm. I was there, twice or thrice afterwards, in fair weather D 34 PICTURES FROM ITALY. and foul ; and I am afraid there is no doubt that it is a dirty and disagi'eeable place. But the prospect, from the fortified heights, of the beautiful Mediterranean, with its lovely rocks and islands, is most delightful. These heights are a desirable retreat, for less picturesque reasons — as an escape from a compound of vile smells perpetually arising fi'om a great harbour full of stagnant water, and befouled by the refuse of iimumerable ships with all sorts of cargoes : which, in hot weather, is dreadful in the last degree. There were foreign sailors, of all nations, in the streets ; with red shirts, blue shirts, buff shirts, tawny shirts, and shirts of orange colour; with red caps, blue caps, green caps, great beards, and no beards; in Turkish turbans, glazed English hats, and Neapohtan head-dresses. There were the townspeople sitting in clusters on the pavement, or airing themselves on the tops of their houses, or walldng up and down the closest and least airy of Boulevards; and there were crowds of fierce-looking people of the lower sort, blocldng up the way, constantly. In the very heart of all this stir and uproar, was the common madhouse; a low, con- tracted, miserable building, looking straight upon the street, without the smallest screen or comt-yard ; where chattering madmen and mad-women were peeping out, through rusty bars, at the staring faces below, while the sun, darting fiercely aslant into their little cells, seemed to dry up their brains, and wony them, as if they were baited by a pack of dogs. We were pretty well accommodated at the Hotel du MARSEILLES. 35 Paradis, situated in a nari'ow street of very high houses, with a hau'dresser s shop opposite, exhibiting in one of its windows two full-length waxen ladies, twirling round and round : which so enchanted the hairdresser himself, that he and his family sat in arm-chairs, and in cool undresses, on the pavement outside, enjopng the grati- fication of the passers-hy, with lazy dignity. The family had retired to rest when we went to bed, at midnight ; but the hahdresser (a corpulent man, in drab slippers) was still sitting there, with his legs stretched out before him, and evidently couldn't bear to have the shutters put up. Next day we went down to the harbom*, where the sailors of all nations were discharging and taking in cargoes of all kinds : fruits, wuies, oils, silks, stuffs, velvets, and every manner of merchandise. Taking one of a gi'eat number of lively little boats with gay-striped awnings, we rowed away, under the sterns of great ships, under tow-ropes and cables, against and among other boats, and very much too near the sides of vessels that were faint with oranges, to the Marie Antoinette, a handsome steamer bound for Genoa, lyhig near the mouth of the harbom\ By-and-by, the carriage, that unwieldy "trifle from the Pantechnicon," on a flat barge, bumping against everything, and giving occasion for a prodigious quantity of oaths and grimaces, came stupidly alongside ; and by five o'clock we were steaming out in the open sea. The vessel was beautifully clean; the meals were sen^ ed imder an awning on deck ; the night was calm and clear ; the quiet beauty of the sea and sky unspeakable. D 2 36 PICTUEES FEOM ITALY. We were off Nice, early next morning, and coasted along, within a few miles of the Cornice road (of which more in its place) nearly all day. We could see Genoa hefore three ; and watching it as it gradually developed its splendid amphitheatre, terrace rising above terrace, garden above garden, palace above palace, height upon height, was ample occupation for us, till we ran into the stately harbour. Having been duly astonished, here, by the sight of a few Cappuccini monks, who were watching the fair-weighing of some wood upon the wharf, we drove off to Albaro, two miles distant, where we had engaged a house. The way lay through the main streets, but not through the Strada Nuova, or the Strada Balbi, which are the famous streets of palaces. I never, in my life, was so dismayed ! The wonderful novelty of everything, the unusual smells, the unaccountable filth (though it is reckoned the cleanest of Italian towns), the disorderly jumbling of dirty houses, one upon the roof of another ; the passages more squalid and more close than any in Saint Giles's, or old Paris : in and out of which, not vagabonds, but well-dressed women, with white veils and great fans, were passing and repassing ; the perfect absence of resemblance in any dwellmg-house, or shop, or wall, or post, or pillar, to anything one had ever seen before ; and the disheartening dirt, discomfort, and decay; perfectly confounded me. I fell into a dismal reverie. I am conscious of a feverish and bewildered vision of saints and virgins' shrines at the street comers — of great numbers of friars, monks, and soldiers — of GENOA. 37 vast red curtains, waving in the door-ways of the churches — of always going up hill, and yet seeing every other street and passage going higher up — of fruit-stalls, with fresh lemons and oranges hanging in garlands made of vine-leaves — of a guard-house, and a drawbridge — and some gateways — and vendors of iced water, sitting with little trays upon the margin of the kennel — and this is all the consciousness I had, until I was set down in a rank, dull, weedy court-yard, attached to a kind of pink jail ; and was told I lived there. I little thought, that day, that I should ever come to have an attachment for the very stones in the streets of Genoa, and to look back upon the city with affection as connected with many hom's of happiness and quiet ! But these are my first impressions honestly set down ; and how they changed, I will set down too. At present, let us breathe after this long-winded journey. GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD. The first impressions of such a place as Albaro, the suburb of Genoa where I am now, as my Americau friends would say, " located," can hardly fail, I should imagine, to be mournful and disappointing. It requires a little time and use to overcome the feeling of depres- sion consequent, at first, on so much ruin and neglect. Novelty, pleasant to most people, is particularly dehght- fal, I think, to me. I am not easily dispirited when I have the means of pursuing my own fancies and occu- pations ; and I believe I have some natm*al aptitude for accommodating myself to circumstances. But, as yet, I stroll about here, in all the holes and comers of the neighbourhood, in a pei^etual state of forlorn surprise ; and returning to my villa ; the Villa Bagnerello ; (it sounds romantic, but Signer Bagnerello is a butcher hard by,) have sufficient occupation in pondering over my new experiences, and comparing them, very much to my own amusement, with my expectations, until I wander out again. The Villa Bagnerello : or the Pink Jail, a far more expressive name for the mansion: is in one of GENOA. 39 the most splendid situations imaginable. The noble bay of Genoa, with the deep blue Mediterranean, lie stretched out near at hand; monstrous old desolate houses and palaces are dotted all about; lofty hills, with their tops often hidden in the clouds, and with strong forts perched high up on their craggy sides, are close upon the left ; and in front, stretching from the walls of the house, down to a ruined chapel which stands upon the bold and pictui-esque rocks on the sea-shore, are green vineyards, where you may wander all day long in partial shade, through interminable vistas of grapes, trained on a rough trellis- work across the narrow paths. This sequestered spot is approached by lanes so very narrow, that when we anived at the Custom-house, we found the people here, had taken the measure of the narrowest among them, and were waiting to apply it to the cai'riage ; which ceremony was gi'avely performed in the street, while we all stood by, in breathless suspense. It was found to be a very tight fit, but just a possibility, and no more — as I am reminded every day, by the sight of various large holes which it punched in the walls on either side as it came along. We are more fortunate, I am told, than an old lady who took a house in these parts not long ago, and who stuck fast in her carriage in a lane ; and as it was impossible to open one of the doors, she was obliged to submit to the indignity of being hauled through one of the little front windows, like a harlequin. When you have got through these nan'ow lanes, you come to an archway, imperfectly stopped up by a 40 PICTURES FROM ITALY. iiisty old gate — my gate. The rusty old gate has a bell to correspond, which you rmg as long as you like, and which nobody answers, as it has no connexion whatever with the house. But there is a rusty old knocker, too- very loose, so that it slides round when you touch it — and if you learn the trick of it, and knock long enough, somebody comes. The Brave Courier comes, and gives you admittance. You walk into a seedy little garden, all wild and weedy, from which the vineyard opens; cross it, enter a square hall like a cellar, walk up a cracked marble staircase, and pass into a most enormous room with a vaulted roof aiid whitewashed walls: not unlike a great methodist chapel. This is the sala. It has five windows and five doors, and is decorated with pictures wliich would gladden the heart of one of those picture-cleaners in London who hang up, as a sign, a picture divided, like death and the lady, at the top of the old ballad: which always leaves you in a state of micertainty whether the ingenious professor has cleaned one half or dirtied the other. The fumitm*e of this sala is a sort of red brocade. All the chairs are immovable, and the sofa weighs several tons. On the same floor, and opening out of this same chamber, are dining-room, drawing-room, and divers bed-rooms : each with a multiplicity of doore and windows. Up stairs are divers other gaunt chambers, and a kitchen ; and down stairs is another kitchen, which, with all sorts of strange contrivances for burning charcoal, looks like an alchemical laboratory. There are also some half-dozen small sitting-rooms, where the GENOA. 41 servants, in this hot July, may escape from the heat of the fire, and where the Brave Courier plays all sorts of musical instruments of his own manufacture, all the evening long. A mighty old, wandering, ghostly, echomg, grim, bare house it is, as ever I beheld or thought of. There is a little vine-covered terrace, openmg from the drawing-room; and under this ten'ace, and forming one side of the little garden, is what used to be the stable. It is now a cow-house, and has three cows in it, so that we get new milk by the bucket-full. There is no pasturage near, and they never go out, but are constantly lying down and sm'feiting themselves with vine -leaves — perfect Italian cows — enjoying the dolce far niente all day long. They are presided over, and slept with, by an old man named Antonio, and his son : two burnt-sienna natives with naked legs and feet, who wear, each, a shirt, a paii' of trousers, and a red sash, with a relic, or some sacred chaim like a bonbon o£P a twelfth cake, hanguig round the neck. The old man is veiy anxious to convert me to the Catholic Faith; and exhorts me frequently. We sit upon a stone by the door, sometimes, in the eveniug, like Robinson Crusoe and Friday reversed ; and he generally relates, towards my conversion, an abridgment of the History of Saint Peter — chiefly, I beheve, fi'om the imspeakable delight he has in his imitation of the cock. The view, as I have said, is charming ; but in the day you must keep the lattice-bhnds close shut, or the sun would drive you mad ; and when the sun goes 42 PICTURES FROM ITALY. down, you must shut up all the windows, or the mosqui- toes would tempt you to commit suicide.. So at this time of tho year, you don't see much of the prospect within doors. As for the flies, you don't mind them. Nor the fleas, whose size is prodigious, and whose name is Legion, and who populate the coach-house to that extent that I daily expect to see the carriage going oif bodily, drawn by myriads of mdustrious fleas in harness. The rats are kept away, quite comfortably, by scores of lean cats, who roam about the garden for that purpose. The lizards, of course, nobody cares for ; they play in the sun, and don't bite. The little scorpions are merely curious. The beetles are rather late, and have not appeared yet. The frogs are company. There is a pre- serve of them in the grounds of the next villa; and after night-fall, one would think that scores upon scores of women in pattens, were going up and down a wet stone pavement without a moment's cessation. That is exactly the noise they make. The ruined chapel, on the picturesque and beautiful sea-shore, was dedicated, once upon a time, to Saint John the Baptist. I believe there is a legend that Saint John's bones were received there, with various solemni- ties, when they w^ere first brought to Genoa ; for Genoa possesses them to this day. When there is any im- common tempest at sea, they are brought out, and exhibited to the raging weather, which they never fail to calm. In consequence of this connexion of Saint Jolm with the city, great numbers of the common people are chris- tened Giovanni Baptista, which latter name is pronounced GENOA. 43 in the Genoese j^atots "Batcheetcha,"like a sneeze. To hear everybody calling everybody else Batcheetcha, on a Sunday, or Festa-day, when there are crowds in the streets, is not a little singular and amusing to a stranger. The narrow lanes have great villas opening into them, whose walls (outside walls, I mean,) are profusely painted with all sorts of subjects, grim and holy. But time and the sea-air have nearly obliterated them ; and they look like the entrance to Vauxhall Gardens on a sunny day. The court-yards of these houses, are overgrown with grass and weeds ; all sorts of hideous patches cover the bases of the statues, as if they were afflicted with a cutaneous disorder; the outer gates are rusty; and the iron bars outside the lower windows are all tumbling down. Firewood is kept in halls where costly treasures might be heaped up, mountains high ; water-falls are dry and choked.; fountains, too dull to play, and too lazy to work, have just enough recollection of their identity, in their sleep, to make the neighbourhood damp ; and the sirocco wind is often blowing over all these things for days together, like a gigantic oven out for a holiday. Not long ago, there was a festa day, in honour of the Virgins mother, when the young men of the neighbour- hood, having worn green wreaths of the vine ui some procession or other, bathed in them, by scores. It looked very odd and pretty. Though I am bound to confess (not knowing of the festa at that time), that I thought, and was quite satisfied, they wore them as horses do — to keep the flies off. Soon afterwards, there was another festa day, in 44 PICTURES FROM ITALY. honour of a St. Nazaro. One of the Albaro young men brought two large bouquets soon after brealdast, and coming up-stairs into the great sala, presented them himself. This was a polite way of begging for a contri- bution towards the expenses of some music in the Saint's honour, so we gave him whatever it may have been, and his messenger departed: well satisfied. At six o'clock in the evenmg we went to the church — close at hand — a very gaudy place, hung all over with fes- toons and bright draperies, and filled, from the altar to the main door, with women, all seated. They wear no bonnets here, simply a long white veil — the "mezzero;" and it was the most gauzy, ethereal-looking audience I ever saw. The young women are not generally pretty, but they walk remarkably well, and in their personal carriage and the management of their veils, display much innate grace and elegance. There -were some men present : not very many : and a few of these were kneeling about the aisles, while everybody else tumbled over them. Innumerable tapers were burning in the church; the bits of silver and tin about the saints (especially in the Virgin's necldace) sparkled brilliantly ; the priests were seated about the chief altar ; the organ played away, lustily, and a full band did the like ; while a conductor, in a little galleiy op- posite to the band, hammered away on the desk before him with a scroll ; and a tenor, without any voice, sang. The band played one way, the organ played another, the singer went a tliird, and the unfortunate conductor banged and banged, and flourished his scroll on some principle GENOA, 45 of his own : apparently well satisfied with the whole performance. I never did hear such a discordant din. The heat was intense all the time. The men, in red caps, and with loose coats hanging on their shoulders (they never put them on), were plapng bowls, and buying sweetmeats, immediately outside the church. When half-a-dozen of them finished a game, they came into the aisle, crossed themselves with the holy water, knelt on one knee for an instant, and walked off" again to play another game at bowls. They are remarkably expert at this diversion, and will play in the stony lanes and streets, and on the most uneven and disastrous ground for such a purpose, with as much nicety as on a billiard-table. But the most favourite game is the national one of Mora, which they pursue with surprising ardoui', and at which they will stake everything they possess. It is a destmctive kind of gamljling, requiiing no accessaries but the ten fingers, which are always — I intend no pun — at hand. T^\X) men play together. One calls a number — say the extreme one, ten. He marks what portion of it he pleases by throwing out three, or fom% or five, fingers ; and his adversary has, in the same instant, at hazard, and without seeing his hand, to throw out as many fingers as will make the exact balance. Their eyes and hands become so used to this, and act with such astonishing rapidity, that an uninitiated bystander would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to follow the progress of the game. The initiated, however, of whom there is always an eager group looking on, devour 46 PICTURES FROM ITALY. it with the most intense avidity ; and as they are always ready to champion one side or the other in case of a dispute, and are frequently divided in their partizanship, it is often a very noisy proceeding. It is never the quietest game in the world ; for the numbers are always called in a loud sharp voice, and follow as close upon each other as they can be counted. On a holiday evening, standing at a window, or walking in a garden, or passing through the streets, or sauntering in any quiet place about the town, you will hear this game in progress in a score of wine-shops at once ; and looking over any vineyard walk, or turning almost any corner, will come upon a knot of players in full cry. It is observable that most men have a propensity to throw out some particular number oftener than another; and the vigilance with which two sharp-eyed players will mutually endeavour to detect this weakness, and adapt their game to it, is very curious and entertaining. The effect is greatly heightened by the universal suddenness and vehemence of gesture ; two men playing for half a farthing with an intensity as all-absorbing as if the stake were .life. Hard by here, is a large Palazzo, formerly belonging to some member of the Brignole family, but just now hired by a school of Jesuits for their summer quarters. I walked into its dismantled precincts the other evening about smiset, and couldn't help pacing up and down for a little time, drowsily taking in the aspect of the place : which is repeated hereabouts in all directions. I loitered to and fro, under a colonnade, forming two GENOA. 47 sides of a weedy, grass-grown court-yard, whereof the house formed a third side, and a low terrace-walk, over- looking the garden and the neighbouiing hills, the fourth. I don't believe there was an uncracked stone in the whole pavement. In the centre, was a melancholy statue, so piebald in its decay, that it looked exactly as if it had been covered with sticking-plaster, and after- wards powdered. The stables, coach-houses, offices, were all empty, all ruinous, all utterly deserted. Doors had lost their hinges, and were holding on by their latches ; windows were broken, painted plaster had peeled off, and was lying about in clods ; fowls and cats had so taken possession of the out-buildings, that I couldn't help thinking of the faiiy tales, and eyeing them with suspicion, as transformed retainers, waiting to be changed back again. One old Tom in particular : a scraggy brute, with a hungiy green eye (a poor relation, in reality, I am inclined to think) : came prowling round and round me, as if he half believed, for the moment, that I might be the hero come to maiTy the lady, and set all to-rights ; but discovering his mistake, he sud- denly gave a grim snarl, and walked away with such a tremendous tail, that he couldn't get into the little hole where he lived, but was obliged to wait outside, until his indignation and his tail had gone down together. In a sort of summer-house, or whatever it may be in this colonnade, some Englishmen had been livuig, like gmbs in a nut ; but the Jesuits had given them notice to go, and they had gone, and tlio.t was shut up too. The house : a wandering, echoing, thundering bar- 48 PICTURES FROM ITALY. rack of a place, with the lower windows barred up, as usual, was wide open at the door : and I have no doubt I might have gone in, and gone to bed, and gone dead, and nobody a bit the wiser. Only one suite of rooms on an upper floor was tenanted ; and from one of these, the voice of a young-lady vocalist, practising bravura lustily, came flaunting out upon the silent evening. I went down into the garden, intended to be prim and quaint, with avenues, and terraces, and orange- trees, and statues, and water in stone basins ; and every- thing was green, gaunt, weedy, stragglmg, under grown, or over grown, mildewy, damp, redolent of all sorts of slabby, clammy, creeping, and uncomfortable life. There was nothuig bright in the whole scene but a firefly — one solitary firefly — showing against the dark bushes like the last little speck of the departed Glory of the house ; and even it went flittmg up and down at sudden angles, and leaving a place with a jerk, and describing an irreg- ular circle, and returning to the same place with a twitch that startled one : as if it were looking for the rest of the Glory, and wond^ering (Heaven Imows it might!) what had become of it. In the course of two months, the flitting shapes and shadows of my dismal entering reverie gradually resolved themselves into familiar forms and substances; and I already began to think that when the time should come, a year hence, for closing the long holiday and turning back to England, I might part from Genoa with any- thing but a glad heart. GENOA. 49 It is a place that " grows upon you" eveiy day. There seems to be always something to find out m it. There are the most extraordinaiy alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle !) twenty times a-day, if you like ; and turn up again, under the most unexpected and sm^prising diffi- culties. It abounds in the strangest contrasts ; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn. They who would know how beautiful the country im- mediately surrounding Genoa is, should climb (in clear weather) to the top of Monte Faccio, or, at least, ride romid the city walls : a feat more easily performed. No prospect can be more diversified and lovely than the changing views of the harbour, and the valleys of the two rivers, the Polcevera and the Bizagno, from the heights along which the strongly-fortified walls are carried, lilve the great wall of China in little. In not the least picturesque part of this ride, there is a fair specimen of a real Genoese tavern, where the visitor may derive good entertainment from real Genoese dishes, such as Tagliaiini ; Ra\ioli ; German sausages, strong of garlick, sliced and eaten with fresh green figs ; cocks' combs and sheep-kidneys, chopped up with mutton-chops and liver ; small pieces of some unkno\Mi part of a calf, twisted into small shreds, fried, and served up in a gi'eat dish like white-bait ; and other curiosities of that kind. They often get wine at these subm'ban Trattorie, from France and Spain and Portu- gal, which is brought over by small captains m little E 50 PICTURES FEOM ITALY. trading-vessels. They buy it at so much a bottle, without asldng what it is, or caring to remember if any- body tells them, and usually divide it into two heaps; of which they label one Champagne, and the other Madeira. The various op^^osite flavours, qualities, comitries, ages, and vintages that are comprised under these two general heads is quite extraordinary. The most limited range is probably from cool Giniel up to old Marsala, and down again to apple Tea. The great majority of the streets are as naiTOw as any thoroughfare can well be, where people (even Italian people) are supposed to live and walk about ; being mere lanes, with here, and there, a Idnd of well, or breathing- place. The houses are immensely high, painted in all sorts of colours, and are in every stage and state of damage, dirt, and lack of repair. They are commonly let off m floors, or flats, like the houses in the old town of Edinburgh, or many houses in Paris. There are few street doors; the entrance halls are, for the most part, looked upon as public property ; and any moderately enterprising scavenger might make a fine fortune by now and then clearing them out. As it is impossible for coaches to penetrate into these streets, there ai'e sedan chairs, gilded and otherwise, for hire in divers places. A great many private chairs are also kept among the nobility and gentry ; and at night these are trotted to and fro in all directions, preceded by bearers of great lanthorns, made of linen stretched upon a frame. The sedans and lanthorns are the legitimate successors of the long strings of patient and much-abused mules. GENOA. 5 1 that go jingling their little bells through these confined streets all day long. They follow them, as regularly as the stars the sun. When shall I forget the Streets of Palaces : the Strada Nuova and the Strada Balbi ! or how the former looked one summer day, when I first saw it underneath the biightest and most intensely blue of summer skies : which its naiTow perspective of immense mansions, reduced to a tapering and most precious strip of brightness, look- ing down upon the heavy shade below ! A brightness not too common, even in July and August, to be well esteemed : for, if the Truth must out, there were not eight blue skies in as many midsummer weeks, saving, sometimes, early in the morning ; when, looking out to sea, the water and the firmament were one world of deep and brilliant blue. At other times, there were clouds and haze enough to make an Englishman giinnble in his own climate. The endless details of these rich Palaces : the walls of some of them, within, alive with masterpieces by Van- dyke ! The great, heavj'-, stone balconies, one above another, and tier over tier : with here and there, one larger than the rest, towering high up — a huge marble platform; the doorless vestibules, massively-barred lower windows, immense public staircases, thick marble pillars, strong dungeon-like arches, and dreaiy, cbeaming, echoing vaulted chambers : among which the eye wanders again, and again, and again, as eveiy palace is succeeded by another — the terrace gardens between house and house, with green arches of the vine, and groves of orange-trees, E -2 52 PICTURES FROM ITALY. and blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty, thirty, forty, feet above the street — the painted halls, mouldering, and blotting, and rotting in the damp comers, and still sliming out in beautiful colours and voluptuous designs, where the walls are dry — the faded figures on the out- sides of the houses, holding wreaths, and crowns, and flying upward, and downward, and standing in niches, and here and there looking fainter and more feeble than elsewhere, by contrast with some fresh little Cupids, who on a more recently-decorated portion of the fi'ont, are stretching out what seems to be the semblance of a blanket, but is, indeed, a sun-dial — the steep, steep, up- hill streets of small palaces (but very large palaces for all that), with marble terraces looldng down mto close by- ways — the magnificent and innumerable Chm'ches ; and the rapid passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor, steaming with un- wholesome stenches, and swarming with half-naked children and whole worlds of dirty people — make up, altogether, such a scene of wonder : so lively, and yet so dead : so noisy, and yet so quiet : so obtnisive, and yet so shy and lowering : so wide awake, and yet so fast asleep : that it is a sort of intoxication to a stranger to walk on, and on, and on, and look about him. A bewil- dering phantasmagoria, with all the inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and all the pleasure of an extravagant reality ! The different uses to which some of these Palaces are applied, all at once, is characteristic. For instance, the English Banker (my excellent and hospitable friend) hiis. GENOA. 53 his office in a good-sized Palazzo in the Strada Nuova. In the hall (every inch of which is elaborately painted, but which is as dirty as a police-station in London), a hook-nosed Saracen's Head mth an immense quantity of black hair (there is a man attached to it) sells walking- sticks. On the other side of the doorway, a lady with a showy handkerchief for head-dress (wife to the Saracen's Head, I believe) sells articles of her own knitting ; and sometimes flowers. A little further m, two or three blind men occasionally beg. Sometimes, they are visited by a man mthout legs, on a Httle go-cart, but who has such a fresh-colom-ed, lively face, and such a respectable, well-conditioned bodv, that he looks as if he had sunk into the ground up to his middle, or had come, but partially, up a flight of cellar-steps to speak to some- body. A little further in, a few men, perhaps, lie asleep in the middle of the day ; or they may be chair- men waiting for their absent freight. If so, they have brought their chah's in with them, and there they stand also. On the left of the hall is a little room : a hatter's shop. On the first floor, is the English bank. On the first floor also, is a whole house, and a good large residence too. Heaven knows what there may be above that ; but when you are there, you have only just begim to go up-stairs. And yet, coming down stairs again, thhikmg of this ; and passing out at a great crazy door in the back of the hall, instead of turning the other way, to get into the street again ; it bangs behind you, making the dismallest and most lonesome echoes, and you stand in a yard (the yard of the same house) which 54 PICTURES FROM ITALY. seems to have been im\'isited by human foot, for a hmidred years. Not a sound disturbs its repose. Not a head, thinist out of any of the grim, dark, jealous windows within sight, makes the weeds in the cracked pavement famt of heart, by suggesting the possibility of there being hands to grub them up. Opposite to you, is a giant figure carved in stone, reclining, with an urn, upon a lofty piece of artificial rockwork; and out of the urn, dangles the fag end of a leaden pipe, which, once upon a time, poured a small torrent down the rocks. But the eye-sockets of the giant are not drier than this channel is now. He seems to have given his uni, which is nearly upside down, a final tilt ; and after crpng, like a sepulchral child, " All gone ! " to have lapsed into a stony silence. In the streets of shops, the houses are much smaller, but of great size notwithstanding, and extremely high. They are veiy dirty : quite undrained, if my nose be at all reliable : and emit a peculiar fragrance, like the smell of very bad cheese, kept in very hot blankets. Notwithstanding the height of the houses, there would seem to have been a lack of room in the City, for new houses are thrust in everywhere. Wherever it has been possible to cram a tumble-down tenement into a crack or comer, in it has gone. If there be a nook or angle in the wall of a church, or a cre\dce in any other dead wall, of any sort, there you are sure to find some kind of habitation : looking as if it had grown there, like a fmigus. Against the Government house, against the old Senate house, romid about any large building, little GENOA. D-) shops stick close, like parasite veniiin to the great carcase. And for all this, look where you may : up steps, do\sii steps, anpvhere, everywhere : there are irregular houses, receding, starting forward, tumbling down, leaning against their neighbours, crippling them- selves or their friends by some means or other, until one, more irregular than the rest, choaks up the way, and you can't see any further. One of the rottenest-looking parts of the tovm, I think, is down by the landing- wharf : though it may be, that its being associated with a great deal of rottenness on the evening of our arrival, has stamped it deeper in my mind. Here, again, the houses are very high, and are of an infinite variety of deformed shapes, and have (as most of the houses have) something hanging out of a great many windows, and wafting its frowsy fragrance on the breeze. Sometimes, it is a curtain ; sometimes, it is a carpet ; sometimes, it is a bed ; sometimes, a whole line-full of clothes ; but there is almost always some thing. Before the basements of these houses, is an arcade over the pavement : veiy massive, dark, and low, like an old crypt. The stone, or plaster, of which it is made, has turned quite black ; and against eveiy one of these black piles, all sorts of filth and garbage seem to accu- mulate spontaneously. Beneath some of the arches, the sellers of maccaroni and polenta establish thek stalls, which are by no means inviting. The offal of a fish- market, near at hand — that is to say, of a back lane, w^here people sit upon the gi'ound and on various old bulk-heads and sheds, and sell fish when they have any 56 PICTURES FROM ITALY. to dispose of — and of a vegetable liiarket, constructed on the same principle — are contributed to the decoration of this quarter ; and as all the mercantile busmess is trans- acted here, and it is crowded all day, it has a veiy decided flavour about it. The Porto Franco, or Free Port (where goods brought in from foreign coimtries pay- no duty until they are sold and taken out, as in a bonded warehouse in England), is down here also ; and two por- tentous officials, in cocked hats, stand at the gate to search you if they choose, and to keep out Monks and Ladies. For, Sanctity as well as Beauty has been known to yield to the temptation of smuggling, and in the same way : that is to say, by conceahng the smuggled property beneath the loose folds of its dress. So Sanc- tity and Beauty may, by no means, enter. The streets of Genoa would be all the better for the importation of a few Priests of prepossessing appearance. Eveiy fourth or fifth man in the streets is a Priest or a Monk ; and there is pretty sure to be at least one itine- rant ecclesiastic inside or outside every hackney carriage on the neighbouring roads. I have no knowledge, elsewhere, of more repulsive countenances than are to be fomid among these gentiy. If Nature's handwriting be at all legible, greater varieties of sloth, deceit, and intellec- tual torpor, could hardly be observed among any class of men in the world. Mr. Pepys once heard a clergyman assert in his sermon, in illustration of his respect for the Priestly office, that if he could meet a Priest and angel together, he would salute the Priest first. I am rather of the GENOA. 57 opinion of Petrarch who, when his pupil Boccaccio wrote to him in great tribulation, that he had been visited and admonished for his writings by a Carthusian Friar who claimed to be a messenger immediately com- missioned by Heaven for that purpose, replied, that for his own part, he would take the liberty of testing the reality of the commission by personal observ^ation of the Messenger's face, eyes, forehead, behaviour, and discourse. I cannot but believe myself, from similar observation, that many unaccredited celestial messengers may be seen skulking through the streets of Genoa, or droning away their lives in other Italian towns. Perhaps the Cappuccini, though not a learned body, are, as an order, the best friends of the people. They seem to mingle with them more immediately, as their counsellors and comforters ; and to go among them more, when they are sick; and to pry less than some other orders, into the secrets of families, for the purpose of establishing a baleful ascendancy over their weaker members; and to be influenced by a less fierce desire to make converts, and once made, to let them go to ruin, soul and body. They may be seen, in their coarse dress, in all parts of the town at all times, and begging in the markets early in the morning. The Jesuits too, muster strong in the streets, and go slinking noiselessly about, in pairs, like black cats. In some of the narrow passages, distinct trades con- gregate. There is a street of jewellers, and there is a row of booksellers ; but even do^vn in places where nobody ever can, or ever could, penetrate in a carriage, 58 PICTURES FROM ITALY. there are mighty old palaces shut in among the gloomiest and closest walls, and almost shut out from the sun. Very- few of the tradesmen have any idea of settmg forth their goods, or disposing them for show. If you, a stranger, want to buy an}i:hing, you usually look romid the shop till you see it ; then clutch it, if it be within reach ; and inquire how much. Eveiything is sold at the most unlikely place. If you want coffee, you go to a sweetmeat- shop ; and if you want meat, you mil proba])ly find it behind an old checked curtain, down half a dozen steps, in some sequestered nook as hard to find as if the com- modity were poison, and Genoa's law were death to any he that uttered it. Most of the apothecaries' shops are great lounging places. Here, grave men with sticks, sit down in the shade for hom^s together, passing a meagre Genoa paper from hand to hand, and talldng, drowsily and sparingly, about the News. Two or three of these are poor physicians, ready to proclaim themselves on an emergency, and tear off with any messenger who may arrive. You may know them by the way in which they stretch their necks to listen, when you enter ; and by the sigh with which they fall back again into their dull comers, on finding that you only want medicine. Few people lounge in the barbers' shops ; though they are very numerous, as hardly any man shaves himself. But the apothecary's has its group of loungers, who sit back among the bottles, with their hands folded over the tops of their sticks. So still and quiet, that either you don't see them in the darkened shop, or mistake them — as I did one ghostly GENOA. 59 man in bottle-green, one day, with a hat Uke a stopper — for Horse Medicine. On a summer evening, the Genoese are as fond of putting themselves, as their ancestors were of putting houses, in eveiy available inch of space witliin and about the town. In all the lanes and alleys, and up eveiy little ascent, and on eveiy dwarf wall, and on every- flight of steps, they cluster like bees. Meanwhile (and especially on Festa-days) the bells of the chmTlies ring incessantly; not in peals, or any known form of sound, but in a horrible, irregidar, jerking, dingle, dingle, dingle : with a sudden stop at eveiy fifteenth dingle or so, which is maddening. This performance is usually achieved by a boy up in the steeple, who takes hold of the clapper, or a little rope attached to it, and tries to dingle louder than every other boy similarly employed. The noise is supposed to be particularly obnoxious to Evil Spirits ; but looking up into the steeples, and seeing (and hearing) these young Christians thus en- gaged, one might veiy naturally mistake them for the Enemy. Festa-days, early in the autumn, are very numer- ous. All the shops were shut up, twice \\ithin a week, for these holidays; and one night, all the houses in the neighbom'hood of a particulai- church were illumi- nated, while the chm'ch itself was lighted, outside, with torches ; and a grove of blazing links was erected, in an open place outside one of the city gates. This part of the ceremony is prettier and more siiigular a little way 60 PICTURES FROM ITALY. in the country, where you can trace the illummated cottages all the way up a steep hill side ; and where you pass festoons of tapers, wasting away in the starlight night, before some lonely little house upon the road. On these days, they always dress the church of the saint in whose honour the Festa is holden, very gaily. Gold-embroidered festoons of different colours, hang from the arches ; the altar furniture is set forth ; and, sometimes, even the lofty pillars are swathed from top to bottom in tight-fitting draperies. The cathedral is dedicated to St. Lorenzo. On St. Lorenzo's day, w6 went into it, just as the sun was setting. Although these decorations are usually in very indifferent taste, the effect, just then, was very superb, indeed. For the whole building was dressed in red ; and the sinking sun, streaming in, through a great red curtain in the chief doorway, made all the gorgeousness its own. When the sun went down, and it gradually grew quite dark inside, except for a few tmnkling tapers on the principal altar, and some small dangling silver lamps, it was very mysterious and effective. But, sitting in any of the churches towards evening, is like a mild dose of opium. With the money collected at a Festa, they usually pay for the dressing of the church, and for the hiring of the band, and for the tapers. If there be any left (which seldom happens, I believe) the souls in purgatoiy get the benefit of it. They are also supposed to have the benefit of the exertions of certain small boys, who shake money- boxes before some mysterious little buildings like rural turnpikes, which (usually shut up close) fly open on Red- GENOA. 61 letter days, and disclose an image and some flowers inside. Just without the city gate, on the Albaro road, is a small house, with an altar in it, and a stationary money- box : also for the benefit of the souls in Purgatory. Still fm'ther to stimulate the charitable, there is a monstrous painting on the plaster, on either side of the grated door, representing a select party of souls, fi'}dng. One of them has a grey moustache, and an elaborate head of grey hair : as if he had been taken out of a hair- dresser's window and cast mto the furnace. There he is : a most grotesque and hideously comic old soul : for ever blistering in the real sun, and melting in the mimic fire, for the gratification and improvement (and the contributions) of the poorer Genoese. They are not a very joyous people, and are seldom seen to dance on their holidays : the staple places of entertainment among the women, being the churches and the public walks. They are veiy good-tempered, obliging. and industrious. Industiy has not made them clean, for then- habitations are extremely filthy, and their usual occupation on a fine Sunday morning, is to sit at their doors, hunting in each others' heads. But their dwellings are so close and confined that if those parts of the city had been beaten down by Massena in the time of the terrible Blockade, it w^ould have at least occasioned one public benefit among many misfortunes. The Peasant Women, with naked feet and legs, are so constantly washing clothes, in the public tanks, and in eveiy stream and ditch, that one cannot help wondering. 0'2 PICTUKES FROM ITALY. in the midst of all this dirt, who wears them when they are clean. The custom is to lay the wet linen wliich is being operated upon, on a smooth stone, and hammer away at it, with a flat wooden mallet. This they do, as furiously as if they were revenging themselves on dress in general for being connected with the Fall of Manldnd. It is not unusual to see, Ipng on the edge of the tank at these times, or on another flat stone, an unfor- tunate baby, tightly swathed up, arms and legs and all, in an enormous quantity of wrapper, so that it is unable to move a toe or finger. This custom (which we often see represented in old pictures) is universal among the common people. A child is left anywhere without the possibility of crawling away, or is accidentally knocked ofl" a shelf, or tumbled out of bed, or is hung up to a hook now and then, and left dangling like a doll at an English rag shop, without the least inconvenience to anybody, I was sitting, one Sunday, soon after my arrival, in the little country church of San Martino, a couple of miles from the city, while a baptism took place, I saw the priest, and an attendant with a large taper, and a man, and a woman, and some others ; but I had no more idea, until the ceremony was all over, that it was a baptism, or that the curious little stiff instrument, that was passed from one to another, in the course of the ceremony, by the handle — like a short poker — was a child, than I had that it was my o\mi christening. I borrowed the child afterwards, for a minute or two (it was lying across the font then) and found it very red in GENOA. 63 the face but perfectly quiet, and not to be bent on any terms. The number of cripples in the streets, soon ceased to sui'prise me. There are plenty of Saints' and Virgin's Shrines, of course ; generally at the comers of streets. The favourite memento to the Faithful, about Genoa, is a painting, representing a peasant on his knees, with a spade and some other agiicultm-al implements beside him ; and the Madonna, Vvith the Infant Saviour in her arms, appearing to him in a cloud. This is the Legend of the Madonna della Guardia : a chapel on a moimtaiii within a few miles, which is in high repute. It seems that this peasant lived all alone by himself, tilling some land atop of the mountain, where, being a devout man, he daily said his prayers to the Virgin ui the open air ; for his hut was a very poor one. Upon a certain day, the Virgin appeared to him, as in the pictm'e, and said, " Why do you pray in the open air, and without a priest?" The peasant explained because there was neither priest nor church at hand — a very micommon complamt indeed in Italy. " I should wish, then," said the Celestial Visitor, " to have a chapel built here, in which the prayers of the Faithful may be offered up." " But Santissima Madonna," said the peasant, " I am a poor man; and chapels cannot be built without money. They must be supported, too, Santissima ; for to have a chapel and not support it liberally, is a wickedness — a deadly sin." This sentiment gave great satisfaction to the visitor. " Go ! " said she. " There is such a village in the valley on the left, and such another \dllage in the valley on the right. 64 PICTURES FROM ITALY. and such another village elsewhere, that will gladly con- tribute to the building of a chapel. Go to them ! Relate what you have seen ; and do not doubt that sufficient money will be forthcoming to erect my chapel, or that it will, afterwards, be handsomely maintained." All of which (miraculously) turned out to be quite true. And in proof of this prediction and revelation, there is the chapel of the Madonna della Guardia, rich and flemishing at this day. The splendom* and variety of the Genoese churches, can hardly be exaggerated. The church of the Annun- ciata especially : built, like many of the others, at the cost of one noble family, and now in slow progress of repair : from the outer door to the utmost height of the high cupola, is so elaborately painted and set in gold, that it looks (as Simond describes it, in his charming book on Italy) like a great enamelled snuff-box. Most of the richer chm'ches contain some beautiful j)ictm'es, or other embellishments of great price, almost miiversally set, side by side, with sprawling effigies of maudlin monks, and the veriest trash and tinsel ever seen. It may be a consequence of the frequent direction of the popular mind, and pocket, to the souls in Pm'gatoiy, but there is ver}^ little tenderness for the bodies of the dead here. For the very poor, there are, immediately outside one angle of the walls, and behind a jutting point of -the fortification, near the sea, certain common pits — one for every day in the year — which all remain closed up, mitil the tmii of each comes for its daily reception of dead bodies. Among the troops in the GENOA. 65 towTi, there are usually some Swiss : more or less. When any of these die, they are buried out of a fund maintamed by such of their countrj^men as are resident in Genoa. Their providing coffins for these men, is matter of great astonishment to the authorities. Certainly, the effect of this promiscuous and indecent splashing down of dead people into so many wells, is bad. It sun"ounds Death with revolting associations, that in- sensibly become connected with those whom Death is approaching. Indifference and avoidance are the natural result ; and all the softening influences of the great sor- row are harshly disturbed. There is a ceremony when an old Cavaliere or the like, expires, of erecting a pile of benches in the cathe- dral, to represent his bier ; covering them over with a pall of black velvet ; putting his hat and sword on the top ; making a little square of seats about the whole ; and sending out formal invitations to his friends and acquaintance to come and sit there, and hear Mass : which is performed at the principal Altar, decorated with an infinity of candles for that purpose. When the better kind of people die, or are at the point of death, their nearest relations generally walk off: retiring into the coimtry for a little change, and leaving the body to be disposed of, without any superintendance from them. The procession is usually formed, and the coffin borne, and the fimeral conducted, by a body of persons called a Confratemita, who, as a Idnd of voluntary penance, undertake to perform these offices, in regular rotation, for the dead ; but who, mingling some- F 66 PICTURES FROM ITALY. thing of pride with their humihty, are dressed in a loose garment covermg their whole person, and wear a hood concealing the face ; with breathing holes and aper- tures for the eyes. The effect of this costume is very- ghastly : especially in the case of a certain Blue Confra- teniita belonging to Genoa, who, to say the least of them, are very ugly customers, and who look — suddenly encountered in their pious ministration in the streets — as if they were Ghoules or Demons, bearing off the body for themselves. Although such a custom may be liable to the abuse attendant on many Italian customs, of being recognised as a means of estabhshing a current account with Heaven, on which to draw, too easily, for futm'e bad actions, or as an expiation for past misdeeds, it must be admitted to be a good one, and a practical one, and one involvuig unquestionably good works. A voluntary service like this, is surely better than the imposed penance (not at all an infrequent one) of giving so many licks to such and such a stone in the pavement of the cathedral ; or than a vow to the Madonna to wear nothhig but blue for a year or two. This is supposed to give great delight above ; blue being (as is well known) the Madonna s favourite colour. Women who have devoted themselves to this act of Faith, are very commonly seen walking in the streets. There are three theatres in the city, besides an old one now rarely opened. The most important — the Carlo Felice : the opera-house of Genoa — is a very splendid, commodious, and beautiful theatre. A company of come- GENOA. 67 dians were acting there, when we arrived : and after their departure, a second-rate opera company came. The great season is not mitil the carnival time — in the spring. Nothing impressed me, so much, in my visits here (which were pretty numerous) as the uncommonly hard and cniel character of the audience, who resent the slightest defect, take nothmg good-humouredly, seem to be always Ipng in wait for an opportmiity to hiss, and spare the actresses as little as the actors. But, as there is nothing else of a public natm'e at which they are allowed to express the least disapprobation, perhaps they ai'e resolved to make the most of this opportunity. There are a great number of Piedmontese Officers too, who are allowed the privilege of kicking their heels in the pit, for next to nothing: gi-atuitous, or cheap accommodation for these gentlemen being insisted on, by the Governor, in all public or semi-public entertam- ments. They are lofty critics in consequence, and infinitely more exacting than if they made the mihappy manager's fortune. The Teateg Diueno, or Day Theatre, is a covered stage in the open air, where the performances take place by daylight, in the cool of the afternoon ; commencing at four or five o'clock, and lasting some three hours. It is curious, sitting among the audience, to have a fine view of the neighbouring hills and houses, and to see the neighbom's at their windows looldng on, and to hear the bells of the chm'ches and convents ringing at most complete cross-pm-poses with the scene. Beyond this, and the novelty of seeing a play in the fresh pleasant F 2 68 PICTURES FROM ITALY. air, with the darkening evening closing in, there is nothing very exciting or characteristic in the perform- ances. The actors are indifferent; and though they sometimes represent one of Goldoni's comedies, the staple of the Drama is French. Anything like nation- ality is dangerous to despotic governments, and Jesuit- beleaguered kings. The Theatre of Puppets, or Marionetti — a famous company from Milan — is, without any exception, the drollest exhibition I ever beheld m my life. I never saw anything so exquisitely ridiculous. They look be- tween four and five feet high, but are really much smaller ; for when a musician in the orchestra happens to put his hat on the stage, it becomes alaimingly gigantic, and almost blots out an actor. They usually play a comedy, and a ballet. The comic man in the comedy I saw one summer night, is a waiter at an hotel. There never was such a locomotive actor, since the world began. Great pains are taken with him. He has extra jomts in his legs : and a practical eye, with which he winks at the pit, in a manner that is absolutely insupportable to a stranger, but which the uiitiated audience, mainly composed of the common people, receive (so they do everything else) quite as a matter of course, and as if he were a man. His spirits are pro- digious. He continually shakes his legs, and winks his eye. And there is a heavy father mth grey hair, who sits down on the regular conventional stage-bank, and blesses his daughter in the regular conventional way, who is tremendous. No one would suppose it possible GENOA. 69 that anything short of a real man could be so tedious. It is the triumph of art. In the ballet, an Enchanter nms away with the Bride, in the veiy hour of her nuptials. He brings her to his cave, and tries to soothe her. They sit down on a sofa (the regular sofa! in the regular place, O.P. Second Entrance !) and a procession of musicians enter; one creatm'e plajdng a diiim, and knocking himself off his legs at every blow. These failing to delight her, dancers appear. Four first ; then two ; the two ; the flesh-colom-ed two. The way in which they dance ; the height to which they spring; the impossible and in- human extent to which they pirouette ; the revelation of their preposterous legs ; the coming down with a pause, on the veiy tips of their toes, when the music requires it; the gentleman's retiring up, when it is the lady's turn ; and the lady's retiring up when it is the gentle- man's tmn ; the final passion of a pas-de-deux ; and the going off with a bound ! — I shall never see a real ballet, with a composed comitenance, again. I went, another night, to see these Puppets act a play called " St. Helena, or the Death of Napoleon." It began by the disclosure of Napoleon, with an immense head, seated on a sofa in his chamber at St. Helena ; to whom his valet entered, with this obscm'e annomice- ment : " Sir Yew ud se on Low ! " (the ow, as in cow). Sir Hudson (that you could have seen his regi- mentals !) was a perfect mammoth of a man, to Napo- leon; liideously ugly; with a monstrously dispropor- 70 PICTUEES FEOM ITALY. tionate face, and a great clump for the lower-jaw, to express his tyrannical and obdurate nature. He began his system of persecution, by calling his prisoner " Gene- ral Buonaparte ;" to which the latter rephed, with the deepest tragedy, " Sir Yew ud se on Low, call me not thus. Repeat that phrase and leave me ! I am Napo- leon, Emperor of France !" Sir Yew ud se on, nothing daunted, proceeded to entertain him with an ordinance of the British Government, regulating the state he should preserve, and the furniture of his rooms : and limiting his attendants to fom^ or five persons, "Four or five for me ,'" said Napoleon. " Me ! One hundred thousand men were lately at my sole command; and this English officer talks of foiu* or five for me ! " Throughout the piece, Napoleon (who talked very like the real Napoleon, and was, for ever, ha"sdng small soli- loquies by himself) was veiy bitter on " these English officers," and " these English soldiers : " to the great satisfaction of the audience, who were perfectly de- lighted to have Low bullied ; and who, whenever Low said " General Buonaparte " (which he always did : always receiving the same correction) quite execrated him. It would be hard to say why; for Italians have little cause to sympathise with Napoleon, Heaven knows. There was no plot at all, except that a French officer disguised as an Englishman, came to propound a plan of escape ; and being discovered, but not before Napoleon had magnanimously refused to steal his freedom, was immediately ordered off by Low to be hanged. In two GENOA. 71 very long speeches, ■which Low made memorable, by windrng up with " Yas ! " — to show that he was English — which brought down thunders of applause. Napoleon was so affected by this catastrophe, that he fainted away on the spot, and was carried out by two other puppets. Judging from what followed, it would appear that he never recovered the shock ; for the next act showed him, in a clean shirt, in his bed (curtains crimson and white), where a lady, prematurely dressed in mourning, brought two little children, who Imeeled down by the bed-side, while he made a decent end ; the last word on his lips being " Vatterlo." It was unspeakably ludicrous. Buonaparte's boots were so wonderfully beyond control, and did such mar- vellous things of their own accord : doubling themselves up, and getting under tables, and dangling in the air, and sometimes skating away with liim, out of all human knowledge, when he was in full speech — mischances which were not rendered the less absurd, by a settled melancholy depicted in his face. To put an end to one conference with Low, he had to go to a table, and read a book : when it was the finest spectacle I ever beheld, to see his body bending over the volume, like a boot-jack, and his sentimental eyes glaring obstinately into the pit. He was prodigiously good, in bed, with an immense collar to his shirt, and his little hands outside the coverlet. So was Dr. Antommarchi, represented by a Puppet with long lank hair, like Mawworm's, who, in consequence of some derangement of his wires, hovered about the couch like a vultui'e, and gave medical 72 PICTURES FEOM ITALY. opinions in the air. He was almost as good as Low, though the latter was great at all times — a decided brute and villain, beyond all possibility of mistake. Low was especially fine at the last, when, hearing the doctor and the valet say, " The Emperor is dead ! " he pulled out his watch, and wound up the piece (not the watch) by exclaiming, with characteristic brutality, "Ha! ha ! Eleven minutes to six ! The General dead ! and the spy hanged ! " This brought the curtain down, triumphantly. There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them) a lovelier residence than the Palazzo Peschiere, or Palace of the Fishponds, whither we removed as soon as our three months' tenancy of the Pink Jail at Albaro had ceased and determined. It stands on a height within the walls of Genoa, but aloof from the town : surrounded by beautiful gardens of its own, adorned with statues, vases, fountains, marble basins, terraces, walks of orange trees and lemon trees, groves of roses and camelias. All its apartments are beautiful in their proportions and decorations ; but the great hall, some fifty feet in height, with three large windows at the end, overlooking the whole to^vn of Genoa, the harbour, and the neighboming sea, affords one of the most fascinating and delightfid prospects in the world. Any house more cheerful and habitable than the great rooms are, mthin, it would be dijfficult to conceive ; and certainly nothing more delicious than the scene without, in sunshine or in moonlight, could be GENOA. 73 imagined. It is more like an enchanted palace in an Eastern story than a grave and sober lodging. How you may wander on, from room to room, and never tire of the wild fancies on the walls and ceilings, as bright in their fresh colouring as if they had been painted yesterday ; or how one floor, or even the great hall which opens on eight other rooms, is a spacious promenade ; or how there are corridors and bed-chambers above, which we never use and rarely visit, and scarcely know the way through ; or how there is a view of a perfectly different character on each of the fom* sides of the building ; matters little. But that prospect from the hall, is like a vision to me. I go back to it, iji fancy, as I have done in calm reality a hundred times a-day ; and stand there, looking out, with the sweet scents from the garden risiug up about me, in a perfect dream of happiness. There lies all Genoa, in beautiful confusion, with its many churches, monasteries, and convents, pointing up into the sunny sky ; and down below me, just where the roofs begin, a solitaiy convent parapet, fashioned like a gal- lery, with an iron cross at the end, where sometimes, early in the morning, I have seen a little gi'oup of dark-veiled nmis gliding sorrowfully to and fro, and stopping now and then to peep down upon the waking world in which they have no part. Old Monte Faccio, brightest of hills in good weather, but sulkiest when storms are coming on, is here, upon the left. The Fort within the walls (the good King built it to command the town, and beat the houses of the Genoese about their eai'S, in case they 74 PICTUEES FROM ITALY. should be discontented) commands that height upon the right. The broad sea lies beyond, in front there ; and that line of coast, beginning by the light-house, and tapering away, a mere speck in the rosy distance, is the beautiful coast road that leads to Nice. The garden near at hand, among the roofs and houses : all red with roses and fresh with little fountains : is the Acqua Sola — a public promenade, where the military band plays gaily, and the white veils cluster thick, and the Genoese nobility ride round, and roimd, and round, in state- clothes and coaches at least, if not in absolute wisdom. Within a stone 's-throw, as it seems, the audience of the Day-Theatre sit : their faces turned this way. But as the stage is hidden, it is very odd, without a knowledge of the cause, to see their faces change so suddenly from earnestness to laughter; and odder still, to hear the rounds upon rounds of applause, rattling in the evening air, to which the curtain falls. But, being Sunday night, they act their best and most attractive play. And now, the sim is going down, in such magnificent array of red, and green, and golden light, as neither pen nor pencil could depict; and to the ruiging of the vesper bells, darlmess sets in at once, without a twilight. Then, lights begin to shine m Genoa, and on the country road ; and the revohdng lantern out at sea there, flashing, for an instant, on this palace front and portico, illuminates it as if there were a bright moon bursting from behind a cloud ; then, merges it in deep obscurity. And this, so far as I know, is the only reason why the Genoese avoid it after dark, and think it haunted. GENOA. 75 My memory will haunt it, many nights, in time to come; but nothing worse, I will engage. The same Ghost "will occasionally sail away, as I did one pleasant Autumn evening, into the bright prospect, and snuff the morning air at Marseilles. The corpulent hair-dresser was still sitting in his slippers outside his shop-door there, but the twirling ladies in the window, with the natm'al inconstancy of their sex, had ceased to twirl, and were languishing, stock . still, with their beautiful faces addressed to blind corners of the establishment, where it was impossible for ad- mirers to penetrate. The steamer had come from Genoa in a delicious run of eighteen hours, and we were going to run back again by the Cornice Eoad from Nice : not being satisfied to have seen only the outsides of the beautiful towns that rise in pictm-esque white clusters from among the olive woods, and rocks, and hills, upon the margin of the Sea. The Boat which started for Nice that night, at eight o'clock, was very small, and so crowded \sith goods that there was scai'cely room to move ; neither was there any- thing to eat on board, except bread ; nor to drink, except coffee. But being due at Nice at about eight or so in the morning, this was of no consequence : so when we began to wink at the bright stars, in invohmtaiy aclniow- ledgment of their winking at us, we tmiied into our berths, in a crowded, but cool little cabin, and slept soundly till morning. The Boat, being as dull and dogged a little boat as ever was built, it was within an horn* of noon when we 76 • PICTUEES FEOM ITALY. turned into Nice Harbour, where we very little expected anything but brealdast. But we were laden with wool. Wool must not remain in the Custom House at Mar- seilles more than twelve months at a stretch, without paying duty. It is the custom to make fictitious removals of unsold wool to evade this law ; to take it somewhere when the twelve months are nearly out; bring it straight back again ; and warehouse it, as a new cargo, for nearly twelve months longer. This wool of ours, had come originally from some place in the East. It was re- cognised as Eastern produce, the moment we entered the harbour. Accordingly, the gay little Sunday boats, full of holiday people, which had come off to greet us, were warned away by the authorities ; we were declared in quarantine ; and a great flag was solemnly nm up to the mast-head on the wharf, to make it known to all the town. It was a very hot day indeed. We were unshaved, unwashed, undressed, mifed, and could hardly enjoy the absurdity of lying bUstering in a lazy harbour, with the town looking on from a respectful distance, all manner of whiskered men in cocked hats discussing our fate at a remote guard-house, with gestures (we looked very hard at them through telescopes) expressive of a week's detention at least : and nothing whatever the matter all the time. But even in this crisis the Brave Courier acliieved a triumph. He telegraphed somebody [I saw nobody) either naturally connected with the hotel, or put en rapport with the establishment for that occa- sion only. The telegraph was answered, and in half NICE HAEBOUE. • 77 an hour or less, there came a loud shout from the guard-house. The captain was wanted. Everybody helped the captam into his boat. Eveiybody got his luggage, and said we were going. The captain rowed away, and disappeared behind a little jutting comer of the Galley-slaves' Prison : and presently came back with something, veiy sulkily. The Brave Cornier met him at the side, and received the something as its rightful o^^'ner. It w^as a wicker-basket, folded in a linen cloth ; and in it were two great bottles of wine, a roast fowl, some salt fish chopped with garlic, a great loaf of bread, a dozen or so of peaches, and a few other trifles. When we had selected om* own breakfast, the Brave Cornier invited a chosen party to partake of these refreshments, and assured them that they need not be deterred by motives of delicacy, as he would order a second basket to be furnished at their expense. Which he did — no one knew how — and by and by, the captain being again summoned, again sulldly returned with another something; over which my popular attendant presided as before : cai'ving with a clasp-knife, his own per- sonal property, something smaller than a Roman sword. The whole party on board were made merry by these unexpected supplies ; but none more so, than a loquacious little Frenchman, who got drunk in five minutes, and a stm-dy Cappuccino Friar, who had taken eveiybody's fancy mightily, and was one of the best friars in the world, I verily believe. He had a free, open countenance ; and a rich brown, flowing beard; and was a remarkably handsome man, of 78 ' PICTURES FROM ITALY. about fifty. He had come up to us, early in the morning, and inquu'ed whether we were sure to be at Nice by eleven; sapng that he particularly wanted to know, because if we reached it by that time he would have to perform mass, and must deal with the consecrated wafer, fasting ; whereas, if there were no chance of his being in time, he would immediately breakfast. He made this commmiication, under the idea that the Brave Courier was the captain ; and indeed he looked much more like it than anybody else on board. Being assured that we should arrive in good time, he fasted, and talked, fast- ing, to everybody, with the most charming good-humour; answering jokes at the expense of friars, with other jokes at the expense of lajnnen, and saying that friar as he was, he would engage to take up the two strongest men on board, one after the other, with liis teeth, and carry them along the deck. Nobody gave him the opportunity, but I dare say he could have done it; for he was a gallant, noble figure of a man, even in the Cappuccino dress, which is the ugliest and most ungainly that can well be. All this had given great delight to the loquacious Frenchman, who gradually patronised the Friar very much, and seemed to commiserate him as one who might have been born a Frenchman himself, but for an unfortmiate destiny. Although his patronage was such as a mouse might bestow upon a lion, he had a vast opinion of its condescension ; and in the warmth of that sentiment, occasionally rose on tiptoe, to slap the Friar on the back. NICE HARBOUR. 79 When the baskets arrived : it being then too late for Mass : the Friar went to work bravely; eating prodigiously of the cold meat and bread, drinking deep draughts of the wine, smoking cigars, taking snuff, sustaining an uninterrupted conversation with all hands, and occasion- ally running to the boat's side and hailing somebody on shore with the intelligence that we must be got out of this quarantine somehow or other, as he had to take part in a gi^eat religious procession in the afternoon. After this, he would come back, laugliing lustily from pm'e good-humom' : while the Frenchman wrinlded his small face into ten thousand creases, and said how droll it was, and what a brave boy was that Friar ! At length the heat of the sun without, and of the wine within, made the Frenchman sleepy. So, in the noontide of his patronage of his gigantic protege, he lay down among the wool, and began to snore. It was four o'clock before we were released ; and the Frenchman, dirty and woolly, and snuffy, was still sleeping when the Friar went ashore. As soon as we were free, we all hmiied away, to wash and dress, that we might make a decent appearance at the Procession ; and I saw no more of the Frenchman mitil we took up our station in the main street to see it pass, when he squeezed himself into a front place, elaborately reno- vated ; threw back his httle coat, to show a broad-barred velvet waistcoat sprinkled all over with stars ; and adjusted himself and his cane so as utterly to bewilder and transfix the Friar, when he should appear. 80 PICTURES FEOM ITALY. V The procession was a very long one, and included an immense number of people divided into small parties ; each party chaunting nasally, on its own account, without reference to any other, and producing a most dismal result. There were angels, crosses, Virgins carried on flat boards surrounded by Cupids, crowns, saints, mis- sals, infantry, tapers, monks, nuns, relics, dignitaries of the church in green hats, walldng under crimson parasols : and, here and there, a species of sacred street- lamp hoisted on a pole. We looked out anxiously for the Cappuccini, and presently their brown robes and corded gu'dles were seen coming on, in a body. I observed the little Frenchman chuckle over the idea that when the Friar saw him in the broad-barred waist- coat, he would mentally exclaim, " Is that my Patron ! That distinguished man ! " and would be covered with confusion. Ah ! never was the Frenchman so deceived. As om* friend the Cappuccino advanced, with folded arms, he looked straight into the visage of the little Frenchman, with a bland, serene, composed abstraction, not to be described. There was not the faintest trace of recog- nition or amusement on his features ; not the smallest consciousness of bread and meat, wine, snuff, or cigars. " C'est lui-meme," I heard the little Frenchman say, in some doubt. Oh yes, it was liimself. It was not his brother or his nephew, very like him. It was he. He walked in great state : being one of the Superiors of the Order : and looked his part to admiration. There never was anj^hing so perfect of its Idnd as the contemplative way in which he allowed his placid gaze to rest on us. CORNICE ROAD. 81 his late companions, as if he had never seen us in hjs life and didn't see us then. The Frenchman, quite hum- bled, took off his hat at last, but the Friar still passed on, with the same imperturbable serenity; and the broad- barred waistcoat, fading into the crowd, was seen no more. The procession womid up with a discharge of mus- ketry that shook all the windows in the town. Next afternoon we started for Genoa, by the famed Cornice Road. The haK-French, half-Italian Vetturino, who undertook, with his little rattling carriage and pair, to convey us thither in three days, was a careless, good-looking fellow, whose light-heartedness and singing propensities knew no bounds as long as we went on smoothly. So long, he had a word and a smile and a flick of his whip, for all the peasant girls, and odds and ends of the Somnambula for all the echoes. So long, he went jinglmg through every little village, with bells on his horses and rings in his ears : a very meteor of gallantry and cheerfulness. But, it was liighly characteristic to see him under a slight reverse of circumstances, when, in one part of the jour- ney, we came to a narrow place where a waggon had broken down and stopped up the road. His hands were twined in his hair immediately, as if a combination of all the direst accidents in life had suddenly fallen on his devoted head. He swore in French, prayed in Italian, and went up and down, beating his feet on the ground in a very ecstasy of despair. There were various carters and mule-drivers assembled round the broken waggon, and at last some man, of an original turn of mind, proposed that a general and joint effort should be G 82 PICTURES FROM ITALY. made to get things to-rights again, and clear the way — an idea which I verily believe would never have presented itself to our friend, though we had remained there until now. It was done at no great cost of labour; but at every pause in the doing, his hands were wound in his hair again, as if there were no ray of hope to lighten his misery. The moment he was on his box once more, and clatteruig briskly down hill, he returned to the Somnambula and the Peasant girls, as if it were not in the power of misfortune to depress him. Much of the romance of the beautiful to^ns and vil- lages on this beautiful road, disappears when they are entered, for many of them are very miserable. The streets are narrow, dark, and dirty ; the inhabitants lean and squalid; and the withered old women, with their wiry grey hair twisted up into a knot on the top of the head, like a pad to carry loads on, are so intensely ugly, both along the Eiviera, and in Genoa too, that, seen straggling about in dim door- ways with their spindles, or crooning together in by corners, they are like a popula- tion of Witches — except that they certainly are not to be suspected of brooms or any other instrument of cleanhness. Neither are the pig-skins, in common use to hold wine, and hung out in the sun m all directions, by any means ornamental, as they always preserve the form of very bloated pigs, with their heads and legs cut off, danglmg upside-down by their own tails. These towns, as they are seen in the approach, how- ever : nestling, Arith their clustering roofs and towers, among trees on steep hill-sides, or built upon the brmk of CORNICE ROAD. 83 noble bays : are charming. The vegetation is, everywhere, luxuriant and beautiful, and the Palm tree makes a novel featui'e in the novel scenery. In one town, San Remo — a most extraordinaiy place, built on gloomy open arches, so that one might ramble underneath the whole town — there are pretty terrace gardens ; in other towns, there is the clang of shipwrights' hammers, and the building of small vessels on the beach. In some of the broad bays, the fleets of Europe might ride at anchor. In every case, each little group of houses presents, in the distance, some enchanting confusion of picturesque and fancifd shapes. The road itself — now liigh above the glittering sea, which breaks against the foot of the precipice : now turn- ing inland to sweep the shore of a bay : now crossing the stony bed of a mountain stream : now low down on the beach : now winding among riven rocks of many forms and colom's : now chequered by a solitary ruined tower, one of a chain of towers built, in old time, to protect the coast from the invasions of the Barbary Corsairs — pre- sents new beauties every moment. When its own strik- ing scenery is passed, and it trails on through a long line of subm'b, l}ing on the flat sea-shore, to Genoa, then, the changing glimpses of that noble city and its Harbom', awaken a new som'ce of interest ; freshened by eveiy huge, miwieldy, half-inhabited old house in its outskirts ; and coming to its cUmax when the city Gate is reached, and all Genoa mth its beautiftd harbour, and neighbouring hills, bursts proudly on the ^iew. G Q TO PARMA, MODENA, AND BOLOGNA. I STROLLED away from Genoa on the 6th of November, bound for a good many places (England among them), but first for Piacenza ; for which town I started in the coupe of a machine something like a travelling caravan, in company with the Brave Courier, and a lady with a large dog, who howled dolefully, at intervals, all night. It was very wet, and very cold ; very dark, and very dismal ; we travelled at the rate of barely four miles an hour, and stopped nowhere for refreshment. At ten o'clock next morning, we changed coaches at Alessandria, where we were packed up in another coach (the body whereof would have been small for a fly), in company with a very old priest ; a young Jesuit, his companion — who carried their breviaries and other books, and who, in the exertion of getting into the coach, had made a gash of pink leg between his black stocldng and his black Ivnee-shorts, that reminded one of Hamlet in Ophelia's closet, only it was \isible on both legs — a provincial Awocato ; and a gentleman with a red nose that had an uncommon and singidar sheen upon it, which I never observed in the human subject before. In this way we travelled on, STR.ADELL.\. 85 until four o'clock in the afternoon ; the roads being still very heavy, and the coach very slow. To mend the mat- ter, the old priest was troubled with cramps in his legs, so that he had to give a terrible yell every ten minutes or so, and be hoisted out by the united efforts of the com- pany ; the coach always stopping for him, with great gravity. This disorder, and the roads, formed the main subject of conversation. Finding, in the afternoon, that the coupe had discharged two people, and had only one passenger inside — a monstrous ugly Tuscan, with a great purple moustache, of which no man could see the ends when lie had his hat on — I took advantage of its better accommodation, and in company with this gentleman (who was very conversational and good-humom'ed) travelled on, until neai'ly eleven o'clock at night, when the driver reported that he couldn't think of going any farther, and we accordingly made a halt at a place called Stradella. The inn was a series of strange galleries surrounding a yard ; where our coach, and a waggon or two, and a lot of fowls, and firewood, were all heaped up together, higgledy-piggledy; so that you didn't know, and couldn't have taken your oath, which was a fowl and which was a cart. We followed a sleepy man with a flaring torch, into a great, cold room, where there were two immensely broad beds, on what looked like two immensely broad deal dining-tables ; another deal table of similar dimen- sions in the middle of the bare floor ; fpur windows ; and two chairs. Somebody said it was my room ; and I walked up and down it, for half an hour or so, staring at the Tuscan, the old priest, the young priest, and the Aw- 86 PICTUEES FEOM ITALY. ocato (Red-Nose lived in the town, and had gone home), who sat upon the beds, and stared at me in return. The rather dreary whimsicahty of this stage of the proceedings, is interrupted by an announcement from the Brave (he has been cooking) that supper is ready; and to the priest's chamber (the next room and the counterpart of mine) we all adjourn. The first dish is a cabbage, boiled with a great quantity of rice in a tureen full of w-ater, and flavoured with cheese. It is so hot, and we are so cold, that it appears almost jolly. The second dish is some little bits of pork, fried with pigs' kidneys. The third, two red fowls. The fourth, two little red turkeys. The fifth, a huge stew of garlic and truffles, and I don't know what else ; and this con- cludes the entertainment. Before I can sit down in my own chamber, and think it of the dampest, the door opens, and the Brave comes moving in, in the middle of such a quantity of fuel that he looks like Bimam Wood taking a winter w'alk. He kindles this heap in a twinkling, and pro- duces a jorum of hot brandy and water ; for that bottle of his keeps company with the seasons, and now holds nothing but the pm^est eau de vie. When he has accom- plished this feat, he retires for the night ; and I hear him, for an hour afterwards, and indeed until I fall asleep, maldng jokes in some out-house (apparently under the pillow), where he is smoking cigars with a party of confidential friends. He never was in the house in his life before ; but he Imows everj^body every- where, before he has been anywhere five minutes ; and STRADELLA. 87 is certain to have attracted to himself, in the meantime, the enthusiastic devotion of the whole establishment. This is at twelve o'clock at night. At four o'clock next morning, he is up again, fresher than a new-blown rose ; making blazing fires without the least authority from the landlord; producing mugs of scalding coffee when nobody else can get anything but cold water ; and going out into the dark streets, and roaring for fresh milk, on the chance of somebody with a cow getting up to supply it. While the horses are " coming," I stumble out into the town too. It seems to be all one little Piazza, with a cold damp wuid blowing in and out of the arches, alternately, in a sort of pattern. But it is pro- foundly dark, and raining heavily; and I shouldn't know it to-morrow, if I were taken there to try. Which Heaven forbid ! The horses arrive in about an hour. In the interval, the driver swears : sometimes Christian oaths, sometimes Pagan oaths. Sometimes, when it is a long, compound oath, he begins with Christianity and merges into Paganism. Various messengers are despatched ; not so much after the horses, as after each other ; for the first messenger never comes back, and all the rest imitate him. At length the horses appear, surrounded by all the messengers ; some kicking them, and some dragging them, and all shouting abuse to them. Then, the old priest, the young priest, the Awocato, the Tuscan, and all of us, take our places ; and sleepy voices pro- ceeding from the doors of extraordinary hutches in divers parts of the yard, ciy out " Addio coniere mio ! 88 PICTURES FROM ITALY. Buon' viaggio, corriere !" Salutations which the courier, with his face one monstrous grin, returns in like manner as we go jolting and wallowing away, through the mud. At Piacenza, which was four or five hours' journey from the inn at Stradella, we broke up our little company before the hotel door, with divers manifesta- tions of friendly feeling on all sides. The old priest was taken with the cramp again, before he had got half- way down the street ; and the young priest laid the bundle of books on a door step, while he dutifully rubbed the old gentleman's legs. The client of the Awocato was waiting for him at the yard-gate, and kissed him on each cheek, with such a resounding smack, that I am afraid he had either a very bad case, or a scantily-fur- nished purse. The Tuscan, with a cigar in his mouth, went loitering off, carrying his hat in his hand that he might the better trail up the ends of his dishevelled moustache. And the Brave Courier, as he and I strolled away to look about us, began immediately to entertain me with the private histories and family affairs of the whole party. A brown, decayed, old town, Piacenza is, A deserted, solitary, grass-grown place, with ruined ramparts; half filled-up trenches, which afford a frowsy pasturage to tlie lean kine that wander about them ; and streets of stern houses, moodily frowning at the other houses over the way. The sleepiest and shabbiest of soldiery go wander- ing about, with the double curse of laziness and poverty, uncouthly wrinkling their misfitting regimentals ; the PIACENZA. 89 dirtiest of children play with their impromptu toys (pigs and mud) in the feeblest of gutters ; and the gaimtest of dogs trot in and out of the dullest of archways, in perpetual search of something to eat, which they never seem to find. A mysterious and solemn Palace, guarded by two colossal statues, twin Genii of the place, stands gravely in the midst of the idle town ; and the king with the marble legs, who flourished in the time of the thou- sand and one Nights, might live contentedly inside of it, and never have the energy, in his upper half of flesh and blood, to want to come out. What a strange, half-sorrowful and half-delicious doze it is, to ramble through these places gone to sleep and basking in the sun ! Each, in its turn, appears to be, of all the mouldy, dreaiy, God-forgotten towns in the wide world, the chief. Sitting on this hillock where a bastion used to be, and where a noisy fortress was, in the time of the old Roman station here, I become aware that I have never Ivnown till now, what it is to be lazy. A dor- mouse must sm^ely be in very much the same condition before he retires under the wool in his cage ; or a tortoise before he buries liimself. I feel that I am getting rusty. That any attempt to think, would be accompanied with a creaking noise. That there is nothing, anywhere, to be done, or needing to be done. That there is no more human progress, motion, effort, or advancement, of any kind beyond this. That the whole scheme stopped here centmies ago, and lay down to rest until the Day of Judgment. Never while the Brave Courier lives ! Behold him 90 PICTURES FROJI ITALY. jingling out of Piacenza, and staggering this way, in the tallest posting-chaise ever seen, so that he looks out of the front window as if he were peeping over a garden wall ; while the postilion, concentrated- essence of all the shabbiness of Italy, pauses for a moment in his animated conversation, to touch liis hat to a blunt-nosed little Virgin, hardly less shabby than himself, enshrined in a plaster Punch's show outside the town. In Genoa, and thereabouts, they train the vines on trel- lis-work, supported on square clumsy pillars, which, in themselves, are anything but picturesque. But, here, they twine them aromid trees, and let them trail among the hedges; and the vineyards are full of trees, regularly planted for this pm^ose, each with its own vine twining and clustering about it. Their leaves are now of the brightest gold and deepest red ; and never was anythhig so enchautingly graceful and full of beauty. Through miles of these delightful forms and colours, the road winds its way. The wild festoons ; the elegant wreaths, and crowQS, and garlands of all shapes ; the fauy nets flung over great trees, and making them prisoners in sport ; the tumbled heaps and mounds of exquisite shapes upon the ground; how rich and beautiful they are ! And every now and then, a long, long line of trees, will be all bound and garlanded together: as if they had taken hold of one another, and were coming dancmg down the field ! Parma has cheerful, stirring streets, for an Italian town ; and consequently is not so characteristic as many places of less note. Always excepting the retired PARMA. 91 Piazza, where the Cathedral, Baptistery, and Campanile — ancient buildings, of a sombre brown, embellished with innumerable grotesque monsters and dreamy- looldng creatures carved in marble and red stone — are clustered in a noble and magnificent repose. Their silent presence was only invaded, when I saw them, by the twittering of the many birds that were flying in and out of the crevices in the stones and little nooks in the architecture, where they had made their nests. They were busy, rising from the cold shade of Temples made with hands, into the smmy air of Heaven. Not so the worshippers withm, who were listening to the same drowsy chaunt, or kneeling before the same Idnds of images and tapers, or whispering, v^ith their heads bowed down, in the very selfsame dark confessionals, as I had left in Genoa and everywhere else. The decayed and mutilated paintings with which tliis church is covered, have, to my thinking, a remarkably momTiful and depressing influence. It is miserable to see great works of ait — something of the Souls of Painters — perishing and fading away, hke human forms. This cathedral is odorous with the rotting of Coreggio's fres- coes in the Cupola. Heaven linows how beautiful they may have been at one time. Connoisseurs fall into raptures with them now ; but such a labyrinth of arms and legs : such heaps of foreshortened limbs, entangled and involved and jumbled together : no operative surgeon, gone mad, could imagine in his wildest delkium. There is a very interesting subterranean church here ; the roof supported by marble pillars, behind each of 92 PICTURES FROM ITALY. which there seemed to be at least one beggar in ambush : to say nothing of the tombs and secluded altars. From every one of these lurking-places, such crowds of phan- tom-looking men and women, leading other men and women with twisted limbs, or chattering jaws, or paralytic gestures, or idiotic heads, or some other sad infirmity, came hobbling out to beg, that if the ruined frescoes in the cathedral above, had been suddenly animated, and had retired to this lower church, they could hardly have made a greater confusion, or exhibited a more confound- ing display of arms and legs. There is Petrarch's Monument, too; and there is the Baptistery, with its beautiful arches and immense font; and there is a gallery containing some very remarkable pic- tures, whereof a few were being copied by hairy-faced artists, with little velvet caps more off their heads than on. There is the Famese Palace, too ; and in it one of the dreariest spectacles of decay that ever was seen — a grand, old, gloomy theatre, mouldering away. It is a large wooden structure, of the horse-shoe shape ; the lower seats arranged upon the Roman plan, but above them, great heavy chambers rather than boxes, where the Nobles sat, remote, in their proud state. Such desolation as has fallen on this theatre, enhanced in the spectator's fancy by its gay intention and design, none but worms can be familiar with. A hundred and ten years have passed, since any play was acted here. The sky shines in through the gashes in the roof ; the boxes are dropping down, wasting away, and only tenanted by rats ; damp and mildew smear the faded colours, and make MODENA. 93 spectral maps upon the panels ; lean rags are dangling down where there were gay festoons on the Proscenium ; the stage has rotted so, that a narrow wooden galleiy is thrown across it, or it would sink beneath the tread, and bury the visitor in the gloomy depth beneath. The desolation and decay impress themselves on all the senses. The air has a mouldering smell, and an earthy taste ; any stray outer sounds that straggle in with some lost sunbeam, are muffled and heavy ; and the worm, the maggot, and the rot have changed the surface of the wood beneath the touch, as time will seam and roughen a smooth hand. If ever Ghosts act plays, they act them on this ghostly stage. It was most delicious weather, when we came into Modena, where the darkness of the sombre colonnades over the footways skiiling the main street on either side, was made refreshing and agreeable by the bright sky, so wonderfully blue. I passed, from all the glory of the day, into a dim cathedral, where high mass was performing, feeble tapers were burning, people were kneehng in all directions before all manner of shrines, and officiating priests were crooning the usual chaunt, in the usual low, dull, drawling, melancholy tone. Thinking how strange it was, to find, m eveiy stagnant town, this same Heart beating with the same monotonous pulsation, the centre of the same toi'pid, listless system, I came out by another door, and was suddenly scared to death by a blast from the shrillest trumpet that ever was blown. Immediately, came tearing round the comer, an equestrian company from Paris : marshallmg themselves 94 PICTURES FROM ITALY. under the walls of the church, and floutmg, Tsith their horses' heels, the griffins, lions, tigers, and other monsters in stone and marble, decorating its exterior. First, there came a stately nobleman with a great deal of hair, and no hat, bearing an enormous banner, on which was inscribed, Mazeppa ! to-night ! Then, a Mexican chief, with a great pear-shaped club on his shoulder, like Hercules. Then, six or eight Roman chariots : each with a beautiful lady in extremely short petticoats, and unnaturally pink tights, erect within: shedding beaming looks upon the crowd, in which there was a latent expression of discomposure and anxiety, for which I couldn't account, until, as the open back of each chariot presented itself, I saw the immense difficulty with which the pinl^ legs maintamed their pei*pendicular, over the imeven pavement of the town: which gave me quite a new idea of the ancient Romans and Britons. The procession was brought to a close, by some dozen indomitable warriors of different nations, riding two and two, and haughtily surveying the tame population of Modena: among whom, however, they occasionally con- descended to scatter largesse in the form of a few hand- bills. After caracolling among the lions and tigers, and proclaiming that evening's entertainments with blast of trumpet, it then filed off, by the other end of the square, and left a new and greatly uicreased dulness behind. When the procession had so entirely passed away, that the shrill trumpet was mild in the distance, and the tail of the last horse was hopelessly round the corner, the people who had come out of the chm'ch to stare at it, MODENA. 95 went back again. But, one old lady, kneeling on the pavement within, near the door, had seen it all, and had been immensely interested, without getting up ; and this old lady's eye, at that jmicture, I happened to catch : to our mutual confusion. She cut our embarrassment very short, however, by crossing herself devoutly, and going down, at full length, on her face, before a figure in a fancy petticoat and a gilt crown; which was so like one of the procession-figures, that perhaps at this hour she may think the whole appearance a celestial vision. ^ Anyhow, I must certainly have forgiven her, her interest in the Circus, though I had been her Father Confessor. There was a little fieiy-eyed old man with a crooked shoulder, in the cathedral, who took it veiy ill that I made no effort to see the bucket (kept in an old tower) which the people of Modena took away from the people of Bologna in the fom'teenth century, and about which there was war made and a mock-heroic poem by Tasso, too. Being quite content, however, to look at the outside of the tower, and feast, in imagination, on the bucket within ; and preferring to loiter in the shade of the tall Campanile, and about the cathedral; I have no per- sonal knowledge of this bucket, even at the present time. Indeed, we were at Bologna, before the little old man (or the Guide-Book) would have considered that we had half done justice to the wonders of Modena. But it is such a delight to me to leave new scenes behind, and still go on, encountering newer scenes — and, moreover I have such a perverse disposition in respect of sights that 96 PICTURES FEOM ITALY. are cut, and dried, and dictated — that I fear I sin against similar authorities in every place I visit. Be this as it may, in the pleasant Cemetery at Bologna I found myself walking next Sunday morning, among the stately marble tombs and colonnades, in company with a crowd of Peasants, and escorted by a little Cicerone of that town, who was excessively anxious for the honour of the place, and most solicitous to divert my attention from the bad monuments : whereas he was never tired of extolling the good ones. Seeing this little man (a good-humoured little man he was, who seemed to have nothing in his face but shining teeth and eyes) looking, wistfully, at a certain plot of grass, I asked him who was buried there. " The poor people, Signore, " he said with a shrug and a smile, and stopping to look back at me — for he always went on a little before, and took off his* hat to introduce every new monument. " Only the poor, Signore ! It 's veiy cheerful. It 's very lively. How green it is, how cool ! It 's like a meadow ! There are five," — holding up all the fingers of his right hand to express the number, which an Italian peasant will always do, if it be within the com- pass of his ten fingers, — "there are five of my little children buried there, Signore; just there; a little to the right. Well ! Thanks to God ! It 's very cheerful. How green it is, how cool it is ! It 's quite a meadow ! " He looked me very hard in the face, and seeing I was sorry for him, took a pinch of snuff (every Cice- rone takes snuff), and made a little bow; partly in deprecation of his having alluded to such a subject, and BOLOGNA. 97 partly in memory of the children and of his favourite saint. It was as unaffected and as perfectly natural a little bow, as ever man made. Immediately aftei'wards, he took his hat off altogether, and begged to introduce me to the next monument ; and his eyes and his teeth shone brighter than before. THROUGH BOLOGNA AND FERRARA. There was such a very smart ojfficial in attendance at the Cemetery where the little Cicerone had buried his children, that when the little Cicerone suggested to me, in a whisper, that there would be no offence in present- ing this officer, in return for some slight extra service, with a couple of pauls (about tenpence, English money), I looked incredulously at his cocked hat, wash-leather gloves, well-made uniform, and dazzling buttons, and re- buked the little Cicerone with a grave shake of the head. For, in splendour of appearance, he was at least equal to the Deputy Usher of the Black Rod ; and the idea of his carrying, as Jeremy Diddler would say, " such a thing as tenpence " away with him, seemed monstrous. He took it in excellent part, however, when I made bold to give it him, and pulled off his cocked hat with a flourish that would have been a bargain at double the money. It seemed to be his duty to describe the monuments to the people — at all events he was doing so ; and when I compared him, like Gulliver in Brobdignag, "with the Institutions of my own beloved country, I could not refrain from tears of pride and exultation." He had no BOLOGNA. 99 pace at all ; no more than a tortoise. He loitered as the people loitered, that they might gratify their curiosity ; and positively allowed them, now and then, to read the inscriptions on the tombs. He was neither shabby, nor insolent, nor churlish, nor ignorant. He spoke his own language with perfect propriety, and seemed to consider himself, in his way, a kind of teacher of the people, and to entertain a just respect both for himself and them. They would no more have such a man for a Verger in Westminster Abbey, than they w^ould let the people in (as they do at Bologna) to see the monuments for nothing. Again, an ancient sombre town, under the brilliant sky ; with heavy arcades over the footways of the older streets, and lighter and more cheerful archways in the newer portions of the town. Again, brown piles of sacred buildings, with more birds flying in and out of chinks in the stones ; and more snarling monsters for the bases of the pillars. Again, rich chm'ches, drowsy masses, curling incense, tinkling bells, priests in bright vestments : pictm"es, tapers, laced altar cloths, crosses, images, and artificial flowers. There is a grave and learned air about the city, and a pleasant gloom upon it, that would leave it, a distinct and separate impression in the mind, among a crowed of cities, though it were not still further marked in the travellers remembrance by the two brick leaning towers (sufficiently unsightly in themselves, it must be acknowledged), in- clming cross-wise as if they were bowing stiffly to each other — a most extraordinary termination to the per- spective of some of the narrow streets. The colleges, H 2 100 PICTURES FROM ITALY. and churches too, and palaces : and above all the academy of Fine Arts, where there are a host of interestmg pictures, especially by Guido, Domenichino, and LuDovico Caracci : give it a place of its own in the memory. Even though these were not, and there were nothing else to remember it by, the great Meridian on the pavement of the church of San Petronio, where the sunbeams mark the time among the kneeling people, would give it a fanciful and pleasant interest. Bologna being very full of tourists, detained there by an inmidation which rendered the road to Florence im- passable, I was quartered up at the top of an Hotel, in an out-of-the-way room which I never could find : con- taining a bed, big enough for a boarding-school, which I couldn't fall asleep in. The chief among the waiters who visited this lonely retreat, where there was no other company but the swallows in the broad eaves over the window, was a man of one idea in connection with the English ; and the subject of this harmless monomania, was Lord Byron. I made the discovery by accidentally remarking to him, at breakfast, that the mattmg with which the floor was covered, was very comfortable at that season, when he immediately replied that Milor Beeron had been much attached to that kind of matting. Observ- ing, at the same moment, that I took no milk, he exclaimed with enthusiasm, that Milor Beeron had never touched it. At first, I took it for granted, in my innocence, that he had been one of the Beeron servants ; but no, he said no, he was in the habit of speaking about my Lord, to English gentlemen ; that was all. He knew all about BOLOGNA. 101 him, he said. In proof of it, he connected him with every possible topic, from the Monte Pulciano wine at dinner, (which was grown on an estate he had owned,) to the big bed itself, which was the very model of his. When I left the inn, he coupled with his final bow in the yard, a parting assurance that the road by which I was going, had been Milor Beeron's favourite ride ; and before the horse's feet had well begun to clatter on the pavement, he ran briskly up stairs again, I dare say to tell some other EngUshman in some other solitary room that the guest who had just departed, was Lord Beeron's living image. I had entered Bologna by night — almost midnight — and all along the road thither, after our entrance into the Papal territory : which is not, in any part, supremely well governed, Saint Peter's keys being rather rusty now: the driver had so worried about the danger of robbers in travellmg after dark, and had so infected the Brave Courier, and the two had been so constantly stopping and getting up and down to look after a portmanteau which was tied on behmd, that I should have felt almost obliged to any one who would have had the goodness to take it away. Hence it was stipulated, that, whenever we left Bologna, we should start so as not to arrive at Ferrara later than eight at night ; and a delightful afternoon and evening jomney it was, albeit tln-ough a flat district which gradually became more marshy from the overflow of brooks and rivers in the recent heavy rains. At sunset, when I was walking on alone, while the 102 PICTUEES FROM ITALY. horses rested, I arrived upon a little scene, which, by- one of those singular mental operations of which we are all conscious, seemed perfectly familiar to me, and which I see distinctly now. There was not much in it. In the blood-red light, there was a momTiful sheet of water, just stirred by the evening wind ; upon its margin a few- trees. In the foreground was a group of silent peasant- girls leaning over the parapet of a little bridge, and looking, now up at the sky, now down into the water ; in the distance, a deep bell; the shadow of approaching night on eveiything. If I had been mm'dered there, in some former life, I could not have seemed to remember the place more thoroughly, or with a more emphatic chilling of the blood ; and the real remembrance of it acquired in that minute, is so strengthened by the imaginary recollection, that I hardly think I could forget it. More solitary, more depopulated, more deserted, old Ferrara, than any city of the solemn brotherhood ! The grass so grows up in the silent streets, that anyone might make hay there, literally, while the sun shines. But the sun shines with diminished cheerfulness in grim Ferrara ; and the people are so few who pass and repass through the public places, that the flesh of its inhabitants might be grass indeed, and growing in the squares. I wonder why the head coppersmith in an Italian town, always lives next door to the Hotel, or opposite : making the visitor feel as if the beating hammers were his own heart, palpitating with a deadly energy! I wonder why jealous corridors surround the bedroom on FERRAEA. 103 all sides, and fill it with unnecessary doors that can't be shut, and will not open, and abut on pitchy darkness ! I wonder why it is not enough that these distrustful genii stand agape at one's dreams all night, but there must also be round open portholes, high in the wall, suggestive, when a mouse or rat is heard behind the wainscot, of a somebody scraping the wall with his toes, in his endeavours to reach one of these portholes and look in ! I wonder why the faggots are so constructed, as to know of no effect but an agony of heat when they are lighted and replenished, and an agony of cold and suffo- cation at all other times ! I wonder, above all, why it is the great feature of domestic architecture in Italian inns, that all the fire goes up the chimney, except the smoke ! The answer matters little. Coppersmiths, doors, portholes, smoke, and faggots, are welcome to me. Give me the smiling face of the attendant, man or woman ; the courteous manner ; the amiable desire to please and to be pleased; the light-hearted, pleasant, simple air — so many jewels set m dirt — and I am theirs again to-morrow ! Ariosto's house, Tasso's prison, a rare old gothic cathedral, and more churches of course, are the sights of Ferrara. But the long silent streets, and the dis- mantled palaces, where ivy waves in lieu of banners, and where rank weeds are slowly creeping up the long- untrodden stairs, are the best sights of all. The aspect of this dreary town, half an hour before sunrise one fine morning, when I left it, was as pic- 104 PICTURES FROM ITALY. turesque as it seemed unreal and spectral. It was no matter that the people were not yet out of bed ; for if they had all been up and busy, they would have made but little difference in that desert of a place. It was best to see it, without a single figure in the picture ; a city of the dead, without one solitary survivor. Pesti- lence might have ravaged streets, squares, and market- places ; and sack and siege have ruined the old houses, battered down their doors and windows, and made breaches in their roofs. In one part, a great tower rose into the air ; the only landmark in the melancholy view. In another, a prodigious Castle, with a moat about it, stood aloof: a sullen city in itself. In the black dun- geons of this castle, Parisina and her lover were beheaded in the dead of night. The red light, beginning to shine when I looked back upon it, stained its walls without, as they have, many a time, been stained within, in old days ; but for any sign of life they gave, the castle and the city might have been avoided by all human creatures, from the moment when the axe went down upon the last of the two lovers : and might have never \'ibrated to another sound Beyond the blow that to the block Pierced through with forced and sullen shock. Coming to the Po, which was greatly swollen, and running fiercely, we crossed it by a floating bridge of boats, and so came into the Austrian territory, and resumed our journey : through a country of which, for some miles, a great part was under water. The Brave Courier and the soldiery had first quarrelled, for half an hour or more, over our eternal passport. But this was a daily relaxation with the FERRA.RA. 105 Brave, who was always stricken deaf when shabby func- tionaries in uniform came, as they constantly did come, plunging out of wooden boxes to look at it — or in other words to beg — and who, stone deaf to my entreaties that the man might have a trifle given him, and we resume our journey in peace, was wont to sit reviling the functionary in broken Enghsh: while the unfortunate man's face was a portrait of mental agony framed in the coach window, from his perfect ignorance of what was being said to his disparagement. There was a Postilion, in the course of this day's journey, as wild and savagely good-looldng a vagabond as you would desire to see. He was a tall, stout-made, dark-complexioned fellow, with a profusion of shaggy black hair hanging all over his face, and great black whiskers stretching down his throat. His dress was a torn suit of rifle green, garnished here and there with red; a steeple-crowned hat, innocent of nap, with a broken and bedraggled feather stuck in the band ; and a flaming red neck-kerchief hanging on his shoulders. He was not in the saddle, but reposed, quite at his ease, on a sort of low footboard in front of the postchaise, down among the horses' tails — convenient for having his brains kicked out, at any moment. To this Brigand, the Brave Courier, when we were at a reasonable trot, happened to suggest the practicability of going faster. He received the proposal with a perfect yell of derision ; brandished his whip about his head (such a whip ! it was more like a home-made bow); flung up his heels, much higher than the horses; and disappeared, in a pai'oxysm, 106 PICTURES FROM ITALY. somewhere in the neighbourhood of the axle-tree. I fully expected to see him lying in the road, a hundred yards behind, but up came the steeple-crowned hat again, next minute, and he was seen reposing, as on a sofa, entertaining himself with the idea, and crying, "Ha ha ! what next. Oh the devil ! Faster too ! Shoo — hoo — — ! " (This last ejaculation, an inexpressibly defiant hoot.) Being anxious to reach our immediate destination that night, I ventured, by and by, to repeat the experiment on my own account. It produced exactly the same effect. Round flew the whip with the same scornful flemish, up came the heels, down went the steeple-crowned hat, and presently he re- appeared, reposing as before and saying to himself, " Ha ha ! what next ! Faster too. Oh the devil ! Shoo — hoo — 0—0 ! " AN ITALIAN DREAM. I HAD been travelling, for some days ; resting very little in the night, and never in the day. The rapid and unbroken succession of novelties that had passed before me, came back like half-formed dreams : and a crowd of objects wandered in the gi'eatest confusion through my mind, as I travelled on, by a solitary road. At intervals, some one among them would stop, as it were, in its restless flitting to and fro, and enable me to look at it, quite steadily, and behold it in full distinctness. After a few moments, it would dissolve, like a view in a magic- lantern ; and while I saw some part of it quite plainly, and some faintly, and some not at all, would show me another of the many places I had lately seen, lingering behind it, and coming through it. This was no sooner visible than, in its turn, it melted into something else. At one moment, I was standing again, before the brown old rugged churches of Modena. As I recognised the cmious pillars with grim monsters for their bases, I seemed to see them, standing by themselves in the quiet squai'e at Padua, where there were the staid old University, and the figures, demurely-gowned, gi'ouped 108 PICTURES FROM ITALY. here and there in the open space about it. Then, I was strolling in the outskirts of that pleasant city, admiring the unusual neatness of the dwelling-houses, gardens, and orchards, as I had seen them a few hours before. In their stead, arose, immediately, the two towers of Bologna; and the most obstinate of all these objects, failed to hold its ground, a minute, before the monstrous moated castle of Ferrara, which, like an illustration to a wild romance, came back again in the red sun-rise, lording it over the solitary, grass-grown, withered town. In short, I had that incoherent but delightful jumble in my brain, which travellers are apt to have, and are indolently willing to encourage. Every shake of the coach in which I sat, half dozing in the dark, appeared to jerk some new recollection out of its place, and to jerk some other new recollection into it ; and in this state I fell asleep. I was awakened after some time (as I thought) by the stopping of the coach. It was now quite night, and we were at the water side. There lay here, a black boat, with a little house or cabin in it of the same mournful colour. When I had taken my seat in this, the boat was paddled, by two men, towards a great light, lying in the distance on the sea. Ever and again, there was a dismal sigh of wind. It ruffled the water, and rocked the boat, and sent the dark clouds flying before the stars. I could not but think how strange it was, to be floating away at that hour : leaving the land behind, and going on, towards this light upon the sea. It soon began to burn brighter : and from being one light became a cluster of tapers, twinlding and AN ITALIAN DREAM. 109 shining out of the water, as the boat approached towards them by a dreamy kind of track, marked out upon the sea by posts and piles. We had floated on, five miles or so, over the dark water, when I heard it rippling, in my dream, against some obstruction near at hand. Looking out attentively, I saw, through the gloom, a something black and mas- sive — ^like a shore, but lying close and flat upon the water, like a raft — which we were gliding past. The chief of the two rowers said it was a bmial-place. Full of the interest and wonder which a cemetery lying out there, in the lonely sea, inspired, I turned to gaze upon it as it should recede in our path, when it was quickly shut out from my view. Before I knew by what, or how, I found that we were gliding up a street — a phantom street ; the houses rising on both sides, from the water, and the black boat gliding on beneath their windows. Lights were shining from some of these case- ments, plumbing the depth of the black stream with their reflected rays ; but all was profoundly silent. So we advanced into this ghostly city, continuing to held our course through narrow streets and lanes, all filled and flowing with water. Some of the comers where our way branched off, were so acute and narrow, that it seemed impossible for the long slender boat to turn them ; but the rowers, with a low melodious cry of warning, sent it skimming on, without a pause. Some- times, the rowers of another black boat like our own, echoed the ciy, and slackening their speed (as I thought we did ours) would come flitting past us, like a dark no PICTURES FEOM ITALY. shadow. Other boats, of the same sombre hue, were lying moored, I thought, to painted pillars, near to dark mysterious doors that opened straight upon the water. Some of these were empty ; in some, the rowers lay asleep ; towards one, I saw some figures coming down a gloomy archway from the interior of a palace : gaily dressed, and attended by torch-bearers. It was but a glimpse I had of them; for a bridge, so low and close upon the boat that it seemed ready to fall down and crush us : one of the many bridges that perplexed the Dream : blotted them out, instantly. On we went, floating towards the heart of this strange place — with water all about us where never water was elsewhere — clusters of houses, churches, heaps of stately buildmgs growing out of it — and, everj^^vhere, the same extraordinary silence. Presently, we shot across a broad and open stream ; and passing, as I thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps with which it was illuminated, shewed long rows of arches and pillars, of ponderous con- struction and great strength, but as light to the eye as garlands of hoar-frost or gossamer — and where, for the first time, I saw people walking — arrived at a flight of steps leading from the water to a large mansion, where, having passed through corridors and galleries innumer- able, I lay down to rest; listening to the black boats stealing up and down below the window on the rippling water, till I fell asleep. The glory of the day that broke upon me in this Dream ; its freshness, motion, buoyancy ; its spai'kles of the sun in water ; its clear blue sky and nistling air ; no ' AN ITALIAN DREAM. HI waldng words can tell. But, from my window, I looked down on boats and barks; on masts, sails, cordage, flags ; on groups of busy sailors, working at the cargoes of these vessels ; on wide quays, strewn with bales, casks, merchandise of many kinds ; on great ships, Ipng near at hand in stately indolence ; on islands, crowned with gorgeous domes and turrets: and where golden crosses glittered in the light, atop of wondrous churches springing from the sea ! Going down upon the margin of the gi'een sea, rolling on before the door, and fil- ling all the streets, I came upon a place of such sur- passing beauty, and such grandeur, that all the rest was poor and faded, in comparison with its absorbing loveliness. It was a great Piazza, as I thought ; anchored, like all the rest, in the deep ocean. On its broad bosom, was a Palace, more majestic and magnificent in its old age, than all the buildmgs of the earth, in the high prime and fulness of their youth. Cloisters and galleries: so light, they might have been the work of faiiy hands : so strong that centuries had battered them in vain : wound round and round this palace, and enfolded it with a Cathedral, gorgeous in the wild luxuriant fancies of the East. At no great distance from its porch, a lofty tower, standing by itself, and rearing its proud head, alone, into the sky, looked out upon the Adriatic sea. Near to the margin of the stream, were two ill-omened pillars of red granite ; one having on its top, a figure with a sword and shield; the other, a winged lion. Not far from these again, a second tower : richest of the rich in all its 112 PICTURES FROM ITALY. decorations: even here, where all was rich: sustained aloft, a great orb, gleaming with gold and deepest blue : the Twelve Signs painted on it, and a mimic sun revolv- ing in its com'se around them : while above, two bronze giants hammered out the hours upon a sounding bell. An oblong square of lofty houses of the whitest stone, surrounded by a light and beautiful arcade, formed part of this enchanted scene ; and, here and there, gay masts for flags rose, tapering, from the pavement of the unsubstantial ground. I thought I entered the Cathedral, and went in and out among its many arches : traversing its whole extent. A grand and dreamy structure, of immense proportions ; golden with old mosaics; redolent of perfumes; dim with the smoke of incense ; costly in treasure of precious stones and metals, glittering through iron bars; holy with the bodies of deceased saints ; rainbow-hued with windows of stained glass ; dark with carved woods and coloured marbles ; obscure in its vast heights, and length- ened distances ; shining with silver lamps and winking lights ; mireal, fantastic, solemn, inconceivable through- out. I thought I entered the old palace ; pacing silent galleries and council-chambers, where the old iiilers of this mistress of the waters looked sternly out, in pictures, from the walls, and where her high-prowed galleys, still victorious on canvass, fought and conquered as of old. I thought I wandered through its halls of state and triumph — bare and empty now! — and musmg on its pride and might, extinct : for that was past ; all past : heard a voice say, " Some tokens of its ancient rule, and AN ITALIAN DEEAM, 113 some consoling reasons for its downfal, may be traced here, yet ! " I dreamed that I was led on, then, into some jealous rooms, commmiicating with a prison near the palace ; separated from it by a lofty bridge crossing a narrow street ; and called, I dreamed, The Bridge of Sighs. But first I passed two jagged slits in a stone wall ; the lions' mouths — now toothless — where, in the distem- pered horror of my sleep, I thought denunciations of innocent men to the old wicked Council, had been dropped through, many a time, when the night was dark. So, when I saw the council-room to which such prisoners were taken for examination, and the door by which they passed out, when they were condemned — a door that never closed upon a man with life and hope before him — my heart appeared to die within me. It was smitten harder though, when, torch in hand, I descended from the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal, awful, horrible stone cells. They were quite dark. Each had a loop-hole in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day, a torch was placed — I dreamed — to light the prisoner within, for half an hour. The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays, had scratched and cut inscriptions in the blackened vaults. I saw them. For their labour with a rusty nail's point, had outlived their agony and them, through many generations. One cell, I saw, in which no man remained for more than four-and-twenty hom^s ; being marked for dead before he entered it. Hard by, another, and a dismal I 114 JICTUEES FHOM ITALY. one, whereto, at midnight, the confessor came— a m^onfc brown-robed, and hooded — ghastly in the day, and free bright air, but in the midnight of that murky prison, Hope's extinguisher, and Murder's herald. I had my foot 'upon the spot, where, at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled ; and struck my hand upon the guilty door— low browed and stealthy — through which the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat, and rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a net. Around this dungeon stronghold, and above some part of it: licking the rough walls without, and smearing them with damp and slime within : stuffing dank weeds and refuse into chinks and crevices, as if the very stones and bars had mouths to stop : fumishmg a smooth road for the removal of the bodies of the secret victims of the state — a road so ready that it went along with them, and ran before them, like a cruel officer — flowed the same water that filled this Dream of mine, and made it seem one, even at the time. Descending from the palace by a staircase, called, I thought, the Giant's — I had some imaginary recollection of an old man abdicating, coming, more slowly and more feebly, down it, when he heard the bell, proclaiming hi» successor — I glided off, in one of the dark boats, until we came to an old arsenal guarded by fom* marble lions. To make my Dream more monstrous and unlikely, one of these had words and sentences upon its body, inscribed there, at an unknown time, and in an unknown language ; so that their pm-port was a mysteiy to all men. There was little somid of hammers in this place for AN ITALIAN DREAM. il5 building ships, and little work in progress ; for the great- ness of the city was no more, as I have said. Indeed, it seemed a very wreck fomid drifting on the sea ; a strange flag hoisted in its honourable stations, and strangers standuig at its helm. A splendid barge in which its* ancient chief had gone forth, pompously, at certain periods, to wed the ocean, lay here, I thought, no more ; but, in its place, there was a tiny model, made from recollection like the city's greatness ; and it told of what had been (so are the strong and weak confounded in the dust) almost as eloquently as the massive pillars, arches, roofs, reared to overshadow stately ships that had no other shadow now, upon the water or the earth. An armoury was there yet. Plundered and despoiled; but an armoury. With a fierce standai'd taken from the Turks, drooping in the dull air of its cage. Kich suits of mail worn by great warriors were hoarded there ; cross- bows and bolts; quivers full of an-ows; spears; swords, daggers, maces, shields, and heavy-headed axes. Plates of wi'ought steel and iron, to make the gallant horse a monster cased in metal scales ; and one spring- weapon (easy to be carried in the breast) designed to do its office noiselessly, and made for shooting men with poisoned darts. One press or case I saw, fidl of accursed instru- ments of torture : horribly contrived to cramp, and pinch, and grind, and crush men's bones, and tear and twist them with the torment of a thousand deaths. Before it, were two iron helmets, with breast-pieces : made to close up tight and smooth upon the heads of living sufferers ; I 2 116 PICTUEES FROM ITALY. and fastened on to each, was a small knob or anvil, where the dkectmg devil could repose his elbow at his ease, and listen, near the walled-up ear, to the lamentations and confessions of the wretch within. There was that grim resemblance in them to the human shape — they were such moulds of sweating faces, pained and cramped — that it was difl&cult to think them empty; and terrible distortions lingering within them, seemed to follow me, when, taking to my boat again, I rowed off to a kind of garden or public walk in the sea, where there were grass and trees. But I forgot them when I stood upon its farthest brink — I stood there, in my dream — and looked, along the ripple, to the setting sun : before me, in the sky and on the deep, a crimson flush ; and behind me the whole city resolving into streaks of red and purple, on the water. In the luxmious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little heed of time, and had but little understanding of its flight. But there were days and nights in it ; and when the sun was high, and when the rays of lamps were crooked in the running water, I was still afloat, I thought : plashmg the slippeiy walls and houses with the cleavuigs of the tide, as my black boat, borne upon it, skimmed along the streets. Sometimes, alighting at the doors of chm'ches and vast palaces, I wandered on, from room to room, from aisle to aisle, through labyrinths of rich altars, ancient monuments; decayed apartments where the furniture, half awful, half grotesque, was mouldermg away. Pic- tm'es were there, replete with such enduring beauty and AN ITALIAN DREAM. 117 expression : with such passion, tnith, and power : that they seemed so many young and fresh realities among a host of spectres. I thought these, often intermingled with the old days of the city : with its beauties, tyrants, captains, patriots, merchants, courtiers, priests : nay, with its very stones, and bricks, and public places ; all of which lived agam, about me, on the walls. Then, com- ing down some marble staircase where the water lapped and oozed against the lower steps, I passed into my boat again, and went on in my dream. Floating down narrow lanes, where cai'penters, at work with plane and chisel in their shops, tossed the light shaving straight upon the water, where it lay like weed, or ebbed away before me in a tangled heap. Past open doors, decayed and rotten from long steeping in the wet, through which some scanty patch of vine shone green and bright, making unusual shadows on the pave- ment with its trembling leaves. Past quays and ter- races, where women, gi'acefully veiled, were passing and repassing, and where idlers were reclining in the sunshine, on flag-stones and on flights of steps. Past bridges, where there were idlers too : loitering and looking over. Below stone balconies, erected at a giddy height, before the loftiest windows of the loftiest houses. Past plots of garden, theatres, shrmes, prodigious piles of architecture — Gothic — Saracenic — fanciful with all the fancies of all times and countries. Past buildings that were high, and low, and black, and white, and straight, and crooked; mean and gi^and, crazy and strong. Twining among a tangled lot of boats and barges, and shooting out at last 118 PICTUEES FROM ITALY. into a Grand Canal ! There, in the errant fancy of my dream, I saw old Shylock passing to and fro upon a bridge, all buil1;,upon with shops and humming with the tongues of men ; a form I seemed to know for Desde- mona's, leaned down through a latticed blind to pluck a flower. And, in the dream, I thought that Shakespeare's spirit was abroad upon the water somewhere : stealing through the city. At night, when two votive lamps burnt before an image of the Virgin, in a gallery outside the great cathedral, near the roof, I fancied that the great piazza of the Winged Lion was a blaze of cheerful light, and that its whole arcade was thronged with people ; while crowds were diverting themselves in splendid coffee- houses opening from it — which were never shut, I thought, but open all night long. When the bronze giants struck the hour of midnight on the bell, I thought the life and animation of the city were all centered here ; and as I rowed away, abreast the silent quays, I only saw them dotted, here and there, with sleeping boatmen wrapped up in their cloaks, and lying at fuU length upon the stones. But, close about the quays and churches, palaces and prisons : sucking at their walls, and welling up into the secret places of the town : crept the water always. Noiseless and watchful : coiled round and romid it, in its many folds, like an old serpent : waiting for the time, I thought, when people should look down into its depths for any stone of the old city that had claimed to be its mistress. AN ITALIAN DREAM. 119 Thus it floated me away, until I awoke in the old market-place at Verona. I have, many and many a time, thought, since, of this strange Dream upon the water: half-wondering if it lie there jet, and if its name be Venice. BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE SIMPLON INTO SWITZERLAND. I HAD been half afraid to go to Verona, lest it should at all put me out of conceit with Romeo and Juliet. But, I was no sooner come into the old Market-place, than the misgiving vanished. It is so fanciful, quaint, and picturesque a place, formed by such an extraordinaiy and rich variety of fantastic buildings, that there could be nothing better at the core of even this romantic town : scene of one of the most romantic and beautiful of stories. It was natural enough, to go straight from the Market-place, to the House of the Capulets, now degene- rated into a most miserable little mn. Noisy vetturini and muddy market carts were disputing possession of the yard, which was ankle-deep in dirt, with a brood of splashed and bespattered geese ; and there was a grim- visaged dog, viciously panting in a dooi'way, who would certainly have had Romeo by the leg, the moment he put it over the wall, if he had existed and been at large in those times. The orchard fell into other hands, and VERONA. 1'21 was parted off many years ago ; but there used to be one attached to the house — or at all events there may have been, — and the hat (Cappello) the ancient cognizance of the family, may still be seen, carved in stone, over the gateway of the yard. The geese, the market-carts, their drivers, and the dog, were somewhat in the way of the stoiy it must be confessed; and it would have been pleasanter to have found the house empty, and to have been able to walk thi'ough the disused rooms. But the hat was unspeakably comfortable ; and the place where the garden used to be, hardly less so. Besides, the house is a distmstful, jealous-looking hoiLse as one would desire to see, though of a veiy moderate size. So I was quite satisfied with it, as the veritable mansion of old Capulet, and was coiTespondingly grateful in my acknow- ledgments to an extremely unsentimental middle-aged lady, the Padrona of the Hotel, who was lomiging on the threshold looking at the geese ; and who at least resembled the Capulets in the one particular of being very great indeed in the " Family " way. From Juliet's home, to Juliet's tomb, is a transition as natural to the visitor, as to fair Juliet herself, or to the proudest Juliet that ever has taught the torches to bum bright in any time. So, I went off, with a guide, to an old, old garden, once belonguig to an old, old convent, I suppose ; and being admitted, at a shattered gate, by a bright-eyed woman who was washing clothes, went down some walks where fresh plants and young flowers were prettily growing among fragments of old wall, and ivy- covered mounds ; and was shewn a little tank, or water 122 PICTURES FROM ITALY. trough, which the bright-eyed woman — drying her arms upon her 'kerchief, called, " La tomba di Giulietta la sfortmiata." With the best disposition in the world to believe, I could do no more than believe that the bright- eyed woman believed ; so I gave her that much credit, and her customary fee in ready money. It was a pleasure, rather than a disappointment, that Juliet's resting-place was forgotten. However consolatory it may have been to Yorick's Ghost, to hear the feet upon the pavement overhead, and, twenty times a day, the repetition of his name, it is better for Juliet to lie out of the track of tourists, and to have no visiters but such as come to graves in spring-rain, and sweet air, and sunshine. Pleasant Verona ! With its beautiful old palaces, and charming country in the distance, seen from terrace walks, and stately, balustraded galleries. With its Roman gates, still spanning the fair street, and casting, on the sunlight of to-day, the shade of fifteen hundred years ago. With its marble-fitted churches, lofty towers, rich architecture, and quaint old quiet thoroughfares, where shouts of Montagues and Capulets once resounded, And made Verona's ancient citizens Cast by their grave, beseeming ornaments, To wield old partizans. With its fast-rushing river, picturesque old bridge, great castle, waving cypresses, and prospect so delightful, and so cheerful ! Pleasant Verona ! In the midst of it, in the Piazza di Bra — a spirit of VERONA. 123 old time among the familiar realities of the passing hour — is the great Roman Amphitheatre. So well preserved, and carefully maintained, that every row of seats is there, unbroken. Over certain of the arches, the old Ptoman numerals may yet be seen ; and there are corridors, and staircases, and subten'anean passages for beasts, and winding ways, above-ground and below, as when the fierce thousands hurried in and out, intent upon the bloody shows of the arena. Nestling in some of the shadows and hollow places of the walls, now, are smiths with their forges, and a few small dealers of one kind or other ; and there are green weeds, and leaves, and grass, upon the parapet. But little else is greatly changed. When I had traversed all about it, with great interest, and had gone up to the topmost round of seats, and turning from the lovely panorama closed in by the dis- tant Alps, looked down into the building, it seemed to lie before me like the inside of a prodigious hat of plaited straw, with an enormously broad brim and a shallow crown : the plaits being represented by the fom^- and-forty rows of seats. The comparison is a homely and fantastic one, in sober remembrance and on paper, but it was irresistibly suggested at the moment, never- theless. An equestrian troop had been there, a short time before — the same troop, I dare say, that appeared to the old lady in the church at Modena — and had scooped out a little ring at one end of the arena ; where their per- formances had taken place, and where the marks of 124 PICTUEES FROM ITALY. their horses' feet were still fresh. I could not but pic- ture to myself, a handful of spectators gathered together on one or two of the old stone seats, and a spangled Cavalier being gallant, or a Policinello funny, with the grim walls looldng on. Above all, I thought how strangely those Roman mutes would gaze upon the favourite comic scene of the travelling English, where a British nobleman (Lord John), with a very loose stomach : dressed in a blue tailed coat down to his heels, bright yellow breeches, and a white hat: comes abroad, riding double on a rearing horse, with an English lady (Lady Betsey) in a straw bonnet and green veil, and a red spencer; and who always carries a gigantic reticule, and a put-up parasol. I walked through and through the town all the rest of the day, and could have walked there until now, I tliink. In one place, there was a very pretty modem theatre, where they had just performed the opera (always popular in Verona) of Romeo and Juliet. In another, there was a collection, under a colonnade, of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan remains, presided over by an ancient man who might have been an Etruscan relic himself ; for he was not strong enough to open the iron gate, when he had milocked it, and had neither voice enough to be audible when he described the curiosities, nor sight enough to see them : he was so very old. In another place, there was a gallery of pictures : so abominably bad, that it was quite delightful to see them mouldering away. But anywhere : in the chmThes, among the palaces, in the streets, on the bridge, or down beside the river: it was MANTUA. 125 always pleasant Verona, and in my remembrance always will be. I read Romeo and Juliet in my own room at the inn that night — of com'se, no Englishman had ever read it there, before — and set out for Mantua next day at sun- rise, repeating to myself (in the coupe of an omnibus, and next to the conductor, who was reading the Mys- teries of Paris) There is no world without Verona's walls, But purgatory, torture, hell itself. Hence-banished is banish'd from the world, And world's exile is death which reminded me that Romeo was only banished five- and-twenty miles after all, and rather disturbed my con- fidence in his energy and boldness. Was the way to Mantua, as beautiful, in his time, I wonder! Did it wind through pasture land as green, bright with the same glancing streams, and dotted with fresh clumps of graceful trees ! Those purple moun- tains lay on the horizon, then, for certain ; and the dresses of these peasant girls, who wear a great, knobbed, silver pin like an English " life-preserver " through their hsdr behind, can hardly be much changed. The hopeful feeling of so bright a morning, and so exquisite a sunrise, can have been no stranger, even to an exiled lover's breast; and Mantua itself must have broken on him in the prospect, with its towers, and walls, and water, pretty much as on a common-place and matrimonial omnibus. He made the same sharp twists and turns, perhaps, over two rumbling drawbridges ; 126 PICTURES FROM ITALY. passed through the like long, covered, wooden bridge; and leaving the marshy water behind, approached the rusty gate of stagnant Mantua. If ever a man were suited to his place of residence, and his place of residence to him, the lean Apothecary and Mantua came together in a perfect fitness of things. It may have been more stirring then, perhaps. If so, the Apothecary was a man in advance of his time, and Imew what Mantua would be, in eighteen hundred and forty-four. He fasted much, and that assisted him m his foreknowledge. I put up at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, and was in my own room arranging plans with the Brave Courier, when there came a modest little tap at the door, which opened on an outer gallery surrounding a courtyard; and an intensely shabby little man looked in, to inquire if the gentleman would have a Cicerone to shew the town. His face was so very wistful and anxious, in the half-opened doorway, and there was so much poverty expressed in his faded suit and little pinched hat, and in the thread- bare worsted glove with which he held it — not expressed the less, because these were evidently his genteel clothes, hastily slipped on — that I would as soon have trodden on him as dismissed him. I engaged him on the instant, and he stepped in directly. While I finished the discussion in which I was engaged, he stood, beaming by himself in a comer, making a feint of brushing my hat with his arm. If his fee had been as many napoleons as it was francs, there could not have shot over the twilight of his shabbiness MANTUA. 127 such a gleam of sun, as lighted up the whole man, now that he was hired. " Well ! " said I, when I was ready, " shall we go out now ? " " If the gentleman pleases. It is a beautiful day. A little fresh, but charming; altogether charming. The gentleman will allow me to open the door. This is the Inn Yard. The courtyard of the Golden Lion ! The gentleman will please to mind his footing on the stairs." We were now in the street. *' This is the street of the Golden Lion. This, the outside of the Golden Lion. The interesting window up there, on the first Piano, where the pane of glass is broken, is the window of the gentleman's chamber ! " Havmg viewed all these remarkable objects, I inquired if there were much to see in Mantua. "Well! Truly, no. Not much ! So, so," he said, shrugging his shoulders apologetically. " Many churches '? " " No. Nearly all suppressed by the French." " Monasteries or convents ? " "No. The French again! Neai'ly all suppressed by Napoleon." " Much busmess ? " " Very little business." " Many strangers ? " " Ah Heaven ! " I thought he would have fainted. " Then, when we have seen the two large Churches yonder, what shall we do next? " said I. 128 PICTURES FROM ITALY. He looked up the street, and down the street, and rubbed his chin timidly; and then said, glancing in my face as if a light had broken on his mind, yet with a humble appeal to my forbearance that was perfectly irresistible : " We can take a little turn about the town, Signore! " (Si puo far 'un piccolo giro della citta). It was impossible to be anything but delighted with the proposal, so we set off together in gi'eat good-hu- mom\ In the relief of his mind, he opened his heart, and gave up as much of Mantua as a Cicerone could. " One must eat," he said ; " but, bah ! it was a dull place, without doubt ! " He made as much as possible of the Basilica of Santa Andi'ea — a noble church — and of an inclosed portion of the pavement, about which tapers were burning, and a few people kneeling, and mider which is said to be pre- served the Sangreal of the old Romances. This church disposed of, and another after it (the cathedral of San Pietro), we went to the Museum, which was shut up. " It was all the same," he said ; " Bah ! There was not much inside ! " Then, w^e went to see the Piazza del Diavolo, built by the Devil (for no particular pm'pose) in a single night ; then, the Piazza Virgiliana ; then the statue of Vii^gil — our Poet, my little friend said, plucking up a spirit, for the moment, and putting his hat a little on one side. Then, we went to a dismal sort of farm- yard, by which a pictui'e-gallery was approached. The moment the gate of this retreat was opened, some five hundred geese came waddling round us, stretching out MANTUA. 129 their necks, and clamouring in the most hideous manner, as if they were ejaculating, "Oh! here's somebody come to see the Pictures ! Don't go up ! Don't go up!" While we went up, they waited very quietly about the door, in a crowd, cackling to one another occasionally, in a subdued tone ; but the instant we appeared again, their necks came out like telescopes, and setting up a great noise, which meant, I have no doubt, " What, you would go, would you ! What do you think of it ! How do you like it ! " they attended us to the outer gate, and cast us forth, derisively, into Mantua. The geese who saved the Capitol, were, as compared with these, Pork to the learned Pig. What a galleiy it was ! I would take their opinion on a question of art, in preference to the discom'ses of Sir Joshua Pieynolds. Now that we were standing in the street, after being thus ignominiously escorted thither, my Uttle friend was plainly reduced to the " piccolo giro," or little circuit of the town, he had fonnerly proposed. But my suggestion that we should visit the Palazzo Te (of which I had heard a great deal, as a strange ^^ild place) imparted new life to him, and away we went. The secret of the length of Midas' ears, would have been more extensively known, if that ser\^ant of his, who whispered it to the reeds, had lived in Mantua, where there are reeds and nishes enough to have published it to all the world. The Palazzo Te stands in a swamp, among this sort of vegetation ; and is, indeed, as singular a place as I ever saw. Not for its dreariness, though it is very dreory. Nor K 130 PICTUEES FROM ITALY. for its dampness, tliough it is very damp. Nor for its desolate condition, though it is as desolate and neglected as house can be. But chiefly for the unaccountable nightmares with which its interior has been decorated (among other subjects of more delicate execution), by Giulio Romano. There is a leering Giant over a certain chimney-piece, and there are dozens of Giants (Titans warring with Jove) on the walls of another room, so in- conceivably ugly and grotesque, that it is marvellous how any man can have imagined such creatures. In the cham- ber in which they abound, these monsters, with swollen faces and cracked cheeks, and every kind of distortion of look and limb, are depicted as staggering under the weight of falling buildings, and being overwhelmed in the ruins ; upheaving masses of rock, and burying themselves be- neath ; vainly striving to sustain the pillars of heavy roofs that topple down upon their heads ; and, m a word, undergoing and doing every kuid of mad and demoniacal destruction. The figures are immensely large, and exaggerated to the utmost pitch of uncouthness ; the colourhig is harsh and disagreeable ; and the whole effect more like (I should imagine) a violent rush of blood tx) the head of the spectator, than any real pictm'e set before him by the hand of an artist. This apoplectic performance was shown by a sicldy-looking woman, whose appearance was referable, I dare say, to the bad air of the marshes ; but it was difficult to help feeling as if she were too much haunted by the Giants, and they were frightening her to death, all alone in that exhausted, cistern of a Palace, among the reeds and nishes, with MANTUA. 131 the mists hovering about outside, aiid stalldiig round and round it continually. Our walk through Mantua showed us, m almost every street, some suppressed church : now used for a warehouse, now for nothing at all : all as crazy and dismantled as they could be, short of tumbling down bodily. The marshy to\Mi was so intensely dull and flat, that the dirt upon it seemed not to have come there in the ordinary course, but to have settled and mantled on its surface as on standing water. And yet there were some business- deahngs going on, and some profits realizmg ; for there were arcades full of Jews, where those extraordinary people were sitting outside their shops: contemplating their stores of stuffs, and woollens, and bright handker- chiefs, and tiinkets : and looking, in all respects, as wary and business-like, as their brethren in Houndsditch, London. Having selected a Vettmino from among the neigh- bouring Christians, who agreed to carry us to Milan in two days and a half, and to start, next morning, as soon as the gates were opened, I returned to the Golden Lion, and dined luxuriously in my own room, in a naiTow passage between two bedsteads : confronted by a smoky tire, and backed up by a chest of drawers. At six o'clock next morning, we were jingling in the dark through the wet cold mist that enshrouded the to\vn ; and, before noon, the driver, (a native of Mantua, and sixty years of age, or thereabouts) began to ask the way to Milan, It lay through Bozzolo : formerly a little republic, and K 2 13Q PICTURES FROM ITALY. now one of the most deserted and poverty-stricken of towns : where the landlord of the miserable inn (God bless him I it was his weekly custom) was distributing in- finitesimal coins among a clamorous herd of women and children, whose rags were fluttering in the wind and rain outside his door, where they were gathered to receive his charity. It lay through mist, and mud, and rain, and vines trained low upon the ground, all that day and the next ; the first sleeping-place being Cremona, memorable for its dark brick churches, and immensely high tower, the Torrazzo — to say nothing of its violins, of which it certainly produces none in these degenerate days ; and the second, Lodi. Then we went on, through more mud, mist, and rain, and marshy gi'omid : and through such a fog, as Englishmen, strong in the faith of their o^vn grievances, are apt to believe is nowhere to be found but in their own country : until we entered the paved streets of Milan. The fog was so dense here, that the spire of the far- famed Cathedral might as well have been at Bombay, for anything that could be seen of it at that time. But as we halted to refresh, for a few days then, and retm^ned to Milan again next summer, I had ample opportmiities of seeing the glorious structure in all its majesty and beauty. All Christian homage to the saint who lies within it ! There are many good and true saints in the calendar, but San Carlo Borromeo has — if I may quote Mrs. Primrose on such a subject — " my warm heart." A charitable doctor to the sick, a munificent friend to the MILAN. 133 poor, and this, not in any spirit of blind bigotiy, but as the bold opponent of enormous abuses in the Romish church, I honoui' his memoiy. I honom" it none the less, because he was nearly slain by a priest, suborned, by priests, to murder him at the altar : in acknowledgment of his endeavom-s to reform a false and hypocritical brother- hood of monks. Heaven shield all imitators of San Carlo Borromeo as it shielded him ! A reforming Pope would need a little shieldmg, even now. The subterranean chapel in which the body of San Carlo Borromeo is preserved, presents as strildng and as ghastly a contrast, perhaps, as any place can show. The tapers which are lighted down there, flash and gleam on alti-relievi in gold and silver, delicately wrought by skil- ful hands, and representing the principal events in the life of the saint. Jewels, and precious metals, shine and sparkle on every side. A windlass slowly removes the front of the altar ; and, within it, in a gorgeous shruie of gold and silver, is seen, through alabaster, the shrivelled mummy of a man : the pontifical robes with which it is adorned, radiant \rith diamonds, emeralds, rabies : every costly and magnificent gem. The shrunken heap of poor earth in the midst of this great glitter, is more piti- ful than if it lay upon a dunghill. There is not a ray of imprisoned light in all the flash and fii'e of jewels, but seems to mock the dusty holes where eyes were, once. Every thread of silk m the rich vestments seems only a provision from the worms that spm, for the behoof of worms that propagate in sepulchres. In the old refectory of the dilapidated Convent of 134 PICTURES FROM ITALY. Santa Maria delle Grazie, is the work of art, perhaps better known than any other in the world : the Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci — with a door cut through it by the intelligent Dominican friars, to facilitate their operations at dinner time. I am not mechanically acquainted with the art of painting, and have no other means of judging of a pic- ture than as I see it resembling and refining upon nature, and presenting graceful combinations of forms and colours. I am, therefore, no authority AYhatever, in reference to the " touch " of this or that master; though I know very well (as anybod}^ may, who chooses to think about the matter) that few very great masters can pos- sil)ly have painted, in the compass of their lives, one half of the pictures that bear their names, and that are recog- nised by many aspirants to a reputation for taste, as undoubted originals. But this, by the way. Of the Last Supper, I would simply observe, that in its beautiful composition and arrangement, there it is, at Milan, a wonderful pictm^e ; and that, in its original colouring, or in its original expression of any single face or feature, there it is not. Apart from the damage it has sustained from damp, decay, and neglect, it has been (as Bariy shows) so retouched upon, and repainted, and that so clumsily, that many of the heads are, now, positive deformities, with patches of paint and plaster sticldng upon them like wens, and utterly distorting the expression. Where the original artist set that impress of his genius on a face, which, almost in a line or touch, separated him from meaner painters and made him what he was, sue- MILAN. 135 ceeding bunglers, filling up, or painting across seams and cracks, have been quite imable to imitate his hand ; and putting in some scowls, or frowns, or wiinkles, of their own, have blotched and spoiled the work. This is so well established as a historical fact, that I should not repeat it, at the risk of being tedious, but for ha\dng obsen-ed an English gentleman before the picture, who was at great pains to fall into what I may describe as mild convulsions, at certain minute details of expression which are not left in it. Whereas, it would be comfort- able and rational for travellers and critics to amve at a general understanding that it cannot fail to have been a work of extraordinary^ merit, once : when, with so few of its original beauties remaining, the gi-andeur of the general design is yet sufficient to sustain it, as a piece replete with interest and dignity. We achieved the other sights of Milan, in due com^se, and a fine city it is, though not so mnnistakeably Italian as to possess the characteristic qualities of many towns far less important in themselves. The Corso, where the Milanese gentry ride up and down in carriages, and rather than not do which, they would half starve them- selves at home, is a most noble public promenade, shaded by long avenues of trees. In the splendid theatre of La Scala, there was a ballet of action per- formed after the opera, under the title of Prometheus : in the begmning of which, some hundred or two of men and women represented our mortal race before the refinements of the arts and sciences, and loves and graces, came on earth to soften them. I never saw anv- 136 PICTURES FROM ITALY. thing more effective. Generally speaking, the panto- mimic action of the Italians is more remarkable for its sudden and impetuous character than for its delicate expression; but, in this case, the drooping monotony: the weaiy, miserable, listless, moping life : the sordid passions and desires of human creatures, destitute of those elevating mfluences to which we owe so much, and to whose promoters we render so little : were expressed in a manner really powerful and affecting. I should have thought it almost impossible to present such an idea so strongly on the stage, without the aid of speech. Milan soon lay behind us, at five o'clock in the morn- ing; and before the golden statue on the summit of the cathedral spire was lost in the blue sky, the Alps, stu- pendously confused in lofty peaks and ridges, clouds and snow, were towering in our path. Still, we continued to advance towards them until nightfall ; and, all day long, the mountain tops presented strangely shifting shapes, as the road displayed them in different points of view. The beautiful day was just declinmg, when we came upon the Lago Maggiore, with its lovely islands. For however fanciful and fantastic the Isola Bella may be, and is, it still is beautiful. Anything springing out of that blue water, with that scenery around it, must be. It was ten o'clock at night when we got to Domo d'Ossola, at the foot of the Pass of the Simplon. But as the moon was shining brightly, and there was not a cloud in the starlit sky, it was no time for gomg to bed, or PASS OF THE SIMPLON. 137 going anj^where but on. So, we got a little carriage, after some delay, and began the ascent. It was late in November ; and the snow lying four or five feet thick in the beaten road on the summit (in other parts the new drift was already deep,) the air was piercing cold. But, the serenity of the night, and the grandeur of the road, with its impenetrable shadows, and deep glooms, and its sudden turns into the shining of the moon, and its incessant roar of falling water, rendered the journey more and more sublime at eveiy step. Soon leaving the calm Italian villages below us, sleep- ing in the moonlight, the road began to wind among dark trees, and after a time emerged upon a barer region, veiy steep and toilsome, where the moon shone bright and high. By degrees, the roar of water grew louder ; and the stupendous track, after crossing the torrent by a bridge, struck in between two massive perpendicular walls of rock that quite shut out the moonlight, and only left a few stars shinhig in the narrow strip of sky above. Then, even this was lost, in the thick darkness of a cavern in the rock, through which tlie way was pierced; the tenible cataract thmidering and roai'ing close below it, and its foam and spray hanging, in a mist, about the entrance. Emerging from tliis cave, and coming again mto the moonlight, and across a dizzy bridge, it crept and twisted upward, through the Gorge of Gondo, savage and grand beyond description, with smooth-fronted precipices, rising up on either hand, and almost meeting overhead. Thus we went, climbing on 138 PICTURES FROM ITALY. our nigged way, higher and higher, all night, -without a moment's weariness : lost in the contemplation of the black rocks, the tremendous heights and depths, the fields of smooth snow lying in the clefts and hollows, and the fierce torrents thundering headlong down the deep abyss. Towards daybreak, we came among the snow, where a keen wind was blowing fiercely. Having, with some trouble, awakened the inmates of a wooden house in this solitude: round which the wind was howling dismally, catching up the snow in wreaths and hurling it away : we got some breakfast in a room built of rough timbers, but well warmed by a stove, and well contrived (as it had need to be) for keeping out the bitter storms. A sledge being then made ready, and four horses harnessed to it, we went, ploughing, through the snow. Still upward, but now in the cold light of morning, and with the great white