ITALIAN • JOURHETiS BY W*D iHOWELLS I/LU5TRATED:BT JOSEPH-FENNELL UNIVi.fiSITY ARCHlTECrU«E A PofTeffion of Grace W and IraW Hoover ^ ITALIAN JOURNEYS -^:- ^ ^ ' nsMgy S^^;;^^"^;^:^ ! - ^ ;_L^ ^/f%^lM,,i'^ Uniform nnth this Volume }'ott 4io, /OS. net. Also ijo Copies on Japanese Vclluiit, price 40s. net A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE HENRY JAMES WITH 94 II-LUSTKATIONS BY JOSEPH PENNELL LONDON": WILLIAM HEINEMANN ^^^M^ '.^:i3tW« .!^. r Jbssll^ .'■♦|v|VAOCulvivv-y \ V,WVCt'. ITALIAN JOURNEYS W. D. HOWELLS WITH ONE HUNDRED AND THREE ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSEPH PENNELL LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN I yo 1 ARCHITECTURE AH ris^hts reserved This Edition enjoys Copyright in all Countries Signatory to the Bertie Treaty, and is not to be imported into the United States of America ^^^ -^ '^ 'l " >• ' A Confidence TVhen the publishers suggested the notion of revising this A Con- hook^ and taming its wild youthfulness here and there^ making ""^"^c^ it a little ?nore just^ if not a little wiser ^ and possibly shedding upon the belated text some light from the events occurring since it was written well-nigh forty years ago^ I promptly refused. I also profnptly refused to write any sort of intro- duction for this nezu edition ; and as I presently did revise the book^ I am not now surprised to find myself addressing these prefatory lines to an i7naginable reader. They are 7nainly to tell hi?n of my odd experience in going over my work^ zvhich at tifnes ?noved me to doubt not only of the perfection of my taste^ the accuracy of my knowledge^ and the infallibility of tny judgment^ but the sincerity of my feelings and the veracity of my statements. From time to titne it see?ned to ?ne that I was aware of posing^ of straining^ even^ in some of my attitudes^ and I had a sense of having put on more airs than I could handsofnely carry^ and of having at other V M603624 B Confi^cnc^: A Con- t'lmrs assioncd an onmiscicnce for which I can noxv find no reasonable grounds. There were moments when I thought I had indulged unseemly spites and resentments totvards nationalities that had never injured me^ and yet blacker }no?nefits when I fancied I had pretended to frel thcse^ but ivhcn in fact I was at heart most a?niabl\ affected toivard all alien peoples. So exacting is one at sixty-four, that I fell upon these faults and pruned them away with a free hand ; and though I cannot hope to have removed them all, I can now honestly commend the book as fnuch ivorthier credence than it was before. As jor brmging it up to date, there I own that even my age has been powerless. My Italy was the Italy of the time ivhen the Austrians seemed per?nanent in Lombardy and Venetia, and when the French garrison was apparently established indefinitely at Rome ; when Napoleon III. was Emperor, and Pio Nono was Pope, and the first Victor Emanuel was King, and Garibaldi tuas Liberator, and Francis Joseph was Kaiser. Of these the last alone remains to attest the past, and it seems to ?ne that as far as my poor word can go, it ought to be left to corroborate the reality of his witness, zvith no hint of change in conditions ivhich are already sufficiently incredible. W. D. HOWELLS. Avgmt 28, igoi. %■-: mm^; TKJ!*»SF Contents The Road to Rome from Venice: I. Leaving Venice II. From Padua to Ferrara . III. The Picturesque, the Improbable, and the Pathetic m Ferrara IV. Through Bologna to Genoa . V. Up and Down Genoa VI. By Sea from Genoa to Naples VII. Certain Things in Naples VIII, A Day in Pompeii . IX. A Half-Hour at Herculaneum X. Capri and Capriotes XI. Between Rome and Naples . XII. Roman Pearls .... Forza Maggiore ...... At Padua A Pilgrimage to Petrarch's House at Arqua A Visit to the Cimbri .... vii I 3 6 29 35 47 53 74 93 102 124 130 157 174 194 208 Contents Minor Travels : I. Pisa II. Trieste III. Bassano . . . . . IV. Possagna, Canova's Birthplace V, Como Vicenza, Verona, and Parma . 220 226 237 246 251 259 ja^.:wri:^ List of Illustrations Approaching Venice . The Castle at Ferrara Bologna: the Great Fountain Rome : the Tarpeian Rock Rome : the Capitol Civita Vecchia : the Harbour Padua : the Clock Tower . Pisa : the Embankment Trieste : the Grand Canal The Tombs at Verona Parma: the Baptistry and Cathedral Campanile .... The Steps of the Capitol, Rome The Garden, Miramai Near Castellammare Genoa: Doorway of the Cathedral Transept of the Cathedral, Parma On the Palatine, Rome Road to Castellammare Leaving Venice .... The Ferrara Road at the foot of the Hills FronU spiecc To face page 22 30 144 148 164 180 222 232 282 the half-title the title-page page 284 vu viii ix xii I 3 list of illustrations Cathedral at Ferrara ..... Piazza del Municipio, Ferrara . Ponte Longoscuro, Ferrara Road The Piazza, Bologna ..... The Tower at Bologna .... The Harbour Tower, Genoa Genoa : a City of Palaces .... Genoa: the Harbour ..... Naples : the Harbour ..... Fish Market, Naples ..... Santa Lucia (now being demolished), Naples A Baker's Shop, Naples .... The Grotto of Posilippo : the Tunnel The Streets of Stairs, Naples . Fountain of Ferdinand, Naples A Fountain, Naples . . - . . Theatre, Pompeii ..... The Temple of Apo lo, Pompeii The Street of the Tombs, Pompeii Herculaneum ...... The Forum, Pompeii ..... The Brindisi Gate, Pompeii A Tomb, Pompeii ..... The Sea Gate, Pompeii .... New Excavations, Pompeii The Road to Pompeii from Castellammare The House of Argo ..... Capri ........ The Harbour, Sorrento .... The Piazza, Capri ..... The Villa of Tiberius from the Harbour, Cap The Port, Capri Fishermen's houses, Capri The House of Tasso ..... Monte Cassino, between Rome and Naples On the Road from Sorrento to Castellammare The Forum, Rome ..... The Palatine, Rome ..... 6 17 29 32 35 39 47 53 55 59 62 63 67 69 71 74 77 79 81 84 87 90 92 93 95 97 102 105 109 "3 118 120 122 124 125 130 131 list of illustrations The Fountain of Trevi, Rome Spanish Steps, Rome The Corso, Rome The Porta del Popolo, facing the Corso, Rome St. Peter's from the Campagna The Aqueduct on the Campagna The Piazza Column, Rome The Castle of S. Angelo from the Bridge, Rome The Cathedral, Grosseto . The Palm Tree, Grosseto The Harbour of Alexander, Civita Vecchia The Sea Gate, Civita Vecchia The Flower Market, Padua Corner of the Salone, Padua, decorated with Coats o Arms .... An Arcaded Street, Padua On the River, Padua . The Market, Padua Arqua: Petrarch's Town . The Tomb of Petrarch, Arqua The Castle of the Obizzi . Bassano : the Bridge . Pisa: the Four Fabrics The Arno at Pisa Trieste : the Harbour . The Cathedral, Trieste A Hilly Street, Trieste The Castle of Miramare Bassano .... The Piazza, Bassano . On the Brenta at Bassano Possagno .... The Piazza, Treviso . Como ..... Busy Milan .... Como ..... The Market, Vicenza . Vicenza — Streets like Venice I'AGE 138 141 145 149 151 153 156 157 159 163 173 174 177 183 188 191 194 196 207 208 220 221 225 229 231 233 237 239 243 246 249 251 253 257 259 261 list of .■^llustvations The Piazza. Vicenza . Vicenza— A Palladian Corner The Amphitheatre, Verona Piazza dell' Erbe, Verona . The Fortified Bridge, Verona Doorway of the Duomo, Verona Choir of the Cathedral, Parma Nave of the Cathedral, Parma I'AGE 263 267 271 273 278 279 285 w XII :-^ ••^- '^^yp^^Mit^ij^'^^^^^^'^d Leaving Venice The Road to Rome from Venice I Leaving Venice (E did not know, when we started from liome in \'enice, on November 8, of 18b"4, that we liad taken the longest road to Rome. We thought that of all the pro- verbial paths to the Eternal City that leading to Padua, and thence to Ferrara and Bologna to Florence, and so down the sea-shore from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the briefest, and the cheap- est. Who could have dreamed that this path, so wisely and carefully chosen, would lead us to Genoa, conduct us on shipboard, toss us four dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void, battered, and bewildered, in Naples ? Luckily, " The moving accident is not my trade," for there are e\ents of this journey (now ha}>pily at an 1 A 5talia» Souincvs Leaving eiul) wliich, if I recounted them with unsparin*!; sincerity, Venice -would for ever deter the reader from taking any road to Rome. Though, indeed, what is Ronie^ after all, Avhen you come to it ? .„ ^1#.> r^S^• ■n >r:\ ^4f^f^iW% ■5- .^ The Ferrara Road at the foot of the Hills II From Padua to Ferrara [S fav as to Ferrara there was no sign of deviation from the direct line in our road, and the company was well enough. We had a Swiss family in the car with us to Padua, and they told us how the}- were going home to their mountains from Russia, where they had spent nineteen years of their lives. They were mother and father and only daughter, and the last, without ever having seen her ancestral country, was so Swiss in her yet childish beauty, that she filled the morning twi- light with vague images of glacial height, blue lake, snug ch^ilet, and whatever else of picturesque there is in paint and print about Switzei'land. Of course as the light grew brighter these images melted away, and left only a little frost upon the window-pane. The mother was restively anxious at nearing her country and told us everything of its loveliness and happiness. 3 Ferrara Italian 3 o u r i\ c v a From Nineteen years of absence had not robbed it cf the poorest Padua to charm, and I h()})e that seeing it again took nothing from it. We said how glad we sliould be if we were as near America as she was to Switzerhind. "America!" she screamed ; " you come from America ! Dear God, the worhl is wide — the world is wide ! " The thought was so paralysing that it silenced the fat little lady for a moment, and gave her husband time to express his sympathy with us in our war, which he understood perfectly well. He trusted that the revolution to perpetuate slavery nuist fail, and he hoped that the war would soon end, for it made cotton vei-y dear. Eui'ope is material. I doubt if, after Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there were many upon that continent whose enthusiasm for American unity (which is Euroj)ean freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the expensiveness of cotton. The fabrics were all doubled in price, and every man in Europe paid tribute in hard money to the devotion with which we ])rosecuted the war, and, incidentally, interrupted the cultivation of cotton. We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted at Padua, where we were to take the diligence for the Po. In the diligence their loss was more than made good by the company of the only honest man in Ital}'. Of course this honest man had been a great sufferer from his own <'Ountrymen, and I wish that all English and American tourists, who think themselves the sole victims of publican rapacity and deceit in Italy, could have heard our honest man's talk. The truth is, these ingenious i)eople prey upon their own kind with an avidity quite as keen as that with which they devour strangers ; and I am half-j)crsuaded that a ready-witted foreigner iarcs better among them than a traveller of their own nation. Italians will always pretend, on any occasion, that you have been plundered much worse than they; but the reverse often hap))ens. They give little in fees ; but their landlord, their porter, their driver, and 4 Jtalian Souincvs their boatman pillage them with the same impunity that From they rob an Inglese. As for this honest man in the Padua to diligence, he had suffered such enormities at the hands of ^rrara the Paduans, from which we had just escaped, and at the hands of the Ferrarese, into which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles scant an hour), that I was almost minded to stop between the nests of those brigands and pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man lived. His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to illustrate the strong municipal spirit which still dominates all Italy, and which is more inimical to an effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser has ever been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a foreigner at Padua, twenty-five miles north, and a foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles south ; and throughout Italy the native of one city is an alien in another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or an American with people who consider every stranger as sent them by the bounty of Providence to be eaten alive. Heaven knows what our honest man had paid at his hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the other week he had been made to give five francs apiece for two small roast chickens, besides a fee to the waiter ; and he pathetically warned us to beware how we dealt with Italians. Indeed, I never met a man so thoroughly persuaded of the rascality of his nation and of his own exceptional virtue. He took snuff with his whole person ; and he volunteered, at sight of a flock of geese, a recipe which I give the reader : Stuflf" a goose with sausage ; let it hang in the weather during the winter; and in the spring cut it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and delicate soup. But, after all, our friend's talk, though constant, became dispiriting, and we were willing when he left us. His integrity had, indeed, been so oppressive that I was glad to be swindled in the charge for our dinner at the Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more cheerfully on to Ferrara. |l*iif^8|l|i:fM^.; hi 4 1 i';,'iii''3A i^;:\;i Cathedral at Ferrara III The Picturesque, the Improbable, and the Pathetic in Ferrara iT was one of the Vitalities of travel, rather than any real interest in the poet, which led ine to visit the prison of Tasso on the night of our arrival, which was mild and moonlit. The portier at the Stella d'Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows which it is sometimes difficult to respect, and I went and paid this homage in the coal-cellar in which was never imprisoned the poet whose works I had not read. The famous hospital of St. Anna, where Tasso was con- fined for seven years, is still an asylum for the infirm and sick, but it is no longer used as a madhouse. It stands on one of the long, silent Ferrarese streets, not fVir from the Ducal Castle, and it is said that from the window of his cell the unhappy poet could behold Leonora in her tower. It may be so ; certainly those who can believe in tlic geiuiine- () Jtalian Jounicvs ness of the cell will have no trouble in believing that the Ferrara vision of Tasso could pierce through several brick walls and a Doric portico, and at last comprehend the lady at her casement in the castle. We entered a modern gateway, and passed into a hall of the elder edifice, where a slim young soldier sat reading a romance of Dumas. This was the keeper of Tasso's prison ; and knowing me, by the instinct which teaches an Italian custodian to distinguish his prey, for a seeker after the True and Beautiful, he relin- quished his romance, lighted a waxen taper, unbolted a heavy door with a dramatic clang, and preceded nie to the cell of Tasso. We descended a little stairway, and found ourselves in a sufficiently spacious court, which was still ampler in the poet's time, and was then a garden planted with trees and flowers. On a low doorway to the right was inscribed the legend " Prigione di Tasso," and passing through this doorway into a kind of reception-cell, we entered the poet's dungeon. It is an oblong room, with a low waggon-roof ceiling, under which it is barely possible to stand upright. A single narrow window admits the light, and the stone casing of this window has a hollow in a certain place, which might well have been worn there by the friction of the hand that for seven years passed the prisoner his food through the small opening. The young custodian pointed to this memento of suffering, without effusion, and he drew my attention to other remarkable things in the cell, without troubling himself to palliate their improbability in the least. They were his stock in trade ; you paid your money, and took your choice of believing in them or not. On the other hand, my portier, an t\-v(ilet de place, pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm, and expressed the freshest delight in the in- spection of each object of interest. One still faintly discerns among the vast number of names with which the walls of the ante-cell are bewritten, that of Lamartine. The name of Byron, which was once 7 Italian ."^oiiincvs Ferrara ckcply <>iaven in the stucco, lincl been scooped ;i\vay by the (•rand Duke of Tuscany (so the custodian said), and there is only part of a capital B now visible. But the cell itself is still fragrant with associations with the noble bard, who, according to the story related to V^alery, caused himself to be locked up in it, and there, with his head fallen uj)on his breast, and frequently smiting his brow, s])ent two hours in pacing the floor with great strides. It is a touch- ing picture ; but its pathos becomes somewhat embarrass- ing when you enter the cell, and see the impossibility of taking more than three generous paces without turning. When Byron issued forth, after this exercise, he said (still according to Valery) to the custodian : "I thank thee, good man ! The thoughts of Tasso are now all in my mind and heai't." "A short time after his departure froni Ferrara," adds the Frenchman, maliciously, " he com])osed his 'Lament of Tasso/ a mediocre result from such ins]>iru- tion." No doubt all this is coloured, for the same author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity of the spec- tacle : he declares that Byron spent part of his time in the cell in writing upon the ceiling Lamartine's verses on Tasso, which he misspelled. The present visitor has no means of judging of the truth concerning this, for the lines of the poet have been so smoked by the candles of suc- cessive pilgrims in their efforts to get light on then), that they are now utterly illegible. But if it is uncertain what were Byron's emotions on visiting the prison of Tasso, there is no doubt about Lady Morgan's: she " ex})erienced a suffocating emotion ; her heart failed her on entering that cell ; and she satisfied a melancholy curiosity at the cost of a most jiainful sensation." 1 find this amusing fact stated in a translation of her ladyship's own language, in a clever guide-book called // Seirilore cli Piazza, which I bought at Ferrara, and from which, I confess, I have learnt all I know to confirm me in my doubt of Tasso's prison. The Count Avventi, who S Italian 5ouinc\:s writes this book, prefaces it by saying that he is a valcl "> t a 1 1 a n 3 o ii r n c v 9 Ferrara off' behind. One sees instantly that the conscience of tliis early riser is clean, for he makes no miserable attenij)t to turn over for a nap of a few thousand years more, with the l)retence that it was not the trump of doom, but some other and unimj)ortant noise he had heard. The final reward of the blessed is expressed by the re])ose of one small figure in the lap of a colossal eftigy, which I understood to mean rest in Abraham's bosom ; but the artist has bestowed far more interest and feeling upon the fate of the damned, who are all boiling in rows of immense ])ots. It is doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured in the one small saint and the large ])atriarch) whether the artist intended the condition of his sinners to be so horriblv comic as it is ; but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowest conscience might well take alarm from the sj)ectacle of fate so grotesque and ludicrous ; for, wittingly or unwittingh', the artist here punishes^ as Dante knew best how to do, the follv of sinners as well as their wickedness. Boiling is bad enough; but to be boiled in an undeniable dinner-jiot, like a leg of mutton, is to suffer shame as well as agony. We turned from these horrors, and walked down by the side of the Duomo toward the Ghetto, which is not so foul as one could wish a Ghetto to be. The Jews were admitted to Ferrara in 1275, and, throughout the govern- ment of the Dukes, Avere free to live where they chose in the city ; but the Pope's Legate assigned them afterward a separate quarter, which was closed Avith gates. Large numbers of Spanish Jews fled hither during the persecu- tions, and there are four synagogues for the four languages, — Spanish, German, French, and Italian. Avventi mentions, among other interesting facts concerning the Ferrarese Jews, that one of their Rabbins, Isacco degli Abranelli, a man of excellent learning in the Scrij)tures. claimed to be descended from David. His children still abide in Ferrara .and it may have been one of his kingly line that kept the Italian 3oiiinc\;5 Ferrara Ponte Longoscuro, Ferrara Road tempting antiquarian's sliop on the corner from whicli you turn up toward the Libraiy. I should think such a man would find a sort of melancholy solace in such a })lace : filled with broken and fragmentary glories of every kind ; it would serve him for that chamber of desolation, set apart in the houses of the Oriental Hebrews as a place to bewail themselves in ; and, indeed, this idea may go far to ex})lain the universal Israelitish fondness for dealing in relics and ruins. The Ghetto was in itselr indifferent to us ; it was merely our wav to the Library, Avhither the great memory of Ai-iosto invited us to see his famous relics treasured there. We found that the dead letterati of Ferrara had the place wholly to themselves ; not a living soul disjjuted the soli- tude of the halls with the custodians, and the bust of Ariosto looked down from his monument upon rows of empty tables, idle chairs, and dusty inkstands. The poet, who was painted by Titian, has a tomb of 17 u Italian ^oiuncvs Ferrara abandoned ugliness, and sleeps under three epitaphs; while cherubs frescoed on the wall beliind affect to disclose tlie mausoleum, by lifting a frescoed curtain, but deceive no one who cares to consider how impossible it would be for them to perform this service, and caper so ignobly as they do at the same time. In fact this tomb of Ariosto shocks with its hideousness and levity. It stood formerly in the Church of San Benedetto, where it was erected shortly after the poet's death, and it was brought to the Lil)rary by the French, when they turned the church into a barrack for their troops. The poet's dust, therefore, rests liere, where the worm, working silently through the vellum volumes on the shelves, feeds upon the immortality of many other poets. In the adjoining hall are the famed and precious manuscripts of Ariosto and of Tasso. A special application must be made to the librarian, in order to see the fragment of the Furioso in Ariosto's hand, and the manuscript copy of the Genisalemma, with the corrections by Tasso. There are some pages of Ariosto's Satires, framed and glazed for the satisfaction of the less curious ; as well as a letter of Tasso's, written from the Hospital of St. Anna, which the poet sends to a friend, with twelve shirts, and in which he begs that his friend will have the shirts mended, and cautions him " not to let them be mixed •with others." But when the slow custodian had at last unlocked that more costly fragment of the Furioso, and placed it in my hands, the other manuscripts had no value for me. It seems to me that the one privilege which travel has reserved to itself, is that of making each tra- veller, in presence of its treasures, forget whatever other travellers have said or written about them. I had read so much about Ariosto's industry, and of the proof of it in this manuscript, that I doubted if I should at last marvel at it. But the wonder remains with the relic, and I paid it my homage devoutly and humbly, and was disconcerted after- wai'd to read again in my \'^alery how sensibly all others had IS Italian Jounicvis felt the preciousness of that famous page, which, filled witli Ferrara half a score of previous failures, contains in a little oj)en space near the margin, the poet's final triumph in a clearly written stanza. Scarcely less touching and interesting than Ariosto's painful woi'k on these yellow leaves, is the grand and simple tribute which another Italian poet was allowed to inscribe on one of them : " Vittorio Alfieri beheld and venerated"; and I think, counting over the many memorable things I saw on the road to Rome and the way home again, this manuscript was the noblest thing and best worthy to be remembered. When, at last I turned from it, however, I saw that the custodian had another relic of Messer Lodovico, Avhich he was not ashamed to match with the manuscript in my interest. This was the bone of one of the poet's fingers, which the pious care of Ferrara had picked up from his dust (when it was removed from the church to the Library), and neatly bottled and labelled. They keep a great deal of sanctity in bottles with the bones of saints in Italy; but I found very little savour of poesy hanging about this literary relic. As if the melancholy relic of mortality had marshalled us the w'ay, we went from the Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands at the end of a long, long street, not far from the railway station. There was not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen in all that long sti'eet, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing perspective, and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a posthumous meeting in his little reddish brick house, there is nothing to prevent their assembly, in broad daylight from any part of the neighbourhood. There was no presence, however, more spiritual than a comely country girl to respond to our summons at the door, and nothing but a tub of corn-meal disputed our passage inside. When I found the house inhabited by living people, I began to be sorry that it was not as empty as the Library and the 19 .'Italian Soiuiicvs Ferrara street. Indeed, it is miu'li better with Petrareli's lioiise ;it AnjuH, where the <(randeiir ofthepast is never molested by the small household joys and troubles of the ])resent. That house is vaeant, and no eyes less tender and fond than the poet's visitors may look down from its windows over the slopes of vines and olives which it crowns ; and it seemed hard, here in Ferrara, where the houses are so many and the people are so few, that Ariosto's house could not be left to him. Parva sed apla mihi, he has con- tentedly written upon the front ; but I doubt if he finds it large enough for another family, though his modern house- keeper reserves him certain rooms for visitors. To gain these, you go up to the second storey — -there are but two floors — and cross to the rear of the building, where Ariosto's chamber opens out of an ante-room, and looks down uj)on a jjinched and faded bit of garden.* In these chambers they say the poet died. It is oblong, and not large. I should think the windows and roof were of the poet's time, and that everything else had been restored ; I am quite sure the chairs and inkstand are kindly meant inventions ; for the poet's burly great arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both preserved in the Library. But the house is otherwise decent and probable ; and I do not question but it was in the hall where we encountered the meal-tub, that the poet kept a copy of his Furiosu subject to the corrections and advice of his visitors. The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been within a few years restored out of all memory and semblance of itself; and my wish to see the place in which the poet was born "' In this garden the poet spent much of his time — chiefly in plucking up and transplanting the unlucky shrubbery, which was never suffered to grow three months in the same place- such was the poet's rage for revision. It was probably never a very large or splendid garden, for the reason that Ariosto gave when reproached that he who knew so well how to describe magnificent palaces should have built such a poor little house : "It was easier to make verses than houses and the fine palaces in his poem cost him no money." Italian 3oiiiucv;s and spent his childhood resulted, after infinite search, in Ferrara finding a building faced newly with stucco and newly French-windowed. Our portier said it was the work of the late K,nglish \'ice- Consul, who had bought the house. When I complained of the sacrilege, he said : " Yes, it is true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were not of the noble families of Ferrara." The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which cluster so many sad and splendid memories, stands in the heart of the city. I think that the moonlight which, on the night of oin- arrival, showed me its massive walls rising from the shadowy moat that surrounds them, and its four great towers, heavily buttressed, and expanding at the top into bulging cornices of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on nothing else in all Italy so picturesque, and so full of the proper dread charm of feudal times, as this pile of gloomv and majestic strength. The daylight took nothing of this charm from it ; for the castle stands isolated in the midst of the city, as its founder meant it should,* and modern civilisation has not crossed the castle moat, to undignify its exterior with any visible touch of the present. To be sure, when you enter it, the magnificent life is gone out of *" The castle of Ferrara was begun in 1385 by Niccold d'Este, to defend himself against the repetition of scenes of tumult, in which his princely rights were invaded. One of his tax-gatherers, Tommaso da Tortona, had, a short time before, made himself so obnoxious to the people by his insolence and severity, that they rose against him and demanded his life. He took refuge in the palace of his master, which was immediately assailed. The prince's own life was threatened, and he was forced to surrender the fugitive to the people, who tore Tortona limb from limb, and then, after parading the city with the mutilated remains, quietly returned to their allegiance. Niccolo, therefore, caused this castle to be built, which he strengthened with massive walls and towers commanding the whole city, and rendered inaccessible by surrounding it with a deep and wide canal from the river Reno. i2l Italian ^ouincvs Ferrara the old edifice ; it is no stately halberdier who stands on guard at the gate of the drawbridge, but a stumpy Italian soldier in baggy trousers. The castle is full of public offices, and one sees in its courts and on its stairways, not brilliant men-at-arms, nor gay squires and pages, but whistling messengers going from one office to another with docketed papers, and slipshod serving-men carrying the clerks their coffee in very dirty little pots. Dreary- looking suitors, slowly grinding through the mills of law, or passing in the routine of the offices, are the guests encountered in the corridors ; and all that bright-coloured throng of the old days, ladies and lords, is passed from the scene. The melodrama is over, and now we have a play of real life, founded on fact and inculcating a moral. Of course the custodians were slow to admit any change of this kind. If you could have believed them — and the poor people told as many lies as they could to make you — you would believe that nothing had ever hap])ened of a commonplace nature in this castle. The taking-off of Hugo and Parisina they think the great merit of the castle ; and one of them, seeing us, made haste to light his taper and conduct us down to the dungeons where those unhapj)y lovers were imprisoned. It is the misfortune of memor- able dungeons to acquire, when put upon show, just the reverse of those properties which should raise horror and distress in the mind of the beholder. It was impossible to deny that the cells of Parisina and of Hugo were both singularly warm, dr}', and comfortable ; and we, who had never been imprisoned in them, found it hard to command, for our sensation, the terror and agony of the miserable ones who suffered there. We, happy and secure in these dungeons, could not think of the guilty pair bowing them- selves to the headsman's stroke in the gloomy chamber under the Hall of Aurora; nor of the Marquis, in liis night-long walk, breaking at last into frantic remorse and tears to know that his will had been accomplished. Naj', '^^^^^^'^ V )1- '^lf\jL I cui/l L.. a I 1 m.vcvA,cL/; Italian ^ouincvis there upon its vei*y scene, tlie whole tragedy faded from Ferrara us ; and, seeing our wonder so cold, the custodian tried to kindle it by saying that in the time of the event these cells were much dreadfuUer than now, which was no doubt true. The floors of the dungeons are both below the level of the moat, and the narrow windows, or rather crevices to admit the light, were cut in the prodigiously thick wall just above the water, and were defended with four succes- sive iron gratings. The dungeons are some distance apart : that of Hugo was separated from the outer wall of the castle by a narrow passage-way, while Parisina's window opened directly upon the moat. When we ascended again to the court of the castle, the custodian, abetted by his wife, would have interested us in two memorable wells there, between which, he said, Hugo was beheaded ; and unabashed by the small success of this fable, he pointed out two windows in converging angles overhead, from one of Avhich the Marquis, looking into the other, discovered the guilt of the lovers. The windows are now walled up, but are neatly represented to the credulous eye by a fresco of lattices. Valery mentions another claim upon the interest of the tourist which this castle may make, in the fact that it once sheltered John Calvin, who was protected by the Marchioness Renee, wife of Hercules II. ; and my seniture di piacrja (the one who knows how to read and write) gives the following account of the matter, in speaking of the domestic chapel which Renee had built in the castle : " This lady was learned in belles-lettres and in the schis- matic doctrines which at that time were insinuating them- selves throughout France and Germany, and with which Calvin, Luther, and other proselytes, agitated the people, and threatened war to the Catholic religion. Nationally fond of innovation, and averse to the court of Rome on account of the dissensions between her father and Pope Julius II., Renee began to receive the teachings of Calvin, Stalian .'^oimicvs Ferrara witli whom she maintained a correspondence. Indeed, Calvin himself, under the name of Hupperville. visited her in Ferrara, in l.}.'>6', and ended by corrupting iier mind and seducing her into his own errors, which pro- duced discord between her and her religious husband, and resulted in his placing her in temporary seclusion, in order to attemj)t her conversion. Hence, the chapel is faced witli marble, panelled in relief, and studied to avoid giving place to saints or images, which were dis- approved by the almost Anabaptist doctrines of Calvin, then fatally imbibed by the princess." We would willingly, as Protestants, have visited this wicked chapel ; but we were prevented from seeing it, as well as the famous frescoes of Dosso Dossi in the Hall of Aurora, by the fact that the prefect was giving a little dinner (^prmizetto) in that part of the castle. We were not so greatly disappointed in reality as we made belie\ e ; but our serriture di piazza (the unlettered one) was almost moved to lesa macsta with vexation. He had been full (jf scorching patriotism the whole morning ; but now electing the unhappy and apologetic custodian rejn-esentative of Piedmontese tyranny, he bitterly assailed the government of the king. In the times of His Holiness the Legates had made it their pleasure and duty to show the wliole castle to strangers. But now strangers must be sent away without seeing its chief beauties, because, forsooth, the prefect was giving a little dinner. Presence of the Devil 1 In our visits to the different churches in Ferrara we noticed devotion in classes of people who are devout nowhere else in Italy. Not only came solid-looking busi- ness men to say their prayers, but gay young dandies, who knelt and repeated their orisons and then rose and went seriously out. In Venice they would have posted them- selves against a pillar, sucked the heads of their sticks, and !24 Italian Journcvs made eyes at the young ladies kneelinc; near them. This Ferrara degree of religion was all the more remarkable in Ferrara, because that city had been so many years under the Pope. Valery speaks of the delightful societj' which he met in the gray old town ; and it is said that Ferrara has an unusual share of culture in her wealthy class, which is large. With such memories of learning and literary splendour as belong to her, it would be strange if she did not in some form keep alive the sacred Hame. But, though there may be refinement and erudition in Ferrara, she has given no great name to modern Italian literature. Her men of letters seem to be of that race of grubs singularly abundant in Italy — men who dig out of archives and libraries some topic of special and momentary interest and print it, un- studied and unphilosophised. Their books are material, not literature, and it is marvellous how many of them are published. A writer on any given subject can heap together from them a mass of fact and anecdote invaluable in its way ; but it is a mass without life or light, and must be vivified by him who uses it before it can serve the world, which does not care for its dead local value. What numbei's of people used to write verses in Ferrara ! By operation of the principle which causes things concern- ing whatever subject you happen to be interested in to turn up in every direction, I found a volume of these dead- and-gone immortals at a bookstall, one day, in Venice. It is a curiously uncomfortable volume of the year ITO.'J, printed all in italics. I suppose there are two hundred odd rhymers selected from in that book — and how droll the most of them are, with their unmistakable traces of descent from Ariosto, Tasso, and (hiarini ! What acres of enamelled meadow there are in those pages ! Brooks enough to turn all the mills in the world go purling through them. I should say some thousands of nymphs are constantly engaged in weaving garlands there, and the swains keep 25 Italia n 3 o u i- ii c v s Ferrara siicii a ])ipiiiy- on those familiar notes — Anioir, do/ore, cnidc/c, and iiiicle. Poor little poets ! they knew no other tunes. I think some of the pleasantest people in Ital\' are the army gentlemen. There is the race's gentleness in their ways, in spite of their ferocious trade, and, met in travel, they are ready to render an}- little kindness. The other day at Reggio (which is not far from Modena) we stopped to dine at a restaurant where the whole garrison had its coat off and was playing billiards, with the excep- tion of one or two officers, who were dining. These I'ose and bowed as we entered their room, and when the waiter pretended that such and such dishes were out (in Italy the waiter, for some mysterious reason, always pretends that the best dishes are out), they bullied him for the honour of Italy, and made him bring them to us. We were in deep despair at finding no French bread, and the waiter swore with pathos that there was none ; but as soon as his back was turned, a tightly laced little captain rose and began to forage for the bread. He opened every drawer and cupboard in the room, and finding none, invaded another room, captured several loaves from the plates laid there, and brought them back in triumph, presenting them to us amid the applause of his comrades. The dismay of the waiter, on his return, was ineffable. Three officers, who dined with us at the ta})lc (F/io/e of the Stella d'Oro in Ferrara (and excellent dinners were those we ate there), were visibly anxious to address us, and began not uncivilly, but still in order that we should hear, to speculate on our nationality among themselves. It appeared that we were (Germans ; for one of these officers, who had formerly been in the Austrian service at Vienna, recognised the word biller in our remarks on the beccajichi. As I did not care to put these fine fellows to the trouble of hating us for others' faults, I made bold to say that we Italian 9ourncv;s were not Germans^ and to add that (niter was also an Kng- Ferrara lish word. Ah ! yes^ to be sure, one of them admitted ; when he was with the Sardinian arnij' in the Crimea, he liad frequently heard the word used by the English soldiers. He nodded confirmation of what he said to his comrades, and then was good enough to display what English he knew. It was barely sufficient to impress his comrades ; but it led the way to a good deal of talk in Italian. "I suppose you gentlemen are all Piedmontese .^ " I said. " Not at all," said our Crimean. " I am from Como ; this gentleman, il signor Conte (il signer Conte bowed), is of Piacenza ; and our friend across the table is Genoese. The army is doing a great deal to unify Italy. We are all Italians now, and you see we sjjcak Italian, and not our dialects, together." My cheap remark that it was a fine thing to see them all united under one flag, after so many ages of mutual hate and bloodshed, turned the talk upon the origin of the Italian^flag ; and that led our Crimean to ask what was the origin of the English colours. " I scarcely know," I said. " We are Americans." Our friends at once grew more cordial. " Oh, Americani ! " They had great pleasure of it Did we think Signor Leen- colen would be reelected ? I supposed that he had been elected that day, I said. Ah ! this was the election day, then. Coxpefto ! At this the Genoese frowned superior intelligence, and the Crimean gazing admiringly upon him, said he had been nine months at Nuova York, and that he had a brother living there. The poor Crimean boastfully added that he himself had a cousin in America, and that the Americans generally s])oke Spanish. The count from Piacenza woi'e an air of pathetic discomfiture, and tried to invent a transatlantic relative, as I think, but failed. 27 ."Italian 3 u i ii c v 3 Ferrara I am persuaded that none ot tliese warriors really had kinsmen in America, but that tliey hU j)retended to have thein, out of politeness to us, and that they beheved each other. It was very kind of them, and we were so grateful that we put no embarrassing questions. Indeed, the con- versation presently took another course, and grew to include the whole table. There was an extremely pretty Italian present with her newly-wedded husband, who turned out to be a retired officer. He fraternised at once with our soldiers, and when we left the table they all rose and made military obeisances. Having asked lea.'e to light their cigars, they were smoking — the sweet young bride blowing a fairy cloud from her rosy lips with the rest. "Why," I once heard an Italian lady ask, " should men pretend to deny us the privilege of smoking.^ It is so pleasant and innocent." It is but just to the Italians to say that the}' do not always deny it ; and there is, without doubt, a certain grace and charm in a pretty fumattice. I suppose it is a habit not so pleasing in an ugly or middle-ajjed woman. 28 The Piazza, Bologna IV Through Bologna to Genoa «E had intended to stay only one day at Ferrara, but just at tliat time the storms predicted on the Adriatic and Mediter- ranean coasts, by Mathieu de la Drome, §!a had been raging all over Italy, and the railway communications were broken in every direction. The magnificent work through and under the Apennines, between Bologna and Florence, had been washed away by the mountain torrents in a dozen places, and the roads over the plains of the Romagna had been sapjied by the flood, and rendered useless, where not actually laid under water. On the day of our intended de])arture we left the hotel, with other travellers, gaily incredulous of the landlord's fear that no train would start for Bologna. At the station we found a crowd of people waiting and hoping, but there was a sickly cast of doubt in some faces, and the labelled 29 to ■Genoa 5 1 a I i a n 3 o u r n c v s Through employes of the railway wore looks of ominous importance. Bologna Qf ^.^,^^^y^Q tji,. erowd did not lose its temper. It sought information of the officials running to and fro with tele- grams, in a spirit of national sweetness, and consoled itself w-ith saying, as Italy has said under all circumstances of difficulty for centuries: Ci vuol pazicnza ! At last a blank silence fell upon it, as the Capu-Slazioue advanced toward a well-dressed man in the crowd, and spoke to him quietly. The well-dressed man lifted his forefinger and waved it back and forth before his face : The Well dressed Man. — Dunque, non si parte piii .'' (Xo departures, then ?) The Capo-Stazione (waving his forefinger in like manner.) — Non si parte piii. (Like a mournful echo.) We knew quite as well from this pantomime of negation as from the dialogue our sad fate, and submitted to it. Some adventurous spirit demanded whether any trains would go on the morrow. The Capo-Stazione, with an air of one who would not presume to fathom the designs of Providence, responded : " Who knows } To-day, certainly not. To-morrow, perhaps. But" — and vanished. This break in the line was only a few miles in extent, and trains could have approached both to and from Bologna, so that a little enterprise on the pai-t of the company could have passed travellers from one side to the other with very small trouble or delay. But the railway company was as much daunted by the inundation as a peasant going to market, and for two months after the accident no trains carried passengers from one city to the other. Xo doubt, however, the line was under process of very solid repair meanwhile. For the present the only means of getting to Bologna was by carriage on the old highway, and accordingly we took passage thither in the omnibus of the Stella d'Oro. There was little to interest us in the country over which we rode. It is perfectly flat, and I sujipose the reader .SO Itu. ^JOIO^I TCUIA^la iicic^'u Italian Joiuncvs knows what quantities of hemj) and flax are raised there. Through The land seems poorer than in Lombardy, and the farm- Bologna houses and peasants' cottages are small and mean, though ° the })easants themselves, when we met them, looked well fed, and were certainly well clad. The landscape lay soaking in a dreary drizzle the whole way, and the town of Cento, when we reached it, seemed miserably conscious of being too wet and dirty to go in-doors, and was loitering ' about in the rain. Our arrival gave the poor little place a sensation, for I think such a thing as an omnibus had not been seen there since the railway of Bologna and Ferrara was built. We went into the principal cafe to lunch — a cafe much too large for Cento, with immense red-leather cushioned sofas, and a cold, forlorn air of half-starved gentility, a clean, high-roofed cafe and a breezy — and thither the youthful nobility and gentry of the place followed us, and ordered a cuj) of coffee, that they might sit down and give us the pleasure of their distinguished compan}'. They put on their very finest manners, and took their most captivating attitudes for the ladies' sake ; and the gentlemen of our party fancied that it was for them these young men began to discuss the Roman question. How loud they were, and how earnest ! And how often they consulted the ancient newspapers of the cafe ! The great painter Guercino was born at Cento, and they have a noble and beautiful statue of him in the piazza, which the town caused to be erected from contributions by all the citizens. Foi*merly his house was kept for a show to the public ; it was full of the pictures of the painter and many mementos of him ; but recently the paintings have been taken to the gallery, and the house is now closed. The gallery is, consequently, one of the richest second-rate galleries in Italy, and one may spend much longer time in it than w^e gave, with great profit. There are some most interesting heads of Christ, painted, as Guercino always painted the Saviour, with a great degree .SI Italia n ^ o u v nc v 5 Through of Imniaiiity in the faci-. It is an excellent countenance, Bologna jmd fui] of sweet dif^nity.- but (juite different from the conventional face of Christ. to Genoa At night \vc were again in Bologna, of which we had not seen the gloomy ar- i cades for two years. It must be a dreary town at all times : in a rain it is horrible ; and I think tlie whole race of arcaded cities, Treviso, Padua, and Bologna, are dull, blind, and comfortless. The effect of the buildings vaulted above the sidewalks is that of a continuous cellarway ; your view of the street is constantly interrupted by the heavy brick pillars that support the arches ; the arcades are not even pic- turesque. Liking to leave Bologna as quickly as pos- sible, and learning that there was no hope of crossing the Apennines to Florence, we made haste to take the first train for The Tower at Bologna Genoa, meaning to proceed thence directly to Xaj)les by steamer. In our car there were none but Italians, and the exchange of •• La Perseverauza " of Milan for " // Pupolo " of Turin with one of them quickly opened tiie way for conversation and acquaintance. My new-made friend turned out to be a Milanese. He was a ])hysician, and had served as a Stalian 5ouinc\:s surgeon in the late war of Italian independence ; but was Through now placed in a hospital in Milan. There was a gentle Bologna little blonde with him, and at Piacenza, where we stopped ^ Genoa for lunch, "You see, said he, indicating the lady, "we are newly married," — which was, indeed, plain enough to any one who looked at their joyous faces, and observed how great disposition that little blonde had to nestle on the young man's broad shoulder. " I have a week's leave from my place," he went on, "and this is our wedding^ journey. We were to have gone to Florence, but it seems we are fated not to see that famous city." He spoke of it as immensely far olF, and greatly amused us Americans, who had outgrown distances. " So we are going to Genoa instead, for two or three days." " Oh, have you ever been at Genoa ? " the bride broke in, " What magnificent palaces ! And then the bay, and the villas in the environs ! There is the Villa Pallavicini, with beautiful gardens, where an artificial shower breaks out from the bushes, and sprinkles the people who pass. Such fun ! " and she continued to describe vividly a city of which she had only heard from her husband ; and it was easy to see that she walked in paradise wherever he led her. Tliey say that Italian husbands and wives do not long remain fond of each other, but it was impossible in the l)resence of these happy people not to believe in the eternity of their love. Their bliss infected everybody in the car, and in spite of the weariness of our journey, and the vexation of the misadventures which had succeeded one another unsparingly ever since we left home, we found ourselves far on the way to Genoa before we thought to grumble at the distance. There was with us, besides the bridal party, a lady travelling from Bologna to Turin, who had learned English in London, and spoke it much better than most Londoners. It is surprising how thoroughlv Italians master a language so alien to their own as ours, 33 c Through and how frequently you find them acquainted with Bologna K„giish. -, As we drew near Genoa," the moon came out on purpose Genoa ' * * to sliow us the superb city, and we strove eagerly for a first glimpse of the proud capital where Columbus was born. To tell the truth, the glimjjse was but slight and false, for railways always enter cities by some mean level, from which any picturesque view is impossible. Near the station in Genoa, however, is the weak and ugly monument which the municipality has lately raised to Columbus. The moon made the best of this, which stands in a wide open space, and contrived, with an Italian skill in the arrangement of light, to produce an effect of un- deniable splendour. On the morrow, we found out by the careless candour of the daylight what a uselessly big head Columbus had, and how the sculptor had not very happily thought proper to represent him with his sea-legs on. 34 t'y, aKf; The Harbour Tower, Genoa Up and Down Genoa FORMER Consul at , whom I know, has told me a good many stories about the pieces of popular mind which he received at different times from the travelling public, in reproof of his difficulty of discovery ; and I think it must be one of the most jealously guarded rights of American citizens in foreign lands to declare the national representative hard to find, if there is no other comjjlaint to lodge against him. It seems to be, in peculiar degree, 35 Genoa 3 1 a I i a n 3 o u v ii c v s Up and a (luality of consulship at , to be fouiicl remote and Down inaccessible. My friend says that even at New York, before setting out for his post, when inquiring into the history of his predecessors, he heard that they were one and all hard to find ; and he relates that on the steamer, going over, there was a low fellow who set the table in a roar by a vulgar anecdote to this effect : — " There was once a Consul at , who indicated his office-hours by the legend on his door, ' In from ten to one.' An old ship-captain, who kept coming for about a week without finding the Consul, at last furiously wrote, in the terms of wager, under this legend, ' Ten to one you' re out ! ' " My friend also states that one day a visitor of his re- marked : " I 'm rather surprised to find you in. As a general rule, I never do find consuls in." Habitually, his fellow countrymen entertained him with accounts of their misadventures in i-eaching him. It was useless to represent to them that his house was in the most convenient locality in , where, indeed, no stranger can walk twenty rods from his hotel without losing himself; that their guide was an ass, or their courier a rogue. They listened to him politely, but they never pardoned him in the least; and neither will I forgive the Consul at Genoa. I had no earthly consular business with him, but a private favour to to ask. It was Sunday, and I could not reasonably expect to find him at his office, or anybody to tell me where he lived ; but I have seldom had so keen a sense of personal wrong and national neglect as in my search for that Consul's house. In Italy there is no species of fact with which anv human being you meet will not pretend to have perfect acqiiai)it- ance, and, of course, the driver whose fiacre we took pro- fessed himself a complete guide to the Consul's w-hereabouts, and took us successively to the residences of the consuls of all the South American republics. It occurred to me that ,'Jo Italian 3oiuncv;s it might be well to inquire of these officials where their Up and colleague was to be found ; but it is true that not one Down consul of them was at home! Their doors were opened Genoa by vacant old women, in whom a vague intelligence feebly guttered, like the wick of an expiring candle, and who, after feigning to throw floods of light on the object of my search, successively flickered out, and left me in total darkness. Till that day, I never knew what lofty flights stairs were capable of. As out-of-doors, in Genoa, it is either all up or down hill, so in-doors it is either all up or down stairs. Ascending and descending, in one palace after another, those infinite marble steps, it became a question not solved to this hour, whether it was worse to ascend or descend, — each ordeal in its turn seemed so much more terrible than the other. At last I resolved to come to an understanding with the driver, and I spent what little breath I had left — it was dry and hot as the simoom — in blowing up that infamous man. " You are a great driver," I said, "not to know your own city. What are you good for if you can't take a foreigner to his consul's .^ " " Signore," answered the driver patiently, "you would have to get a book in two volumes by heart, in order to be able to find everybody in Genoa. This city is a labyrinth." Truly, it had so proved, and I could scarcely believe in my good luck when I actually found my friend, and set out with him on a ramble through its toils. A very great number of the streets in Genoa are foot- ways merely, and these are as narrow, as dark, as full of jutting chimney-places, balconies, and opened window- shutters, and as picturesque as the little alleys in Venice. They wander at will around the bases of the gloomy old stone palaces, and seem to have a vagabond fondness for creeping down to the port, and losing themselves there in a certain cavernous arcade which curves round the water 37 Down Genoa Stalin n 3 o u v ncvs Up and with the flection of the shore, and makes itself a twilight at noonday. Under it are clangorous shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling shops of marine cooks, and, looking down its dim perspective, one beholds chiefly sea-legs coming and going, more or less affected by strong waters ; and as the faces to which these sea-legs belong draw near, one discerns sailors from all parts of the world, — tawny men from Sicily and Xorwaj', as diverse in their tawniness as olive and train-oil ; sharp faces from Nantucket and from the Piraeus, likewise mightily different in their sharpness ; blonde (lermans and blonde Englishmen; and now and then a coloured brother also in the seafaring line, with sea-legs, also, more or less affected by strong waters like the rest. What curious people are these seafarers ! They coast the whole world, and know nothing of it, being more ignorant and helpless than children on shore. I spoke with the Yankee mate of a ship one day at Venice, and asked him how he liked the city. Well, he had not been ashore yet. He was told he had better go ashore ; that the Piazza San Marco was worth seeing. Well, he knew it ; he had seen pictures of it ; but he guessed he wouldn't go ashore. Why not, now he was here ? Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he came to V^enice. And he lay three weeks at Venice with his ship, after a voyage of two months, and he sailed away without ever setting his foot on that enchanted ground. I should have liked to stop some of those seafarers and ask them what they thought of Genoa. It must have been in the little streets — impassable for horses — that the people sat and talked, as Heine fabled, in their doorways, and touched knees with the people sitting and talking on the thresholds of the opj)osite side. But we saw no gossipers there on our Sunday in Genoa; Genoa : a City of Palaces Jtalian ^oiuncvs and I think the domestic race of Heine's day no lon^ujer Up and lives in Genoa, for everybody we saw in the streets was Down gaily (h-essed in the idea of the last fashions^ and was to G^'^o^ be met chiefly in the public promenades. The fashions were French ; but here still lingers the lovely phantom of the old national costume of Genoa, and snow-white veils fluttered from many a dark head, and caressed many an olive cheek. It is the kindest and charital)lest of attire- ments, this white veil, and, while decking beauty to the most perilous effect, befriends and modifies age and ugliness. The pleasure with which I look at the splendour of an Italian crowd in winter is always touched with melancholy. I know that, at the time of its noonday promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its stoniach ; that it has emerged from a house as cold and dim as a cellar ; and that it will presently go home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I know that chilblains secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid gloves, and I see in the rawness of its faces the anguish of winter-long suffering from cold. But I also look at many in this crowd with the eye of the economist, and wonder how jjeople practising even so gi'eat self-denial as they can contrive to make so much display- on their little means, — how those clerks of public offices, who have rarely an income of five hundred dollars a year, can dress with such peerless gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct teaches them ways and means unknown to us. The passion for dress is universal : the men are as fond of it as the women; and, happily, clothes are com- paratively cheap. We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upon the hill where the public promenade overlooks a landscape of city and country, houses and gardens, vines and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, it is so faultlesslv beautiful. Behind us the fountain was — " Shaking its loosened silver in the sun " ; 41 Genoa Italia n 3 o u i n c v s Up and tile birds were singing ; and tliere were innumerable Down pretty girls going by, about whom one might have made romances if one had not known better. Our friend pointed out to us the " pink jail " in which Dickens lived while at (ienoa; and showed us on the brow of a distant upland the villa, called // Pnrndiso, Avhich Byron had occupied. I dare say this Genoese joke is already in print: That the Devil reentered Paradise when Byron took this villa. Though, in loveliest Italy, one is half- persuaded that the Devil had never left Paradise. After lingering a little longer on that delicious height, we turned and went down for a stroll through the city. My note-book says that Genoa is the most magnificent city I ever saw, and I hold by my note-book, though I hardly know how to prove it. Venice is, and remains, the most beautiful city in the world ; but her ancient rival impresses you with greater splendour. I suppose that the exclusively Renaissance architecture, which Buskin declares the architecture of pride, lends itself powerfully to this effect in Genoa. It is here in its best mood, and there is little grotesque rococo to be seen, though the palaces are, as usual, loaded with ornament. The ^'ia Nuova is the chief thoroughfare of the city, and the crowd pours through this avenue between long lines of palaces. Height on height rise the stately, sculptured facades, colonnaded, statued, pierced by mighty doorwavs and lofty windows ; and the palaces seem to gain a kind of aristocratic hauteur from the fact that there are for the most part no sidewalks, and that the carriages, rolling insolently throi"gh the crowd, threaten constantly to grind the pedestrian up against their carven marbles, and immolate him to their stony pride. There is some- thing gracious and gentle in the grandeur of Venice, and much that the heart loves to cling to ; but in Genoa no sense of kindliness is touched by the magnificence of the city. 42 Italian 3oui-ncv!S It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to Up and come, on a sudden, upon the Duonio, one of the few Down Gothic buildings in Genoa, and rest our jaded eyes on *^^"°^ that ai'chitecture which Heaven seems truly to have put into the thoughts of man together with the Christian faith. O beloved beauty of aspiring arches, of slender and clustered columns, of flowering capitals and window- traceries, of many-carven breadths and heights, wherein all Nature breathes and blossoms again I There is neither Greek perfection, nor winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent Renaissance opulence, which may compare with this loveliness of yours ? Alas that the interior of this Gothic tem2:>le of Genoa should abound in the abomination of rococo restoration ? They say that the dust of St. John the Baptist lies there within a costly shrine ; and I wonder that it can sleep in peace amid all that heathenish show of bad taste. But the poor saints have to suflier a great deal in Italy. Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was an idle, cruel crowd, amusing itself with the efforts of a blind old man to find the entrance. He had a number of books which he desperately laid down while he ran his helpless hands over the clustered columns, and which he then des- perately caught up again, in fear of losing them. At other times he paused, and wildh' clasped his hands upon his eyes, or wildly threw up his arms ; and then began to run to and fro again uneasily, while the crowd laughed and jeered. He seemed the type of a blind soul that gropes darkly about through life, to find the doorway of some divine truth or beauty, — touched by the heavenly harmonies from within, and nn'serablv failing, amid the scornful cries and bitter glee of those who have no will but to mock aspiration. The girl turning somersaults in another place had far more popular sympathy than the blind man at the temple door, but she was hardly a more cheerful spectacle. For 4;j ."Italian ."^oiiiucvs Up and all iier festive spangles and fairy-like brevity ot skirts, she Down liad (jiiitc a workaday look upon her honest, blood-red Genoa fjjp^^ .jj^ jf- ^.j^jg were business though it looked like sport, and her p.irt of the diversion were as jiractical as that of the famous captain of the waiters, Who gave the act of peeling a sack of potatoes a playful effect by standing on his head. The poor damsel was going over and over to the sound of most dismal drumming and braying, in front of the immense old palace of the Genoese Doges, — a classic building, stilted on a rustic base, and quite worthy of Palladio, if any body thinks that is praise. There was little left of our day when we liad dined ; but having seen the outside of Genoa, and not hoping to see the inside, we found even this little heavy on our hands, and were glad as the hour drew near when we were to take the steamer to Naples. It had been one of the noisiest days spent during several years in clamorous Italy, whose voiceful uproar strikes to the summits of her guardian Alps, and greets the coming stranger, and whose loud Addio would stun him at parting, if he had not meanwhile become habitu- ated to the operatic pitch of her every-day tones. In Genoa, the hotels, taking counsel of the vagabond streets, stand about the cavernous arcade already mentioned, and all the noise of the shipping reaches their guests. We rose early that Sunday morning to the sound of a fleet unloading cargoes of wrought-iron, and of the hard-swear- ing of all nations of seafaring men. The whole day long the tumult followed us, and seemed to culminate at last in the screams of a parrot, who thought it fine to cry, " Piove ! piovc ! piove !—" It rains ! it rains ! it I'ains ! " — and had, no doubt, a secret interest in some umbrella-shop. This unprincipled bird dwelt somewhere in the neighbour- hood of the street where you see the awful tablet in the wall devoting to infamy the citizens of the old republic that were false to their country. The sight of that pitiless 44 Italian 5oiu-ncv!S stone recalls with a thrill the picturesque, unhappy past, Up and with all the wandering, half-benighted efforts of the people Down to rend their liberty from now a foreign and now a native lord. At best, they only knew how to avenge their wrongs ; but now, let us hope, they have learnt, with all Italy, to prevent them. The will was never wanting of old to the Ligurian race, and in their time they have done their full share to establish Italian freedom. I do not know why it should have been so surprising to hear the boatman who rowed us to the steamer's anchor- age speak English ; but, after his harsh Genoese profanity in getting his boat into open water, it was the last thing we expected from him. It had somehow the effect of a furious beast addressing you in your native tongue, and telling you it was "Wary poordy wedder ; " and it made us cling to his good-nature with the trembling solicitude of Little Red-Riding-Hood, when she begins to have the first faint suspicions of her grandmother. However, our boatman was no wild beast, but took our six cents of huonamano with the servility of a Christian man, when he had put our luggage in the cabin of the steamer. I wonder how he should have known us for Amei'icans } He did so know us, and said he had been at New York in better days, when he voyaged upon higher seas than those he now- navigated. On board, we watched with compassion an old gentle- man in the cabin making a hearty meal of sardines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if he had ever been at sea. No, he said. I could have w-ept over that innocent old gentle- man's childlike confidence of appetite, and guileless trust of the deep. We went on deck, where one of the gentle beings of our party declared that she would remain as long as Genoa was in sight ; and to tell the truth, the scene was woi'thy of the promised devotion. There, in a half-circle before us, blazed the lights of the quay ; 45 Italia n 3 o u v ncvs Up and above these twinkled the himps of the steep streets Down .^nj climbing palaces ; over and behind all luin -X- -. -^" "-r>= ? Naples: the Harbour VII Certain Things in Naples ^ERHAPS some reader of mine who visited Naples under the old disorder of things, when the Bourbonand the Camorra reigned, will like to hear that the pitched battle which travellers formerly fought, in landing from their steamer, is now gone out of fashion. Less truculent boatmen I never saw than those who rowed us ashore at Naples ; they were so quiet and peaceful that they harmonised perfectly with that tranquil scene ot drowsy-twinkling city lights, slumbrous mountains, and calm sea, as they dipped softly toward us in the glare of the steamer's lamps. The mystery of this placidity had been already solved by our captain, whom I had asked what price I should bargain to pay from the steamer to the shore. " There is a tariff," said he, "and the boatmen keep to it. The Neapolitans are good people {huoiia geiife), and only needed 53 Italian ^ounicvs Certain justice to m.ike them obedient to the laws." 1 must say Things that I found this to be true. Tlie fares of all pul)lie eon- m Naples veyanees are now fixed, and tlie attempts which drivers occasionally make to cheat you seem to be rather the involuntary imj^ulses of old habit than deliberate intentions to do you wrong. You pay what is due, and as your man merely rumbles internally when you turn away, you nnist be a very timid .sigiwriii indeed, if you buy his content with anything more. I fancy that all these things are now much better managed in Italy than in America, only we grumble at them there and stand them in silence at home. Every one can recall frightful instances of plunder, in which he was the victim, at New York — in which the robbery had none of the neatness of an operation, as it often has in Italy, but was a brutal mutilation. And then as regards civility from the same kind of people in the two countries, thei*e is no comparison that holds in favour of us. All questions are readily and politely answered in Italian travel, and the servants of companies ai'e required to be courteous to the public; whereas, one is only too glad to receive a silent snub from such people at home. The first sun that rose after our arrival in Naples was mild and warm as a May sun, though we were quite in the heart of November. We early strolled out under it into the crowded ways of the city, and drew near as we might to that restless, thronging, gossiping southern life, in contrast with which all northern existence seems only a sort of hibernation. The long Toledo, on which the magnificence of modern Naples is threaded, is the most brilliant and joyous street in the world ; but I think there is less of the quaintness of Italian civilisation to be seen in its vivacious crowds than anywhere else in Italy. One easily understands how, with its sujierb length and straight- ness, and its fine, respectable, commonplace-looking houses, it should be the pride of a people fond of show ; but after 5i ~ji lei- ■ '^^W^^^-^^ ^ lU' Fish Market; Naples Italian Jouvncvs V eniee and Genoa it lias no picturesque charm ; nay, even Certain bus\^ Milan seems less modern and more picturesque. The Things lines of the lofty palaces on the Toledo are seldom broken ^" Naples by the fa9ade of a church or other public edifice ; and when this does happen, the building is sure to be coldly classic or frantically baroque. ^'ou weary of the Toledo's perfect repair, of its monotonous iron balconies, its monotonous lofty windows ; and it would be insufferable if you could not turn out from it at intervals into one of those wondrous little streets which branch up on one hand and down on the other, rising and falling with flights of steps between the high, many-balconied walls. They ring all day with the motleyest life of fishermen, fruit-vendors, chestnut-roasters, and idlers of every age and sex ; and there is nothing so full of local colour, unless it be the little up-and-down-hill streets in Genoa. Like those, the by-streets of Naples are meant only for foot-passengers, and a carriage never enters them ; but sometimes you may see a mule climbing the long stairways, moving solemnly under a stack of straw, or tinkling gaily downstairs, be- stridden by a swarthy, handsome peasant — all glittering teeth and eyes and flaming Phrygian cap. The rider exchanges lively salutations and sarcasms with the by- standers in his way, and perhaps brushes against the bag- pipers who bray constantly in those hilly defiles. They are in Neapolitan costume, these pijf'eran, and have their legs incomprehensibly tied up in the stockings and garters affected by the peasantry of the provinces, and wear brave red sashes about their waists. They are simple, harmless- looking people, and would no doubt rob and kill in the most amiable manner, if brigandage came into fashion in their neighbourhood. Sometimes the student of men may witness a Neapolitan quarrel in these streets, and may pick up useful ideas of invective from the remarks of the fat old women who always take part in the contests. But, though we were 57 Italian ^oiirncvs Certain ten days in Naples, I only saw one (iiiarrel, and I could Things have heard much finer violence of language among the P gondoliers at any ferry in \'enice than 1 heard in this altercation. The Neapolitans are, of course, furious in traffic. They sell a great deal, and very boisterously, the fruit of the cactus, which is about as large as an egg, and w'hich they peel to a very bloody pulp, and lay out, a sanguinary presence, on boards for purchase. It is not good to the uncultivated taste ; but the stranger may stop and drink, with relish and refreshment, the orangeade and lemonade mixed with snow and sold at the little booths on the street- corners. These stands look much like the shrines of the Madonna in other Italian cities, and a friend of ours was led, before looking carefully into their office, to argue immense Neapolitan piety from the frequency' of their ecclesiastical architecture. They are, indeed, the shrines of a god much worshi}i])ed during the long Neapolitan summers ; and it was the profound theory of the Bourbon kings of Naples that, if they kei)t their subjects well supplied with snow to cool their drink, there was no fear of revolution. It shows how liable statesmen are to err, that, after all, the Neapolitans rose, drove out the Bourbons, and welcomed (Jaribaldi. The onl\' j)art of the picturesque life of the side streets which seems ever to issue from them into the Toledo is the goatherd with his Hock of milch-goats, which mingle with the passers in the avenues as familiarly as with those of the alley, and thrust aside silk-hidden hoops, and brush against dandies' legs, in their course, but keep on perfect terms with everybody. The goatherd leads the eldest of the flock, and the rest follow in docile order and stop as he stops to ask at the doors if milk is wanted. When he happens to have an order, one of the goats is haled, much against her will, into the entry of a house, and there milked, while the others wait outside alone. :::_ "Ivn?!!.!,^ p],i^ a Santa Lucia (now being demolished), Naples Italian 5oiuncv;3 nibbling and smelling thoughtfully about the masonry. Certain It is noticeable that none of the good-natured passers Things seem to think these goats a great nuisance in the crowded ^" ^P ^^ street ; but all make way for them as if they were there by perfect riglit, and were no inconvenience. On the Toledo people keep ujjon the narrow side-walks, or strike out into the carriage-way, with an indifference to hoofs and wheels which one, after long residence in tran- quil Venice, cannot acquire, in view of the furious Neapol- itan driving. That old comprehensive gig of Naples, witli which many pens and pencils have familiarised the reader, is nearly as hard to find there now as the lazzaroui, who have gone out altogether. You may still see it in the remoter quarters of the city, with its complement of twelve passengers to one horse, distributed, two on eacli thill, four on the top seats, one at each side, and two behind ; but in the Toledo it has given place to much finer vehicles. Slight buggies, which take you anywhere for half a franc, are the favourite means of public convey- ance, and the private turnouts are of every description and degree. Indeed, all the Neapolitans take to cari'iages, and the Strand in London at six o'clock in the evening is not a greater jam of wheels than the Toledo in the after- noon. Shopping feels the expansive influence of the out-of-doors life, and ladies do most of it as they sit in their open carriages at the shop-doors, ministered to bv the neat-handed shopmen. They are very languid ladies, as they recline upon their carriage cushions ; they are all black-eyed, and of an olive pallor, and have gloomy rings about their fine eyes, like the dark-faced dandies who bow to them. This Neapolitan look is very curious, and I have not seen it elsewhere in Italy ; it is a look of peculiar pensiveness, and comes, no doubt, from the peculiarly heavy growth of lashes which fringes the lower evelid. Then there is the weariness in it of all peoj^les whose summers are fierce and long. ()1 3 1 a 1 1 a i\ 3 u v n c v s Certain Things in Naples 1^! 'W :^' ^ ^^^ /. ii?. ij/ A Baker's Shop, Naples As the Italians usually dress beyond their means, the dandies of Naples are very gorgeous. If it is now, say, four o'clock in the afternoon, they are all coming down the Toledo with the streams of carriages bound for the long drive around the bay. But our foot-passers go to Avalk in the beautiful Villa Reale, between this course and the sea. The Villa is a slender strip of Paradise, a mile long; it is lapture to walk in it, and it comes, in description, to be a garden-grove, with feathery palms, Greekish temples, musical fountains, white statues of the gods, and groups of fair girls in spring silks. If I remember aright, the sun is always setting on the bay, and you cannot tell whether this sunset is cooled by the water or the water is warmed by the golden light upon it, and upon the city, and upon all the soft mountain-heights around. Walking westward through the whole length of the Villa Reale, and keeping with the crescent shore of the bay, you come, after a while, to the Grot of Posilippo, which is not a grotto but a tunnel cut for a carriage-way under the hill. It serves, however, the purpose of a grotto, if a grotto has anv, and is of great length and dimness, 62 %. The Grotto of Posilippo : the Tunnel Italian Sourness and is all a-twinkle night and day with numberless lamps. Certain Overlooking the street which passes into it is the tomb of Things Virgil, and it is this you have come to see. To reach it, '" Naples you knock first at the door of a blacksmith, who calls a species of custodian, and, when this latter has opened a gate in a wall, you follow him upstairs into a market- garden. In one corner, and standing in a leafy and grassy shelter somewhat away from the vegetables, is the poet's tomb, which has a kind of claim to genuineness by virtue of its improbable appearance. It looks more like a bake-oven than even the Pompeian tombs ; the masonry is antique, and is at least in skilful imitation of the fine Roman work. The interior is a small chamber with vaulted or waggon-roof ceiling, under which a man may stand upright, and at the end next the street is a little stone commemo- rating the place as Virgil's tomb, which was placed there by the Queen of France in 1840, and said by the custo- dian to be an exact copy of the original, whatever the original may have been. This guide could tell us nothing more about it, and was too stupidly honest to pretend to know more. The laurel planted by Petrarch at the door of the tomb, and renewed in later times by Casimir Delavigne, has been succeeded by a third laurel. The present twig was so slender, and looked so friendless and unprotected, that even enthusiasm for the memory of two poets could not be brought to rob it of one of its few leaves; and we contented ourselves with plucking some of the grass and weeds that grew abundantly on the roof of the tomb. There was a dusty quiet within the tomb, and a grassy quiet without, that pleased exceedingly ; but though the memories of the place were so high and epic, it only suggested bucolic associations, and, sunken into that nook of hill-side verdure, made me think of a spring-house on some far-away Ohio farm ; a thought that, perhaps, would 65 E ."^ t a I i a 11 ^ u i- n c v s Certain not have ottiended the poet, who loved and sang of humble Things country things, and, drawing wearily to his rest here, no ap s jIqjjJjj. turned and remembered tenderly the rustic days before the excellent veterans of Augustus came to exile him from his father's farm at Mantua, and banish liim to mere glory. But I believe most travellers have much nobler sensations in Virgil's tomb, and there is a great deal of testimony borne to their lofty sentiments on every scribbleable inch of its walls. Valery reminded luc tliat Boccaccio, standing near it of old, first felt his fate decided for literature. Did he come there, I wonder, with poor Fiammetta, and enter the tomb with her tender hand in his, before ever he thought of that cruel absence she tells of .^ "O donne pietose ! ' I hope so, and that this pilgrimage, half of love and half of letters, took place, "nel tempo nel quale la rivestita terra pin che tutto I'altro anno si mostra bella." If you ascend from the tomb and turn Naples-ward from the crest of the hill, you have the loveliest view in the world of the sea and of the crescent beach, mightily jewelled at its further horn with the black Castel dell' Ovo. Fishermen's children ai"e playing all along the foamy border of the sea, and boats are darting out into the surf. The present humble muse is not above saying also that the linen which the laundresses hang to dry upon lines along the beach takes the sun like a dazzling flight of white birds, and gives a breezy life to the scene which it could not spare. There was a little church on our way back from Posilippo, into which we lounged a moment, pausing at the altar of some very successful saint near the door. Here there were great numbers of the usual offerings from the sick whom the saint had eased of their various ills, — waxen legs and arms from people who had been in peril of losing their limbs, as well as eyes, noses, fingers, and feet, and 66 i:^ The Streets of Stairs, Naples Italian Jouincvs Certain Things in Naples .SIS^i - - ''■'■'>■' ?J^'\^V^ M\ ^^^^ ^'"^'' cycle of the Christian Era, and, ^^^^>3^-s<^)/i skirting the waters of the Neapolitan bay almost the wliole length of our journey, readied the railway station of Pompeii in an hour. As we rode along by that bluest sea, we saw the fishing-boats go out, and the foamy waves (which it would be violence to call breakers) come in ; we saw the mountains slo))e their tawny and golden manes caressingly downward to the waters, where the islands were dozing yet ; and landward, on the left, we saw \'esuvius, with his brown mantle of ashes drawn close about his throat, reclining on the plain, and smoking a bland and thoughtful morning pipe, of which the silver fumes curled lightly, lightly upward in the sunrise. We dismounted at the station, walked a fcAv rods east- ward through a little cotton-field, and found ourselves at 74 Italian 5ouinc\:s the door of Hotel Diomed, where we took breakfast for a A Day in number of sesterces which I am sure it would have made Pompeii an ancient Pompeian stir in his urn to think of paying. But in Italy one learns the chief Italian virtue^ patience, and we paid our account Avith the utmost good nature- There was compensation in store for us, and the guide whom we found at the gate leading up the little hill to Pompeii inclined the disturbed balance in favour of our 'happiness. He was a Roman, spoke Italian that Beatrice might have addressed to Dante, and was numbered Twenty- six. I suppose it is known that the present Italian Government forbids people to be pillaged in any way on its premises, and that the property of the State is no longer the traffic of custodians and their pitiless race. At Pompeii each person pays two francs for admission, and is rigorously forbidden by recurrent sign-boards to offer money to the guides. \ entisei (as we shall call him) himself pointed out one of these notices in English, and did his duty faithfullj' without asking or receiving fees in money. He was a soldier, like all the other guides, and was a most intelligent, obliging fellow, with a self-respect h which the excavation first passes is not of t a I i a n 3 o u r n c v s A Day in Pompeii / / The Foium, Pompeii startling^ it blew back the light chafF we threw to it with amazing vehemence, and almost made us doubt if it were not a direct human utterance. Yet how was \ entise to know our names ? And there was no one else to call them but ourselves. Our dolce cluca gathered a nose- gay from the crumbling ledges, and sat down in the cool of the once cruel cells beneath, and put it prettily together for the ladies. When we had wearied ourselves with the echo he arose and led us back to Pompeii. The plans of nearly all the houses in the city are aHke : the entrance-room next the door ; the parlour or drawing- room next that ; then the impluvium, or unroofed space in the middle of the house, where the rains were caught and drained into the cistern, and where the house- hold used to come to wash itself, primitively, as at H pump ; tlie little garden, with its painted columns, behind the impluvium, and, at last, the dining- room. There are minute bed-chambers on either side, and, as I said, a shop at one side in front, for the sale of the master's grain, wine, and oil. The pavements of all the houses are of mosaic, which, in tlie better sort, is very 84 Italian Journcvs delicate and beautiful, and is found sometimes perfectly A Day in uninjured. Of course there were many picturesque and Pompeu fanciful designs, of which the best have been removed to the museum in Naples ; but several good ones are still left, and (like that of the Wild Boar) give names to the houses in which they are found. But, after all, the great wondei*, the glory, of these Pompeian houses is in their frescoes. If I tried to give an idea of the luxury of colour in Pompeii, the most gorgeous adjectives would be as poorly able to reproduce a vivid and glowing sense of those hues as the photography which now copies the drawing of the decorations ; so I do not try. I know it is a cheap and feeble thought, and yet, let the reader please to consider : a workman nearly two thousand years laying upon the walls those soft lines that went to make up fauns and satyrs, nymphs and naiads, heroes and gods and goddesses ; and getting weary and lying down to sleep, and dreaming of an eruption of the mountain ; of the city buried under a fiery hail, and slumbering in its bed of ashes seventeen centuries ; then of its being slowly exhumed, and, after another lapse of years, of some one coming to gather the shadow of that dreamer's work upon a plate of glass, that he might infinitely reproduce it and sell it to tourists at from five francs to fifty centimes a copy — I say, consider such a dream dreamed in the hot heart of the day, after certain cups of Vesuvian wine ! What a piece of K at zen jammer (I can use no milder term) would that workman think it when he woke again ! Alas ! what is history and the progress of the arts and sciences but one long Katzenjammer ! Photography cannot give, any more than I, the colours of the frescoes, but it can do the drawing better, and, I suspect, the spirit also. I used the word workman, and not artist, in speaking of the decoration of the wall?, for S5 Jtalian Soiuncvs A Day in in most cases the painter was only an artisan, and did his Pompeii work probably by the yard, as the artisan who paints walls and ceilings in Italy does at this day. IJnt the old workman did his work much more skilfully and tastefully than the modern — threw on expanses of niellow colour, delicately panelled oft' the places for the scenes, and pencilled in the figures and draperies (there are usually more of the one than the othei") with a deft hand. Of course the houses of the rich were adorned b\' men of talent; but it is surprising to see the community of thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be from cunninger or clumsier hands. The subjects are nearly always chosen from the iables of the gods, and they are in illustration of the poets, Homer and the rest. To suit that soft, luxurious life which people led in Pompeii, the themes are commonly amorous, and sometimes not too chaste ; there is much of Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus and Adonis, and Diana bathes a good deal with her nymphs — not to mention frequent representations of the toilet of that beautiful monster which the lascivious art of the time loved to depict. One of the most pleasing of all the scenes is that in one of the houses, of the Judg- ment of Paris, in which the shepherd sits upon a bank in an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, with one leg carelessly crossing the other, and both hands resting lightly on his shepherd's crook, while the goddesses before him await his sentence. Naturally the painter has done his best for the victress in this rivalry, and you see " Idalian Aphrodite beautiful," as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice of girlish resentment in her attitude, that Paris should pause for an instant, which is altogether delicious. " And I beheld great Here's angry eyes." Awful eyes ! How did the painter make them ? The wonder of all these pagan frescoes is the mystery of the 86 The Brindisi Gate, Pompeii 5talian Journcvs eyes — still, beautiful, unlmnian. You cannot believe that A Day in it is wrong for those tranquil-eyetl men and women to Ponipeu do evil, they look so calm and so unconscious in it all ; and in the presence of the celestials, as they bend upon you those eternal orbs, in whose regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here art has achieved the unearthly. I know of no words in literature which give a aeiise (nothing gives the idea) of the stare of these gods, except that magnificent line of Kingsley's, describing the advance over the sea toward Andromeda of the oblivious and unsympathising Nereids. That floated slowly up, and their eyes " Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house of the idols.'' The colours of this fresco of the Judgment of Paris are still so fresh and bright, that it photographs very well, but there are other fi'escoes wherein there is more visible per- fection of line, but in which the coloui's are so dim that they can only be reproduced by drawings. One of these is the wounded Adonis cared for by Venus and the Loves ; in Avhich the story is treated with a playful pathos wonder- fully charming. The fair boy leans in the languor of his hurt toward Venus, who sits utterly disconsolate beside him, while the Cupids busy themselves Avith such slight surgical offices as Cupids may render : one jjrepares a linen bandage for the wound, another wraps it round the leg of Adonis, another supports one of his heavy arms, another finds his own emotions too much for him and pauses to weep. It is a pity that the colours of this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, and a greater pity that most of the other frescoes in Pompeii must share its fate, and fade away. The hues are vivid when the walls are first uncovered, and the ashes washed from the pictures, but then the malice of the elements begins anew, and rain and sun draw the life out of tints which the volcano failed to obliterate. 89 3 1 a 1 1 n u 3 on i n c v 3 A Day in Pompeii ..^^#1^ ^^ , ._^..:...:^^i=^:^^_xf^-;f-^- e-:,__-_^^^^ .41 \«4^ - A Tomb. Pompeii Among the frescoes which told no story but their own, we were most j^leasecl with one in a delicately painted little bed-chamber. This represented an alarmed and furtive man, whom we at once pronounced The Belated Husband, opening a door with a night-latch. Nothing could have been better than this miserable wretch's cowardly haste and cautious noiselessness in apj)lying his key ; apprehension sat upon his brow, confusion dwelt in his guilty eye. He had been out till two o'clock in the morning, electioneering for Pansa, the friend of the people (" Pansa, the Roman gladiators," " Pansa, and Christians to the Beasts," was the platform), and he had left his placciis inur at home alone with the children, and now within this door that placcns ?/.ror awaited him ! You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a year or two since, in making an excavation in a Pomjieian street, the moulds of four human bodies, three women and a man, who fell down, blind and writhing, in the storm of tire 90 3ta[iau 5ouincv;5 eighteen hundred years ago ; whose shape the settHng A Day in and hardening ashes took ; whose fiesh wasted away, and Pompen whose bones lay there in the hollow of the matrix till the cunning of this time found them, and, pouring liquid plaster round the skeletons, clothed them with human form again, and drew them forth into the world once more. Thei'e are many things in Pompeii which bring back the gay life of the city, but nothing which so vividly reports the terrible manner of her death as these effigies of the creatures that actually shared it. The man in the last struggle has thrown himself upon his back, and taken his doom sturdily — there is a sublime calm in his rigid figure. The women lie upon their faces, their limbs tossed and distorted, their drapery tangled and heaped about them, and in every fibre you see how hard they died. One presses her face into her handkerchief to draw one last breath unmixed with scalding steam ; another's arms are wildly thrown abroad to clutch at help ; another's hand is appealingly raised, and on her slight nngei-s you see the silver hoops with which her poor dead vanity adorned them. The guide takes you aside from the street into the house where they lie, and a dreadful shadow drops upon your heart as you enter their presence. Without, the hell- storm seems to fall again, and the whole sunny plain to be darkened with its ruin, and the city to send up the tumult of her despair. What is there left in Pompeii to speak of after this ? The long street of tombs outside the walls .^ Those that died before the city's burial seem to have scarcely a claim to the solemnity of death. Shall we go see Diomed's Villa, and walk through the freedman's long underground vaults, where his friends thought to be safe, and were smothered in heaps .'' The garden-ground grows wild among its broken columns with weeds and poplar saplings ; in one of the corridors they 91 Staliaii ^ouincvs A Day in sell photographs, on which, if you please, V^entisei has his Pompeii bottle, or drink-money. So we escajie from the doom of the calamity, and so, at last, the severely forbidden hiiotui- viaiio is paid. VV'e return slowly through the city, where we have sj)ent tlie whole day, from nine till four o'clock. We linger on tlie way, imploring Ventisei if there is not something to be seen in this or that house ; we make our weariness an excuse for sitting down, and cannot rend ourselves from the bliss of being in Pompeii. At last we leave its gates, and swear each other to come again many times while in Naples, and never go again. Perhaps it was as well. You cannot repeat great haj)- piness. The Sea Gate, Pompeii 92 .u-.*,: !,^ ,„v A-lr ' New Excavations, Pompeii IX A Half-Hour at Herculaneum HE road from Naples to Herculaneum is, in fact^ one long street ; it hardly ceases to be city in Naples till it is town at Portici, and in the interval it is suburb, running between palatial lines of villas, which all have their names ambitiously painted over their doors. Great part of the distance this street is bordered by the bay, and, as, far as this is the case, it is picturesque, as everything is belonging to marine life in Italy. Seafaring people go lounging up and down among the fishermen's boats drawn up on the shore, and among the fishermen's wives making nets, while the fishermen's children play and clamber everywhere, and over all flap and flutter the clothes hung on poles to dry. In this part of the street there are, of course, oysters, and grapes, and oranges, and cactus-pulps, and cutlerv, and iced drinks to sell at various Hercu- laneum Italian Souincvs A Half- booths ; and Commerce is exceedingly dramatic and bois- Hour at terous over the bargains she offers ; and equally, of course, drinking shops lurk at intervals along the pavement, and lure into their recesses mariners of foreign birth, bricHy ashore from their ships, 'i'he New York Coffee House is there to attract my maritime fellow countrymen, and I know that if I look into that place of refreshment I shall see their honest, foolish ftices flushed with drink, and with the excitement of buying the least they can for the most money. Poor souls ! they shall drink that pleasant morning away in the society of Antonino the best of Neapolitans, and at midnight, emptied of every soldo, shall arise, wrung with a fearful suspicion of treachery, and wander away under Antonino's guidance to seek the protection of the Consul ; or, taking the law into their own hands, shall proceed to clean out, more Americano, the New York Coffee House, when Antonino shall develop into one of the land- lords, and deal them the most artistic stab in Naples ; handsome, worthy Antonino ; tender-eyed, subtle, pitiless ! Where the road to Herculaneum leaves the bay and its seafai'ing life, it enters, between the walls of lofty, fly- blown houses, a world of maccaroni haunted by foul odours, beggars, and poultry. There were few people to be seen on the street, but through the open doors of the lofty fly- blown houses we saw floury legions at work making macca- roni ; grinding maccaroni, rolling it, cutting it, hanging it in mighty skeins to dry, and gathering it when dried, and ])utting it away. By the frequency of the wine-shops we judged that the legions were a thirsty host, and by the number of the barber-surgeons' shops, that they were a plethoric and too full-blooded host. The latter shops were in the proportion of one to five of the former ; and the artist who had painted their signs had indulged his fancy in wild excesses of phlebotomy. We had found that, as we came south from Yenice, science grew more and more Italian 5 o u r n c v » A Half- Hour at Hercu- laneum The road to Pompeii from Castellammare sanguinary in Italy, and more and more disposed to let blood. At Ferrara, even, the propensity began to be manifest on the barbers' signs, which displayed the device of an arm lanced at the elbow, and jetting the blood by a neatly described curve into a tumbler. Further south the same arm was seen to bleed at the wrist also ; and at Naples an exhaustive treatment of the subject appeared, the favourite study of the artist being a nude figure re- clining in a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant green sward, and bleeding from the elbows, wrists, hands, ankles, and feet. In Naples everywhere one is surprised by the great number of English names which appear on business houses, but it was entirely bewildering to read a bill affixed to a gate of one of the villas on this road : " This Desirable Property for Sale." I should scarcely have cared to buy that desirable property, though the neighbourhood seemed to be a favourite summer resort, and there were villas, as I said, nearly the whole way 95 Hercu laneum Italian 3ourncv3 A Half- to I'ortici. Those which stood with their gardens Hour at toward the bay would have been tolerable, no doubt, if they could have ke})t their windows shut to the vile street before their doors ; but the houses opjjosite could have had no escape from its stench and noisomeness. It was absolutely the filthiest street I have seen any- where outside of New York, excepting only that little street which, in Herculaneum, leads from the theatre to the House of Argo. This pleasant avenue has a stream of turbid water in its centre, bordered by begging children, and is either fouler or cleaner for the water, but I shall never know which. It is at a depth of some fifty or sixty feet below the elevation on which the present city of Portici is built, and is part of the excavation made long ago to reach the plain on which Herculaneum stands, buried under its half- score of successive layers of lava, and ashes, and Portici. We had the aid of all the poverty and leisure of the modern town — there was a vast deal of both, we found- in our search for the staii'case by which you descend to the classic plain, and it proved a discovery involving the outlay of all the copper coin about us, while the sight of the famous theatre of Herculaneum was much more expensive than it would have been had we come there in the old time to see a play of Plautus or Terence. As for the theatre, "the large and highly ornamented theatre " of which I read, only a little while ago, in an encvclopedia, we found it, by the light of our candles, a series of gloomy holloAvs, of the general effect of coal-bins and potato-cellars. It was never perfectly dug out of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last century, together with other excavations, when they endangered the foundations of worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself so hot ujjon the poor property- holders of Portici. I suppose I should not myself, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of 9b" Italian Jouincvs A Half- Hour at Hercu- laneum The House of Argo classic civilisation, like to have my house tumbled about my ears.) But though it was impossible in the theatre of Herculaneum to gain any idea of its size or richness^ I remembered there the magnificent bronzes which had been found in it^ and paid a hasty reverence to the place. Indeed, it is amazing, when one sees how small a part of Herculaneum has been uncovered, to con- sider the number of fine works of art in the Museo Nazionale which were taken thence, and which argue a much I'icher and more refined community than that of Pompeii. A third of the latter city has now l)een restored to the light of day ; but though it has yielded abundance of all the things that illustrate the domestic and public life, and the luxury and depravity of those old times, and has given the once secret rooms of the museum their worst attraction, it still falls far below Herculaneum in the value of its contributions to the treasures of classic art, except only in the variety and beauty of its exquisite frescoes. The effect of this fact is to stimulate the imagination ot the visitor to that degree that nothing short of the instant destruction of Portici and the excavation of all Hercula- {.)7 u Hercu- laneum 9tnUan ^ouvncvs A Half- Ileum will satisfy him. If the opening of one theatre. Hour at .j,,(} ^\]q uncovering of a basilica and two or three houses, have J .i-? The Harbour, Sorrento Italian Joiuncvs nature of a consul, who, he said, would not permit boats Capri and to leave Capri for the mainland after five o'clock in the Capnotes evening. When it was decided that we should remain on the island till the morrow, we found so much time on our hands, after bargaining for our lodging at the Hotel di Londra, that we resolved to ascend the mountain to the ruins of the palaces of Tiberius, and to this end we con- tracted for the services of certain of the muletresses that had gathered about the inn-gate, clamorously offering their beasts. The muletresses chosen were a matron of mature years and of a portly habit of body ; her daughter, a mere child ; and her niece, a very pretty girl of eighteen, with a voice soft and sweet as a bird's. They placed the ladies, one on each mule, and then, while the mother and daughter devoted themselves to the hind-quarters of the foremost animal, the lovely niece brought up the rear of the second beast, and the patriarch went before, and T. and I trudged behind. So the cavalcade ascended ; first, from the terrace of the hotel overlooking the bit of shipping village on the beach, and next from the town of Capi-i, clinging to the hill-sides, midway between sea and sky, until at last it reached the heights on which the ruins stand. Our way was through narrow lanes, bordered by garden walls ; then thi'ough narrow streets bordered by dirty houses ; and then again by gardens, but now of a better sort than the first, and belonging to handsome villas. On the road our pretty muletress gossiped cheerfully, and our patriarch gloomily, and between the two w^e accumulated a store of information concerning the present inhabitants of Capri, which, I am sorry to say, has now for the most part failed me. I I'emember that they said most of the landowners at Capri were Neapolitans, and that these villas were their country-houses ; though they pointcil out one of the stateliest of the edifices as belonging to a certain English physician who had come to visit Capri for 107 Italian 5ourncvs Capri and ;i few davs, and iiad now been living on the island twenty Capnotes years, having married (said the niuletress) the prettiest and poorest girl in the town. From this romance — some- thing like which the muletress seemed to think might well happen concerning herself — we i)assed lightly t(» speak of kindred things, the muletress responding gaily between the blows she bestowed upon her beast. The accent of these Capriotes has something of German harsh- ness and heaviness : they say nan hos.su instead of tiuii posso, and moiiio instead of momlo, and interchange the / and d a good deal ; and they use for father the Latin pater, instead of padre. But this girl's voice, as I said, was very musical, and the island's accent was sweet upon her tongue. /. — What is your name .'' She. — Caterina, little sir (^.s'igiioriiiy I. — And how old are you, Caterina ? She. — Eighteen, little sir. /. — And you are betrothed .'' She feigns not to understand ; but the patriarch, who has dropped behind to listen to our discourse, explains — " He asks if you are in love. ' She. — Ah, no ! little sir, not yet. /. — No.'' A little late, it seems to me. I think there must be some good looking youngster who pleases you — no.^ She. — Ah, no ! one must work, one cannot think of marrying. We are four sisters, and we have onlv the (nfoiunnaiio from hiring these mules, and we must spin and cook. The Pafriarch. — Don't believe her ; she has two lovers. She. — Ah, no ! It isn't true. He tells a fib — he ! But, nevertheless, she seemed to love to be accused of lovers, — such is the guile of the female heart in Capri, — and laughed over the patriarch's wickedness. She confided that she ate niaccaroni once a day, and she talked constantly of eating it just as the Northern Italians always talk of polenta. She was a true daughter of the isle, and 108 ^''tfitiiju ri ti'iFiP"^' ^'* W\\\\ I; III i m^i f'l 'if r^sS -I f I Kip r' ' ^^' i/j' The Piazza, Capri Italian Journcvs had left it but once in her life, when she went to Naples. Capri and " Naples was beautiful, yes ; but one always loves one's Capriotes own country the best." She was very attentive and good, but at the end was rapacious of more and more hiiofunnaiiu. " Have patience with her, sir," said the blameless Antonino, who witnessed her greediness; "they do not understand certain matters here, poor little things ! " As for the patriarch, he was full of learning relative to himself and to Capri ; and told me with much elaboration that the islanders lived chiefly by fishing, and gained something also by their vineyards. But they were greatly oppressed by taxes, and the strict enforcement of the conscriptions, and they had little love for the Italian Government, and wished the Bourbons back again. The Piedmontese, indeed, misgoverned them horribly. There was the Blue Grotto, for example ; formerly travellers ]niid the guides five, six, ten francs for viewing it ; but now the Piedmontese had made a tariff, and the poor guides could only exact a franc from each person. Things were in a ruinous condition. By this Ave had arrived at a little inn on the top of the mountain, very near the ruins of the palaces. " Here," said the patriarch, " it is customary for strangers to drink a bottle of the wine gf Tiberius." We obediently entered the hostelry, and the landlord — a white-toothed, brown-faced, good-humoured peasant — gallantly ran for- ward and presented the ladies with bouquets of roses. We thought it a pretty and graceful act, but found later that it was to be paid for, like all pretty and graceful things in Italy ; for when we came to settle for the wine, and the landlord wanted more than justice, he urged that he had presented the ladies with flowers ; yet he equally gave me his benediction when I refused to pay for his politeness. " Now here," again said the patriarch in a solemn whis- per, " vou can see the Tarantella danced for two francs ; 111 3 1 a I i n ii ^ o u v n c v s Capri and whereas down at your inn, if you hire the dancers through Capriotes your landlord, it will cost you five or six francs." The difference was tempting, and decided us in favour of an immediate Tarantella. The muletresses left their beasts to browse about the door of the inn and came into the little public room, where were already the wife and sister of the landlord, and took their places vix-a-ri.s; while the landlord seized his tambourine and beat from it a wild and lively measure. The women were barefooted and hoop- less, and they gave us the Tarantella with all the beauty of natural movement and free floating drapery, and with all that splendid grace of pose which animates the antique statues and pictures of dancers. They swayed themselves in time with the music ; then, filled with its passionate impulse, advanced and retreated and whirled away ; sna])ping their fingers above their heads, and looking over their shoulders with a gay and a laughing challenge to each other, they drifted through the ever-repeated figures of flight and wooing, and wove for us pictui'es of delight that remained upon the brain like the effect of long-pon- dered vivid colours, and still return to illumine and complete any representation of that indescribable dance. Heaven knows what peril there might have been in the beauty and grace of the pretty muletress but for the spectacle of her fat aunt, who burlesqued some of her niece's airiest move- ments, and whose hard-bought buoyancy was pathetic. She earned her share of the spoils certainly, and she seemed glad when the dance was over, and went con- tentedly back to her mule. The patriarch had early retired from the scene as from a vanity with wliich he was too familiar for enjoyment, and I found him, when the Tarantella was done, leaning on the curb of the preci])itous rock immediately behind the inn, over which the Capriotes say Tiberius used to cast the victims of his pleasures after he was sated with them. These have taken their place in the insular imagi- 112 ^?Ji ' •^- .® ui)f /\\\U * ife^V"'^": '^T' V' -^Si'^- .•■#1" A^^Mi.^- :.^2ii^ The House of Tasso We returned, soaked and disappointed, to the liotel^ where we found Antonino very doubtful about the possi- bility of getting back that day to Sorrento, and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of bad weather, to revive the fiction of a j^rohibitory consul. He was staying- in Capri at our expense, and the honest fellow would willingly have spent a fortnight there. We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he came with all his household to present the account — each one full of visible longing, yet restrained from asking hi/oiia- iiiano by a strong sense of previous contract. It was a deadly struggle with them, but they conquered themselves, and blessed us as we departed. The pretty muletress took leave of us on the beach, and we set sail for Sorrento, the ladies crouching in the bottom of the boat, and taking their sea-sickness in silence. As we drew near tiie beau- tiful town, we saw how it lay on a plateau, at the foot of the mountains, but high above the sea. Antonino pointed out to us the house of Tasso, in which the novelist Cooper also resided when in Sorrento — a white house not hand- 122 Jtalian ^ourncvs somer nor uglier than the rest, with a terrace looking out Capri and over the water. The bluffs are pierced by numerous Capnotes arched caverns^ as I have said, giving shelter to the fisher- men's boats, and here and there a devious stairway mounts to their crests. Up one of these we walked, noting how iu the house above us the people, with that puerility usually mixed with the Italian love of beauty, had placed painted busts of terra-cotta in the windows to simulate persons looking out. There was nothing to blame in the breakfast we found ready at the Hotel Rispoli, or in the grove of slender, graceful orange-trees in the midst of which the hotel stood, and which had lavished the fruit in every direction on the ground. Antonino attended us to our carriage when we went away. He had kept us all night at Capri, it is true, and he had brought us in at the end for a prodigious buonamano; yet I cannot escape the conviction that he parted from us with an inifulfilled purpose of greater plunder, and I have a comj)as- sion, which I here declare, for the strangers who fell next into his hands. He was good enough at the last moment to say that his name, Silver-Eye, Avas a nick name given him according to a custom of the Sorrentines ; and he made us a farewell bow that could not be bought in America for money. At the station of Castellammare sat a curious cripple on the stones — a man with little, short, withered legs, and a pleasant face. He showed us the ticket-office, and wanted nothing for the politeness. After we had been in the waiting-room a brief time, he came swinging himself in upon his hands, followed by another person, who, when the cripple had planted himself finally and squarely on the ground, whipped out a tape from his pocket and took his measure for a suit of clothes, the cri])ple twirling and twisting himself about in every way for the tailor's con- venience. Nobody was surprised or amused at the sight, and when his measure was thus publicly taken, the cripple gravely swung himself out as he had swung himself in. I '2.S Monte Cassino, between Rome and Naples XI Between Rome and Naples NE day it became plain even to our reluc- tance that we could not staj^ in Naples for ever, and the next morning we took the train for Rome. The \'illa Heale put on its most alluring charm to him that ran down before breakfast to thrid once more its pathways bordered with palms and fountains and statues ; the bay beside it purpled and twinkled in the light that made silver of the fishermen's sails ; far away rose \'esuvius with his nightcap of mist still hanging about his shoulders; all around rang and rattled Naples. The city was never so i'air before, nor could ever have been so hard to leave ; and at the last moment the laniUord of the Hotel Wash- ington must needs add a supreme pang by developing into a poet, and presenting me with a copy of a comedy he had written. Nobody who cares to travel with decency and comfort 1^24- On the Road from Scrrento to Castellammare Jtalian Jouriicvs can take the second-class cars on the road between Naples Between and Rome, though these are perfectly good everywhere ^o"^^ else in ItaJv. Tlie Papal citv makes her influence felt for , shabbiness and uncleanliness wherever she can, and her management seems to prevail on this railway. A glance into the second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class — which in themselves were bad — and we took our places almost contentedly. The road passed through the wildest country we had seen in Italy ; and presently a rain began to fall and made it drearier than ever. The land was much grown up witii thickets of hazel, and was here and there sparsely wooded with oaks. Under these, hogs were feeding upon the acorns, and the wet swineherds were steaming over fires built at their roots. In some places the forest was quite dense ; in other places it fell entirely away, and left the rocky hillsides bare, and solitary but for the sheep that nibbled at the scanty grass, and the shepherds that leaned upon their crooks and motionlessly stared at us as we rushed by. As we drew near Rome the scenery grew lonelier yet ; the land rose into desolate, sterile, stony heights, without a patch of verdure on their nakedness, and at last abruptly dropped into the gloomy expanse of the Campagna. The towns along the route had little to interest us in their looks, though at San Germano we caught a glimpse of the famous old convent of Monte-Cassino, perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of the rock on which it was built. Fancy now loves to climb that steep acclivity, and wander through the many-volumed library of the ancient Benedictine retreat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and certainly less expen- sive than actual ascent and acquaintance with the monastery would have been. Two Croatian priests, who shared our compartment of the railway carriage, first drew our notice to the place, and were enthusiastic 127 and Naples Italian ^ouincvs Between about it for many miles after it was out of silk.- i3 ffl %i^ 'S The Corso, Rome Stalian 5oiuncv5 ill this act were children, and the boys enjoyed it with a Roman good deal of giggling, as a very amusing feat. Some old Pearls and haggard women gave the scene all the dignity which it possessed ; but certain well-dressed ladies and gentle- men were undeniably awkward and absurd, and I was led to doubt if there were not an incompatibility between the abandon of simple faith and the care of good clothes. In all other parts of Italy one hears constant talk among travellers of the malaria at Rome. But in Rome itself the malaria is laughed at by the foreign residents, — who, nevertheless, go out of the city in midsummer. The Romans, to the number of a hundred thousand or so, remain there the whole year round, and I am bound to say I never saw a healthier, robuster-looking population. The cheeks of the French soldiers, too, whom we met at every turn, were as red as their trousers, and they seemed to flourish on the imputed unwholesomeness of the atmo- sphere. All at Rome are united in declaring that the fever exists at Naples, and that sometimes those who have taken it there come and die in Rome, in order to give the city a bad name ; and I think this very likely. Rome is certainly dirty, however, though there is a fountain in every squax'e, and you are never out of the sound of falling water. The Corso and some of the prin- cipal streets do not so much impress you with their filth as with their dulness ; but that part of the city where some of the most memorable relics of antiquity are to be found is unimaginably vile. The least said of the state of the archways of the Coliseum the soonest mended ; and I have already spoken of the Forum. The streets near the Theatre of Pompey are almost impassable, and the so- called House of Rienzi is a stable, fortified against approach by a fos.sc of excrement. A noisome smell seems to be esteemed the most appropriate offering to the memory of ancient Rome, and I am not sure that the moderns are 143 .■^ t a 1 i a H 3 11 r » c v s Roman mistaken in tliis. In the rascal streets in tlie nei,i^lib()ur- Pearls hood of the most august ruins, the people turn round to stare at the stranger as he passes them ; they are all dirty, and his decency must be no less a surprise to them than the neatness of the French soldiers amid all the filth is a j)uzzle to him. We wandered about a long time in such places one day, looking for the Tarpeian Rock, less for Tarpeia's sake than for the sake of Hawthorne's Miriam and Donatello and the Model. There are two Tarpeian rocks, between which the stranger takes his choice ; and we must have chosen the wrong one, for it seemed but a shallow gulf compared to that in our fancy. We were somewhat disappointed ; but then Niagara disap- points one ; and as for Mont Blanc It is worth while for every one who goes to Rome to visit the Church of St. Peter's ; but it is scarcely worth while for me to describe it, or for ever)- one to go up into the bronze globe on the top of the cupola. In fact, this is a great labour, and there is nothing to be seen from the crevices in the ball which cannot be far more comfortably seen from the roof of the church below. The companions of our ascent to the latter point were an English lady and gentleman, brother and sister, and both Catholics, as they at once told us. The lad}' and myself spoke for some time in the Tuscan tongue before we discovered that neither of us was Italian, after which we paid each other some handsome compliments uj)on our fluency and perfection of accent. The gentleman was a pleasant purple porpoise from the waters of Chili, whither he had wandered from the English coasts in early youth. He had two leading ideas : one concerned the Pope, to whom he had just been presented, and whom he viewed as the best and blandest of beings ; the other related to his boy, then in England, whom he called Jack Spratt, and considered the grandest and greatest of boys. With the 14.4 R I ■ >:. 1 %V '^ ''A 'V/ ^^^^ ^Sm \ y> ^ ..i'^ Mu- 1 CLtfuXlM. (vUxJl . (tlTYVU. . Italian Souvncvs Roman Pearls The Porta del Popolo, facing the Corso, Rome view from the roof of the church this gentleman did not much trouble himself. He believed Jack Spratt could ride up to the roof where we stood on his donkey. As to the great bronze globe which we were hurrying to enter, he seemed to regard it merely as a rival in I'otundity, and made not the slightest motion to follow us. I should be loth to vex the i-eader with any description of the scene before us and beneath us, even if I could faithfully portray it But I recollect, with a pleasure not to be left unrecorded, the sweetness of the great fountain j)laying in the square before the church, and the harmon}' in which the city grew in evei-y direction from it, like an emanation from its music till the last house sank away into the pathetic solitude of the Campagna, with nothing beyond but the snow-capped mountains lighting up the remotest distance. At the same moment I experienced a rapture in reflecting that I had underpaid three hackmen during my stay at Rome, and thus contributed to avenge mv race for ages of oppression. The vastness of St. Peter's itself is best felt in looking down upon the interior from the gallery that surrounds the li,') K Italian 5ouinc\?3 Roman inside of the dome, and in comparincf one's own littleness Pearls with tlie greatness of all the neighbouring mosaics. But as to the beauty of the temple, I could not find it without or within. In Rome one's fellow tourists are a constant source of gratification and surprise. I thought that American travel- lers were by no means the most absurd amongst those we saw, nor even the loudest in their approval of the Eternal City. A certain order of German greenness affords, perhaps, the pleasantest pasturage for the ruminating mind. For example, at the Villa Ludovisi there was besides numerous PLnglishry in detached bodies, a troop of Germans, chiefly young men, frugally pursuing the Sehenswiirdigkeiten in the social manner of their nation. They took their enjoyment very noisih', and wrangled together with furious amiability as they looked at Guercino's " Aurora." Then two of them parted from the rest, and went to a little summer-house in the gardens, while the others followed iis to the top of the Casino. There they caught sight of their friends in the arbour, and the spectacle appeared to overwhelm them. They bowed, they took oft' their hats, they waved their handkerchiefs. It was not enough ; one young fellow mounted on the balustrade of the roof at his neck's risk, lifted his hat on his cane and flourished it in greeting to the heart's-friends in the arbour, from whom he had parted two minutes before. In strange contrast to the producer of this enthusiasm, so pumped and so unmistakably mixed with beer, a fat and pallid Englishwoman sat in a chair upon the roof and coldly, coldly sketched the lovely landsca])e. And she and the blonde young English girl beside her pronounced a little dialogue together, which I give, because I saw thev meant it for the public : The Young Girl. — I wonder, you knoa, you don't draw- >ow St. Petuh's ! Italian ^oiuncvs Tlic Artist. — O ah, you knoa, I can draw-ow St. Petuh's Roman from so mennee powints. Pearls I am afraid that the worst form of American greenness aj)peai-s abroad in a desire to be perfectly up in critical appreciation of the arts, and to approach the great works in tlie spirit of the connoisseur. Tiie ambition is not altogether a bad one. A fellow countryman told me that he had not yet seen Raphael's " Transfiguration," because he wished to prepare his mind for understanding the original by first looking at all the copies he could find. The Basilica San Paolo fuori le Mura surpasses every- thing in splendour of marble and costly stone — porphyry, malachite, alabaster — and luxury of gilding that is to be seen in Rome. But I chieHy remember it because on the road that leads to it, tln-ough scenes as quiet and peaceful as if history had never known them, lies the Protestant graveyard in which Keats is buried. Quite by chance the driver mentioned it, pointing in the direction of the cemetery with his whip. We eagerly dismounted and repaired to the gate, where we were met by the son of the sexton, who spoke English through the beauteous line of a curved Hebrew nose. Perhaps a Christian could not be found in Rome to take charge of these heretic graves, though Christians can be got to do almost anything there for money. However, I do not think a Catholic would have kept the place in better order, or more intelli- gently received our reverent curiosity. It was the new burial-ground which we had entered, and which is a little to the right of the elder cemeteiy. It was very beautiful and tasteful in every way ; the names upon the stones were chiefly English and Scotch, with here and there an American's. But affection drew us only to the prostrate tablet inscribed with the words, •' Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor Cordium," and then we were ready to go to the grave of him for whom we all feel so deep a tenderness. The 147 Italian .^ouiiicvs Roman yrave ot" John Keats is one of few in the old biiiyin^- Pearls jriound, and lies almost in tlie shadow of the pyramid ot Caius Cestiiis ; and I could not help thinking of tlie wonder the Roman would iiave felt could he have known into what uimainable richness and beaut}^ his Greek faith had rij)ened in the heart of the poor poet, where it was mixed with so much pain. Doubtless, in his time, a prominent citizen like Cains C'estius w'as a leading member of the temple in his neighbourhood, and regularly attended sacrifice : it would have been but decent ; and yet I fancied that a man immersed like him in affairs might have learned with sin-prise the inner and more fragrant meaning of the symbols with the outside of which his life was satisfied ; and I was glad to reflect that in our day a like thing is impossible. The grave of our beloved poet is sunken to the level of the common earth, and is only marked by the quaintly lettered, simple stone bearing the famous epitaph. Wiiile at Rome I heard talk of another and grander monument which some members of the Keats family were to place over the dust of their great kinsman. But, for one, I hope this may never be done, even though the original stone should also be left there, as was intended. Let the world still keep unchanged his shrine, to which it can repair with at once pity and tenderness and respect. A rose-tree and some sweet-smelling bushes grew upon the grave, and the roses were in bloom. We asked leave to take one[of them ; but at last could only bring ourselves to gather some of the fallen petals. Our Hebrew guide was willing enough, and unconsciously set us a little example of wantonness : for while he listened to our explanation of the mystery which had puzzled him ever since he jhad learned English, namely, why the stone should say " tint on water," and not tnitteii, he kept plucking mechanically at one of the fragrant shrubs, pinching away the leaves, and rending the tender twig, U8 t "^VIvL Ca(vd'tr{. , kcTivL . Italian ^ciuncvs Roman Pearls tW4M'"'>^2. ?^V^ St. Peter's from the Campagna till, I'emembering the once sensitive dust from which it grew, one waited for the tortured tree to cry out to him with a voice of words and blood, '• Perche mi schi- anti r " One Sunday afternoon we went with some artistic- friends to visit the studio of the great Cierman painter, Overbeck ; and since I first read Uhland I have known no pleasure so illogical as I felt in looking at this painter's drawings. In the sensuous heart of objective Italy he treats tlie themes of mediaeval Catholicism with the most subjective feeling, and I thought I perceived in his work the enthusiasm which led many Protestant German painters and poets of the romantic school back into the twilight of the Romish faith, in the hope that they might thus realise to themselves soniething of the earnest- ness which animated the elder Christian artists. Walking from the painter's house, two of us parted with the rest on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and pursued our stroll through the gate of San 149 Italian ^ournojs Roman Lorenzo out upon the Campagna, wliich tempts and tempts Pearls |-{^g sojourner at Rome, until at last he must go and see — if it will give him the fever. And, alas ! there I caught the Roman fever — the longing that burns one who lias once been in Rome to go again — that will not be cured bv all the cool contemptuous things he may think or say of the Eternal City : that fills him w'ith memories of its fasci- nation, and makes it for ever desired. We walked far down the dusty road beyond the city walls, and then struck out from the highway across the wild meadows of the Camp.igna. They were weedv and desolate, seamed by shaggy grass-grown ditches, and deeply pitted with holes made in search for catacombs. There was here and there a farm-house amid the wide lonesomeness, but oftener a round, hollow, roofless tomb, from which the dust and memory of the dead had long been blown away, and through the top of which — fringed and overhung with grasses, and opening like a great eye — the evening sky looked mysteriously sad. One of the fields was full of grim, wide-horned cattle, and in another there were four or five buffaloes lying down and chewing their cuds,— holding their heads horizontally in the air, and with an air of gloomy wickedness which nothing could exceed in their cruel black eyes, glancing about in visible pursuit of some object to toss and gore. There were also many canebrakes, in which the wind made a mournful rustling after the sun had set in golden glitter on the roofs of the Roman churches and the transparent night had fallen upon the scene. In all our ramble we met not a soul, and I scarcely know what it is makes this walk upon the Campagna one of my vividest recollections of Rome, unless it be the opportunitv it gave me to weary myself upon that many-mcmoried • ground as freely as if it had been a woods-pasture in Ohio. Nature, where history was so august, was perfectly simple and motherly, and did so much to make me at home, that, 150 Italian 5ouvncv3 P nu ii w.ii' ; >j)i ^' •r-. '"-—^^r'Scsyi^TiT;; Roman Pearls The Aqueduct on the Campagna as the night thickened and we plunged here and there into ditches and climbed fences, and struggled, heavy- footed, back through the suburbs to the city gate, I felt as if half my boyhood had been passed upon the Campagna. Pasquino, like most other great people, is not very in- teresting upon close approach. There is no trace now in his aspect to show that he has ever been satirical ; but the humanity that the sculptor gave him is imperishable, though he has lost all character as a public censor. The torso is at first glance merely a shapeless mass of stone, but the life can never die out of that which has been shaped bj' art to the likeness of a man, and a second look restores the lump to full possession of form and expression. For this reason I lament that statues should ever be restored except by sympathy and imagination. When the Tiber, according to its frequent habit, rises and inundates the city, the Pantheon is one of the first places to be Hooded — the sacristan told us. '1 he water 151 Jtalian Souincvs Roman climbs above the altar-tops, sa])j)ing, in its recession, the Pearls cement of the fine marbles which incrust the columns, so that about their bases the })ieces have to be continually renewed. Nothing vexes you so much in the Pantheon as your consciousness of these and other repairs. Bad as ruin is, I think I would rather have the old temple ruinous in every part than restored as you find it. The sacristan felt the wrongs of the place keenly, and said, referring to the removal of the bronze roof, which took place some centuries ago, "They have robbed us of everything" (67 hanno levato ti/tto) ; as if he and the Pantheon were of one blood, and he had suffered personal hurt in its spoliation. What a sense of the wildness everywhere lurking about Rome we had given us by that group of peasants who had built a fire of brushwood almost within the portico of the Pantheon, and were cooking their supper at it, the light of the flames luridly painting their swarthy faces ! Poor little Xumero Cinque Via del Gainbero has seldom, I imagine, known so violent a sensation as that it experi- enced when, on the day of the Immaculate Conception, the Armenian Archbishop rolled up to the door in his red coach. The master of the house had always seemed to like us ; now he appeared with profound respect suffusing, as it were, his whole being, and announced, '•' Signore, it is Monsignore come to take you to the Sistine Chapel in his carriage," and drew himself up in a line, as much like a series of serving-men as possible, to let us pass out. There was a private carriage for the ladies near that of Monsignore, for he had already advertised us that the sex were not permitted to ride in the red coach. As thev appeared, however, he renewed his expressions of desola- tion at being deprived of their company, and assured them of his good-will with a multiplicity of smiles and nods, intermixed with shrugs of recurrence to his poignant regret. But ! In fine, it was forbidden ! 152 J' _J!.' The Piazza Column. Rome Italian ^oiuncvs Moiisififnore was in full costume, with his best ecclesias- Roman tieal clothes on, and with his great gold chain about his Pearls neck. The di'ess was richer than that of the western archbishoj)s ; and the long white beard of Monsignore made him look much more like a Scriptural monsignoi'e than these. He lacked, perhaps, the fine spiritual grace of his brother, the Archbishop at Venice, to whose letter of introduction we owed his acquaintance and untiring civilities ; but if a man cannot be plump and spiritual, he can be plump and pleasant, as Monsignore Avas to the last degree. He enlivened our ride with discourse about the Annenians at Venice, equally beloved of us ; and, arrived at the Sistine Chapel, he marshalled the ladies before him, and won them early entrance through the crowd of English and Americans crushing one another at the door. Then he laid hold upon the captain of the Swiss Guard, who was swift to provide them with the best places ; and in nowise did he seem one ot the uninfluential and insignificant priests that About describes the archbishops at Rome to be. According to this lively author, a Swiss guard was striking back the crowd on some occasion with the butt of his halberd, and smote a cardinal on the breast. He instantly dropped upon his knees, with '• Pardon, Eminenza ! I thought it was a monsignore ! " Even the chief of these handsome fellows had nothing but resjiect and obedience for our Archbishop. The gentlemen present were separated from the ladies, and in a very narrow space outside of the chapel men of every nation were penned up together. All talked — several priests as loudly as the rest. But the rudest among them w-ere certain Germans, who not only talked but stood upon a seat to see better, and were ordered down by one of the Swiss with a fierce " Gii), signori, giu ! " Other- wise the guai-d kept good order in the chapel, and were no doubt as useful and genuine as anything about the poor old Pope. What gorgeous fellows they were, and, as soldiers 1.55 Roman Pearls Staliau Journcvs how absurd I 'Vhv weaj)Oiis they bore were as obsolete as the In(]iiisitioii. It was aimisiiig to ])ass one of these plav- soldiers on . beautiful, superb, with his hal- berd on his shoulder — and then eome to a real warrior outside, a little, ugly, red-legged French sentinel, with his Minie on his arm. Except for the singing of the Pope's clioir — which was angelically sweet, and heavenly far above all praise — the re- ligious ceremonies affected me as tedious and empty. Each of the cardinals, as he entered the chapel, blew a sonorous nose ; and was received standing by his brother ])relates — a grotes- que company of old-womanish old men in gaudy gowns. From where I stood I saw the Pope's face only in profile ; it was gentle and benign enough, but not great in ex- pression, and the smile on it almost degenerated into a .simper. His Holiness had a cold ; and his i-ecitative, though full, was not smooth. He was all prete when, in the midst of the service, lie hawked, held his handkerchief up before his face, a little way off, and ruthlessly sjiat in it ! ^J%, ^:^^0^^ The Castle of S. Angelo from the Bridge, Rome 1.0() The Cathedral, Grosseto Forza Maggiore IMACjINK that (Jrosseto is not a town much known to travel, for it is absent from all the guide-books I have looked at. How- ever, it is chief in the Maremma where sweet Pia de' Tolommei languished and perished of the poisonous air and her love's cruelt}', and where, so many mute centuries since, the Etrurian cities flourished and fell. Further, one may sny that Grosseto is on the diligence road from Civita Vecchia to Leghorn, and that in the very heart of the ])lace there is a lovely })alm- tree, rare, if not sole, in that latitude. This palm stands in a well-sheltered, dull little court, out of everything's way, and turns tenderly towards the wall that shields it on the north. It has no other company but a beautiful young girl, who leans out of a window high over its head, and I have no doubt talks with it. At the moment we discovered the friends, the maiden Avas looking j)athetically to the north- ward, while the palm softly stirred and opened its plumes, ]'>7 3 1 a 1 i a n 3 o u v n c v s Forza as a bird does wlien liis soui;- is finished ; and there is very Maggiore Jjttle (jiiestioii but, it had just been siiip;xrent doubt of the propriety of their j)ublic apj)earance in that state. There was also a Museum at Grosseto, and I wondered Avhit was in it ? 158 -■'^/ ?.^';^i "ft tP.^^ . m , 'j>0m The Palm Tree, Grosseto Italian Joiuncvs The wall of the town was perfect yet, though the moat Forza at its feet had been so long dry tliat it was only to be Maggiore known from the adjacent fields by the richness of its soil. The top of the wall had been levelled, and planted with shade, and turned into a peaceful promenade, like most of such mediaeval defences in Italy ; though I am not sui'C that a little militaiy life did not still linger about a bastion here and there. From somewhere, when we strolled out early in the morning, to walk upon the wall, there came to us a throb of drums ; but I beHeve that tlie only armed men we saw, beside the officers in the piazza, Avere the numerous sportsmen resorting at that season to Grosseto for the excellent shooting in the marshes. All the way to Florence we continued to meet them and their dogs ; and our inn at Grosseto overflowed with abundance of game. On the kitchen floor and in the court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, and beccafichi, at which a troop of scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from which the great, noble, beautiful, wliite-aproned cook for ever fried, stewed, broiled, and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these generous birds during our sojourn, and found, when we at- tempted to vai'y our bill of fare, that the very genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas beyond them. He was part of the repairs and improvements whicli that hostelry had recently undergone, and had evidently come in with the fom-pronged forks, the chromo-lithographs of Victor Emanuel, Garibaldi, Solferino, and Magenta in the large dining-room, and the iron stove in the small one. He had nothing, evidently, in common with the brick floors of the bed-chambers, and the ancient rooms with great fire-places. He strove to give a Florentine polish to the rusticity of life in the Maremma ; and we felt sure that he must know what beefsteak was. When we or- dered it, he assumed to be perfectly conversant with it, started to bring it, paused, turned, and, with a great sacri- fice of personal dignity, demanded, " Bifsteca d'l manzo, o 161 L Italian 3ouvncv;s Forza hi /sicca di molonc ? " — " Beefsteak of beef, or beefsteak of Maggiore „„,tton ? " Of Grosseto proper, this is all 1 remember, if I except a boy whom I heard singing after dark in the streets, — " Camicia rossa, Camicia ardente ! " The cause of our sojourn there was an instance oi forza maggiore, as the agent of the diligence company defiantly expressed it, in refusing us damages for our overturn into the river. It was in the early part of the winter when we started from Rome for \"enice, and we were travelling northward by diligence because the railways were still more or less interrupted by the storms and floods pre- dicted of Matthieu de la Drome, the only reliable prophet France has produced since Voltaire ; and if our accident was caused b}' an overruling Providence, the company, according to the very law of its existence, was not respon- sible. To be sure, we did not see how an overruling Providence was to blame for loading upon our diligence the baggage of two diligences, or for the clumsiness of our driver; but, on the other hand, it is certain that the company did not make it rain or cause the inundation. And, in fine, although we could not have travelled by railway, we were masters to have taken the steamer instead of the diligence at Civita \'ecchia. The choice of either of these means of travel had presented itself in vivid hues of disadvantage all the way from Rome to the Papal port, where the French steamer for Leghorn la}' dancing a hornpipe upon the short, chopping waves, while we approached by railway. We had leism'e enough to make the decision, if that was all we wanted. Our engine-driver had derived his ideas of progress from an Encyclical Letter, and the train gave every promise of arriving at Civita Vecchia five hundred years behind time. But such was the deso- lating and depressing influence of the weatlier and the 16"2 Italian ^ouincvs Forza Maggiore The Harbour of Alexander, Civita Vecchia landscajje, that we reached Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had left Rome. On the one hand, there had been the land, soaked and sodden ; wild, shagged Avith scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable dejection, with their legs wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like satyrs that had been converted, and were trying to do right ; turning- dim faces to us, they warned us with every mute ap- peal against the land, as a waste of mud from one end of Italy to the other. On the other hand, there was the sea-wind raving about our train and threatening to blow it over, and whenever we drew near the coast, heaping the waves ujion the beach in thundering menace. We weakly and fearfully remembered our former journeys by diligence over broken railway routes ; we recalled our cruel voyage from Genoa to Naples by sea. Still, we might have lingered and hesitated, and perhaps returned to Rome at last, but for the dramatic resolution of the old man Avho 163 Italian 3 o ii v ii c v s Forza solicited passengers for the diligence, and carried their Maggiore passports for a final Papal rim at the police-office. By the account he gave of himself, he was one of the best men in the world, and unique in those pai'ts for honesty ; and he besought us, out of that affectionate intei'est with which our very aspect had inspired him, not to go by steamer, but to go by diligence, which in nineteen hours would land us safe, and absolutely refreshed by the journey, at the railway station in Follonica. And now, once, would we go by diligence ? twice, would we go ? three times, would we go ? " Signore," said our benefactor, angrily, "I lose my time with you " ; and ran away, to be called back in the course of destiny, as he knew well enough, and besought to take us as a special favour. From the passports he learned that there was official dignity among us, and addressed the unworthy beju'er of public honours as Eccellenza and at })arting bequeathed his advantage to the conductor, commending us all in set terms to his courtesy. He hovered caressingly about us as long as we remained, straining politeness to do us some last little service ; and when the diligence rolled away, he did all that one man could to give us a round of applause. At the moment of departure, we were surprised to have enter the diligence a fellow countryman, whom we had first seen on the road from Naples to Rome. He had since crossed our path with that iteration of travel which brings you again and again in view of the same trunks and the same tourists in the round of Europe, and finally at C'ivita Vecchia he had turned up, a silent spectator of our scene with the agent of the diligence, and had gone off appa- rently a confirmed j)assenger by steamer. Perhaps a nearer view of the sailor's hornpipe, as danced by that vessel in the harbour, shook his resolution. At any rate, here he was again, and with his ticket for Follonica— a bright- eyed, rosy-cheeked man, and we will say a citizen of d. i{\jL tt OAJwruA. . LlwIxL V UxKxsk. Italian Joimic^s Portland, though he was not. For the first time in our Forza long acquaintance with one another's faces, we entered Maggiore into conversation, and wondered whether we should find brigands or anything to eat on the road, without expecta- tion of finding eithei". In respect of robbers, Ave were not disappointed ; but shortly after nightfall we stopped at a lonely jwst-liouse to change horses, and found that the landlord had so far counted on our appearance as to have, just roasted and fragrantly fuming, a leg of lamb, with certain small fried fish and a sufficiency of bread. It was a very lonely place as I say ; the sky was gloomy overhead ; and the wildness of the landscape all about us gave our provision quite a gamey flavour ; and brigands could have added nothing to our sense of solitude. The road creeps along the coast for some distance from Civita Vecchia, within hearing of the sea, and nowhere widely forsakes it, I believe, all the way to FoUonica. The country is hilly, and we stopped every two hours to change horses; at which times we looked out, and seeing that it was a grey and windy night, though not rainy, exulted that we had not taken the steamer. With very little change, the wisdom of our decision in favour of the dili- gence formed the burden of our talk during the whole night ; and to think of eluded sea-sickness requited us in the agony of our break-neck efforts to catch a little sleep, as, mounted upon our nightmares, we rode steeple-chases up and down the highways and by-ways of horror. Any- thing that absolutely awakened us was accounted a blessing; and I remember few things in life with so keen a pleasure as the summons that came to us to descend from our places and cross a river in one boat, while the two diligences of our train followed in another. Here we had time to see our fellow passengers, as the pulsating light of their cigars illumined their faces, and to discover among them that Italian, common to all large companies, who speaks Englisli, and is very eager to practise it with you ; who is such a 165 ."Italian Soiiincvs Forza benefnctor if you do not know liis own language, and such Maggiore ^ bore if you do. After this, being landed, it was rapture to stroll up and down the good road, and feel it hard and real under our feet, and not an abysmal impalpability, while all the grim shapes of our dreams fled to the spectral line of small boats sustaining the ferry-barge, and swaying slowly from it as the drowned men at their keels tugged them against the tide. "rrnf«,cj,^-| &^ The Sea Gate, Civita Vecehia 173 ■6' ^ :'-^f, r: The Flower Market, Padua At Padua HOSE of my readers who have frequented the garden of Doctor Rappaccini no doubt recall with perfect distinctness the quaint old city of Padua, They remember its miles and miles of dim arcade over-roofing the sidewalks everywhere, affording excellent opportunity for the flirtation of lovers by day and the vengeance of rivals by night. They have seen the now vacant streets thx-onged with maskers, and the \"enetian Podesta going in gorgeous state to and from the vast Palazzo della Ragione. They have witnessed ringing tournaments in those sad, empty squares, and races in the Prato della Valle, and many other wonders of different epochs, and their pleasure makes me half-sorry that I should have lived for several years within an hour by rail from Padua, and should know little or nothing of these great sights from actual observation. I take shame to myself for having visited Padua so often and so familiarly as I used to tlo ; for 17-i Stalian Jounicvs having been bored and hungry there ; for having had At Padua toothache there, upon one occasion ; for having rejoiced more in a cup of coffee at Pedrocchi's than in the whole history of Padua ; for having slept repeatedly in the bad- bedded hotels of Padua and never once dreamt of Portia ; for having been more taken by the salli mortali* of a waiter who summed up my account at a Paduan i-estaurant than by all the strategies with which the city has been many times captured and recaptured. Had I viewed Padua only over the wall of Doctor Rappaccini's garden, how different my impressions of the city would now be ! This is one of the drawbacks of actual knowledge. " Ah ! how can you write about Spain when once you have been there t " asked Heine of Theophile Gautier setting out on a journey thither. Nevertheless, it seems to me that I remember some- thing about Padua with a sort of romantic pleasure. There was a certain charm in sauntering along the top of the old wall of the city, and looking doAvn upon the plumy crests of the Indian corn that flourished up so mightily from the dry bed of the moat. At such times I figured to myself the many sieges that the wall had known, with the fierce assault by day, the secret attack by night, the swarming foe upon the plains below, the bristling arms of the besieged upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the ladders planted against the defences and staggering headlong into the moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters, but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from * Salti mortali are those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which Italian waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the product of two and two. 175 3tali;in Soiuncvs At Padua imiseunis of armour and from cabinets of anticjuitics ; but they were very vivid for all that. I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to divest myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay awaiting admission on the outside. For an instant they masked again the Venetian troops that, in the War of the League of Cambray, entered the city in the hay-carts, shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and, uniting with the citizens, cut the Cierman garrison to pieces. But it was a thing long ])ast. The (Jerman garrison was here again ; and the heirs of the landsknechts went clanking through the gate to the parade-ground, with that fierce clamour of their kettle-drums which is so much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of fifes. Once more now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust, for ever ; but when I saw them, there seemed little hope of their going. They had a great Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up the altars of their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city. I please myself with thinking that, if 1 walked on such a spring day as this in the arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch glimpses, through the gate-ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom, and of fountains that tinkle there for ever. If it were autumn, and I were in the great market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I should hear the baskets of amber-hued and hone3ed grapes humming Avitli the murmur of multitudinous bees, and making a music as if the wine itself were already singing in their gentle hearts. It is a great field of succulent verdure, that wide old market-place ; and fancy loves to browse about among its guy stores of fruits and vegetables, brought thither by the world-old peasant- women who have been bringing fruits and vegetables to tlie Paduan market for so many centuries. They sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit and doze, and wake up with a drowsy " Cuiiiaiiddld ?" as you linger 17() [Wm i'^ \^-'^ Tf " > if r -j' .\\Ai' ' !W Mil »^ M 'l Corner of the Salone, Padua, decorated with Coats of Arms j&aiSssiL. Italian 5ournc^s to look at their grapes. They have each a pair of scales — At Padua the emblem of Injustice — and will weigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if you like. Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them so full of wrinkles that tliere is not room for another line. Doubt- less tliese old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell tlie whole history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription. Among their primal records there must be some account of the Roman city, as each little contadinella remembered it on market-days ; and one might read of the terror of Attila's sack, a little later, with the peasant-maid's personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper who ate up the grapes in her basket, and kissed her hard, round red cheeks — for in that time she Avas a blooming girl — and paid nothing for either privilege. What wild and confused reminiscences on the wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the fierce Republican times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of the Venetian rule I And is it not sad to think of systems and peoples all passing away, and these ancient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in front of the Palazzo della Ragione ? What a long mortality ! The youngest of their number is a thousand years older than the palace, which was begun in the twelfth century, and which is much the same now as it was when first com- pleted. I know that, if I entered it, I should be sure of finding the great hall of the palace — the greatest hall in the world — dim and dull and dusty and delightful, with nothing in it except at one end Donatello's colossal marble- headed wooden horse of Troy, stared at from the other end by the two dog-faced Egyptian women in basalt placed thei'e by Belzoni. Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should have the Court of the University all to myself, and might study unmolested the blazons of the noble youth who have at- tended the school in different centuries ever since 1200, 179 Jtalian Journcvjs At Padua ;iiul have left their escutcheons on the walls to commemo- rate them. At the foot of the stairway ascending to the schools from the court is the statue of the learned lady who was once a professor in the University, and who, if her likeness belie not her looks, must have given a great charm to student life in other times. At present there are no lady professors at Padua any more than at Harvard ; and during late years the schools have suffered greatly from the interference of the Austrian government, which frequently closed them for months, on account of political demonstrations among the students. But now there is an end of this and many other stupid oppressions ; and the time-honoured University will doubtless regain its ancient importance. Even in ISG^ it had nearly fifteen hundred students, and one met them everywhere under the arcades, and could not well mistake them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy which these studious young men loved to assume. They were to be seen a good deal on the promenades outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are driven in their carriages in the afternoon, and where one sees the blood-horses and fine equipages for which Padua is famous. There used once to be races in the Prato della Valle, after the Italian notion of horse-races ; but these are now discontinued, and there is nothing to be found there but the statues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen, posted in a circle around the old race-course. If you strolled thither about dusk on such a day as this, you might see the statues unbend a little from their stony rigidity, and in the failing light nod to each other very pleasantly through the trees. And if you stayed in Padua over night, what could be better to-morrow morning than a stroll through the great Botanical Garden ? — the oldest botanical garden in the world ; the garden which first received in Europe the strange and splendid growths of our hemisphere ; the garden where Doctor llapjKiccini doubtless found the germ of his mortal plant. 180 ym-^ C9 x^cr^ 1 ?=«^'^'*'-ii"'^"''*WW!^i'^f';»i .» I I IM^:^^ •'j'j t 'J'/*' w'MPc v^*** >^. iS. -i, .r\v*'i' A^'iS V'-..y '^j'fPf • "^i ( (ccA'^vuKA .OaAaii Italian Journcvs The day that we first visited the city was very rainy. At Padua and we spent most of the time in viewing the churches. Their architecture forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The superb domes of St. Anthony's emulate those of St. Mark's; and the porticoes of other Paduan churches rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards that fascinate with their mystery and beauty. It was the wish to see the atti'ibutive Giottos in the Chapter which drew us first to St. Anthony's, and we saw them with the satisfaction naturally attending the con- templation of frescoes discovered only since 1858, after having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many centuries ; but we could not believe that Giotto's fame was destined to gain much by their rescue from oblivion. They are in nowise to be compared with this master's frescoes in the Chapel of the Annunziata, which, indeed, is in every way a place of wonder and delight. You reach it by passing through a garden lane bordered with roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with clinking keys, and lets you into the chapel, where there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as a sacred place should be ; a blessed benching goes round the walls, and you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the frescoes. The gardener leaves vou alone to the solitude and the silence, in which the talk of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their contemporaries and yours are cordial in their gay companionship: through the half-open door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine that they saw lie there ; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the garden trees ; it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hundred years ago that breathes through all the lovely garden grounds. But in the midst of this pleasant connnunion with the past, you have a lurking pain ; for you have hired your 181 Italian ^ourncvs At Padua brougham by the hour; and you presently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account. We had cliosen our (h'iver from among many other drivers of broughams in the vicinity of Pedrocchi's, because he had such an honest look, and was not likely, we thought, to deal unfairly with us. " But first," said the signor who had selected him, " how much is your brougham an hour ? " So and so. " Show me the tariff of fares." "There is no tariff." "There is. Show it to me." "It is lost, signor." "I think not. It is here in this pocket. Get it out." The tariff appears, and with it the fact that he had demanded just what the boatman of the ballad received in gift — thrice his fee. The driver mounted his seat, and served us so faithfully that day in Padua that we took him the next day for Arqua. At the end, when he had received his due, and a handsome mancia besides, he was still unsatisfied, and referred to the tariff in proof that he had been underpaid. On that confronted and defeated, he thanked us very cordially, gave us the number of his brougham, and begged us to ask for him when we came next to Padua and needed a carriage. From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us to the Church of Santa Giustina, where is a very famous and noble picture by Romanino. But as this writing has nothing in the world to do with art, I here dismiss that subject, and with a gross and idle delight follow the sacristan down under the church to the prison of Santa Giustina. Of all the faculties of the mind there is none so little fatiguing to exercise as mere wonder ; and, for m}- own sake, I try always to wonder at things without the least 182 An Arcaded Street, Padua Italian ^ourucvs critical reservation. I therefore, in the sense of deglii- At Padua tition, bolted this prison at once, though subsequent experiences led me to look with grave indigestion upon the whole idea of prisons, their authenticity, and even their existence. As far as mere dimensions are concerned, the prison of Santa Giustina was not a hard one to swallow, being only three feet wide by about ten feet in length. In this- limited space, Santa Giustina passed five years of the reign of Nero, and was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining, to suffer a blessed martyrdom. I am not sure now whether the sacristan said she was dashed to- death on the stones, or cut to pieces with knives ; but wiiatever the form of martyrdom, an iron ring in the ceiling was employed in it, as I know from seeing the rintr — a curiously well-preserved piece of ironmongery. Within the narrow prison of the saint, and just under the grating, through which the sacristan thrust his candle to illuminate it, was a mountain of candle-drippings — a monument to the fact that faith still largely exists in this doubting world. My own credulity, not only with regard to this prison, but also touching the coffin ot St. Luke, which I saw in the church, had so wrought upon the esteem of the sacristan, that he now took me to a well, into which, he said, had been cast the bones of three thousand Christian martyrs. He lowered a lantern into the well, and assured me that, if 1 looked through a certain screenwork there, I could see the bones. On experiment I could not see the bones, but this circum- stance did not cause me to doubt their presence, par- ticularly as I did see upon the screen a great number of coins offered for the repose of the martyrs' souls. 1 threw down some soldi, and thus enthralled the sacristan. If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the driver must take him to those of Ecelino, at present the property of a private gentleman near by. As I had just bought a 18.5 Italian ^ourncvs At Padua history of Kcelino, at a great bargain, from a .second-liaiul bookstall, and had a lively interest in all the enormities of that nobleman, I sped the driver instantly to the villa of the Signor V . It depends here altogether upon the freshness or mustiness of the reader's historical reading whether he cares to be reminded more particularly who Ecelino was. He flourished balefully in the early half of the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and IJrescia, and was defeated and hurt to death in an attempt to possess himself of Milan. He was in every respect a remarkable man for that time — fearless, abstemious, con- tinent, avaricious, hardy, and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He survived and suppressed innumerable con- spiracies, escaping even the thrust of the assassin whom the fame of his enormous wickedness had caused the Old Man of the Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua he was more incredibly severe and bloody in his rule than as lord of the other cities, for the Paduans had been latest free, and conspired the most frequently against liim. He extirpated whole families on suspicion that a single member had been concerned in a meditated revolt. Little children and helpless women suffered hideous muti- lation and shame at his hands. Six prisons in Padua were constantly filled by his arrests. The whole country- was traversed by witnesses of his cruelties — men and women deprived of an arm or leg, and begging fi'om door to door. He had long been excommunicated ; at last the Church proclaimed a crusade against him, and his lieutenant and nephew — more demoniacal, if possible, than himself — was driven out of Padua while lie was operating against Mantua. Ecelino retired to ^^erona, and maintained a struggle against the crusade ibr nearly two years longer, with a courage which never failed him. Wounded and taken prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious army gathered about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon him: and 18() Jtalian Jouincvs one fiirious peasant, whose brother's feet had been cut oft" At Padua by Ecehno's command, dealt the helpless monster four blows upon the head with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of these wounds alone ; but by others it is related that his death was a kind of suicide, inasmuch as he himself put the case past surgery by tearing off" the bandages from his hurts, and refusing all medicines. Entering at the enchanted portal of the \ ilia P we found ourselves in a realm of wonder. It was our misfortune not to see the magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monu- mental and mortuary eff"ect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety of all ages concerning life and death ; we began with Confucius, and w'e ended with Benjamino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality were not sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor P had collected into earthen amphorce the ashes of the most famous men of ancient and modern times, and arranged them so that a sense of their number and variety should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was conspicuously labelled with the name its illustrious dust had borne in life ; and if one escaped with comparative cheerfulness from the thought that Seneca had died, there were in the very next pot the cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense of his mortality. We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of these objects broken by the custodian, who approached to ask if Ave wished to see the prisons of Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the rain out of our sepulchral shelter. KS7 3 1 n I i a II 3 o u v ncvs At Padua On the River, Padua Between the vestibule and the towers of the tyrant lay tliat garden already mentioned, and our guide led us through ranks of" weeping statuary, and rainy bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we reached the door of his cottage. While he entered to fetch the key to the j)risons, we noted that the towers were freshly painted and in perfect repair; and indeed the custodian said frankly enough, on reappearing, that they were merely built over the prisons on the site of the original towers. The storied stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps through the grounds, and now, swollen by the rainfall, it roared, a yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The towers rise from masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what must be, in spite of Signer P — — , a delightful Italian garden in sunny weather. The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and this inequality gives an additional picturesque- ness to the place. Hut as we Avere come in search of horrors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and hastened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. ]88 Italian Jouvncvs The custodian, lighting a candle (which ought, we felt, to At Padua have been a torch), went before. We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not uncom- fortable, and the guide conceded that they had undergone some repairs since Ecelino's time. But all the horrors for which we had come were there in perfect grisliness, and labelled by the ingenious Signor P with Latin in- scriptions. In the first cell was a shrine of the Virgin, set in the wall. Beneath this, while the wretched prisoner knelt in jn-ayer, a trap-door opened, and jjrecipitated him upon the points of knives, from which his body fell into the Bacchi- glione below. In the next cell, held by some rusty iron rings to the wall, was a skeleton, hanging by the wrists. "This," said the guide, "was another punishment of which Ecelino was very fond." A di'eadful doubt seized my mind. " Was this skeleton found here } " I demanded. Without faltering an instant, without so much as winking an eye, the custodian replied, " Appu?itu." It was a great relief and restored me to confidence in the establishment. I am at a loss to explain how my faith should have been confirmed afterwards by coming upon a guillotine — an awful instrument in the likeness of a straw- chopper, with a decapitated wooden figure vnider its blade — which the custodian confessed to be a modern improve- ment placed there by Signor P . Yet my credulity was so strengthened by his candoui', that I accepted without hesitation the torture of the water-drop when we came to it. The water-jar was as «ell preserved as if placed there but yesterday, and the skeleton beneath it — found as we saw it — was entire and perfect. In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton — found as we saw it — with its neck in the clutch of the garrote, which was one of Ecelino's more merciful punishments ; while in still another cell the ferocity of the tyrant appeared in the ISf) Italian 3ouvnc\:s At Padua |)t.'iialty iiiHictcd upon the wretch whose skeleton had been hanging for ages — as we saw it — head downwards from the ceihng. IJeyond these, in a yet darker and (h'earicr diin<>-eon stood a lieavy oblong wooden box, with two ajiertures near tlie toj), peering through which we found that we were looking into the eyek-ss sockets of a skull. Within this box EceHno had immured the victim we beheld there, and left him to perish in view of the platters of food and goblets of drink placed just beyond the reach of his hands. The food we saw was of course not the original food. At last we came to the crowning horror of Villa P ^ the supreme excess of Ecelino's cruelty. The guide entered the cell before us, and, as we gained the threshold, threw the light of his taper vividly upon a block that stood in the middle of the flooi*. Fixed to the block by an immense s])ike driven through from the back was the little slender hand of a woman, which lay there just as it had been struck from the living arm, and which, after the lapse of so many centuries, was still as ])erfectly preserved as if it had been embalmed. The sight had a most cruel fascination ; and while one of the horror-seekers stood helplessly conjuring to his vision that scene of unknown dread — the shrinking, shrieking woman dragged to the block ; the wild, shrilly horrible screech following the blow that drove in the spike ; the merciful swoon after the mutilation — his com- ])anion, with a sudden pallor, demanded to be taken instantly away. In their swift withdrawal, they only glanced at a few detached instruments of torture — all original Ecelinos, but intended for the infliction of minor and comparatively unimportant torments — and then they passed from that place of fear. In the evening we sat talking at the Cafe Pedrocchi with an abbate, an acquaintance of ours, who was a 1 90 Italian Jouincvs At Padua 4? ?s^;' Pif^w ^niti«+*y'^i?^ The Market. Padua Professor in the University of Padua. Pedrocchi's is the great cafe of Padua, a granite edifice of Egyptian aichitecture, which is the mausoleum of the proprietor's fortune. The pecuniary skeleton at the feast, however, does not much trouble the guests. They begin early in the evening to gather into the elegant saloons of the cafe — somewhat too large for so small a city as Padua — and they sit there late in the night over their cheerful cups and their ices, with their newspapei's and their talk. Not so many ladies are to be seen as at the cafe in Venice, for it is only in the greater cities that they go much to these public places. There are few students at Pedrocchi's, for they frequent the cheaper cafe ; but you maj' nearly always find there some Professor of the University, and on tlie evening of which I speak there were two present besides 191 Jtalian ^ouincvg At Padua our abbatc. Our friend's great j)assion was the ]".ii<;lish language, which he understood too well to venture to sj)eak a great deal. He had been translating from that tongue into Italian certain American poems, and our talk was of these at first. At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the gentle abbate of our day's adventures, and eagerly related that of the Ecelino ])risons. To have seen them was the most terrific jileasure of our lives. "Eh ! " said our friend, " I believe vou." "We mean those under the Villa P ." " Exactly." There was a tone of politely suppressed amusement in the abbate's voice ; and after a moment's j)ause, in which we felt our awful experience slipping and sliding away from us, we ventured to say, "You don't mean that those ■are not the veritable Ecelino ])risons .' ' " Certainly they are nothing of the kind. The Ecelino prisons Avere destroyed when the Crusaders took Padua, with the exception of the tower, which the Venetian Republic converted into an observatory." " But at least these prisons are on the site of Ecelino's ■castle ? ' ' " Nothing of the sort. His castle in that case would have been outside of the old city walls." " And those tortures and the prisons ai'e all" " Things got up for show. No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P cannot conceive. But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and what he can do to realise theiu he has done in his prisons." " But the custodian — how could he lie so ?" Our friend shrugged his shoulders. " Eh ! easily. And perhaj)s he even believed what he said." The world began to assume an as])ect of bewildering ungenuineness, and there seemed to be a treacherous Jtalian 5oiirncvs quality of fiction in the ground under our feet. Even the At Padua play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale where we went to pass the rest of the evening appeared hollow and improbable. We thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience and goodness ; and as for the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the rich profligate, we doubted if she were any better than she should be. 193 Arqua : Petrarch's Town A Pilgrimage to Petrarch's House at Arqua |E said, dui'ing summei* days at Venice, Avhen every campo was a furnace seven times heated, and every canal Avas filled Avith ,, boilinff bathers, " As soon as it rains we i^^ will go to Arqua." Remembering the ardours of an April sun on the long level roads of plain, we could not think of them in August without a sense of dust clogging every ])ore, and eyes that shrank from the vision of their blinding whiteness. So we stayed in Venice, waiting for rain, until the summer had almost lapsed into autumn ; and as the weather cooled before any rain reached us, we took the moisture on the mainland for granted, and set out under a cloudy and windy sky. We had to go to Padua by railway, and take carriage thence to Ai-qua upon the road to Ferrara. I believe no rule of human experience was violated when it began to If)!- Italian ^ouincvs rain directly after we reached Padua^ and continued to A Pil- rain violently the whole day. We gave up this day grimage entirely to the rain, and did not leave Padua until the r 11 • • , 1 .1 . trarch's lollowing moi-ning, when we count that our pilgrnnage House to Petrarch's house actually began. The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it was already too late in the season for the summer to recover herself with the elastic brilliancy that follows the rain of July or early August ; and there was I know not what vague sentiment of autunm in the weather. There wa& not yet enough of it to stir the " Tears from the depth of some divine despair ; " but in here and there a faded leaf, in the purple of the ripening grapes, and in the tawny grass of the pastures, there was autumn enough to touch our spirits, and while it hardly affected the tone of the landscape, to lay upon us the gentle and pensive spell of its presence. Of all the days in the year I would have chosen this to go pilgrim to the house of Petrarch. The Euganean hills, on one of which the poets house is built, are those mellow heights which you see when you look south-west across the lagoon at Venice. In misty weather they are blue, and in clear weather silver, and the October sunset loves them. They rise in tender azure before you as you issue from the southern gate of Padua, and grow in loveliness as you grow nearer to them from the rich plain that washes their feet with endless harvests. Oh beauty that will not let itself be told ! Could I not take warning from another, and refrain from this fruitless effort of description } A friend in Padua had lent me Disraeli's " Venetia," because a passage of the story occurs in Petrarch's house at Arqua, and we carried the volumes with us on our pilgrimage. I would here quote the des- cription of the village, the house, and the hills from this work, as foultlessly true, and as affording no just idea of 195 3ta[ian 3oiivncv;s A Pil- cither ; but nothing of it has remained in my mind except gnmage ti^g geological fact that the hills are a volcanic range. To tell the truth, the landscape, as we rode alonj;, continually trarch s ' f-<> . House ''*' "^y mind off the book, and I could not give that at- tention either to the elegant language of its descriptions, or the adventures of its well-born chai-acters, which they deserved. I was even more interested in the disreputable- looking person who mounted the box beside our driver as soon as we got out of the city gate, and who invariably commits this infringement upon your rights in Italy, no matter how strictly and cunningly you frame your contract that no one else is to occupy any part of the carriage but yourself. He got down, in this instance, just before we reached the little town at which our driver stopped, and asked us if we wished to drink a glass of the wine of the country. We did not, but his own thirst seemed to answer equally well, and he slaked it cheerfully at our cost. The fields did not present the busy appearance which had delighted us on the same road in the spring, but they had that autumnal charm already mentioned. Many of the vine-leaves were sere ; the red grapes were already purple, and the white grapes pearly ripe, and they formed a gorgeous necklace for the trees, around which they clung in opulent festoons. Then, dearer to our American hearts than this southern splendoui', were the russet fields of Indian corn, and, scattered among the shrunken stalks, great nuggets of the " harmless gold " of pumpkins. At Battaglia (the village just beyond which vou turn off" to go to Arqua) there was a fair, on the blessed occasion of some saint's day, and there were many booths full of fruits, agricultural imj)lements, toys, clothes, wooden ware, and the like. There was a great crowd and a noise, but, according to the mysterious Italian custom, nobody seemed to be buying or selling. I am in the belief that a small purchase of grapes we made here on our i*eturn was the great transaction of the day, unless, indeed, the neat 196 Jtalian 5ouincv;s operation in alms achieved at our expense by a mendicant A Pil- villager may be classed commercially. gnmage When we turned off from the Rovigo road at Batta^lia ° ^" trarch's we were only three miles from Arqua. House Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of the hill on which the village was stretched asleep in the tender sunshine, there was on either side of the road a stream of living water. There was no other barrier than this between the road and the fields (unless the vines swinging from tree to tree formed a barrier), and, as if in graceful excuse for the interposition of even these slender streams. Nature had lavished such growth of wild flowers and wild berries on the banks that it was like a garden avenue, thi'ough the fragrance and beauty of which we rolled, delighted to silence, almost to sadness. When we began to climb the hill to Arqua, and the driver stopped to breathe his horse, I got out and finished the easy ascent on foot. The great marvel to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on which, turning back, 1 feasted my vision, should be there yet, and always. It had the rare and melanclioly beauty of evanescence, and I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road from his house just above } I figured him coming to meet me with his book in his hand, in his reverend poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that curious kind of bandaging which he seems to have been fond of — looking, in a word, for all the world like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures. Drawing nearer, I discerned the apjoarition to be a robeless, laurelless lout, who belonged at the village inn- Yet this lout, though not Petrai-ch, had merits. His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from his knees down, were richly tanned, had the tone of the richest bronze ; he wore a mountain cap with a long tasselled fall to the back of it ; his face was comely and his eye beautiful ; and he was so nobly ignorant of everything that a colt or young bullock 197 Italian Soiiiucvs A Pil- grimage to Pe- trarch's House could not have been better company. He merely offered to <^uide us to Petrarch's house, and was silent, except when spoken to, from that instant. I am here tempted to say : Arqua is in tlie figure of" a man stretched upon the hill slope. The head, which is Petrarch's house, rests upon the summit. The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in one direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter. It is a very lank and shamb- ling figure, without elegance or much proportion, and the attitude is the last wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout u}) the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in the general likeness of a street. World-old stone cottages crouch on either side ; here and there is a more ambitious house in decay ; trees wave over the street, and down its distance comes an occasional donkey-cart very musically and leisurely. We reached Petrarch's house before the custodian had arrived to admit us, and stood before the high stone wall which shuts in the front of the house, and quite hides it from those without. This wall bears the inscription, Casa Petrarca, and a marble tablet lettered to the following effect : — SE TI AGITA SACRO AMORE DI PATRIA, T'INCHINA A QUESTE MURA OVE SPIRO LA GRAND' ANIMA, IL CANTOR DEI SCIPIONI E DI LAURA. Which may be translated : " If thou art stirred by love of country, bow to these walls, whence passed the great soul, the singer of the ScijHos and of Laura." Meanwhile we became the centre of a grouj) of the youths of Arqua, who had kindly attended our progress in gradually increasing numbers from the moment wt- had entered the village. They were dear little girls and boys, and mountain babies, all with sunburnt faces, and the winning ways native to this race, which Nature loves better lf)S .'Italian Joiuncvs A Pil- grimage to Pe trarch's House ^^'^'i/|«. Tha Tomb of Petrarch, Arqu;i than us of the Noi'th. The blonde jnlgrim seemed to please them, and they evidently took us for Tedesc/ii. You learn to submit to this fate in Northern Italy, however ungracefully, for it is the one that constantly befalls you outside of the greatest cities. The jjeople know but two varieties of foreigners — the Englishman and the German. If there- fore, you have not rosbif expressed in every lineament of your countenance, you must resign yourself to be a German. This is grievous to the soul which loves to spread its eagle in every land and to be known as Ameri- can with star-spangled conspicuousness all over the woi'ld ; but it cannot be helped. I vainly tried to explain the geographical, political, and natural difference between Tedeschi and Americani to the custodian of Petrarch's house. She listened with amiability, shrugged her shoulders hopelessly, and said, in her rude Venetian, " Mi no so miga "' (I don't know at all). Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celebrity of a poet on the spot where he lived and died, — on his very hearthstone, as it were. So I asked the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting his weight from one foot to tlie other, — A Pil- " When (lid Petnirch live here ? " grimage <. \]^ i j ^\^y^^'^■ remember him." to Pe- ,, ,.T, , , „ " \\ ho WHS he ? trarcn s House " '^ V^^^> signer." Certainly the first res])onse was not enconraging, but the last revealed that even to the heavy and clouded soul of this lout the divine fame of the poet had penetrated — and he a lout in the village where Petrarch lived and ought to be first forgotten. He did not know when Petrarch had lived there^ — a year ago, perhaps, or many centuries, — but he knew that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of doubt was lifted from my spirit, and I responded cheerfully to some observations on the weather offered by a rustic matron who was pitching manure on the little hill slope near the house. When, at last, the custodian came and opened the gate to us, we entered a little grassy yard from which a flight of steps led to Petrarch's door. A few Howers grew wild among the grass, and a fig-tree leaned its boughs against the wall. The figs on it were green, though they hung ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arqua. Some ivy clung to the stones, and from this and the fig-tree, as we came away, we plucked memoi-ial leaves, and blended them with flowers which the youth of Arqua picked and forced upon us for remembrance. A quaint old door opened into the little stone house, and admitted us to a kind of wide passage-way with rooms on on either side ; and at the end opposite to which we entered, another door opened upon a balcony. From this balcony we looked down on Petrarch's garden, which, presently speaking, is but a narrow space with more fruit than flowers in it. Did Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden ? For me I should better have liked a chair on the balcony, with the further and lovelier pros- pect on every hand of village roofs, slo])ing hills all grey with olives, and the broad, blue Lombard j)lain sweeping from heaven to heaven below. !200 3talian Souincvs The walls of the passage way are frescoed, now very A Pil- faintly, in illustration of the loves of Petrarch and Laura, grimage with verses from the sonnets inscribed to explain the illus- trach's trations. In all these Laura prevails as a lady of a singu- pjouse larly long waist and stiff movements, and Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily in his hand, contemplates the flower in mingled botany and toothache. There is occa- sionally a startling literalness in the way the painter has rendered some of the verses. I remember with peculiar interest the illustration ot a 'lachrymose passage concern- ing a river of tears, wherein the weeping Petrarch, stretched beneath a tree, had already started a small creek of tears, which was rapidly swelling to a flood with the torrent from his eyes. I attribute these frescoes to a later date than that of the poet's residence, but the portrait over the door of the bedroom inside of the chamber, was of his own time, and taken from him — the custodian said. As it seemed to look like all the Petrarchian portraits, I did not remark it closely, but rather turned my attention to the walls of the chamber, which were thickly over- scribbled with names. They were nearly all Italian, and none English so far as I saw. This passion for allying one's self to the great, by insci'ibing one's name on places hallowed by them, is certainly very odd ; and (I reflected as I added our names to the rest) it is, without doubt, the most impertinent and idiotic custom in the world. Peojile have thus written themselves down, to the contempt of futurity, all over Petrarch's house. The custodian insisted that the bedroom was just as in the poet's time ; some rooms beyond it had been restored; the kitchen at its side was also repaired. Crossing the passage-way, we entei'ed the dining-room, which was comparatively large and lofty, with a generous fire-jilace at one end, occupying the whole space left by a balcony window. The floor was paved with tiles, and the window-panes were round and small, and set in lead — like '201 Italian 3 u r ncvs A Pil- the floors aiul \viiKlo\v-j)aiies of all the other rooms. A grimage fresco, rejiresentin^ some indelicate female deity, adorned the front of the fire-jilace, which sloped expanding from House *-'^^ ceiling and terminated at the mouth ■without a mantel- piece. The chimney was deep, and told of the cold winters in the hills, of which, afterward, the landlady of the village inn prattled less eloquently. From this dining-room opens, to the right, the door of the room which they call Petrarch's library ; and above the dooi', set in a marble frame, with a glass before it, is all that is mortal of Petrarch's cat, except the hair. Whether or not the fur was foinid incompatible with the jirocess of embalming, and therefore removed, or whether it has slowly dropped away with the lapse of centuries, I do not know ; but it is certain that the cat is now quite bald. On the marble slab below there is a Latin inscription, said to be by the great poet himself, declaring this cat to have been ''second only to Laura." We may, therefore, believe its virtues to have been rare enough ; and cannot well figure to ourselves Petrarch sitting before that wide- mouthed fire-place, without beholding also the gifted cat that purrs softly at his feet and nestles on his knees, or, with thickened tail and lifted back, parades loftily round his chair in the haughty and disdainful manner of cats. In the library, protected against the predatory enthu- siasm of visitors by a heavy wire netting, are the desk and chair of Petrarch, which I know of no form of words to describe perfectly. The front of the desk is of a kind of mosaic in cubes of wood, most of which have been carried away. The chair is wide-armed and carved, but the bottom is gone, and it has been rudely repaired. The custodian said Petrarch died in this chair wliile he sat writing at his desk in the little nook lighted by a single window opening on the left from his library. He loved to sit there. As I entered I found he had stepped out for a moment, but I know he returned directly after I withdrew. 20tl Italian 5oiuncv>s On one wall of the library (which is a simple oblonij; A. Pil- room, in nowise remarkable) was a copy of verses in a frame, grimage by Cesarotti, and on the wall opposite a tribute from Alfieri, ° ^' . trarch's both 7nanu propria. Over and above these are many other „ scribblings ; and hanging over the door of the poet's little nook was a criminal French lithograph likeness of *' Petrarque " when young. Alfieri's verses are written in ink on the wall, while those of Cesarotti are on paper, and framed. I do not remember any reference to his visit to Petrarch's house in Alfieri's autobiography, though the visit must have taken place in 1783, when he sojourned at Padua, and "made the acquaintance of the celebrated Cesarotti, with whose lively and courteous manners he was no less satisfied than he had always been in reading his (Cesarotti's) most masterly version of ' Ossian.' " It is probable that the friends visited the house together. At any rate, I care to believe that while Cesarotti sat "composing" his tribute comfortably at the table, Alfieri's impetuous soul was lifting his tall body on tiptoe to scrawl its inspirations on the plastering. After copying these verses we returned to the dining- room, and while one pilgrim strayed idly through the names in the visitors' book, the other sketched Petrarch's cat, before mentioned, and Petrarch's inkstand of bronze. Thus sketching and idling, we held spell-bound our friends the youth of Arqua, as well as our driver, who, having brought innumerable people to see the house of Petrarch, now for the first time, with great astonishment, beheld the inside of it himself. As to the authenticity of the house I think there can be no doubt, and as to the genuineness of the relics there, nothing in the world could shake my faith in them, though Muratori certainly characterises them as " superstitions." The great poet was sixty-five years old when he came to rest at Arquji, and when, in his own pathetic words, " there 203 Italian ^oiuncvs A Pil- grimage to Pe- trarch's House reinained to him only to consider and to desire liow to make a good end." He says further, at the close of his autobiography : " In one of the Euganean hills, near to ten miles from the city of Padua, I have built me a house, small but pleasant and decent, in the midst of slopes clothed with vines and olives, abundantly sufficient for a family not large and discreet. Here I lead my life, and although, as I have said, infirm of body, yet tranquil of mind, without excitements, without distractions, without cares, reading always, and writing and praising God, and thanking (Jod as well for evil as for good ; which evil, if I err not, is trial merely and not punishment. And all the while I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my life, and have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even forget my youthful sins ; wherefore, in this solitude, no words are so sweet to my lips as these of the psalm : ' Delicta jiireiifiitix mew, et igiiumi/tia.s- mcas nc memiueris.' And with every feeling of the heart I pray God, when it please Him^ to bridle my thoughts, so long unstable and erring ; and as they have vainly wandered to many things, to turn them all to Him — only true, certain, immutable Good." I venerate the house at Arqua because these sweet and solemn words were written in it. We left its revered shelter (after taking a final look from the balcony down upon " the slopes clothed with vines and olives ") and returned to the lower village, where, in the court of the little church, we saw the tomb of Petrarch — "an ark of red stone, upon four columns, likewise of marble." The epitaph is this : — " Frigida Francisci lapis hie tegit ossa Petrarcac ; Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam ; sate Virgine, parce Fessaque jam terris Cteli recjuiescat in arce." A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. The housekeeper of the parish j)riest, who ran out to enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me a wild local tradition of an attemj)t on the j)art of the Florentines to steal the bones. 204 Italian Journcvs of Petrarch away from Arqiia, in proof of which she showed A Pil- me a block of marble set into the ark, whence she said a grimage fraf^ment had been removed by the Florentines. This ° ^" local tradition I afterwards found verified, with names and tt ' House dates, in a little " Life of Petrarch," by F. Leoni, published at Padua in 18i3. It appears that this curious attempt of the Florentines to do doubtful honour to the great citizen whose hereditary civic rights they restored too late (about the time he was drawing nigh his " good end " at Arqua), was made for them by a certain monk of Portagruaro named Tommaso Martinelli. He had a general instruction from his employers to bring away from Arqua " any impor- tant thing of Petrarch's " that he could ; and it occurred to this ill-advised friar to " move his bones." He succeeded on a night of the year iGSO in stealing the dead poet's arm. The theft being at once discovered, the Venetian Republic rested not till the thief was also discovered ; but what became of the arm or of the sacrilegious monk neither the Signor Leoni nor the old women of Arqua give am' account. The Republic removed the rest of Petrarch's body, which is now said to be in the Royal Museum of Madrid. I was willing to know more of this quaint village of Arqua, and I rang at the parish priest's door to beg of him some account of the place, if any were printed. But already at one o'clock he had gone to bed for a nap, and must on no account be roused till four. It is but a quiet life men lead in Arqua, and their souls are in drowsy hands. The amount of sleep which this good man gives himself (if he goes to bed at P p.m. and rises at f) a.m., with a nap of three hours during the day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a good digestion, and uneventful days. As I turned this notion over in my mind, my longing to behold his revei-ence increased, that I might read life at Arquii in the smooth curves of his well-padded countenance. Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a second 205 Italian ."^ounicvs A Pil- visit to Aajiia, 1 succeeded in fiiidiii<>- this excellent eccle- gnmage siastic wide awake at two o'clock in the afternoon, and tiiat he jirranted me an interview at that hour? .Justice to trarch s . . House 'liin, I think, demands this admission of me. He was not at all a fat priest, as I had prefigured him, but rather of a spare person, and of a brisk and lively manner. At the village inn, after listeninij;' half an hour to a discourse on nothinii; but white wine from a younj^ priest, who had stopped to drink a 14. Jtaliau Joui-ncvs made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before us A Visit with some unhappy wine^ and while we were eating the *° ^^^ Capo-gente came in. imbri He was a very well-mannered person, but had the bash- fulness naturally resulting from his lonely life at that altitude, where contact with the world must be infre(}uent. His fellow citizens seemed to regard him with a kind of affectionate deference, and some of them came in to hear him talk with the strangers. He stood till we prayed him to sit down, and he presently consented to take some wine with us. After all, however, he could not tell us much of his people which we had not heard before. A tradition existed among them, he said, that their ancestors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that they had dwelt for a long time in the hollows and caves of the mountains, living and burying their dead in the same secret places. At what time they had been converted to Christianity he could not tell ; they had, up to the beginning of the present century, had little or no intercourse with the Italian population by which they were surrounded on all sides. Formerly, they did not intermarrv Avith that race, and it was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its language. But now intermarriage is very frequent ; both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling into disuse. They still, however, have books of religious instruction in their ancient dialect, and until very lately the services of their church were performed in Cimbrian. I begged the Capo to show us some of their books, and he brought us two — one a catechism for children, entitled '•' I)ar Kloane Catechism vor i Beloseland vortx'aghet in z' gaprecht von siben Komiinen, un vier Halghe Gasang. 18i':i. Padova." The other book it grieved me to see, for it proved that I was not the only one tempted in recent times to visit these ancient people, ambitious to bear to them the relation of discoverer, as it were. A High-Dutch 215 Cimbri Jtaliaii Sourncies A Visit Columbus, from ^'ienna, had been before me, and I could to the o„]y eome in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered glory. This (lernian savant had dwelt a week in these lonely places, patiently compiling a dictionary of their tongue, which, when it was printed, he had sent to the Capo. Concerning the present Cimbri, the Capo said that in his community they were chiefly hunters, wood-cutters, and charcoal-burners, and that they practised their primi- tive crafts in those gloomier and wilder heights we saw to the northward, and descended to the towns of the plain to make sale of their faggots, charcoal, and w'ild-beast skins. In Asiago and the larger communities they w'ere farmers and tradesmen like the Italians ; and the Capo believed that the Cimbri, in all their villages, numbered near ten thousand. He could tell me of no particular customs or usages, and believed they did not differ from the Italians now except in race and language.* They are, of course, subject to the Austrian Government, but not so strictly as the Italians are ; and though they are taxed and made to do military service, they are otherwise left to regulate their affairs pretty much at their pleasure. * The EngHsh traveller Rose, who (to my further discomfiture, I find) visited Asiago in 1817, mentions that the Cimbri have the Cehic custom of waking the dead. " If a traveller dies by the way, they plant a cross upon the spot, and all who pass by cast a stone upon his cairn. Some go in certain seasons in the year to high places and woods, where it is supposed they worshipped their divinities, but the origin of the custom is forgot amongst them- selves." If a man dies by violence, they lay liim out with his hat and shoes on, as if to give him the appearance of a wayfarer, and " symbolise one surprised in the great journey of life." A woman dying in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal ornaments. Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people are Cimbri, and holds that it is " more consonant to all the e\idence of history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders at different periods deposited this backwater of barbarians " in the district they now inhabit. " The whole space, which in addition to the seven burghs contains twenty-four \illages, is bounded by rivers, alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are the Brenta to the east, and the Astico to the west." 216 Italian Sourncvjs The Capo ended his discourse with much poHte regret A Visit that he had nothing more worthy to tell us ; and, as if to to the make us amends for having come so far to learn so little, ^"^ " he said there was a hermit living near, whom we might like to see, and sent his son to conduct us to the hermitage. It turned out to be the white object which we had seen gleaming in the wood on the mountain from so great distance below, and the wood turned out to be a pleasant beechen grove, in Avhich we found the hermit cutting faggots. He was warmly dressed in clothes without rent, and wore the clerical knee-bi'eeches. He saluted us with a cricket-like chirpiness of manner, and was greatly amazed to hear that we had come all tlie way from America to visit him. His hermitage was built upon the side of a white-washed chapel to St. Francis, and contained three or four little rooms or cupboards, in which the hermit dwelt and meditated. They opened into the chapel, of which the hermit had the care, and which he kept neat and clean like himself He told us proudly that once a year, on the day of the titular saint, a priest came and said mass in that chapel, and it was easy to see that this was the great occasion of the old man's life. For forty years, he said, he had been devout ; and for twenty-five he had dwelt in this place, Avhere the goodness of God and the charity of the poor people around had kept him from want. Altogether, he was a pleasant enough hermit, not in the least spiritual, but gentle, simple, and evidently sincere. We gave some small coins of silver to aid him to continue his life of devotion, and Count Giovanni bestowed some coppers with the stately blessing, " Iddio vi hencdica, padre Jiiio / " So we left the hermitage, left Fozza, and started down the mountain on foot, for no one may ride down those steej)s. Long before we reached the bottom, we had learned to loathe mountains and to long for dead levels during the rest of life. Yet the descent was picturesque, 217 Italian ^ouiucvs A Visit and in some things even more interesting than the ascent to the 1j;j(J been. We met more people : now melancholy shep- herds with their flocks; now swineherds and swineherdesses with herds of wild black pigs of the Italian breed ; now men driving asses that brayed and woke long, loud, and most musical echoes in the hills ; now whole peasant families driving cows, horses, and mules to the plains below. On the way down, fragments of autobiography began, with the opportunities of conversation^ to come from the Count Giovanni, and we learned that he was a private soldier at home on that pcrmessu which the Austrian Government frequently gives its less able-bodied men in times of peace. He had been at home some years, and did not expect to be again called into the service. He liked much better to be in charge of the cave at Oliero than to carry the musket, though he confessed that he liked to see the world, and that soldiering brought one acquainted with many places. He had not many ideas, and the philosophy of his life chiefly regarded deportment toward strangers who visited the cave. He held it an error in most custodians to show discontent when travellers gave them little ; and he said that if he received never so much, he believed it wise not to betra}' exultation. '• Always be contented, and nothing more," said Count Giovanni. '•'It is what you people always promise beforehand," I said, "when you bargain with strangers, to do them a certain service for what they please ; but afterward they must pay what i/ou please or have trouble. I know you will not be content with what I give you." "If I am not content," cried Count Giovanni, "call me the greatest ass in the world ! " And I am bound to say that, for all I could see through the mask of his face, he was satisfied with what I gave him, though it was not much. He had told us casually that he was nei)hew of a noble- '■2\H Cimbri Jtaliaii Souvncvs man of a certain rich and ancient family in \'enice, who A Visit sent him money while in the army, but this made no great to the impression on me ; and though I knew there was enough noble poverty in Italy to have given rise to the proverb, Un conte che nun couta, 71011 conta niente, yet I confess that it was with a shock of surprise 1 heard our guide and servant saluted by a lounger in ^^alstagna with " Siur coiitc, scn-ilor suof" I looked narrowly at him, but there was no ray of feeling or pride visible in his pale, languid visage as he responded, " Biiuna ,scra, cam." Still, after that revelation we simple plebeians, who had been all day heaping shawls and guide-books upon Count Giovanni, demanding menial offices from him, and treating him with good-natured slight, felt uncomfortable in his presence, and welcomed the appearance of our carriage with our driver, who, having started drunk from Bassano in the morning, had kept drunk all day at Valstagna, and who now drove us back wildly over the road, and almost made us sigh for the security' of mules ambitious of the brinks of precipices. 2iy =^*y Pisa : the Four Fabrics Minor Travels Pisa AM afraid that the talk of the modern railway traveller, if he is honest, must be a great deal of the custodians, the vetturini, and the facehini, whose acquaintance con- stitutes his chief knowledge of the popu- lation among which he journeys. We do not nowadays carry letters recommending us to citizens of the different places. If we did, consider the calamity we should be to the be-travelled Italian communities we now bless ! Xo, we buy our through-tickets, and we put up at the hotels praised in the hand-book, and are very glad of a little conversation with any native, however adulterated he be by contact Avith the world to which we belong. I do not blush to own that I love the whole rascal race which ministers to our curiosity and preys upon us, and I am !220 Jtaliau 5oiunc\:e Pisa The Arno at Pisa not ashamed to have spoken so often in this book of the lowly and rapacious but interesting porters who opened to me the different gates of that great realm of wonders, Italy. I doubt if they can be much known to the dwellers in the land^ though they are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers ; and if I have any regret in the matter, it is that I did not more diligently study them when I could. Among memorable custodians in Italy was one whom we saw at Pisa, where we stopped on our way from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma, and spent an hour in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. The beautiful old town, which every one knows from the report of travellers, one yet finds possessed of the uncommunicable charm Avhich keeps it for ever novel to the visitor. Lying upon either side ot the broad Arno, it mirrors in the flood architecture almost as fair and noble as that glassed in the Canalazzo, and its other sti'eets seemed as tranquil as the canals of Venice. Those over which we drove, on the day of our visit, were paved with broad flag-stones, and gave out scarcely a sound under our wheels. It was Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet the empty and silent city inspired us with no sense of desolation. The palaces 2iil 5 1 n I i a n 3 o u i n c v; s Pisa were in ju-rt'ect repair; the pavements were clean; ])elnn(l those windows we felt that there must be a good deal of easy, comfortable life. It is said that Pisa is one of the few places in Europe where the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness — everywhere jjursued by railways — still lingers, and that you find cheap apartments in those well- preserved old palaces. No doubt it would be worth more ■ to live in Pisa than it would cost, for the history of the place would alone be to any reasonable sojourner a perpetual recompense, and a princely income far exceeding his ex- j^enditure. To be sui-e, the Tower of Famine, with which we chiefly associate the name of Pisa, has been long rased to the ground, and built piecemeal into the neighbouring palaces, but you may still visit the dead wall which hides from view the place where it stood ; and you may thence drive on, as we did, to the great Piazza where stands the most famous group of architecture in the world, after that of St. Mark's Place in Venice. There is the wonderful Leaning Tower, there is the old and beautiful Duomo, there is the noble Baptistry, there is the lovely Campo- Santo, and there — somewhere lurking in portal or behind pillar, and keeping out an eagle-eye for the marvelling stranger — is the much-exjierienced cicerone who shows you through the edifices. Yours is the fourteen-thousandth American family to which he has had the honour of acting as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfaction in thus becoming a contribution to statistics. We entered the Duomo, in our new friend's custody, and we saw the things which it was well to see. There was mass, or some other ceremony, transacting ; but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as possible, and there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship with which travellers view objects of interest. Then we ascended the Leaning Tower, skilfully ])reserving its equilibrium as we went by an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to the tower's inclination, but perhaps not receiving '^VKx. rWWuJoaLtujl'Quai-.. Italian 3cjiunc\:3 a full justification of the Campanile's appearance in pictures, Pisa till we stood at its base, and saw its vast bulk and height as it seemed to sway and threaten in the blue sky above our heads. There the sensation was too terrible for endur- ance — even the architectural beauty of the tower could not save it from being monstrous to us — and we were glad to hurry away from it to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the Campo Santo. Here are the frescoes painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and ready against the time of your arrival in 1S64', and you feel that you are the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade who ])eers through her fingers at the shameful condition of deboshed father Noah, and seems to wink one eye of wicked amusement at you. Turning afterward to any book written about Italy during the time specified, you find your impression of exclusive possession of the frescoes erroneous, and your muse naturally despairs, where so many muses have laboured in vahi, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo. Yet it is most Avorthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched and traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim cypresses out of the sainted earth of Jerusalem ; and those old paintings, made when Art was — if ever — a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce more effectively than their authors conceived the lessons of life and death ; for they are themselves becoming jiart of the triumjihant decay they represent. If it was awful once to look u))on that strange scene where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly upon three dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet more tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardiv dis- cernible in their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy bliss. Alas ! Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears and hopes : with dust he covers dust, and with decav he blots the image of decav. 3 1 a I i a II 3 o u r n c v 3 Pisa I assure the I'eader that I made none of these apt re- Hections in the Canipo Santo at l*isa, but have written them out this morning in Cambridge because there liappens to be an east wind blowing. No one could have been sad in the company of our cheerful and patient cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth American family away, still would not go till he had shown us that monument to a dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo. This is the mighty chain which the Pisans, in their old wars with the Genoese, once stretched across the mouth of their harbour, to prevent the entrance of the hostile galleys. Tlie Genoese with no great trouble carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till I860, when Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored to the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo, an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient foes.* It is not a very good world — e pur si miiuve. The Baptistry stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our guide ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in reserve his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he waited till we liad looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures by Nicolo Pisano before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious species of howl. While we stood in some amazement at thisj the conscious structure of the dome caught the sound and prolonged it with a variety and sweetness of which I could not have dreamed. The man poured out in quick succession his musical wails, and then ceased, and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in response. There was a * I read in Mr. Norton's " Notes of Travel and Study in Italy," that he saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, " the chains that marked the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is of course possible that our cicerone may have employed one of those chains for the different historical purpose I have mentioned. It would be a thousand pities, I think, if a monument of that sort should be limited to the commemoration of one fact only. 224 5talian Jouvncvs supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I despair Pisa of giving any true idea ; they were of such tender and exalted rapture that we might well have thought them the voices of young-eyed cherubim, singing as they passed thi'ough Paradise over that spot of earth where we stood. They seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and soothed, and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and penitent and humbled. We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of which the marvellous echo made eloquence. " Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had left the building, " hear such music as that } " " The papal choir does not equal it," we answered with one voice. The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he Avent on : " Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the President ? No .'' Ah, what a fine man ! You saw that he had his heart actually in his hand ! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told him of the Baptistry echo, ' We have the finest echo in the world in the Hall of Congress.' I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a little — thus ! Moshu Feelmore was con- vinced. Said he, ' There is no other echo in the world besides this. You are i-ight.' I am unique," pursued the cicerone, " for making this echo. But," he added with a sigh, " it has been my ruin. The English have put me in all the guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl twenty times a day. When our Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the church, the tower, and the Campo Santo. Says the king, ' Pfui ! ' " — here the cicerone gave that sweeping outward motion with both hands by which Italians dismiss a trifling subject — "'make me the echo!' I was forced," concluded the cicerone with a strong pre- tence of injury in his tone, " to howl half an hour without ceasing." 225 p Trieste : the Harbour II Trieste |F you take the midnight steamei* at \'enice j-ou reach Trieste by six o'clock in the morning, and the hills rise to meet you as you enter the broad bay dotted -with the sail of fishing-craft. The hills are bald and bare, and you find, as you draw near, that the city lies at their feet under a veil of mist, or climbs earlier into view along their sides. The prospect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing features, and looking at those rugged acclivities, with their aspect of continual bleakness, you readily believe all the stories you have heard of that fierce wind called the Bora which sweeps from them through Trieste at certain seasons. While it blows, ladies walking near the quays are sometimes caught up and set afloat, involuntary Galateas, in the bay, and people keep indoors as much as possible. But the Bora, though so sudden and so savage, does give warning of its rise, and the peasants avail themselves of 5talian 5oiivucv;s this characteristic. They station a man on one of the Trieste mountain tops, and when he feels the first breath of the Boi'a he sounds a horn, which is a signal for all within hearing to lay hold of something that cannot be blown away, and cling to it till the wind falls. This may happen happen in three days or in nine, according to the popular proverbs. "The spectacle of the sea," says Dall' Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, " while the Bora blows, is sublime, and when it ceases the prospect of the surround- ing hills is delightful. The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them with a rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly softened, even in the heart of winter." The city itself, as you penetrate it, makes good with its stateliness and picturesqueness your loss through the grimness of its environs. It is in great part new, very clean, and full of the life and movement of a prosperous port ; but, better than this, so far as the mere sightseer is concerned, it wins a peculiar charm from the many public staii'cases by w^hich you ascend and descend its hillier quarters, and which are made of stone, and lightly railed and balustraded with iron. Something of all this I noticed in my ride from the landing of the steamer to the house of friends in the suburbs, and there I grew better disposed toward the hills, which, as I strolled over them, I found dotted with lovely villas, and everywhere ti'aversed by perfectly-kept carriage- roads, and easy and pleasant foot-paths. It was in the springtime, and the jieach-trees and almond-trees hung full of blossoms and bees, the lizards lay in the walks absorbing the vernal sunshine, the violets and cowslips sweetened all the grassy borders. The scene did not want a human interest, for the peasant girls were going to market at that hour, and I met them everywhere, bearing heavy burdens on their own heads, or hurrying forward with their wares on the backs of donkeys. They were as handsome as heart could wish, and they wore that Italian 227 atalian Souincvs Trieste costmne which is not to be seen anywhere in Italy except at Trieste and in tlie Roman and Neapolitan provinces — a bright bodice and gown, with the head-dress of dazzling white linen, square upon the crown, and dropping lightly to the shoulders. Later I saw these comely maidens crouching on the ground in the market-place, and selling their wares, with much glitter of eyes, teeth, and earrings, and a continual babble of bargaining. It seemed to me that the average of ffood looks was greater among the women of Trieste than among those of Venice, but that the instances of striking and exquisite beauty were rarer. At Trieste, too, the Italian type, so pure at Venice, is lost or continually modified by the mixed character of the population, which perhaps is most notice- able at the Merchants' Exchange. This is a vast edifice roofed with glass, Avhere the traffickers of all races meet daily to gossip over the news and the prices. Here a Greek or Dalmat talks with an eager Italian or a slow, sure Englishman ; here the hated Austrian button-holes the Venetian or the Magyar ; here the Jew meets the Gentile on common ground ; here Christianity encounters the hoaiy superstitions of the East, and makes a good thing- out of them in cotton or grain. All costumes are seen here, and all tongues are heard, the native Triestines con- tributing almost as much to the variety of parlance as the foreigners. "In regard to language," says Cantu, "though the country is peopled by Slavonians, yet the Italian tongue is spreading into the remotest villages where a few years since it was not understood. In the city it is the common and familiar language ; the Slavonians of the North use the German for the language of ceremony ; those of the South, as well as the Israelites, the Italian ; while the Protestants use the German, the Greeks the Hellenic and Illyric, the emploijcs of the civil courts the Italian or the German, the schools now German and now Italian, the bar and pul})it Italian, Most of the inhabitants, 228 111 ' iiK: y^) ■^^i III, #! ^j-hrfHl M|; .1 ■T'^-'-i -^ -fm^- """^ The Cathedral, Trieste Italian Joiirncvs indeed, are bi-lingual, and very many tri-lingua], without Trieste countino- Frencli, which is understood and spoken from infancy. Italian^ (jerman, and Greek are written, but the Slavonic little, this having remained in the condition of a vulgar tongue. But it would be idle to distinguish the population ac- cording to lan- guage, for the son adopts a language dif- ferent from the father's, and now prefers one language and now another ; the women in- c 1 i n e to the Italian; but those of the upper class prefer now (lerman, now French, now English, as, from one de- cade to an- other, affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the salons ; in the squares and streets, the Vene- tian dialect is heard." And with the introduction of the Venetian dialect, \'enetian discontent seems also to have crept in, and I once heard a Ti-iestine declaim against the Imperial government quite in the manner of Venice. It struck me that this desire for union with Italy, which he declared A Hilly Street, Triests Trieste ])revalent in Trieste must be of very recent <:jrowth, since even so lute as IStH, 'J'riestc had refused to join Venice in the expulsion of the yVustrians. Indeed, the Triestines have fought the Venetians from the first ; they stole the Brides of Venice in one of their piratical cruises in the lagoons ; gave aid and comfort to those enemies of Venice, the Visconti, the Carraras, and the Genoese ; revolted from St. Mark whenever subjected to his banner, and finally, rather than remain under his sway, gave themselves nve centuries ago to Austria. The objects of intei'est at Trieste are not many. There are remains of an attributive temple of Jupiter under the Duon:o, and there is near at hand the Museum of Classical Antiquities founded in honour of Winckelmann, murdered at Trieste by Ancangeli, who had seen the medals bestowed on the antiquary by Mai-ia Theresa and believed him rich. There is also a scientific museum founded by the Archduke Maximilian, and, above all, there is the beautiful residence of that ill-starred prince — the Miramare, where the half- crazed Empress of the Mexicans vainly waits her husband's return from the experiment of paternal government in the New World. It would be hai*d to tell how Art has charmed rock and wave at Miramare, until the spur of one of those rugged Triestine hills, jutting into the sea, has been made the seat of ease and luxury, but the visitor is aware of the magic as soon as he passes the gate of the palace grounds. These are in great part perpendicular, and are over clam- bered with airy stairways climbing to pensile arbours. Where horizontal, they are diversified with mimic seas for swans to sail upon, and summer-houses for people to lounge in and look at the swans from. On the point of land furthest from the acclivity stands the Castle of Miramare, half at sea, and half adrift in the clouds above : — " And fain it would stoop downward To the mirrored wave below ; And fain it would soar upward In the evening's crimson glow," *=fj*' "vkx QnciAxA C ou-oi . ."buxtt-tx . Italian Jouincvs Trieste r^actt ii i The Castle of Miramare I remember that a little yacht laj- beside the pier at the castle's foot, and lazily flapped its sail, while the sea beat inward with as languid a pulse. That was some years ago, before Mexico was dreamed of at Miramare : now, jjer- chance, she who is one of the most unhappy among women looks down distraught from those high windows, and finds in the helpless sail and impassive wave the images of her baffled hope, and that immeasurable sea which gives back its mariners neither to love nor sorrow. I think, though she be the wife and daughter of princes, we may pity this poor Empress at least as much as we pity the Mexicans to whom her dreams brought so many woes. It was the midnight following my visit to Miramare when the fiacre in which I had quitted my friend's house was drawn up by its greatly bewildered driver on the quay near the place where the steamer for \'enice should be lying. There was no steamer for Venice to be seen. The driver swore a little in the polyglot profanities of his native city, and descending from his box, went and questioned different lights — blue lights, yellow liglits, green lights — to be seen at diffei-ent points. To a light they were ignorant, though 233 Italian Jourucvs Trieste eloquent, and to pass the time we drove up and down the (juay, and stopped at the landings of all the steamers that touch at Trieste. It was a snug fiacre enough, but I did not care to spend the night in it, and I urged the driver to further inquiry. A wanderer whom we met, declared that it was not the night for the Venice steamer; another admitted that it might be ; a third conversed with the driver in low tones, and then leaped upon the box. We drove rapidly away, and before I had, in view of this mysterious proceeding, composed a fitting paragraph for the Fafti Diversi or the Osservatorc Tricstinu, descriptive of the state in which the (iuardie di Polizia should find me floating in the bay, exanimate and evidently the prey of a tnste avvenimento — the driver pulled up once more, and now beside a steamer. It was the steamer for ^'enice, he said, in precisely the tone which he would have used had he driven me directly to it without blundering. It was breathing heavily, and was just about to depart, but even in the hurry of getting on board I could not help noticing that it seemed to have grown a great deal since I had last voyaged in it. There was not a soul to be seen except the mute steward who took my satchel, and guiding me below into an elegant saloon, instantly left me alone. Here again the steamer was vastly enlarged. These were not the narrow quarters of the Venice steamer, nor was this lamp, shedding a soft light on cushioned seats and panelled doors and wainscotings the sort of illumination usual in that humble craft. I rang the small silver bell on the long table, and the mute steward a})peared. Was this the steamer for Venice .'' Siciiro ! All that I could do in comment was to sit down, and in the meantime the steamer trembled, groaned, choked, cleared its throat, and we were under way. "The other passengers have all gone to bed, I suppose," I argued acutely, seeing none of them. Nevertheless, I 5talian Joiuncvs thought it odd, and it seemed a shrewd means of relief Trieste to ring the bell, and pretending drowsiness, to ask the steward which was my state-room. He replied with a curious smile that I could have any of them. Amazed, I yet selected a state-room, and while the steward was gone for the sheets and pillow-cases, I occupied my time by opening the doors of all the other state-i'ooms. They were empty. "Am I the only passenger.-^" I asked, when he returned, with some anxiety, " Precisely," he answered. I could not proceed and ask if he composed the entire crew — it seemed too fearfully probable that he did. I now suspected that I had taken passage with the Olandese Volante. There was nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and there, with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views of the situation under- went a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom with the Ancient Mariner — I was a Manuscript Found in a Bottle ! Coming to the surface about six o'clock a.m., I found a daylight as cheerful as need be upon the appointments of the elegant saloon ; and upon the good-natured face of the steward when he brought me the caff'r latlc, and the buttered toast for my breakfast. He said " Servitor suo ! " in a loud and comfortable voice, and I perceived the absurdity of having thought that he was in any way related to the Night- mare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man's-blood-with-cold. " This is not the regular V'enice steamer, I suppose "^ " I remarked to the steward as he laid my breakfast in state upon the long table. No. Properly, no boat should have left for \'enice last night, which was not one of the times of the tri-weekly depai'ture. This was one of the steamers of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it was going at present to take on an extraordinary freight at ^'enice for Italian 3oiunc^s Trieste J'Lg} pt. 1 had been permitted to come on board because my driver said I had a return ticket, and would go. Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever mys- terious in the management of the steamer. The captain met me with a bow in tlie gangway ; seamen were coiling wet ropes at difi'erent ])oints, as they always are ; the mate was promenading tlie bridge, and taking the rainy weather as it came^ with his oilcloth coat and hat on. We were in sight of the breakwater outside Malamocco, and a 2:)ik)t-boat was making us from the land. Even at this point the innumerable fortifications of the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we drew near Venice, till we entered the lagoon, and found it a nest of fortresses one with another. Unhappily, the day being rainy, Venice did not spring resplendent from the sea, as I had always read she would. She rose slowly and languidly from the water — not like a queen, but like the grave, slovenly, bedrabbled, heart- broken old slave she really was. ^■:i() Bassano III Bassano HAVE already told, in recounting the story of our visit to the Cimbri, how full of courtship we found the litth; city of Bassano on the evening of our arrival there. Bassano is the birthplace of the painter Jacopo da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to treat scriptural story as accessory to mere landscape, and who had a peculiar fondness for painting Entrances into the Ark, for in these he could indulge without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired from observation of local customs in his native town. This was the theory offered by one who had imbibed the spirit of subtle speculation from Ruskin, and I think it reasonable. At least it does not conflict with the fact that there is at Bassano a most excellent gallery of paint- ings entirely devoted to the works of Jacopo da Ponte, and his four sons, who are here to be seen to better 237 Italian 5cuinc\;s Bassano advantage than anywhere else. As few strangers visit Bassano, the gallery is little frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man, wdio will not allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown thcni the adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you assure him of your indifference to these scientific .seccatKre ; he is deaf and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when he came to his last inquiry, " Have the Protestants the same Ciod as the Catholics ? " we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle the fact for himself. Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom as we entered we heard humming over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to gather from the opening flowers of orthography. When we jiassed out, the master gave these poor busy bees an atom of holida}-, and they all swarmed forth together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a long, lank man, in a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap — exactly like the schoolmaster in "The Deserted Village." We made a pretence of asking him our way to somewhere, and went wrong, and came by accident upon a wide flat space, bare as a brick-yai'd, beside which was lettered on a fragment of the old city wall, " Giuoco di Palla." It was evidently the plaj'ground of the whole city, and it gave us a pleasanter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet conceived, to think of its entire population playing ball there in the spring afternoons. We respected Bassano as much for this as for her diligent remembrance of her illustrious dead, of whom she had very gi'eat numbers. It appeared to us that nearly every other house bore a tablet announcing that " Here was born," or " Here died," some great or good man of whom no one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough celebrity in Bassano to supply the world ; but as laurel is a thing that grows anywhere, I covet rather from Bassano the magnificent 238 3 fW^wm '^ •ri. ■^-^X'^^^ii^ « r The Piazza, Bassano Jtalian ^ournevs ivy that covers the poi'tions of her ancient wall yet standing. Bassano The wall, where visible, is seen to be of a pebbly rough- cast, but it is clad almost from the ground in glossy ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast shoulders of some giant warrior. The moat beneath is turned into a lovely promenade bordered by quiet villas, with rococo shepherds and shepherdesses in marble on their gates ; where the wall is built to the verge of the high ground on which the city stands, there is a swift descent to the wide valley of the Brenta waving in corn and vines and tobacco. We went up the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, to visit the famous cavern already mentioned, out of which, from the secret heart of the hill, gushes one of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached by passing through a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through a sort of ante-grot, whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling current through a succession of natural compartments with dome-like roofs. From the hill overhead hang stalac- tites of all gi'otesque and fairy shapes, and the rock under- foot is embroidered with fantastic designs wrought by the water in the silence and darkness of the endless night. At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cavern is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging to the centre of the pool your attention is drawn to the dome above you, which contracts into a shaft rising upward to a height as yet unmeasured and even unpierced by light. From somewhere in its mysterious ascent, an auroral boy, with a tallow candle, produces a so-called effect of suni-ise, and sheds a sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the cavern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind creatures of subtein-anean waters are to those of waves that lauffh and dance above jjround. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on the surface of the earth, wliy do jieople visit them ? I do not know 241 Q Jtallan ^ourncvs Bassano that this is more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another. The wicked memory of the Ecehni survives everywhere in this part of Italy, and near the entrance of the OHero grotto is a hollow in the hill something like the apsis of a cliurch, which is popularly believed to have been the liiding-place of Cecilia da Baone, one of the many unhappy wives of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino family. It is not quite clear why Cecilia should have employed this as a place of refuge, and it is certain that she was not the wife of Ecelino da Romano, as the neigh- bours believe at Oliero, but of Ecelino il Monaco, his father ; yet since her name is associated with the grot, let us have her story, which is curiously illustrative of the life of the best society in Italy during the thirteenth century. She was the only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to the guardianship of Spinabello da Xendrico. When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello cast about him to find a suitable husband for her, and it appeared to him that a match with the son of Tiso da Camposampiero promised the greatest advantages. Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon so important a matter, he confided it for advice to his brother-in-law and closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. It had just happened that Balbo's son, Ecelino il Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having been recently divorced from his first wife, the lovely but light Speronella ; and Balbo falsely went to the greedy guardian of Cecilia, and offering him better terms than he could hope for from Tiso, secured Cecilia for his son. At this treachery the Camposampieri were furious ; but they dissembled their anger till the moment of revenge arrived, when Cecilia's rejected suitor, encountering her upon a journey beyond the protection of her husband, violently dishonoured his successful rival. The unhappy lady 242 On the Brenta at Bassano Jtalian Jouvncvs returning to Ecelino at Bassano, recounted her wrong, and Bassano was with a horrible injustice repudiated and sent home, while her husband arranged schemes of vengeance in due time consummated. Cecilia next married a \ enetian noble, and being in due time divorced, married yet again, and died the mother of a large family of children. This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was an habitue of the cafe in Bassano who could have given some of its particulars from personal recollection. He was an old and smoothly shaven gentleman, in a scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we saw every evening in a corner of the cafe playing solitaire. He talked Avith no one, saluted no one. He drank his glasses of water with anisette, and silently played solitaire. There is no good reason to doubt that he had been doing the same thing every evening for six hundred years. 24j :,^ :M' ■WS.ii Possagno IV Possagno, Canova's Birthplace T did not take a long time to exhaust tlie interest of Bassano, but we were sorry to leave the place because of the excellence of the inn at which Ave tarried. It was called "II Mondo," and it had everythingin it that heart could wish. Our rooms were miracles of neatness and comfort ; they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair, and they opened into the dining-hall, where we were served with indescribable salads and risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed the house ; when we were come away we wondered that so much perfection of hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano. It is one of the jileasures of by-way travel in Italy, that you are everywhere introduced in character, that you become fictitious and play a part as in a novel. To this inn of The World our 246 Canova's Birth- place Italian Jouvncvs driver had brought us with a clamour and rattle propor- Pos- tioned to the fee received from us, and when, in response sagno, to his haughty summons, the cameriere, who had been gossiping with the cook, threw open the kitchen door, and stood out to welcome us in a broad square of forth- streaming ruddy light, amid the lovely odours of broiling and roasting, our driver saluted him with '' Receive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very best. They are worthy of anything." This at once put us back several centuries, and we never ceased to be lords and ladies of the period of Don Quixote as long as we rested in that inn. It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left " II Mondo," and gaily joui'neyed toward Treviso, intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace of Canova, on our way. The road to the latter place passes through a beautiful country, that gently undulates on either hand till in the distance it rises into pleasant hills and green mountain heights. Possagno itself lies upon the brink of a declivity, down the side of which drops terrace after terrace, all planted with vines and figs and peaches, to a watercourse below. The ground on which the village is built, with its quaint and antiquated stone cottages, slopes gently northward, and on a little rise upon the left hand of us coming from Bassano, we saw that stately edifice wdth which Canova has honoured his humble birthplace. It is a copy of the Pantheon, and it cannot help being beautiful and imposing, but it would be utterly out of place in any other than an Italian village. Here, however, it consorted well enough with the lingering qualities of the old pagan civilisation still perceptible in Italy. A sense of that past was so strong with us as we ascended the broad stairway leading up the slope from the village to the level on which the temple stands at the foot of a mountain, that we might well have believed we approached an altar devoted to the elder worship : through the open doorway and between 247 Italian ."> o u v ii c v s Pos- the columns of the portico we could seethe priests moving sagno, to and fro, and the voice of their chanting came out to us Canova s jjj^g ^.j^^ sound of hymns to some of the deities long dis- owned ; and I remembered how Padre L liad said to place me in \'enice, " Our blessed saints are only the old gods baptized and christened anew." Within as without, the temple resembled the Pantheon, but it had little to show us. The niches designed by Canova for statues of the saints are empty yet ; but there are busts by his own hand of himself and his brother, the Bishop Canova. Among the people was the sculptor's niece, whom our guide pointed out to us, and who was evidently used to being looked at. She seemed not to dislike it, and stared backed at us amiably enough, being a good-natured, plump, comely dark-faced lady of perhaps fifty years. Possagno is nothing if not Canova, and our guide, a boy, knew all about him — hov>^, more especially, he had first manifested his wonderful genius by modelling a group of sheep out of the dust of the highway, and how an Inglese happening along in his carriage, saw the boy's work and gave him a plateful of gold napoleons. I dare say this is as near the truth as most facts. And is it not better for Canova to have begun in this way than to have poorly picked up the rudiments of his art in the workshop of his father, a maker of altar-pieces and the like for country churches ':' The Canova family has intermarried with the Venetian nobility, and will not credit those stories of Canova's beginnings which his townsmen so fondly chei"ish. I believe they would even distrust the butter-lion with which the boy-sculptor is said to have adorned the table of the noble Falier, and first won his notice. Besides the temple at Possagno, there is a very pretty gallery containing casts of all Canova's works. It is an interesting place, where Psyches and Cupids flutter, where A^enuses present themselves in every variety of attitude, where Sorrows sit u{)on hard, straight-backed classic chairs 248 Jtaliaii Souiucvs Pos- sagno, Canova's Birth- place The Piazza., Treviso and mourn in the society of faithful Storks ; where the Bereft of this century surround death-beds in Greek costume appropriate to the scene ; where Muses and Graces sweetly pose themselves and insipidly smile, and where the Dancers and Passions, though nakeder, are no wickeder than the Saints and Virtues. In all, there are a hundred and ninety-five pieces in the gallery, and among the rest the statue named George Washington, which was sent to America in 1820, and afterwards destroyed by fire in the Capitol. The figure is in a sitting posture naturally, it is in the dress of a Roman general ; and if it does not look much like George Washington, it does resemble Julius Caesar. The custodian of the gallery had been Canova's body- servant, and he loved to talk of his master. He had so far imbibed the family spirit that he did not like to allow that Canova had ever been other than rich and grand, and he begged us not to believe the idle stories of his first essays in art. He was delighted with our interest in the Ca?sarean Washington, and our pleasure in the Avhole 249 Canova's Birth place ."^ t a I i a n 3 o n v n c v; s Pos- _4i;allery, which we viewed witli tlie liomage due to tlie man sagno, Avlio had rescued tlie world from Swaggering in sculpture. When we were satisfied^ he invited us, with his misti'ess's permission, into the house of the Canovas adjoining the gallery ; and there we saw many paintings by the sculptor — pausing longest in a lovely little room decorated after the Pompeian manner with .sc/icr:.i in miniature panels re})resenting the jocose classic usualities : Cupids escaping from cages, and being sold from them, and jilaying many pranks and games with Nymphs and Graces. Then Canova was done and Possagno was finished ; and we resumed our way to Treviso, a town nearly as much porticoed as Padua, and having a memory and hardly any other consciousness. The Duomo, which is perhaps the ugliest duomo in the world, contains an ''Annunciation," by Titian, one of his best paintings ; and in the Monte di Pieta is the beautiful '' Entombment," by which Giorgione is perhaps most woi-thily remembered. The church of San Nicolo is interesting from its quaint frescoes by the school of Giotto. At the railway station an admirable old man sells the most delicious white and purple grapes. 2.50 y^: N,^!^:'>talian 5ourncv>s Verona Tne Fortified Bridge, Verona the tawny river, spanned with many beautiful bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat and turned by the rapid current ; or the thoroughfares with their passengers and bright shops and cafes ; or the grim old feudal towers ; or the age-embrowned palaces, eloquent in their haughty strength of the times when they were famih^ fortresses ; or the churches with the I'ed pillars of their porticos resting upon the backs of eagle-headed lions ; or even the white- coated garrison (now there no more), with its heavy-footed rank and file, its resplendent officers, its bristling fortifica- tions, its horses and artillery, crowding the piazzas of churches turned into barracks. Verona is an almost purely Gothic city in her architecture, and her churches are more worthy to be seen than any others in North Italy, outside of Venice. San Zenone, with the bronzes on its doors representing in the rudeness, of the first period of art the incidents of the Old Testament and the miracles of the saints — with the allegorical sculi)tures surrounding the interior and exterior of the portico, and illustrating, among other things, the creation of Eve with absolute literalness '^78 ' '4 J Efi' i r >';?'> Doorway of the Duomo, Verona Italian 5ourucv;s — with its fine, solemn crypt in wliicli the dust of the Verona titular saint lies entombed — with its minute windows, and its vast massive columns sustaining the roof upon capitals of every bizarre and fantastic device — is doubtless most abun- dant in that Gothic spirit, now grotesque and now earnest, which somewhere appears in all the churches of Verona ; which has carven upon the fa9ade of the Duomo the statues of Orlando and Oliviei-o, heroes of romance, and near them has placed the scandalous figure of a pig in a monk's robe and cowl, with a bx-eviary in his paw ; whicli has reared the exquisite monument of Guglielmo da Castelbarco before the church of St. Anastasia, and has produced the tombs of the Scaligeri before the chapel of Santa Maria Antica. I have already pledged myself not to attempt any description of these tombs, and shall not fall now. But I bought in the English tongue, as written at Verona, some '•' Notices," kept for sale by the sacristan, " of the Ancient Churg of Our Lady, and of the Tombs of the most illus- trious Family Della-Scala," and from these I think it no dereliction to quote verbatim. First is the tomb of Can Francesco, wlio was " surnamed the Great by reason of his valour." " With him the Great Alighieri and other exiles took refuge. We see his figure extended upon a bed, and above his statue on horsebac with the vizor down, and his crest falling behind his shoulders, his horse covered with mail. The columns and capitals are wonderful." "Within the Cemetery to the right leaning against the walls of the church is the tomb of John Scaliger." " In the side of this tomb near the wall of Sacristy, you see the urn that encloses the ashes of Martin I.," "who was traitorously killed on the 17th of October 1^377 by Scaramello of the Scaramelli, who wished to revenge the honour of a young lady of his family." " The Mausoleum tiiat is in the side facing the Place encloses the Martin II. 's ashes. . . . This building is sumptuous and wonderful because it stands on four columns, each of whicii has an architrave of nine feet. t.'cS 1 Italian Souincvs Verona On the beams stands a very large square of" marble that forms the floor, on which stands the urn of the Defunct. Four otiier columns support the vault that covers the urn ; and the rest is adorned by facts of Old Testament. Upon the Summit is the equestrian statue as large as life." Of " Can Signorius," whose tomb is the most splendid of all, the " Notices " say : "He spent two thousand florins of gold, in order to prepare his own sepulchre while he was yet alive, and to surpass the magnificence of his j^rede- cessors. The monument is as magnificent as the contracted space allows. Six columns support the floor of marble on which it stands covered with figures. Six other columns support the top, on that is the Scaliger's statues. . . . The monument is surrounded by an enclosure of red marble, Avith six pillai's, on which are square capitols with armed Saints. The rails of iron with the Arms of the Scala, are worked with a beauty wonderful for that age," or, I may add, for any age. These " rails " are an exquisite net-work of iron wrought by hand, with an art emulous of that of Nicolo Caparra at Florence. The chief device employed is a ladder (scala) constantly repeated in the centres of quatre-foils; and the whole fabric is still so flexible and perfect, after the lapse of centuries, that the net may be shaken throughout by a touch. Four other tombs of the Scaligeri are here, among which the " Notices" particularly mention that of Alboin della Scala : " He was one of the Cjhibelline party, as the arms on his urn schew, that is a staircase risen by an eagle — wherefore Dante said, I/i siilla Sea /a po) fa il santo Ucccllo." I should have been glad to meet the author of these delightful histories, but in his absence w-e fared well enough with the sacristan. When, a few hours before we left Verona, we came for a last look at the beautiful sepulchres, he recognised us, and seeing a sketch-book in the party, he invited us within the inclosure again, and then ran and fetched chairs for us to sit upon — nay, even ?-M ^. "^fu. Urtni^ al I i/urrva . Italian Sounicvs placed chairs for us to rest our feet on. Winning and Verona exuberant courtesy of tJie Italian race ! If I had never acknowledged it before, I must do homage to it now, remembering the sweetness of the sacristans and custodians of Verona. They were all men of the most sympathetic natures. He at San Zenone seemed never to have met with real friends till we expressed pleasure in the magni- ficent Mantegna, which is the pride of his church. " What colouring ! " he cried, and then triumphantly took us into the crypt : " What a magnificent crypt ! What works they executed in those days, there ! " At San Giorgio Maggiore, where there are a Tintoretto and a \'eronese, and four hor- rible swindling big pictures by Romanino, I discovered to my great dismay that I had in my pocket but five soldi, which I offered with much abasement and many apologies to the sacristan ; but he received them as if they had been so many napoleons, prayed me not to speak of embarrassment, and declared that his labours in our behalf had been nothing but pleasure. At Santa Maria in Organo, where are the wonderful intagli of Fra Giovanni da A erona, the sacristan fully shared our sori'ow that the best pictures could not be unveiled as it was Holy Week. He was also moved at the gradual decay of the vitagli, and led us to believe that, to a man of so much sensibility, the general ruinous state of the church was an inexpressible affliction ; and we rejoiced for his sake that it should possess at least one piece of art in perfect repair. This was a modern work, that day exposed for the first time, and it represented in a group of wooden figui-es The Death of St. Joseph. The \'irgin and Christ supported the dying saint on either hand ; and as the whole was vividly coloured, and rays of glory in pink and yellow gauze descended upon Joseph's head, nothing could have been more impressive. Parma is laid out with a regularity which may be called Parma characteristic of the great ducal cities of Italy, and which Italian 3oiunci?s Parma it fully shares with Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna. The signorial cities, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso, are ' far more picturesque, and Parma excels only in the number and beauty of her fountains. It is a city of gloomy aspect, says Valery, who possibly entered it in a pensive frame of mind, for its sadness did not impress us. We had just come from Modena, where the badness of our hotel enve- loped the city in an atmosphere of profound melancholy. Ill fact, it will not do to trust to travellers in anything. I, for example, have just now spoken of the many beautiful fountains in Parma because I think it right to uphold the statement of M. Richard's handbook ; but I only remember seeing one fountain, passably handsome, there. My Lord Corke, who was at Parma in 1754, says nothing of fountains, and Richard Lasells, Gent., who was there a century earlier, merely speaks of the fountains in the Duke's gardens, which, together with his Grace's " wild beasts " and "exquisite coaches," and "admirable Theater to exhibit Operas in," "the Domo, whose Cupola was painted bj'the rare hand of Corregio," and the church of the Capuchins, Avhere Alexander Fai'nese is buried, wei'e "the Chief things to be seen in Parma" at that day. The wild beasts have long ago run away with the exquisite coaches, but the other wonders named by Master Lasells are still extant in Parma, together with some things he does not name. Our minds, in going thither, were mainly bent upon Correggio and his works, and while our dinner was cooking at the admirable Alberga della Posta> we went off to feast upon the perennial Hash of Frogs in the dome of the Cathedral. This is one of the finest Gothic churches in Italy, and vividly recalls \'erona, while it has a quite unique and most beautiful feature in the three lijjht-columned ijalleries that traverse the facade one above another. Close at hand stands the ancient Baptistry, hardly less peculiar and beautiful ; but, after all, it is the work of the great painter which gives the temple its chief 284 ilu r)a|vU)lui i iv alliiiUal I. a Choir of ths Cathedral, Parma Italian Journeys ricfht to wonder and reverence. We found the fresco, of Parma coarse, much wasted, and at first glance, before the innu- merable arms and legs had time to order and attribute themselves to their respective bodies, we felt the justice of the undying spite which called this divinest of frescoes a guazzetto di rane. But in another moment it appeared to us the most sublime conception of the Assumption ever painted, and we did not find Caracci's praise too warm where he says : " And I still remain stupefied with the sight of so grand a work — everything so well conceived — so well seen from below — with so much severity, yet with so much judgment and so much grace; with a colouring which is of very flesh." The height of the fresco above the floor of the church is so vast that it might well appear like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense of the spectator. Brain, nerve, and muscle were strained to utter exhaustion in a very few minutes, and we came away with our admira- tion only half satisfied, and resolved to ascend the cupola next day, and see the fresco on something like equal terms. In one sort we did thus approach it, and as we looked at the gracious floating figures of the heavenly company through the apertures of the dome, they did seem to adopt us and make us part of the painting. But the tremendous depth, over which they drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to look into ; and I am not certain that I should counsel travellers to repeat our experience. Where still perfect,, the fresco can only gain from close inspection — it is painted with such exquisite and jealous perfection — yet the whole effect is now better from below, for the decay is less appa- rent ; and besides, life is short, and the stairway by which one ascends to the dome is in every way too exigent. It is with the most astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the Assumption to the contemplation of that other famous roof frescoed by Correggio, in the Monastero di San Paolo. You might almost touch the ceiling with your hand, it hovers so low with its counterfeit of vine-clambered 287 Italian Souincvs Parma trellis-work, and its pretty boys lookin