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ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 BY 
 
 W. D. HOWELLS. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "VENETIAN LIFE, 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON, 
 
 459 BECOME STREET. 
 
 1867. 
 
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by 
 
 WILLIAM D. Ho WELLS, 
 in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 
 
 RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 
 
 STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 
 H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE : 
 
 I. LEAVING VENICE . 9 
 
 II. FROM PADUA TO FERRARA 10 
 
 III. THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND THE PATHETIC 
 
 IN FERRARA 14 
 
 IV. THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA 43 
 
 V. UP AND DOWN GENOA 52 
 
 VI. BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES 65 
 
 VII. CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES 75 
 
 VIII. A DAY IN POMPEII ........ 89 
 
 IX. A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM .... 106 
 
 X. CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES 116 
 
 XI. THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES . . 136 
 
 XII. BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES 147 
 
 XIII. ROMAN PEARLS 151 
 
 FORZA MAGGIORE 178 
 
 AT PADUA 196 
 
 A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUA . . .216 
 
 A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI 235 
 
 MINOR TRAVELS : 
 
 I. PISA .... 251 
 
 II. THE FERRARA ROAD 259 
 
 III. TRIESTE 264 
 
 IV. BASSANO ... 274 
 
 V. POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE 280 
 
 VI. COMO ... 285 
 
 STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA . . . .293 
 
THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE. 
 .1. 
 
 LEAVING VENICE. 
 
 WE did not know, when we started from home in 
 Venice, on the 8th of November, 1864, that we had 
 taken the longest road to Rome. We thought that 
 of all the proverbial paths to the Eternal City that 
 leading to Padua, and thence through Ferrara and 
 Bologna to Florence, and so down the sea-shore from 
 Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the briefest, 
 and the cheapest. Who could have dreamed that 
 this path, so wisely and carefully chosen, would lead 
 us to Genoa, conduct us on shipboard, toss us four 
 dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void, bat- 
 tered, and bewildered, in Naples ? Luckily, 
 
 " The moving accident is not my trade," 
 
 for there are events of this journey (now happily at 
 an end) which, if I recounted them with unsparing 
 sincerity, would forever deter the reader from taking 
 any road to Rome. 
 
 Though, indeed, what is Rome, after all, when 
 you come to it ? 
 
n. 
 
 FROM PADUA TO FERRARA. 
 
 As far as to Ferrara there was no sign of devia- 
 tion from the direct line in our road, and the com- 
 pany was well enough. We had a Swiss family in 
 the car with us to Padua, and they told us how they 
 were going home to their mountains from Russia, 
 where they had spent nineteen years of their lives. 
 They were mother and father and only daughter, 
 and the last, without ever having seen her ancestral 
 country, was so Swiss in her yet childish beauty, 
 that she filled the morning twilight with vague im- 
 ages of glacial height, blue lake, snug chalet, and 
 whatever else of picturesque there is in paint and 
 print about Switzerland. Of course, as the light 
 grew brighter these images melted away, and left 
 only a little frost upon the window-pane. 
 
 The mother was restively anxious at nearing her 
 country, and told us every thing of its loveliness and 
 happiness. Nineteen years of absence had not robbed 
 it of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it 
 again took nothing from it. We said how glad we 
 should be if we were as near America as she was to 
 Switzerland. "America!" she screamed; "you 
 come from America ! Dear God, the world is wide 
 
FROM PADUA TO PERRAEA. 11 
 
 the world is wide ! " The thought was so paralyz- 
 ing that it silenced the fat little lady for a moment, 
 and gave her husband time to express his sympathy 
 with us in our war, which he understood perfectly 
 well. He trusted that the revolution to perpetuate 
 slavery must fail, and he hoped that the war would 
 soon end, for it made cotton very dear. 
 
 Europe is material : I doubt if, after Victor Hugo 
 and Garibaldi, there were many upon that continent 
 whose enthusiasm for American unity (which is Eu- 
 ropean freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the ex- 
 pensiveness of cotton. The fabrics were all doubled 
 in price, and every man in Europe paid tribute in 
 hard money to the devotion with which we prose- 
 cuted the war. and, incidentally, interrupted the cul- 
 tivation of cotton. 
 
 We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted 
 at Padua, where we were to take the diligence for 
 the Po. In the diligence their loss was more than 
 made good by the company of the only honest man 
 in Italy. Of course this honest man had been a 
 great sufferer from his own countrymen, and I wish 
 that all English and American tourists, who think 
 themselves the sole victims of publican rapacity and 
 deceit in Italy, could have heard our honest man's 
 talk. The truth is, these ingenious people prey upon 
 their own kind with an avidity quite as keen as that 
 with which they devour strangers; and I am half- 
 persuaded that a ready-witted foreigner fares better 
 among them than a traveller of their own nation. 
 Italians will always pretend, on any occasion, that 
 
12 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 you have been plundered much worse than they , 
 but the reverse often happens. They give little in 
 fees ; but their landlord, their porter, their driver, 
 and their boatman pillage them with the same im- 
 punity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest 
 man in the diligence, he had suffered such enormities 
 at the hands of the Paduans, from which we had just 
 escaped, and at the hands of the Farrarese, into 
 which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles 
 scant an hour), that I was almost minded to stop be- 
 tween the nests of those brigands and pass the rest 
 of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man lived. 
 His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to 
 illustrate the strong municipal spirit which still dom- 
 inates all Italy, and which is more inimical to an 
 effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser 
 has ever been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a 
 foreigner at Padua, twenty-five miles north, and a 
 foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles south ; and 
 throughout Italy the native of one city is an alien in 
 another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or an 
 American with people who consider every stranger 
 as sent them by the bounty of Providence to be 
 eaten alive. Heaven knows 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 
 
FROM PADUA TO FERRARA. 13 
 
 snuff with his whole person ; and he volunteered, at 
 sight of a flock of geese, a recipe which I give the 
 reader : Stuff a goose with sausage ; let it hang in 
 the weather during the winter ; and in the spring cut 
 it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and 
 delicate soup. 
 
 But after all our friend's talk, though constant, 
 became dispiriting, and we were willing when he left 
 us. His integrity had, indeed, been so oppressive 
 that I was glad to be swindled in the charge for our 
 dinner at the Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more 
 cheerfully on to Ferrara. 
 
m. 
 
 THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND THE 
 PATHETIC IN FERRARA. 
 
 I. 
 
 IT was one of the fatalities of travel, rather than 
 any real interest in the poet, which led me to visit 
 the prison of Tasso on the night of our arrival, which 
 was mild and moonlit. The portier at the Stella 
 d'Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows 
 which it is sometimes difficult to respect, and I went 
 and paid this homage in the coal-cellar in which was 
 never imprisoned the poet whose works I had not 
 read. 
 
 The famous hospital of St. Anna, where Tasso 
 was confined for seven years, is still an asylum for 
 the infirm and sick, but it is no longer used as a 
 mad-house. It stands on one of the long, silent 
 Ferrarese streets, not far from the Ducal Castle, and 
 it is said that from the window of his cell the un- 
 happy poet could behold Leonora in her tower. It 
 may be so ; certainly those who can believe in the 
 genuineness of the cell will have no trouble in be- 
 lieving that the vision of Tasso could pierce through 
 several brick walls and a Doric portico, and at last 
 comprehend the lady at her casement in the castle. 
 
FERRARA. 15 
 
 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 dis- 
 tinguish his prey, for a seeker after the True and 
 Beautiful, he relinquished his romance, lighted a 
 waxen taper, unbolted a heavy door with a dramatic 
 clang, and preceded me to the cell of Tasso. We 
 descended a little stairway, and found ourselves in a 
 sufficiently spacious court, which was still ampler in 
 the poet's time, and was then a garden planted with 
 trees and flowers. On a low doorway to the right 
 was inscribed the legend " PRIGIONE DI TASSO," 
 and passing through this doorway into a kind of re- 
 ception-cell, we entered the poet's dungeon. It is an 
 oblong room, with a low wagon-roof ceiling, under 
 which it is barely possible to stand upright. A sin- 
 gle narrow 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 suffer- 
 ing, without effusion, and he drew my attention to 
 other remarkable things in the cell, without troubling 
 himself to palliate their improbability in the least. 
 They were his stock in trade ; you paid your money, 
 and took your choice of believing in them or not. 
 On the other hand, my portier, an ex-valet de place, 
 pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm, 
 
16 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 and expressed the freshest delight in the inspection 
 of each object of interest. 
 
 One still faintly discerns among the vast number of 
 names with which the walls of the ante-cell are be- 
 written, that of Lamartine. The name of Byron, 
 which was once deeply graven in the stucco, had 
 been scooped away by the Grand Duke of Tuscany 
 (so the custodian said), and there is only part of a 
 capital B now visible. But the cell itself is still 
 fragrant of associations with the noble bard, who, 
 according to the story related to Valery, caused him- 
 self to be locked up in it, and there, with his head 
 fallen upon his breast, and frequently smiting his brow, 
 spent two hours in pacing the floor with great strides. 
 It is a touching picture ; but its pathos becomes some- 
 what embarrassing when you enter the cell, and see 
 the impossibility of .taking more than three generous 
 paces without turning. When Byron issued forth, 
 after this exercise, he said (still according to Valery) 
 to the custodian : " I thank thee, good man ! The 
 thoughts of Tasso are now all in my mind and heart." 
 "A short time after his departure from Ferrara," adds 
 the Frenchman, maliciously, " he composed his ' La- 
 ment of Tasso,' a mediocre result from such inspira- 
 tion." No doubt all this is colored, for the same 
 author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity 
 of the spectacle : he declares that Byron spent part 
 of his time in the cell in writing upon the ceiling 
 Lamartine's verses on Tasso, which he misspelled. 
 The present visitor has no means of judging of the 
 truth concerning this, for the lines of the poet have 
 
FERRARA. 17 
 
 been so smoked by the candles of successive pil- 
 grims in their efforts to get light on them, that they 
 are now utterly illegible. But if it is uncertain what 
 were Byron's emotions on visiting the prison of 
 Tasso, there is no doubt about Lady Morgan's : she 
 " experienced a suffocating emotion ; her heart failed 
 her on entering that cell ; and she satisfied a mel- 
 ancholy curiosity at the cost of a most painful sen- 
 sation." 
 
 I find this amusing fact stated in a translation of 
 her ladyship's own language, in a clever guide-book 
 called II Servitore di Piazza, which I bought at Fer- 
 rara, and from which, I confess, I have learnt all I 
 know to confirm me in my doubt of Tasso's prison. 
 The Count Avventi, who writes this book, prefaces 
 it by saying that he is a valet de place who knows 
 how to read and write, and he employs these unusual 
 gifts with singular candor and clearness. No one, he 
 says, before the nineteenth century, ever dreamed of 
 calling the cellar in question Tasso's prison, and it 
 was never before that time made the shrine of sen- 
 timental pilgrimage, though it has since been visited 
 by every traveller who has passed through Ferrara. 
 It was used during the poet's time to hold charcoal 
 and lime ; and not long ago died an old servant of 
 the hospital, who remembered its use for that pur- 
 pose. It is damp, close, and dark, and Count Av- 
 venti thinks it hardly possible that a delicate courtier 
 could have lived seven years in a place unwholesome 
 enough to kill a stout laborer in two months ; while 
 it seems to him not probable that Tasso should have 
 2 
 
18 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 received there the visits of princes and other dis- 
 tinguished persons whom Duke Alfonso allowed to 
 see him, or that a prisoner who was often permitted 
 to ride about the city in a carriage should have been 
 thrust back into such a cavern on his return to the 
 hospital. "After this," says our valet de place who 
 knows how to read and write, " visit the prison of 
 Tasso, certain that in the hospital of St. Anna that 
 great man was confined for many years ; " and, with 
 this chilly warning, leaves his reader to his emotions. 
 I am afraid that if as frank caution were uttered 
 in regard to other memorable places, the objects of 
 interest in Italy would dwindle sadly in number, and 
 the valets de place, whether they know how to read 
 and write or not, would be starved to death. Even 
 the learning of Italy is poetic ; and an Italian would 
 rather enjoy a fiction than know a fact in which 
 preference I am not ready to pronounce him unwise. 
 But this characteristic of his embroiders the stranger's 
 progress throughout the whole land with fanciful im- 
 probabilities ; so that if one use his eyes half as much 
 as his wonder, he must see how much better it would 
 have been to visit, in fancy, scenes that have an in- 
 terest so largely imaginary. The utmost he can 
 make out of the most famous place is, that it is pos- 
 sibly what it is said to be, and is more probably as 
 near that as any thing local enterprise could furnish. 
 He visits the very cell in which Tasso was confined, 
 and has the satisfaction of knowing that it was the 
 charcoal-cellar of the hospital in which the poet 
 dwelt. And the genius loci where is that ? Away 
 
FERRARA. 19 
 
 in the American woods, very likely, whispering some 
 dreamy, credulous youth, telling him charming 
 fables of its locus, and proposing to itself to abandon 
 him as soon as he sets foot upon its native ground. 
 You see, though I cared little about Tasso, and 
 nothing about his prison, I was heavily disappointed 
 in not being able to believe in it, and felt somehow 
 that I had been awakened from a cherished dream. 
 
 n. 
 
 BUT I have no right to cast the unbroken shadow 
 of my skepticism upon the reader, and so I tell him 
 a story about Ferrara which I actually believe. He 
 must know that in Ferrara the streets are marvel- 
 ous long and straight. On the corners formed by 
 the crossing of two of the longest and straightest of 
 these streets stand four palaces, in only one of 
 which we have a present interest. This palace my 
 guide took me to see, after our visit to Tasso's prison, 
 and, standing in its shadow, he related to me the 
 occurrence which has given it a sad celebrity. It 
 was, in the time of the gifted toxicologist, the resi- 
 dence of Lucrezia Borgia, who used to make poison- 
 ous little suppers there, and ask the best families 
 of Italy to partake of them. It happened on one 
 occasion that Lucrezia Borgia was thrust out of a 
 ball-room at Venice as a disreputable character, and 
 treated with peculiar indignity. She determined to 
 make the Venetians repent their unwonted accession 
 of virtue, and she therefore allowed the occurrence to 
 
20 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 be forgotten till the proper moment of her revenge 
 arrived, when she gave a supper, and invited to her 
 board eighteen young and handsome Venetian nobles. 
 Upon the preparation of this repast she bestowed all 
 the resources of her skillful and exquisite knowledge ; 
 and the result was, the Venetians were so felicitously 
 poisoned that they had just time to listen to a speech 
 from the charming and ingenious lady of the house 
 before expiring. In this address she reminded her 
 guests of the occurrence in the Venetian ball-room, 
 and perhaps exulted a little tediously in her present 
 vengeance. She was surprised and pained when 
 one of the guests interrupted her, and, justifying 
 the treatment she had received at Venice, declared 
 himself her natural son. The lady instantly recog- 
 nized him, and in the sudden revulsion of maternal 
 feeling, begged him to take an antidote. This he 
 not only refused to do, but continued his dying re- 
 proaches, till his mother, losing her self-command, 
 drew her poniard and plunged it into his heart. 
 
 The blood of her son fell upon the table-cloth, and 
 this being hung out of the window to dry, the wall 
 received a stain, which neither the sun nor rain of 
 centuries sufficed to efface, and which was only re- 
 moved with the masonry, when it became necessary 
 to restore the wall under that window, a few months 
 before the time of my visit to Ferrara. Accordingly, 
 the blood-stain has now disappeared ; but the consci- 
 entious artist who painted the new wall has faithfully 
 restored the tragic spot, by bestowing upon the stucco 
 a bloody dash of Venetian red. 
 
FERA.RRA. 21 
 
 III. 
 
 IT would be pleasant and merciful, I think, if old 
 towns, after having served a certain number of cen- 
 turies for the use and pride of men, could be released 
 to a gentle, unmolested decay. I, for my part, would 
 like to have the ducal cities of North Italy, such as 
 Mantua, Modena, Parma, and Ferrara, locked up 
 quietly within their walls, and left to crumble and 
 totter and fall, without any harder presence to vex 
 them in their decrepitude than that of some gray 
 custodian, who should come to the gate with clank- 
 ing keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if he 
 gave signs of a reverent sympathy, to look for a 
 little while upon the reserved and dignified desola- 
 tion. It is a shame to tempt these sad old cities into 
 unnatural activity, when they long ago made their 
 peace with the world, and would fain be mixing their 
 weary brick and mortar with the earth's unbuilded 
 dust ; and it is hard for the emotional traveller to 
 restrain his sense of outrage at finding them inhab- 
 ited, and their rest broken by sounds of toil, traffic, 
 and idleness ; at seeing places that would gladly have 
 had done with history still doomed to be parts of po- 
 litical systems, to read the newspapers, and to expose 
 railway guides and caricatures of the Pope and of 
 Napoleon in their shop windows. 
 
 Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a liv- 
 ing nation against her will, and I therefore marveled 
 the more that she had become a portion of the pres- 
 ent kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had its 
 
22 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 day long before ours ; it had been a republic, and 
 then subject to lords ; and then, its lords becoming 
 dukes, it had led a life of gayety and glory till its 
 fall, and given the world such names and memories 
 as had fairly won it the right to rest forever from 
 making history. Its individual existence ended with 
 that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when the Pope de- 
 clared it reverted to the Holy See ; and I always 
 fancied that it must have received with a spectral, 
 yet courtly kind of surprise, those rights of man 
 which bloody-handed France distributed to the Ital- 
 ian cities in 1796 ; that it must have experienced a 
 ghostly bewilderment in its rapid transformation, 
 thereafter, under Napoleon, into part of the Cispadan 
 Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the Italian Repub- 
 lic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and that it must 
 have sunk back again under the rule of the Popes 
 with gratitude and relief at last as phantoms are 
 reputed to be glad when released from haunting the 
 world where they once dwelt. I speak of all this, not 
 so much from actual knowledge of facts as from per- 
 sonal feeling ; for it seems to me that if I were a 
 city of the past, and must be inhabited at all, I 
 should choose just such priestly domination, assured 
 that though it consumed my substance, yet it would 
 be well for my fame and final repose. I should like to 
 feel that my old churches were safe from demolition ; 
 that my old convents and monasteries should always 
 shelter the pious indolence of friars and nuns. It 
 would be pleasant to have studious monks exploring 
 quaint corners of my unphilosophized annals, and 
 
FEBBARA. 23 
 
 gentle, snuff-taking abbes writing up episodes in the 
 history of my noble families, and dedicating them to 
 the present heirs of past renown ; while the thinker 
 and the reviewer should never penetrate my archives. 
 Being myself done with war, I should be glad to 
 have my people exempt, as they are under the Pope, 
 from military service ; and I should hope that if the 
 Legates taxed them, the taxes paid would be as so 
 many masses said to get my soul out of the purgatory 
 of perished capitals. Finally, I should trust that in 
 the sanctified keeping of the Legates my mortal part 
 would rest as sweetly as bones laid in hallowed earth 
 brought from Jerusalem ; and that under their serene 
 protection I should be forever secure from being in 
 any way exhumed and utilized by the ruthless hand 
 of Progress. 
 
 However, as I said, this is a mere personal prefer- 
 ence, and other old cities might feel differently. In- 
 deed, though disposed to condole with Ferrara upon 
 the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, 
 I could not deny, on better acquaintance with her, 
 that she was still almost entirely of the past. She has 
 certainly missed that ideal perfection of non-existence 
 under the Popes which I have just depicted, but she 
 is practically almost as profoundly at rest under the 
 King of Italy. One may walk long through the 
 longitude and rectitude of many of her streets with- 
 out the encounter of a single face : the place, as a 
 whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii, where 
 there are always strangers ; perhaps the only cities in 
 the world worthy to compete with Ferrara in point 
 
24 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 of agreeable solitude are Mantua and Herculaneum. 
 It is the newer part of the town the modern quar- 
 ter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was known 
 which is loneliest ; and whatever motion and 
 cheerfulness are still felt in Ferrara linger fondly 
 about the ancient holds of life about the street 
 before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and 
 narrower streets branching away from the piazza of 
 the Duomo, where, on market days, there is a kind 
 of dreamy tumult. In the Ghetto we were almost 
 crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with 
 an enterprise that contrasted strangely with shop- 
 keeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed, surprise at the 
 presence of strangers spending two days in Ferrara 
 when they could have got away sooner, was the only 
 emotion which the whole population agreed in ex- 
 pressing with any degree of energy, but into this 
 they seemed to throw their whole vitality. The 
 Italians are everywhere an artless race, so far as con- 
 cerns the gratification of their curiosity, from which 
 no consideration of decency deters them. Here in 
 Ferrara they turned about and followed us with their 
 eyes, came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us 
 at street-corners, and openly and audibly debated 
 whether we were English or German. We might 
 have thought this interest a tribute to something pe- 
 culiar in our dress or manner, had it not visibly 
 attended other strangers who arrived with us. It 
 rose almost into a frenzy of craving to know more of 
 us all, when on the third day the whole city assem- 
 bled before our hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of 
 
FERRARA. 25 
 
 desperate cry, the departure of the heavy-laden om- 
 nibus which bore us and our luggage from their 
 midst. 
 
 IV. 
 
 I DOUBT if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo 
 at Parma, and the Four Fabrics at Pisa, there is a 
 church more worthy to be seen for its quaint, rich 
 architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is 
 of that beloved Gothic of which eye or soul cannot 
 weary, and we continually wandered back to it from 
 other more properly interesting objects. It is hor- 
 ribly restored in-doors, and its Renaissance splendors 
 soon drove us forth, after we had looked at the Last 
 Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this painting 
 is muscular and Michelangelic, and the artist's notion 
 of putting his friends in heaven and his foes in hell 
 is by no means novel ; but he has achieved fame for 
 his picture by the original thought of making it his 
 revenge for a disappointment in love. The unhappy 
 lady who refused his love is represented in the depths, 
 in the attitude of supplicating the pity and interest 
 of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastia- 
 nino, and who consequently has no mercy on her 
 that snubbed him. But I counted of far more value 
 than this fresco the sincere old sculptures on the 
 faQade of the cathedral, in which the same subject is 
 treated, beginning from the moment the archangel's 
 trump has sounded. The people getting suddenly 
 out of their graves at the summons are all admirable ; 
 but the best among them is the excellent man with 
 
26 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 one leg over the side of his coffin, and tugging with 
 both hands to pull himself up, while the coffin-lid 
 tumbles off behind. One sees instantly that the 
 conscience of this early riser is clean, for he makes 
 no miserable attempt to turn over for a nap of a few 
 thousand years more, with the pretense that it was 
 not the trump of doom, but some other and unim- 
 portant noise he had heard. The final reward of 
 the blessed is expressed by the repose of one small 
 figure in the lap of a colossal effigy, which I under- 
 stood 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 pots. It is doubtful (considering 
 the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured in the 
 one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the 
 artist intended the condition of his sinners to be so 
 horribly comic as it is ; but the effect is just as great, 
 for all that, and the slowest conscience might well 
 take alarm from the spectacle of fate so grotesque 
 and ludicrous ; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the art- 
 ist here punishes, as Dante knew best how to do, the 
 folly of sinners as well as their wickedness. Boil- 
 ing is bad enough ; but to be boiled in an undeniable 
 dinner-pot, 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 government of the Dukes, were free 
 
FEREARA. 27 
 
 to live where they chose in the city ; but the Pope's 
 Legate assigned them afterward a separate quarter, 
 which was closed with gates. Large numbers of 
 Spanish Jews fled hither during the persecutions, 
 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, Isaaco 
 degli Abranelli, a man of excellent learning in the 
 Scriptures, 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 tempting 
 antiquarian's shop on the corner from which you 
 turn up toward the Library. I should think such a 
 man would find a sort of melancholy solace in such a 
 place : 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 explain the universal 
 Israelitish fondness for dealing in relics and ruins. 
 
 v. 
 
 THE Ghetto was in itself indifferent to us ; it was 
 merely our way to the Library, whither the great 
 memory of Ariosto invited us to see his famous relics 
 treasured there. 
 
 We found that the dead literati of Ferrara had 
 the place wholly to themselves; not a living soul 
 disputed the solitude of the halls with the custodi- 
 
28 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 ans, 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 abandoned ugliness, and sleeps under three epi- 
 taphs ; while cherubs frescoed on the wall behind 
 affect to disclose the 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 Library by the French, when they turned the 
 church into a barracks for their troops. The poet's 
 dust, therefore, rests here, where the worm, work- 
 ing 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 G-erusalemma, 
 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 let- 
 ter 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 
 
FERRAEA. 29 
 
 them be mixed with others." But when the slow 
 custodian had at last unlocked that more costly frag- 
 ment 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 traveller, in presence 
 of its treasures, forget whatever other travellers have 
 said or written about them. I had read so much of 
 Ariosto's industry, and of the proof of it in this man- 
 uscript, 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 afterward to read again in my Valery 
 how sensibly all others had felt the preciousness of 
 that famous page, which, filled with half a score of 
 previous failures, contains in a little open space near 
 the margin, the poet's final triumph in a clearly writ- 
 ten stanza. Scarcely less touching and interesting 
 than Ariosto's painful work on these yellow leaves, is 
 the grand and simple tribute which another Italian 
 poet was allowed to inscribe on one of them : " Vit- 
 torio 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 man- 
 uscript 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 Lodo- 
 vico, which 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 
 
30 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 had picked up from his dust (when it was removed 
 from the church to the Library), and neatly bottled 
 and labeled. In like manner, they keep a great 
 deal of sanctity in bottles with the bones of saints in 
 Italy ; but I found very little avor of poesy hanging 
 about this literary relic. 
 
 As if the melancholy fragment of mortality had 
 marshaled us the way, we went from the Library to 
 the house of Ariosto, which stands at the end of a 
 long, long street, not far from the railway station. 
 There was not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat 
 nor a dog to be seen in all that long street, at high 
 noon, as we looked down its narrowing perspective, 
 and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for 
 a posthumous meeting in his little reddish brick house, 
 there is nothing to prevent their assembly, in broad 
 daylight, from any part of the neighborhood. There 
 was no presence, however, more spiritual than a 
 comely country girl to respond to our summons at 
 the door, and nothing but a tub of corn-meal disputed 
 our passage inside. Directly I found the house in- 
 habited by living people, I began to be sorry that it 
 was not as empty as the Library and the street. In- 
 deed, it is much better with Petrarch's house at 
 Arqua, where the grandeur of the past is never mo- 
 lested by the small household joys and troubles of 
 the present. That house is vacant, and no eyes less 
 tender and fond than the poet's visitors may look 
 down from its windows over the slope of vines and 
 ojives which it crowns ; and it seemed hard, here in 
 Ferrara, where the houses are so many and the 
 
FERRARA. 31 
 
 people are so few, that Ariosto's house could not be 
 left to him. Parva sed apta mihi, he has content- 
 edly written upon the front ; but I doubt if he finds 
 it large enough for another family, though his modern 
 housekeeper reserves him certain rooms for visitors. 
 To gain these, you go up to the second story 
 there are but two floors and cross to the rear of 
 the building, where Ariosto's chamber opens out of 
 an ante-room, and looks down upon a pinched and 
 faded bit of garden.* In this chamber they say the 
 poet died. It is oblong, and not large. I should 
 think the windows and roof were of the poet's time, 
 and that every thing else had been restored ; I am 
 quite sure the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant 
 inventions ; for the poet's burly great arm-chair and 
 graceful inkstand are both preserved in the Library. 
 But the house is otherwise decent and probable ; and 
 I do not question but it was in the hall where we en- 
 countered the meal-tub that the poet kept a copy of 
 his " Furioso" subject to the corrections and advice 
 of his visitors. 
 
 The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been with- 
 in a few years restored out of all memory and sem- 
 blance of itself; and my wish to see the place in 
 
 * In this garden the 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." 
 
32 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 which the poet was born and spent his childhood re- 
 sulted, after infinite search, in finding a building 
 faced newly with stucco and newly French-win- 
 dowed. 
 
 Our portier said it was the work of the late Eng- 
 lish Yice-Consul, who had bought the house. When 
 I complained of the sacrilege, he said : " Yes, it is 
 true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were 
 not one of the noble families of Ferrara." 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which 
 cluster so many sad and splendid memories, stands 
 in the heart of the city. I think that the moonlight 
 which, on the night of our arrival, showed me its 
 massive walls rising from the shadowy moat that sur- 
 rounds them, and its four great towers, heavily but- 
 tressed, and expanding at the top into bulging cor- 
 nices of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on 
 nothing else in all Italy so picturesque, and so full of 
 the proper dread charm of feudal times, as this pile 
 of gloomy and majestic strength. The daylight took 
 nothing of this charm from it ; for the castle stands 
 isolated in the midst of the city, as its founder meant 
 that it should,* and modern civilization has not 
 
 * The castle of Ferrara was begun in 1385 by Niccolo cTEste, 
 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 
 
FEBRARA. 33 
 
 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 
 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 grind- 
 ing through the mills of law, or passing in the routine 
 of the offices, are the guests encountered in the cor- 
 ridors ; and all that bright- colored throng of the old 
 days, ladies and lor&s, is passed from the scene. The 
 melodrama is over, friends, and now we have a play 
 of real life, founded on fact and inculcating a moral. 
 
 Of course the custodians were slow to admit any 
 change of this kind. If you could have believed 
 them, and the poor people told as many lies as they 
 could to make you, you would believe that noth- 
 ing had ever happened of a commonplace nature in 
 
 palace of his master, which was immediately assailed. The 
 prince's own life was threatened, and he was forced to surrender 
 the fugitive to the people, who tore Tortona limb from limb, 
 and then, 1 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. 
 
 3 
 
34 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 this castle. The taking-off of Hugo and Parisina 
 they think the great merit of the castle ; and one of 
 them, seeing us*, made haste to light his taper and 
 conduct us down to the dungeons where those un- 
 happy lovers were imprisoned. It is the misfortune 
 of memorable dungeons to acquire, when put upon 
 show, just the reverse of those properties which 
 should raise horror and distress in the mind of the 
 beholder. It was impossible to deny that the cells 
 of Parisina and of Hugo were both singularly warm, 
 dry, and comfortable ; and we, who had never been 
 imprisoned in them, found it hard to command, for 
 our sensation, the terror and agony of the miserable 
 ones who suffered there. We, happy and secure in 
 these dungeons, could not think of the guilty and 
 wretched pair bowing themselves to the headsman's 
 stroke in the gloomy chamber under the Hall of 
 Aurora ; nor of the Marquis, in his night-long walk, 
 breaking at last into frantic remorse and tears to know 
 that his will had been accomplished. Nay, there 
 upon its very scene, the whole tragedy faded from 
 us ; and, seeing our wonder so cold, the custodian 
 tried to kindle it by saying that in the time of the 
 event these cells were much dreadfuller than now, 
 which was no doubt true. The floors of the dun- 
 geons are both below the level of the moat, and the 
 narrow windows, or rather crevices to admit the 
 light, were cut in the prodigiously thick wall just 
 above the water, and were defended with four succes- 
 sive iron gratings. The dungeons are some distance 
 apart : that of Hugo was separated from the outer 
 
FERRABA. 35 
 
 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 
 which the Marquis, looking into the other, discov- 
 ered the guilt of the lovers. The windows are now 
 walled up, but are neatly represented to the credu- 
 lous eye by a fresco of lattices. 
 
 Valery mentions another claim upon the interest 
 of the tourist which this castle may make, in the fact 
 that it once sheltered John Calvin, who was pro- 
 tected by the Marchioness Rene*e, wife of Hercules 
 II. ; and my Servitore di Piazza (the one who knows 
 how to read and write) gives the following account 
 of the matter, in speaking of the domestic chapel 
 which Renee had built in the castle : " This lady 
 was learned in belles-lettres and in the schismatic 
 doctrines which at that time were insinuating them- 
 selves throughout France and Germany, and with 
 which Calvin, Luther, and other proselytes, agitated 
 the people, and threatened war to the Catholic re- 
 ligion. Nationally fond of innovation, and averse to 
 the court of Rome on account of the dissensions be- 
 tween her father and Pope Julius II., Rene*e began 
 to receive the teachings of Calvin, with whom she 
 maintained correspondence. Indeed, Calvin him- 
 self, under the name of Huppeville, visited her in 
 
36 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 Ferrara, in 1536, and ended by corrupting her mind 
 and seducing her into his own errors, which pro- 
 duced discord between her and her religious hus- 
 band, and resulted in his placing her in temporary 
 seclusion, in order to attempt her conversion. Hence, 
 the chapel is faced with marble, paneled in relief, 
 and studied to avoid giving place ^o saints or images, 
 which were disapproved by the almost Anabaptist 
 doctrines of Calvin, then fatally imbibed by the 
 princess." 
 
 We would willingly, as Prostestants, have visited 
 this wicked chapel; but we were prevented from 
 seeing it, as well as the famous frescoes of Dosso 
 Dossi in the Hall of Aurora, by the fact that the 
 prefect was giving a little dinner (pranzetto) in that 
 part of the castle. W,e were not so greatly disap- 
 pointed in reality as we made believe ; but our servi- 
 tore di piazza (the unlettered one) was almost moved 
 to lesa maestd with vexation. He had been full of 
 scorching patriotism the whole morning ; but now 
 electing the unhappy and apologetic custodian rep- 
 resentative of Piedmontese tyranny, he bitterly as- 
 sailed the government of the king. In the times of 
 His Holiness the Legates had made it their pleasure 
 and duty to show the whole castle to strangers. But 
 now strangers must be sent away without seeing its 
 chief beauties, because, forsooth, the prefect was giv- 
 ing a little dinner. Presence of the Devil ! 
 
FERRARA. 37 
 
 VII. , 
 
 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 business men to say their prayers, but gay 
 young dandies, who knelt and repeated their orisons 
 and then rose and went seriously out. In Venice 
 they would have posted themselves against a pillar, 
 sucked the heads of their sticks, and made eyes at 
 the young ladies kneeling near them. This degree 
 of religion was all the more remarkable in Ferrara, 
 because that city had been so many years under 
 the Pope, and His Holiness contrives commonly to 
 prevent the appearance of religion in young men 
 throughout his dominions. 
 
 Valery speaks of the delightful society which he 
 met in the gray old town ; and it is said that Ferrara 
 has an unusual share of culture in her wealthy class, 
 which is large. With such memories of learning 
 and literary splendor as belong to her, it would be 
 strange if she did not in some form keep alive the 
 sacred flame. But, though there may be refinement 
 and erudition in Ferrara, she has given no great 
 name to modern Italian literature. Her men of 
 letters seem to be of that race of grubs singularly 
 abundant in Italy, men who dig out of archives and 
 libraries some topic of special and momentary interest 
 and print it, unstudied and uphilosophized. Their 
 books are material, not literature, and it is marvelous 
 
38 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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. It re- 
 mains to be seen whether the free speech and free 
 press of Italy can reawaken the intellectual activity 
 of the cities which once gave the land so many 
 literary capitals. 
 
 What numbers of people used to write verses in 
 Ferrara ! By operation of the principle which causes 
 things concerning whatever subject you happen to be 
 interested in to turn up in every direction, I found 
 a volume of these dead-and-gone immortals at a book- 
 stall, one day, in Venice. It is a curiously yellow 
 and uncomfortable volume of the year 1703, printed 
 all in italics. I suppose there are two hundred odd 
 rhymers selected from in that book, and how droll 
 the most of them are, with their unmistakable traces 
 of descent from Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini ! What 
 acres of enameled meadow there are in those pages ! 
 Brooks enough to turn all the mills in the world 
 go purling through them. I should say some thou- 
 sands of nymphs are constantly engaged in weaving 
 garlands there, and the swains keep such a piping 
 on those familiar notes, Amore, dolore, crudele^ and 
 miele. Poor little poets ! they knew no other tunes. 
 Do not now weak voices twitter from a hundred 
 books, in unconscious imitation of the hour's great 
 
FERRARA. 39 
 
 VIII. 
 
 I THINK some of the pleasantest people in Italy are 
 the army gentlemen. There is the race's gentleness 
 in their ways, in spite of their ferocious trade, and 
 an American freedom of style. They brag in a 
 manner that makes one feel at home immediately; 
 and met in travel, they are ready to render any little 
 kindness. 
 
 The other year at Reggio ' (which is not far from 
 Modena) we stopped to dine at a restaurant where 
 the whole garrison had its coat off and was playing 
 billiards, with the exception of one or two officers, 
 who were dining. These rose and bowed as we 
 entered their room, and when the waiter pretended 
 that such and such dishes were out (in Italy the 
 waiter, for some mysterious reason, always pretends 
 that the best dishes are out), they bullied him for the 
 honor of Italy, and made him bring them to us. 
 Indeed, I am afraid his life was sadly harassed by 
 those brave men. We were in deep despair at find- 
 ing no French bread, and the waiter swore with the 
 utmost pathos that there was none ; but as soon as 
 his back was turned, a tightly laced little captain rose 
 and began to forage for the bread. He opened every 
 drawer and cupboard in the room, and finding none* 
 invaded another room, captured several loaves from 
 the plates laid there, and 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. 
 
I 
 
 40 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 Three officers, who dined with us at the table 
 cFhdte of the Stella d'Oro in Ferrara (and excellent 
 dinners were those we ate there), were visibly anxious 
 to address us, and began not uncivilly, but still in 
 order that we should hear, to speculate on our 
 nationality among themselves. It appeared that we 
 were Germans ; for one of these officers, who had 
 formerly been in the Austrian service at Vienna, 
 recognized the word bitter in our remarks on the 
 beccafichi. As I did not care to put these fine fel- 
 lows to the trouble of hating us for others' faults, I 
 made bold to say that we were not Germans, and to 
 add that bitter was also an English word. Ah ! yes, 
 to be sure, one of them admitted ; when he was with 
 the Sardinian army in the Crimea, he had frequently 
 heard the word used by the English soldiers. He 
 nodded confirmation of what he said to his comrades ; 
 and then was good enough to display what English 
 he knew. It was barely sufficient to impress his 
 comrades ; but it led the way to a good deal of talk 
 in Italian. 
 
 " I suppose you gentlemen are all Piedmontese ? " 
 I said. 
 
 " Not at all," said our Crimean. " I am from 
 Como ; this gentleman, il signor Conte, (il signor 
 Conte bowed,) is of Piacenza ; and our friend across 
 the table is Genoese. The army is doing a great deal 
 to unify Italy. We are all Italians now, and you 
 see we speak Italian, and not our dialects, to- 
 gether." 
 
 My cheap remark that it was a fine thing to see 
 
FERRAEA. 41 
 
 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 
 colors. 
 
 " I scarcely know," I said. " We are Americans." 
 
 Our friends at once grew more cordial. " Oh, 
 American*!" They had great pleasure of it. Did 
 we think Signor Leencolen would be reflected ? 
 
 I supposed that he had been elected that day, 
 I said. 
 
 Ah ! this was the election day, then. Cmpeito ! 
 
 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 spoke 
 Spanish. The count from Piacenza wore an air of 
 pathetic discomfiture, and tried to invent a trans- 
 atlantic relative, as I think, but failed. 
 
 I am persuaded that none of these warriors really 
 had kinsmen in America, but that they all pretended 
 to have them, out of politeness to us, and that they 
 believed each other. It was very kind of them, and 
 we were so grateful that we put no embarrassing 
 questions. Indeed, the conversation presently took 
 another course, and grew to include the whole table. 
 
 There was an extremely pretty Italian present 
 with her newly wedded husband, who turned out to 
 be a retired officer. He fraternized at once with our 
 
42 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 soldiers, and when we left the table they all rose and 
 made military obeisances. Having asked leave to 
 light their cigars, they were smoking the sweet 
 young bride blowing a fairy cloud from her rosy lips 
 with the rest. " Indeed," I heard an Italian lady 
 once remark, " why should men pretend to deny us 
 the privilege of smoking ? It is so pleasant and 
 innocent." It is but just to the Italians to say that 
 they do not always deny it; and there is, without 
 doubt, a certain grace and charm in a pretty fuma- 
 trice. I suppose it is a habit not so pleasing in an 
 ugly or middle-aged woman. 
 
IV. 
 
 THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 
 I. 
 
 WE had intended to stay only one day at Ferrara, 
 but just at that time the storms predicted on the 
 Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts, by Mathieu de la 
 Drome, had been raging all over Italy, and the rail- 
 way communications were broken in every direction. 
 The magnificent work through and under the Apen- 
 nines, between Bologna and Florence, had been 
 washed away by the mountain torrents in a dozen 
 places, and the roads over the plains of the Romagna 
 had been sapped by the flood, and rendered useless, 
 where not actually laid under water. 
 
 On the day of our intended departure we left the 
 hotel, with other travellers, gayly incredulous of the 
 landlord's fear that no train would start for Bologna. 
 At the station we found a crowd of people waiting 
 and hoping, but there was a sickly cast of doubt in 
 some faces, and the labeled employe's of the railway 
 wore looks of ominous importance. Of course the 
 crowd did not lose its temper. It sought information 
 of the officials running to and fro with telegrams, in 
 a spirit of national sweetness, and consoled itself 
 
44 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 with saying, as Italy has said under all circumstances 
 of difficulty for centuries : Ci vuol pazienza ! At last 
 a blank silence fell upon it, as the Capo-Stazione 
 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 
 piu ? (No departures, then ?) 
 
 The Capo-Stazione (waving his forefinger in like 
 manner.) Non si parte piu. (Like a mournful 
 echo.) 
 
 We knew quite as well from this pantomime of 
 negation as from the dialogue our sad fate, and sub- 
 mitted to it. Some adventurous spirit demanded 
 whether any trains would go on the morrow. The 
 Capo-Stazione, with an air of one who would not 
 presume to fathom the designs of Providence, re- 
 sponded: "Who, knows? To-day, certainly not. 
 To-morrow, perhaps. But " and vanished. 
 
 It may give an idea of the Italian way of doing 
 things to say that, as we understood, this break in 
 the line was only a few miles in extent, that trains 
 could have approached both to and from Bologna, 
 and that a little enterprise on the part of the company 
 could have passed travellers from one side to the 
 other with very small trouble or delay. But the 
 railway company was as much daunted by the in- 
 undation as a peasant going to market, and for two 
 months after the accident no trains carried passengers 
 from one city to the- other. No doubt, however, the 
 
THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 45 
 
 line was under process of very solid repair mean- 
 while. 
 
 For the present the only means of getting to 
 Bologna was by carriage on the old highway, and 
 accordingly we took passage thither in the omnibus 
 of the Stella d'Oro. 
 
 There was little to interest us in the country over 
 which we rode. It is perfectly flat, and I suppose 
 the reader knows what quantities of hemp and flax 
 are raised there. The land seems poorer than in 
 Lombardy, and the farm-houses and peasants' cottages 
 are small and mean, though the peasants themselves, 
 when we met them, looked well fed, and were cer- 
 tainly well clad. The landscape lay soaking in a 
 dreary drizzle the whole way, and the town of Cento, 
 when we reached it, seemed miserably conscious of 
 being too wet and dirty to go in-doors, and was 
 loitering about in the rain. Our arrival gave the 
 poor little place a sensation, for I think such a thing 
 s an omnibus had not been seen there since the 
 railway of Bologna and Ferrara was built. We went 
 into the principal caffd to lunch, a caffe much too 
 large for Cento, with immense red-leather cushioned 
 sofas, and a cold, forlorn air of half-starved gentility, 
 a clean, high-roofed caffe and a breezy, and thither 
 the youthful nobility and gentry of the place followed 
 us, and ordered a cup of coffee, that they might sit 
 down and give us the pleasure of their distinguished 
 company. They put on their very finest manners, 
 and took their most captivating attitudes for the 
 ladies' sake ; and the gentlemen of our party fancied 
 
46 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 that it was for them these young men began to dis- 
 cuss the Roman question. How loud they were, 
 and how earnest! And how often they consulted 
 the newspapers of the caffS ! (Older newspapers I 
 never saw off a canal-boat.) I may tire some time 
 of the artless vanity of the young Italians, so in- 
 nocent, so amiable, so transparent, but I think I 
 never shall. 
 
 The great painter Guercino was born at Cento, 
 and they have a noble and beautiful statue of him 
 in the piazza, which the town caused to be erected 
 from contributions by all the citizens. Formerly his 
 house was kept for a show to the public ; it was full 
 of the pictures of the painter and many mementos 
 of him ; but recently the paintings have been taken 
 to the gallery, and the house is now closed. The 
 gallery is, consequently, one of the richest second- 
 rate galleries in Italy, and one may spend much 
 longer time in it than we gave, with great profit. 
 There are some most interesting heads of Christ',' 
 painted, as Guercino always painted the Saviour, with 
 a great degree of humanity in the face. It is an 
 excellent countenance, and full of sweet dignity, but 
 quite different from the conventional face of Christ. 
 
 n. i 
 
 AT night we were again in Bologna, of which we 
 had not seen the gloomy arcades for two years. It 
 must be a dreary town at all times : in a rain it is 
 horrible ; and I think the whole race of arcaded cities, 
 
THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 47 
 
 Treviso, Padua, and Bologna, are dull, blind, and 
 comfortless. The effect of the buildings vaulted 
 above the sidewalks is that of a continuous cellar- 
 way ; your view of the street is constantly interrupted 
 by the heavy brick pillars that support the arches ; the 
 arcades are not even picturesque. Liking always to 
 leave Bologna as quickly as possible, and, on this 
 occasion, learning that there was no hope of crossing 
 the Apennines to Florence, we made haste to take 
 the first train for Genoa, meaning to proceed thence 
 directly to Naples by steamer. 
 
 It was a motley company that sat down in Hotel 
 Brun the morning after our arrival in Bologna to a 
 breakfast of murky coffee and furry beefsteaks, as- 
 sociated with sleek, greasy, lukewarm fried potatoes. 
 I am sure that if each of our weather-bound pilgrims 
 had told his story, we had been as well entertained 
 as those at Canterbury. However, no one thought 
 fit to give his narrative but a garrulous old Hebrew 
 from London, who told us how he had been made 
 to pay fifteen guineas for a carriage to cross the 
 Apennines, and had been obliged to walk part of the 
 way at that price. He was evidently proud, now 
 the money was gone, of having been cheated of so 
 much; and in him we saw that there was at least 
 one human being more odious than a purse-proud 
 Englishman namely, a purse-proud English Jew. 
 He gave his nobl^e name after a while, as something 
 too precious to be kept from the company, when 
 recommending one of the travellers to go to the Hotel 
 d'Angleterre in Rome : " The best 'otel out of Eng- 
 
48 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 land. You may mention my name, if you like 
 Mr. Jonas." The recipient of this favor noted down 
 the talismanic words in his pocket-book, and Mr. 
 Jonas, conscious of having conferred a benefit on his 
 race, became more odious to it than ever. An Eng- 
 lishman is of a composition so uncomfortably original 
 that no one can copy him, though many may carica- 
 ture. I saw an American in London once who 
 thought himself an Englishman because he wore leg- 
 of-mutton whiskers, declaimed against universal suf- 
 frage and republics, and had an appetite for high 
 game. He was a hateful animal, surely, but he was 
 not the British lion ; and this poor Hebrew at Bologna 
 was not a whit more successful in his imitation of 
 the illustrious brute, though he talked, like him, of 
 nothing but hotels, and routes of travel, and hack- 
 men and porters, and seemed to have nothing to do 
 in Italy but get through it as quickly and abusively 
 as possible. 
 
 We were very glad, I say, to part from all this at 
 Bologna and take the noon train for Genoa. In our 
 car there were none but Italians, and the exchange of 
 " La Perseveranza " of Milan for " IlPopolo " of Tu- 
 rin with one of them quickly opened the way for con- 
 versation and acquaintance. (En passant : I know 
 of no journal in the United States whose articles are 
 better than those of the " Perseveranza," and it was 
 gratifying to an American to read in this ablest jour- 
 nal of Italy nothing but applause and encouragement 
 of the national side in our late war.) My new-made 
 friend turned out to be a Milanese. He was a phy- 
 
THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 49 
 
 sician, and had served as a surgeon in the late war of 
 Italian independence ; but was now placed in a hospital 
 in Milan. There was a gentle little blonde with him, 
 and at Piacenza, where we stopped for lunch, " You 
 see," said he, indicating the lady, " we are newly 
 married," which was, indeed, plain enough to any 
 one who looked at their joyous faces, and observed 
 how great disposition that little blonde had to nestle 
 on the young man's broad shoulder. " I have a 
 week's leave from my place," he went on, " and this 
 is our wedding journey. We were to have gone to 
 Florence, but it seems we are fated not to see that 
 famous city." 
 
 He spoke of it as immensely far off, and herein 
 greatly amused us Americans, who had outgrown 
 distances. 
 
 " So we are going to Genoa instead, for two or 
 three days." " Oh, have you ever been at Genoa ? " 
 broke in the bride. " 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. 
 
 They say that Italian husbands and wives do not 
 long remain fond of each other, but it was impossi- 
 ble in the presence of these happy people not to be- 
 
50 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 lieve in the eternity of their love, and it was hard to 
 keep from " dropping into poetry " on account of 
 them. Their bliss infected every body in the car, 
 and in spite of the weariness of our journey, and the 
 vexation of the misadventures which had succeeded 
 one another unsparingly ever since we left home, we 
 found ourselves far on the way to Genoa before we 
 thought to grumble at the distance. There was with 
 us, besides the bridal party, a lady travelling from 
 Bologna to Turin, who had learned English in Lon- 
 don, and spoke it much better than most Londoners. 
 It is surprising how thoroughly Italians master a lan- 
 guage so alien to their own as ours, and how frequently 
 you find them acquainted with English. From 
 Russia the mania for this tongue has spread all over 
 the Continent, and in Italy English seems to be 
 prized first among the virtues. 
 
 As we drew near Genoa, the moon came out on 
 purpose to show us the superb city, and we strove 
 eagerly for a first glimpse of the proud capital where 
 Columbus was born. To tell the truth, the glimpse 
 was but slight and false, for railways always enter 
 cities by some mean level, from which any pictur- 
 esque view is impossible. 
 
 Near the station in Genoa, however, is the 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 con- 
 trived, with an Italian skill in the arrangement of 
 light, to produce an effect of undeniable splendor. 
 
THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 51 
 
 On the morrow, we found out by the careless candor 
 of the daylight what a uselessly big head Columbus 
 had, and how the sculptor had not very happily 
 thought proper to represent him with his sea-legs on. 
 
V. 
 
 UP AND DOWN GENOA. 
 
 I HAD my note-book with me on this journey, and 
 pledged myself to make notes in it. And, indeed, I 
 did really do something of the kind, though the re- 
 sult of my labors is by no means so voluminous as I 
 would like it to be, now when the work of wishing 
 there were more notes is so easy. We spent but one 
 day in Genoa, and I find such a marvelous succinct 
 record of this in my book that I am tempted to give 
 it here, after the fashion of that Historical Heavy- 
 weight who writes the Life of " Frederick the Great." 
 
 " Genoa, November 13. Breakfast d la fourchette 
 excellently and cheaply. I buy a hat. We go to 
 seek the Consul, and, after finding every thing else 
 for two hours, find him. Genoa is the most magnifi- 
 cent city I ever saw ; and the new monument to 
 Columbus about the weakest possible monument. 
 Walk through the city with Consul ; Doge's palace ; 
 cathedral ; girl turning somersaults in the street ; 
 blind madman on the cathedral steps. We leave for 
 Naples at twelve midnight." 
 
 As for the breakfast, it was eaten at one of the 
 many good caffe" in Genoa, and perhaps some statis- 
 
UP AND DOWN GENOA. 53 
 
 tician will like to know that for a beefsteak and pota- 
 toes, with a half-bottle of Ligurian wine, we paid a 
 franc. For this money we had also the society of an 
 unoccupied waiter, who leaned against a marble col- 
 umn and looked on, with that gentle, half-compassion- 
 ate interest in our appetites, which seems native to 
 the tribe of waiters. A slight dash of surprise is 
 in this professional manner ; and there is a faint 
 smile on the solemn, professional countenance, which 
 is perhaps prompted by too intimate knowledge of the 
 mysteries of the kitchen and the habits of the cook. 
 The man who passes his life among beefsteaks can- 
 not be expected to love them, or to regard without 
 wonder the avidity with which others devour them. 
 I imagine that service in restaurants must beget 
 simple and natural tastes in eating, and that the 
 jaded men who minister there to our pampered ap- 
 petites demand only for themselves 
 
 "A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied, 
 And water from the spring." 
 
 Turning from this thought to the purchase of my 
 hat, I do not believe that literary art can interest the 
 reader in that purely personal transaction, though I 
 have no doubt that a great deal might be said about 
 buying hats as a principle. I prefer, therefore, to 
 pass to our search for the Consul. 
 
 A former Consul at , whom I know, has told 
 
 me a good many stories about the pieces of popu- 
 lar mind which he received at different times from 
 the travelling public, in reproof of his difficulty of 
 discovery ; and I think it must be one of the most 
 
54 ITALIAN JO'URNEYS. 
 
 jealously guarded rights of American citizens in for- 
 eign lands to declare the national representative hard 
 to find, if there is no other complaint to lodge against 
 him. It seems to be, in peculiar degree, a quality of 
 consulship at , to be found remote and inac- 
 cessible. My friend says that even at New York, 
 before setting out for his post, when inquiring into 
 the history of his predecessors, he heard that they 
 were one and all hard to find ; and he relates that on 
 the steamer, going over, there was a low fellow who 
 set the table in a roar by a vulgar anecdote to this 
 effect : 
 
 " There was once a consul at , who indi- 
 cated his office-hours by the legend on his door, 4 In 
 from ten to one.' An old ship-captain, who kept 
 coming for about a week without finding the Consul, 
 at last furiously wrote, in the terms of wager, under 
 this legend, ' Ten to one you 're out ! ' 
 
 My friend also states that one day a visitor of his 
 remarked : " I 'm rather surprised to find you in. As 
 a general rule, I never do find consuls in." Habitu- 
 ally, his fellow-countrymen entertained him with ac- 
 counts of their misadventures in reaching him. It 
 was useless to represent to them that his house was 
 in the most convenient locality in , where, in- 
 deed, no stranger can walk twenty rods from his hotel 
 without losing himself; that their guide was an ass, 
 or their courier a rogue. They listened to him po- 
 litely, 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 
 
UP AND DOWN GENOA. 55 
 
 favor to ask. It was Sunday, and I could not reason- 
 ably expect to find him at his office, or any body 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 any 
 human being you meet will not pretend to have per- 
 fect acquaintance, and, of course, the driver whose 
 fiacre we took professed himself a complete guide to 
 the Consul's whereabouts, and took us successively 
 to the residences of the consuls of all the South 
 American republics. It occurred to me that it might 
 be well to inquire of these officials where their col- 
 league was to be found ; but it is true that not one 
 consul of them was at home ! Their doors were 
 opened by vacant old women, in whom a vague intel- 
 ligence feebly guttered, like the wick of an expiring 
 candle, and who, after feigning to throw floods of 
 light on the object of my search, successively flick- 
 ered out, and left me in total darkness. 
 
 Till that day, I never knew of what lofty flights 
 stairs were capable. As out-of-doors, in Genoa, it is 
 either all up or down hill, so in-doors it is either 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 blow- 
 
56 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 ing 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 pa- 
 tiently, " you would have to get a book in two vol- 
 umes by heart, in order to be able to find every 
 body in Genoa. This city is a labyrinth." 
 
 Truly, it had so proved, and I could scarcely believe 
 in my good luck when I actually found my friend, 
 and set out with him on a ramble through its toils. 
 
 O 
 
 A very great number of the streets in Genoa are 
 footways merely, and these are as narrow, as dark, as 
 full of jutting chimney-places, balconies, and opened 
 window-shutters, and as picturesque as the little alleys 
 in Venice. They wander at will around the bases 
 of the gloomy 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 with the flection of the 
 shore, and makes itself a twilight at noonday. Under 
 it are clangorous shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling 
 shops of marine cooks, and, looking down its dim 
 perspective, one beholds chiefly sea-legs coming and 
 going, more or less affected by strong waters ; and as 
 the faces to which these sea-legs belong draw near, 
 one discerns sailors from all parts of the world, 
 tawny men from Sicily and Norway, as diverse in 
 their tawniness as olive and train-oil ; sharp faces 
 from Nantucket and from the Piraeus, likewise might- 
 ily different in their sharpness ; blonde Germans and 
 blonde Englishmen ; and now and then a colored 
 
UP AND DOWN GENOA. 57 
 
 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 would n't go ashore. 
 
 Why not, now he was here ? 
 
 Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he 
 came to Venice. 
 
 And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three weeks 
 at Venice with his ship, after a voyage of two months, 
 and he sailed away without ever setting his foot on 
 that enchanted 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 
 opposite side. But we saw no gossipers there on our 
 Sunday in Genoa ; and I think the domestic race of 
 Heine's day no longer lives in Genoa, for every body 
 we saw on the streets was gayly dressed in the idea 
 of the last fashions, and was to be met chiefly in the 
 public promenades. The fashions were French ; but 
 
58 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 here still lingers the lovely phantom of the old na- 
 tional costume of Genoa, and snow-white veils flut- 
 tered from many a dark head, and caressed many an 
 olive cheek. It is the kindest and charitablest of 
 attirements, this white veil, and, while decking 
 beauty to the most perilous effect, befriends and 
 modifies age and ugliness. 
 
 The pleasure with which I look at the splendor of 
 an Italian crowd in winter is always touched with 
 melancholy. I know that, at the time of its noonday 
 promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its 
 stomach ; that it has emerged from a house as cold 
 and dim as a cellar ; and that it will presently go 
 home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I know that 
 chilblains secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid 
 gloves, and I see in the rawness of its faces the an- 
 guish of winter-long suffering from cold. But I also 
 look at many in this crowd with the eye of the econ- 
 omist, and wonder how people practicing even so 
 great self-denial as they can contrive to make so 
 much display on their little means, how those 
 clerks of public offices, who have rarely an income 
 of five hundred dollars a year, can dress with such 
 peerless gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct 
 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 compara- 
 tively cheap. It is no great harm in itself, this dis- 
 play : it is only a pity that there is often nothing, or 
 worse than nothing, under the shining surface. 
 
 O ' O 
 
 We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upon 
 
UP AND DOWN GENOA. 59 
 
 the hill where the public promenade overlooks a land- 
 scape of city and country, houses and gardens, vines 
 and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, 
 it is so faultlessly beautiful. Behind us the fountain 
 was 
 
 " Shaking its loosened silver in the sun ; " 
 
 the birds were singing; and there were innumerable 
 fair girls going by, about whom one might have made 
 romances if one had not known better. Our friend 
 pointed out to us the " pink jail " in which Dickens 
 lived while at Genoa; and showed* us on the brow of 
 a distant upland the villa, called II Paradiso, which 
 Byron had occupied. I dare say this Genoese joke 
 is already in print : That the Devil reentered Para- 
 dise when Byron took this villa. Though, in loveli- 
 est Italy, one is half-persuaded that the Devil had 
 never left Paradise. 
 
 After 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 magnifi- 
 cent city I ever saw, and I hold by my note-book, 
 though I hardly know how to prove it. Venice is, 
 and remains, the most beautiful city in the world ; 
 but her ancient rival impresses you with greater 
 splendor. I suppose that the exclusively Renaissance 
 architecture, which Ruskin declares the architecture 
 of pride, lends itself powerfully to this effect in Genoa. 
 It is here in its best mood, and there is little gro- 
 tesque Renaissance to be seen, though the palaces 
 
60 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 are, as usual, loaded with ornament. The Via Nu- 
 ova is the chief thoroughfare of the city, and the crowd 
 pours through this avenue between long lines of pal- 
 aces. Height on height rise the stately, sculptured 
 fagades, colonnaded, statued, pierced by mighty door- 
 ways and lofty windows ; and the palaces seem to 
 gain a kind of aristocratic hauteur from the fact that 
 there are for the most part no sidewalks, and that 
 the carriages, rolling insolently through the crowd, 
 threaten constantly to grind the pedestrian up against 
 their carven marbles, and immolate him to their stony 
 pride. There is something gracious and gentle in the 
 grandeur of Venice, and much that the heart loves 
 to cling to ; but in Genoa no sense of kindliness is 
 touched by the magnificence of the city. 
 
 It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to 
 come, on a sudden, upon the Duomo, one of the few 
 Gothic buildings in Genoa, and rest our jaded eyes 
 on that architecture which Heaven seems truly to 
 have put into the thoughts of man together with the 
 Christian faith. O beloved beauty of aspiring arches, 
 of slender and clustered columns, of flowering capi- 
 tals and window-traceries, of many-carven breadths 
 and heights, wherein all Nature breathes and blos- 
 soms again ! There is neither Greek perfection, nor 
 winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent Renaissance 
 opulence, which may compare with this loveliness of 
 yours ! Alas that the interior of this Gothic temple 
 of Genoa should abound in the abomination of rococo 
 restoration ! They say that the dust of St. John the 
 Baptist lies there within a costly shrine ; and I won- 
 
UP AND DOWN GENOA. 61 
 
 der that it can sleep in peace amid all that heathen- 
 ish show of bad taste. But the poor saints have to 
 suffer a great deal in Italy. 
 
 Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was 
 an idle, cruel crowd, amusing itself with the efforts 
 of a blind old man to find the entrance. He had a 
 number of books which he desperately laid down 
 while he ran his helpless hands over the clustered 
 columns, and which he then desperately caught up 
 again, in fear of losing them. At other times he 
 paused, and wildly clasped his hands upon his eyes, 
 or wildly threw up his arms ; and then began to run 
 to and fro again uneasily, while the crowd laughed 
 and jeered. Doubtless a taint of madness afflicted 
 him ; but not the less he seemed the type of a blind 
 soul that gropes darkly about through life, to find the 
 doorway of some divine truth or beauty, touched 
 by the heavenly harmonies from within, and misera- 
 bly failing, amid the scornful cries and bitter glee of 
 those who have no will but to mock aspiration. 
 
 The girl turning somersaults in another place had 
 far more popular sympathy than the blind madman at 
 the temple door, but she was hardly a more cheerful 
 spectacle. For all her festive spangles and fairy-like 
 brevity of skirts, she had quite a work-a-day look upon 
 her honest, blood-red face, as if this were business 
 though it looked like sport, and her part of the diver- 
 sion were as practical as that of the famous captain 
 of the waiters, who gave the act of peeling a sack of 
 potatoes a playful effect by standing on his head. The 
 poor damsel was going over and over, to the sound of 
 
62 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 most dismal drumming and braying, in front of the 
 immense old palace of the Genoese Doges, a clas- 
 sic building, stilted on a rustic base, and quite worthy 
 of Palladio, if any body thinks that is praise. 
 
 There was little left of our day when we had 
 dined ; but having seen the outside of Genoa, and 
 not hoping to see the inside, we found even this little 
 heavy on our hands, and were glad as the hour drew 
 near when we were to take the steamer for Naples. 
 
 It had been one of the noisiest days spent during 
 several years in clamorous Italy, whose voiceful up- 
 roar strikes to the summits of her guardian Alps, and 
 greets the coming stranger, and whose loud Addio 
 would stun him at parting, if he had not meanwhile 
 become habituated to the operatic pitch of her every- 
 day tones. In Genoa, the hotels, taking counsel of 
 the vagabond streets, stand about the cavernous ar- 
 cade already mentioned, and all the noise of the ship- 
 ping reaches their guests. We rose early that Sun- 
 day morning to the sound of a fleet unloading car- 
 goes of wrought-iron, and of the hard swearing of all 
 nations of seafaring men. The whole day long the 
 tumult followed us, and seemed to culminate at last 
 in the screams of a parrot, who thought it fine to 
 cry, " Piove ! piove ! piove ! " " It rains ! it 
 rains ! it rains ! " and had, no doubt, a secret 
 interest in some umbrella-shop. This unprincipled 
 bird dwelt somewhere in the neighborhood of the 
 street where you see the awful tablet in the wall 
 devoting to infamy the citizens of the old republic 
 that were false to their country. The sight of that 
 
UP AND DOWN GENOA. 63 
 
 pitiless stone recalls with a thrill the picturesque, un- 
 happy past, with all the wandering, half-benighted 
 efforts of the people to rend their liberty from now 
 a foreign and now a native lord. At best, they only 
 knew 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 this time they have done their 
 full share to establish Italian freedom. 
 
 I do not know why it should have been so surpris- 
 ing to hear the boatman who rowed us to the steam- 
 er's anchorage speak English ; but, after his harsh 
 Genoese profanity in getting his boat into open water, 
 it was the last thing we expected from him. It 
 had somehow the effect of a furious beast address- 
 ing you in your native tongue, and telling you it was 
 " Wary poordy wedder ; " and it made us cling to 
 his good-nature with the trembling solicitude of 
 Little Red-Riding-Hood, when she begins to have 
 the first faint suspicions of her grandmother. How- 
 ever, our boatman was no wild beast, but took our 
 six cents of buonamano with the base servility of a 
 Christian man, when he had put our luggage in the 
 cabin of the steamer. I wonder how he should have 
 known us for Americans ? He 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 nav- 
 igated. 
 
 On board, we watched with compassion an old 
 gentleman in the cabin making a hearty meal of sar- 
 dines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if he had ever 
 
64 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 been at sea. No, he said. I could have wept over 
 that innocent old gentleman's childlike confidence of 
 appetite, and guileless trust of the deep. 
 
 We went on deck, where one of the gentle beings 
 of our party declared that she would remain as long 
 as Genoa was in sight ; and to tell the truth, the 
 scene was worthy of the promised devotion. There, 
 in a half-circle before us, blazed the lights of the 
 quay ; above these twinkled the lamps of the steep 
 streets and climbing palaces ; over and behind all 
 hung the darkness on the heights, a sable cloud 
 dotted with ruddy points of flame burning in the 
 windows of invisible houses. 
 
 "Merrily did we drop" 
 
 down the bay, and presently caught the heavy swell 
 of the open sea. The other gentle being of our 
 party then clutched my shoulder with a dreadful 
 shudder, and after gasping, " O Mr. Scribbler, why 
 will the ship roll so ? " was meekly hurried below by 
 her sister, who did not return for a last glimpse of 
 Genoa the Proud. 
 
 In a moment heaven's sweet pity flapped away as 
 with the sea-gull's wings, and I too felt that there 
 was no help for it, and that I must go and lie down 
 in the cabin. With anguished eyes I beheld upon 
 the shelf opposite to mine the innocent old gentleman 
 who had lately supped so confidently on sardines and 
 fruit-pie. He lay upon his back, groaning softly to 
 himself. 
 
VI. 
 
 BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 
 I. 
 
 LIKE the Englishman who had no prejudices, I do 
 hate a Frenchman ; and there were many French- 
 men among our passengers on the Messina, in whose 
 company I could hardly have been happy, had I not 
 seen them horribly sea-sick. After the imprudent 
 old gentleman of the sardines and fruit-pie, these 
 wretched Gauls were the first to be seized with the 
 malady, which became epidemic, and were miserable 
 up to the last moment on board. To the enormity 
 of having been born Frenchmen, they added the 
 crime of being commercial travellers, a class of fel- 
 low-men of whom we know little at home, but who 
 are met everywhere in European travel. They spend 
 more than half their lives in movement from place 
 to place, and they learn to snatch from every kind of 
 travel its meagre comforts, with an insolent disregard 
 of the rights and feelings of other passengers. They 
 excuse an abominable trespass with a cool " Pardon ! " 
 take the best seat everywhere, and especially treat 
 women with a savage rudeness, to which an Ameri- 
 can vainly endeavors to accustom his temper. I have 
 
 5 
 
66 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 seen commercial travellers of all nations, and I think 
 I must award the French nation the discredit of pro- 
 ducing the most odious commercial travellers in the 
 world. The Englishman of this species wraps him- 
 self in his rugs, and rolls into his corner, defiantly, 
 but not aggressively, boorish ; the Italian is almost a 
 gentleman ; the German is apt to take sausage out 
 of a newspaper and eat it with his penknife ; the 
 Frenchman aggravates human nature beyond endur- 
 ance by his restless ill-breeding, and his evident in- 
 tention not only to keep all his own advantages, but 
 to steal some of yours upon the first occasion. There 
 were three of these monsters on our steamer : one a 
 slight, bloodless young man, with pale blue eyes and 
 an incredulous grin ; another, a gigantic full-bearded 
 animal in spectacles ; the third an infamous plump 
 little creature, in absurdly tight pantaloons, with a 
 cast in his eye, and a habit of sucking his teeth at 
 table. When this wretch was not writhing in the 
 
 o 
 
 agonies of sea- sickness, he was on deck w r ith his com- 
 rades, lecturing them upon various things, to which 
 the bloodless young man listened with his incredulous 
 grin, and the bearded giant in spectacles attended 
 with a choked look about the eyes, like a suffering 
 ox. They were constantly staggering in and out of 
 their state-room, which, for my sins, was also mine ; 
 and opening their abominable commodious travelling 
 bags, or brushing their shaggy heads at the reeling 
 mirror, and since they were born into the world, I 
 think they had never cleaned their finger-nails. 
 They wore their hats at dinner, but always went 
 away, after soup, deadly pale. 
 
BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 67 
 
 II. 
 
 IN contrast with these cattle, what polished and 
 courtly gentlemen were the sailors and firemen ! As 
 for our captain, he would in any company have won 
 notice for his gentle and high-bred way ; in his place 
 at the head of the table among these Frenchmen, he 
 seemed to me the finest gentleman I had ever seen. 
 He had spent his whole life at sea, and had voyaged 
 in all parts of the world except Japan, where he 
 meant some day, he said, to go. He had been first 
 a cabin-boy on a little Genoese schooner, and he had 
 gradually risen to the first place on a sailing-vessel, 
 and now he had been selected to fill a commander's 
 post on this line of steamers. (It is an admirable line 
 of boats, not belonging I believe to the Italian gov- 
 ernment, but much under its control, leaving Genoa 
 every day for Leghorn, Naples, Palermo, and Ancona, 
 on the Adriatic coast.) The captain had sailed a good 
 deal in American waters, but chiefly on the Pacific 
 coast, trading from the Spanish republican ports to 
 those of California. He had been in that State dur- 
 ing its effervescent days, when every thing foul 
 floated to the top, and I am afraid he formed there 
 but a bad opinion of our people, though he was far 
 too courteous to say outright any thing of this sort. 
 
 He had very fine, shrewd blue eyes, a lean, weather- 
 beaten, kindly face, and a cautious way of saying 
 things. I hardly expected him to turn out so red-hot 
 a Democrat as he did on better acquaintance, but being 
 
68 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 a warm friend of man myself, I was not sorry. Gar- 
 ibaldi was the beginning and ending of his political 
 faith, as he is with every enthusiastic Italian. The 
 honest soul's conception of all concrete evil was 
 brought forth in two words, of odd enough applica- 
 tion. In Europe, and Italy more particularly, true 
 men have suffered chiefly from this form of evil, and 
 the captain evidently could conceive of no other cause 
 of suffering anywhere. We were talking of the 
 American war, and when the captain had asked the 
 usual question, " Quando finird mai questa guerra ? " 
 and I had responded as usual, U A^, ci vuol pazienza /" 
 the captain gave a heavy sigh, and turning his head 
 pensively aside, plucked his grapes from the cluster a 
 moment in silence. 
 
 Then he said : " You Americans are in the habit 
 of attributing this war to slavery. The cause is not 
 sufficient." 
 
 I ventured to demur and explain. " No," said the 
 captain, " the cause is not sufficient. We Italians 
 know the only cause which could produce a war like 
 this." 
 
 I was naturally anxious to be instructed in the Ital- 
 ian theory, hoping it might be profounder than the 
 English notion that we were fighting about tariffs. 
 
 The captain frowned, looked at me carefully, and 
 then said : 
 
 " In this world there is but one cause of mischief 
 the Jesuits." 
 
BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 69 
 
 III. 
 
 THE first night out, from Genoa to Leghorn, was 
 bad enough, but that which succeeded our departure 
 from the latter port was by far the worst of the three 
 we spent in our voyage to Naples. How we envied 
 the happy people who went ashore at Leghorn ! I 
 think we even envied the bones of the Venetians, 
 Pisans, and Genoese who met and slew each other 
 in the long-forgotten sea-fights, and sank too deeply 
 through the waves to be stirred by their restless tu- 
 mult. Every one has heard tell of how cross and 
 treacherous a sea the Mediterranean is in winter, and 
 my own belief is, that he who has merely been sea- 
 sick on the Atlantic should give the Mediterranean a 
 trial before professing to have suffered every thing of 
 which human nature is capable. Our steamer was 
 clean enough and staunch enough, but she was not 
 large no bigger, I thought, than a gondola, that 
 night as the waves tossed her to and fro, till unwinged 
 things took flight all through her cabins and over her 
 decks. My berth was placed transversely instead of 
 lengthwise with the boat, an ingenious arrange- 
 ment to heighten sea-sick horrors, and dash the blood 
 of the sufferer from brain to boots with exaggerated 
 violence at each roll of the boat ; and I begged the 
 steward to let me sleep upon one of the lockers in the 
 cabin. I found many of my agonized species already 
 laid out there ; and the misery of the three French 
 commercial travellers was so great, that, in the excess 
 
70 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 of my own dolor, it actually afforded me a kind of 
 happiness, and I found myself smiling at times to see 
 the giant, with the eyes of a choked ox, rise up and 
 faintly bellow. Indeed, there was something eldritch 
 and unearthly in the whole business, and I think a 
 kind of delirium must have resulted from the sea-sick- 
 ness. Otherwise, I shall not know how to account for 
 having attributed a kind of consciousness and individ- 
 uality to the guide-book of a young American who 
 had come aboard at Leghorn. He turned out after- 
 ward to be the sweetest soul in the world, and I am 
 sorry now that I regarded with amusement his failure 
 to smoke off his sickness. He was reading his guide- 
 book with great diligence and unconcern, when sud- 
 denly I marked him lay it softly, softly down, with 
 that excessive deliberation which men use at such 
 times, and vanish with great dignity from the scene. 
 Thus abandoned to its own devices, this guide-book 
 began its night-long riots, setting out upon a tour of 
 the cabin with the first lurch of the boat that threw 
 it from the table upon the floor. I heard it careen at 
 once wildly to the cabin door, and knock to get out ; 
 and failing in this, return more deliberately to the 
 stern of the boat, interrogating the tables and chairs, 
 which had got their sea-legs on, and asking them how 
 they found themselves. Arrived again at the point 
 of starting, it seemed to pause a moment, and then I 
 saw it setting forth on a voyage of pleasure in the 
 low company of a French hat, which, being itself a 
 French book, I suppose it liked. In these travels 
 they both ran under the feet of one of the stewards, 
 
BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 71 
 
 and were replaced by an immense tour de force on 
 the table, from which the book eloped again, this 
 time in company with an overcoat ; but it seemed 
 the coat was too miserable to go far : it stretched it- 
 self at full length on the floor, and suffered the book 
 to dance over it, back and forth, I know not how 
 many times. At last, as the actions of the book were 
 becoming unendurable, and the general sea-sickness 
 was waxing into a frenzy, a heavy roll, that made the 
 whole ship shriek and tremble, threw us all from our 
 lockers ; and gathering myself up, bruised and sore 
 in every fibre, I lay down again and became sensible 
 of a blissful, blissful lull ; the machinery had stopped, 
 and with the mute hope that we were all going to the 
 bottom, I fell tranquilly asleep. 
 
 IV. 
 
 IT appeared that the storm had really been danger- 
 ous. Instead of being only six hours from Naples, 
 as we ought to be at this time, we were got no fur- 
 ther than Porto Longone, in the Isle of Elba. We 
 woke in a quiet, sheltered little bay, whence we could 
 only behold, not feel, the storm left far out upon the 
 open sea. From this we turned our heavy eyes 
 gladly to the shore, where a white little town was 
 settled, like a flight of gulls upon the beach, at the 
 feet of green and pleasant hills, whose gentle lines 
 rhymed softly away against the sky. At the end of 
 either arm of the embracing land in which we lay, 
 stood gray, placid old forts, with peaceful sentries 
 
72 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 pacing their bastions, and weary ships creeping round 
 their feet, under guns looking out so kindly and 
 
 harmlessly, that I think General himself would 
 
 not have hesitated (except, perhaps, from a profound 
 sentiment of regret for offering the violence) to at- 
 tack them. Our port was full of frightened shipping 
 steamers, brigs, and schooners of all sizes and 
 nations ; and since it was our misfortune that Napo- 
 leon spent his exile in Elba at Porto Ferrate instead 
 of Porto Longone, we amused ourselves with looking 
 at the vessels and the white town and the soft hills, 
 instead of hunting up dead lion's tracks. 
 
 Our fellow-passengers began to develop themselves : 
 the regiment of soldiers whom we were transporting 
 picturesquely breakfasted forward, and the second- 
 cabin people came aft to our deck, while the English 
 engineer (there are English engineers on all the 
 Mediterranean steamers) planted a camp-stool in a 
 sunny spot, and sat down to read the " Birmingham 
 Express." 
 
 Our friends of the second cabin were chiefly officers 
 with their wives and families, and they talked for the 
 most part of their sufferings during the night. They 
 spoke such exquisite Italian that I thought them 
 Tuscans, but they told me they were of Sicily, where 
 their beautiful speech first had life. Let us hear what 
 they talked of in their divine language, and with that 
 ineffable tonic accent which no foreigner perfectly 
 acquires ; and let us for once translate the profanities, 
 Pagan and Christian, which adorn common parlance 
 in Italy : 
 
BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 73 
 
 " Ah, my God ! how much I suffered ! " says a 
 sweet little woman with gentle brown eyes, red, red 
 lips, and blameless Greek lines of face. " I broke 
 two basins ! " 
 
 " There were ten broken in all, by Diana ! " says 
 this lady's sister. 
 
 " Presence of the Devil ! " says her husband ; and 
 
 " Body of Bacchus ! " her young brother, puffing 
 his cigar. 
 
 " And you, sir," said the lady, turning to a hand- 
 some young fellow in civil dress, near her, " how did 
 you pass this horrible night ? " 
 
 " Oh ! " says the young man, twirling his heavy 
 blond mustache, " mighty well, mighty well ! " 
 
 " Oh mercy of God ! You were not sick ? " 
 
 " I, signora, am never sea-sick. I am of the navy." 
 
 At which they all cry oh, and ah, and declare they 
 are glad of it, though why they should have been I 
 don't know to this day. 
 
 " I have often wished," added the young man 
 meditatively, and in a serious tone, as if he had 
 indeed given the subject much thought, " that it 
 might please God to let me be sea-sick once, if only 
 that I might know how it feels. But no ! " He 
 turned the conversation, as if his disappointment were 
 too sore to dwell upon ; and hearing our English, he 
 made out to let us know that he had been at New 
 York, and could spik our language, which he pro- 
 ceeded to do, to the great pride of his countrymen, 
 and our own astonishment at the remarkable forms 
 of English speech to which he gave utterance. 
 
74 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 V. 
 
 WE set out from Porto Longone that night at eight 
 o'clock, and next evening, driving through much- 
 abated storm southward into calm waters and clear 
 skies, reached Naples. At noon, Monte Circeo, 
 where Circe led her disreputable life, was a majestic 
 rock against blue heaven and broken clouds ; after 
 nightfall, and under the risen moon, Vesuvius crept 
 softly up from the sea, and stood a graceful steep, 
 with wreaths of lightest cloud upon its crest, and the 
 city lamps circling far round its bay. 
 
VII. 
 
 CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 
 
 
 
 I. 
 
 PERHAPS some reader of mine who visited Naples 
 under the old disorder of things, when the Bourbon 
 and 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 harmonized perfectly with that 
 tranquil scene of drowsy-twinkling city lights, slum- 
 brous mountains, and calm sea, and, as they dipped 
 softly toward us in the glare of the steamer's lamps, 
 I could only think of Tennyson's description : 
 
 " And round about the keel with faces pale, 
 Dark faces pale against the rosy flame, 
 The mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters came." 
 
 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, (buona gente,) 
 and only needed justice to make them obedient to 
 the laws." I must say that I found this to be true. 
 
76 ITALIAN JOUKNEYS. 
 
 The fares of all public conveyances are now fixed, 
 and the attempts which drivers occasionally make to 
 cheat you, seem to be rather the involuntary impulses 
 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 
 must be a very timid signorin^ indeed, if you buy his 
 content with any thing 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, there is no comparison that holds in 
 favor of us. All questions are readily and politely 
 answered in Italian travel, and the servants of com- 
 panies are required to be courteous to the public ; 
 whereas, one is only too glad to receive a silent snub 
 from such people at home. 
 
 n. 
 
 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 
 
CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 77 
 
 northern existence seems only a sort of hibernation. 
 The long Toledo, on which the magnificence of mod- 
 ern Naples is threaded, is the most brilliant and joy- 
 ous street in the world ; but I think there is less of 
 the quaintness of Italian civilization to be seen in its 
 vivacious crowds than anywhere else in Italy. One 
 easily understands how, with its superb length and 
 straightness, and its fine, respectable, commonplace- 
 looking houses, it should be the pride of a people 
 fond of show ; but after Venice and Genoa it has no 
 picturesque charm ; nay, even busy Milan seems less 
 modern and more picturesque. The lines of the 
 lofty palaces on the Toledo are seldom broken by 
 the facade of a church or other public edifice ; and 
 when this does happen, the building is sure to be 
 coldly classic or frantically baroque. 
 
 You weary of the Toledo's perfect repair, of its 
 monotonous iron balconies, its monotonous lofty win- 
 dows ; and it would be insufferable if you could not 
 turn out from it at intervals into one of those won- 
 drous 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 motley est life of fishermen, 
 fruit-venders, chestnut-roasters, and idlers of every 
 age and sex; and there is nothing so full of local 
 color, unless it be the little up-and-down-hill streets 
 in Genoa. Like those, the by-streets of Naples are 
 only meant for foot-passengers, and a carriage never 
 enters them ; but sometimes, if you are so blest, you 
 may -see a mule climbing the long stairways, moving 
 
78 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 solemnly under a stack of straw, or tinkling gayly 
 down- stairs, bestridden by a swarthy, handsome peas- 
 ant all glittering teeth and eyes and flaming 
 Phrygian cap. The rider exchanges lively saluta- 
 tions and sarcasms with the by-stariders in his way, 
 and perhaps brushes against the bagpipers who bray 
 constantly in those hilly defiles. They are in Neapol- 
 itan costume, these pifferari, and have their legs in- 
 comprehensibly tied up in the stockings and garters 
 affected by the peasantry of the provinces, and wear 
 brave red sashes about their waists. They are sim- 
 ple, harmless-looking people, and would no doubt rob 
 and kill in the most amiable manner, if brigandage 
 came into fashion in their neighborhood. 
 
 Sometimes the student of men may witness a Nea- 
 politan quarrel in these streets, and may pick up use- 
 ful ideas of invective from the remarks of the fat old 
 women who always take part in the contests. But, 
 though we were ten days in Naples, I only saw one 
 quarrel, and I could have heard much finer violence 
 of language among the gondoliers at any ferry in 
 Venice than I 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 which 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 refresh- 
 ment, the orangeade and lemonade mixed with snow, 
 and sold at the little booths on the street-corners. 
 
CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 79 
 
 These stands looks much like the shrines of the Ma- 
 donna 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 worshiped during the long 
 Neapolitan summers ; and it was the profound theory 
 of the Bourbon kings of Naples, that, if they kept 
 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 wel- 
 comed Garibaldi. 
 
 The only part of the picturesque life of the side 
 streets which seems ever to issue from them into the 
 Toledo is the goatherd with his flock of milch-goats, 
 which mingle with the passers in the avenues as fa- 
 miliarly 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 every 
 body. 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 out- 
 side alone, nibbling and smelling thoughtfully about 
 the masonry. It is noticeable that none of the good- 
 natured passers seem to think these goats a great 
 nuisance in the crowded street ; but all make way 
 for them as if they were there by perfect right, and 
 were no inconvenience. 
 
80 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 On the Toledo people keep upon the narrow side- 
 walks, or strike out into the carriage-way, with an 
 indifference to hoofs and wheels which one, after long 
 residence in tranquil Venice, cannot acquire, in view 
 of the furious Neapolitan driving. That old compre- 
 hensive gig of Naples, with which many pens and 
 pencils have familiarized the reader, is nearly as hard 
 to find there now as the lazzaroni, who have gone out 
 altogether. You may still see it in the remoter quar- 
 ters of the city, with its complement of twelve pas- 
 sengers to one horse, distributed, two on each thill, 
 four on the top seats, one at each side, and two be- 
 hind ; but in the Toledo it has given place to much 
 finer vehicles. Slight buggies, which take you any- 
 where for half a franc, are the favorite means of 
 public conveyance, and the private turn-outs are of 
 eveiy description and degree. Indeed, all the Nea- 
 politans take to carriages, and the Strand in London 
 at six o'clock in the evening is not a greater jam of 
 wheels than the Toledo in the afternoon. Shopping 
 feels the expansive influence of the out-of-doors life, 
 and ladies do most of it as they sit in their open car- 
 riages at the shop-doors, ministered to by 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 
 
CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 81 
 
 of lashes which fringes the lower eyelid. Then there 
 is the weariness in it of all peoples whose summers 
 are fierce and long. 
 
 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 car- 
 riages bound for the long drive around the bay. But 
 our foot-passers go to walk in the beautiful Villa 
 Reale, between this course and the sea. The Villa 
 is a slender strip of Paradise, a mile long ; it is rapt- 
 ure 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 remem- 
 ber 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. 
 
 in. 
 
 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 any, and is 
 of great length and dimness, and is all a-twinkle 
 night and day with numberless lamps. Overlooking 
 
82 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 the street which passes into it is the tomb of Virgil, 
 and it is this you have come to see. To reach it, 
 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 up-stairs 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 genuine- 
 ness 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 skillful imi- 
 tation of the fine Roman work. The interior is a 
 small chamber with vaulted or wagon-roof ceiling, 
 under which a man may stand upright, and at the 
 end next the street is a little stone commemorating 
 the place as Virgil's tomb, which was placed there 
 by the Queen of France in 1840, and said by the 
 custodian (a singularly dull ass) 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 Dela- 
 vigne, has been succeeded by a third laurel. The 
 present twig was so slender, and looked so friendless 
 and unprotected, that even enthusiasm for the mem- 
 ory 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. 
 
CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 83 
 
 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 not have offended the poet, who 
 loved and sang of humble country things, and, draw- 
 ing wearily to his rest here, no doubt turned and 
 remembered tenderly the rustic days before the ex- 
 cellent veterans of Augustus came to exile him from 
 his father's farm at Mantua, and banish him 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 re- 
 minded me that 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 piu che tutto Faltro 
 anno si mostra bella." 
 
 If you ascend from the tomb and turn Naples- 
 ward from the crest of the hill, you have the loveli- 
 est view in the world of the sea and of the crescent 
 beach, mightily jeweled at its further horn with the 
 black Castel delP Ovo. Fishermen's children are 
 playing all along the foamy border of the sea, and 
 
84 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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. 
 
 IV. 
 
 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 the crutches of 
 those cured of lameness ; but we were most amused 
 with the waxen effigies of several entire babies hung 
 up about the altar, which the poor souls who had 
 been near losing the originals had brought there in 
 gratitude to the saint. 
 
 Generally, however, the churches of Naples are 
 not very interesting, and one who came away with- 
 out seeing them would have little to regret. The 
 pictures are seldom good, and though there are mag- 
 nificent chapels in St. Januarius, and fine Gothic 
 tombs at Santa Chiara, the architecture is usually 
 rococo. I fancy that Naples has felt the damage 
 of Spanish taste in such things as well as Spanish 
 tyranny in others. Indeed, I saw much there which 
 
CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 85 
 
 reminded me of what I had read about Spain rather 
 than what I had seen in Italy ; and all Italian writ- 
 ers are agreed in attributing the depravation of Na- 
 ples to the long Spanish dominion. It is well known 
 how the Spaniards rule their provinces, and their 
 gloomy despotism was probably never more cruelly 
 felt than in Italy, where the people were least able 
 to bear it. I had a heart-felt exultation in walking 
 through the quarter of the city where the tumults 
 of Massaniello had raged, and, if only for a few days, 
 struck mortal terror to the brutal pride of the vice- 
 roy ; but I think I had a better sense of the immense 
 retribution which has overtaken all memory of Span- 
 ish rule in Naples as we passed through the palace 
 of Capo di Monte. This was the most splendid seat 
 of the Spanish Bourbon, whose family, inheriting its 
 power from the violence of other times, held it with 
 violence in these ; and in one of the chief saloons 
 of the palace, which is now Victor Ernanuel's, were 
 pictures representing scenes of the revolution of 
 1860, while the statuette of a Garibaldino, in his 
 red shirt and all his heroic rudeness, was defiantly 
 conspicuous on one of the tables. 
 
 v. 
 
 THERE was nothing else that pleased me as well in 
 the palace, or in the grounds about it. These are all 
 laid out in pleasant successions of grove, tangled wil- 
 derness, and pasture-land, and were thronged, the 
 Saturday afternoon of our visit, with all ranks of 
 
86 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 people, who strolled through the beautiful walks and 
 enjoyed themselves in the peculiarly peaceful Italian 
 way. Valery says that the Villa Reale in the Bour- 
 bon time was closed, except for a single day in the 
 year, to all but the nobles ; and that on this occasion 
 it was filled with pretty peasant women, who made it 
 a condition of their marriage bargains that their hus- 
 bands should bring them to the Villa Reale on St. 
 Mary's Day. It is now free to all on every day of 
 the year, and the grounds of the Palace Capo di 
 Monte are opened every Saturday. I liked the 
 pleasant way in which sylvan Nature and Art had 
 made friends in these beautiful grounds, in which 
 Nature had consented to overlook even the foolish 
 vanity of the long aisles of lime, cut and trimmed 
 in formal and fantastic shapes, according to the taste 
 of the silly times of bagwigs and patches. On every 
 side wild birds fluttered through these absurd trees, 
 and in the thickets lurked innumerable pheasants, 
 which occasionally issued forth and stalked in stately, 
 fearless groups over the sunset-crimsoned lawns. 
 There was a brown gamekeeper for nearly every 
 head of game, wearing a pheasant's wing in his hat 
 and carrying a short, heavy sword ; and our driver 
 told us, with an awful solemnity in his bated breath, 
 that no one might kill this game but the king, under 
 penalty of the galleys. 
 
CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 87 
 
 VI. 
 
 WE went one evening to the opera at San Carlo. 
 It is one of the three theatres San Carlo of Na- 
 ples, La Scala of Milan, and Fenice of Venice 
 on which the Italians pride themselves ; and it is 
 certainly very large and imposing. The interior has 
 a bel colpo d'occhio, which is what many Italians 
 chiefly value in morals, manners, and architecture ; 
 but after this comes great shabbiness of detail. The 
 boxes, even of the first order, are paved with brick 
 tiles, and the red velvet border of the box which the 
 people see from the pit is not supported in style by 
 the seats within, which are merely covered with red 
 oil-cloth. The opera we saw was also second-rate, 
 and was to the splendor of the scenic arrangements 
 what the oil-cloth was to the velvet. The house was 
 full of people, but the dress of the audience was not 
 so fine as we had expected in Naples. The evening 
 dress is not de rigueur at Italian theatres, and people 
 seemed to have come to San Carlo in any pleasant 
 carelessness of costume. 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE Italians are simple and natural folks, pleased 
 through all their show of conventionality with little 
 things, and as easy and unconscious as children in 
 their ways. There happened to be a new caffe* 
 opened in Naples while we were there, and we had 
 
88 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 the pleasure of seeing all ranks of people affected by 
 its magnificence. Artless throngs blocked the side- 
 walk day and night before its windows, gazing upon 
 its mirrors, fountains, and frescos, and regarding the 
 persons over their coffee within as beings lifted by 
 sudden magic out of the common orbit of life and set 
 dazzling in a higher sphere. All the waiters were 
 uniformed and brass-buttoned to blinding effect, and 
 the head waiter was a majestic creature in a long 
 blue coat reaching to his feet, and armed with a 
 mighty silver-headed staff. This gorgeous apparition 
 did nothing but walk up and down, and occasionally 
 advance toward the door, as if to disperse the crowds. 
 At such times, however, before executing his pur- 
 pose, he would glance round on the splendors they 
 were admiring, and, as if smitten with a sense of the 
 enormous cruelty he had meditated in thinking to 
 deprive them of the sight, would falter and turn 
 away, leaving his intent unfulfilled. 
 
VIII. 
 
 A DAY IN POMPEII. 
 
 ON the second morning after our arrival in Na- 
 ples, we took the seven o'clock train, which leaves 
 the Nineteenth Century for the first cycle of the 
 Christian Era, and, skirting the waters of the Nea- 
 politan bay almost the whole length of our journey, 
 reached 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 an insolent violence to call breakers) come 
 in ; we saw the mountains slope their tawny and 
 golden manes caressingly downward to the waters, 
 where the islands were dozing yet ; and landward, 
 on the left, we saw Vesuvius, with his brown mantle 
 of ashes drawn close about his throat, reclining on 
 the plain, and smoking a bland and thoughtful morn- 
 ing pipe, of which the silver fumes curled lightly, 
 lightly upward in the sunrise. 
 
 We dismounted at the station, walked a few rods 
 eastward through a little cotton-field, and found 
 ourselves at the door of Hotel Diomed, where we 
 took breakfast for a number of sesterces which I am 
 sure it would have made an ancient Pompeian stir 
 
90 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 in Ins urn to think of paying. But in Italy one 
 learns the chief Italian virtue, patience, and we paid 
 our account with 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 favor 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 cus- 
 todians 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. Ventisei (as we shall call him) himself 
 pointed out one of these notices in English, and did 
 his duty faithfully 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 and dignity worthy of one of our own 
 volunteer soldiers. 
 
 Ventisei took us up the winding slope, and led us 
 out of this living world through the Sea-gate of 
 Pompeii back into the dead past the past which, 
 with all its sensuous beauty and grace, and all its 
 intellectual power, I am not sorry to have dead, and, 
 for the most part, buried. Our feet had hardly 
 trodden the lava flagging of the narrow streets when 
 we came in sight of the laborers who were exhuming 
 the inanimate city. They were few in number, not 
 
A DAY IN POMPEII. 91 
 
 perhaps a score, and they worked .tediously, with 
 baskets to carry away the earth from the excavation, 
 boys and girls carrying the baskets, and several ath- 
 letic old women plying picks, while an overseer sat 
 in a chair near by, and smoked, and directed their 
 exertions. 
 
 They dig down about eight or ten feet, uncovering 
 the walls and pillars of the houses, and the mason, 
 who is at hand, places little iron rivets in the stucco 
 to prevent its fall where it is weak, while an artist 
 attends to wash and clean the frescos as fast as they 
 are exposed. The soil through which the excavation 
 first passes is not of great depth ; the ashes which 
 fell damp with scalding rain, in the second eruption, 
 are perhaps five feet thick; the rest is of that porous 
 stone which descended in small fragments during the 
 first eruption. A depth of at least two feet in this 
 stone is always left untouched by the laborers till the 
 day when the chief superintendent of the work comes 
 out from Naples to see the last layers removed ; and 
 it is then that the beautiful mosaic pavements of the 
 houses are uncovered, and the interesting and valu- 
 able objects are nearly always found. 
 
 The wonder was, seeing how slowly the work pro- 
 ceeded, not that two thirds of Pompeii were yet 
 buried, but that one third had been exhumed. We 
 left these hopeless toilers, and went down-town into 
 the Forum, stepping aside on the way to look into 
 one of the Pompeian Courts of Common Pleas. 
 
92 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 II. 
 
 Now Pompeii is, in truth, so fall of marvel and 
 surprise, that it would be unreasonable to express 
 disappointment with Pompeii in fiction. And yet 1 
 cannot help it. An exuberant carelessness of phrase 
 in most writers and talkers who describe it had led 
 me to expect much more than it was possible to find 
 there. In my Pompeii I confess that the houses had 
 no roofs in fact, the rafters which sustained the 
 tiles being burnt, how could the roofs help falling in ? 
 But otherwise my Pompeii was a very complete 
 affair : the walls all rose to their full height ; door- 
 ways and arches were perfect ; the columns were all 
 unbroken and upright ; putting roofs on my Pompeii, 
 you might have lived in it very comfortably. The 
 real Pompeii is different. It is seldom that any wall 
 is unbroken ; most columns are fragmentary ; and 
 though the ground-plans are always distinct, very few 
 rooms in the city are perfect in form, and the whole 
 is much more ruinous than I thought. 
 
 But this ruin once granted, and the idle disappoint- 
 ment at its greatness overcome, there is endless ma- 
 terial for study, instruction, and delight. It is the 
 revelation of another life, and the utterance of the 
 past is here more perfect than anywhere else in the 
 world. Indeed, I think that the true friend of Pom- 
 peii should make it a matter of conscience, on enter- 
 ing the enchanted city, to cast out of his knowledge 
 all the rubbish that has fallen into it from novels and 
 
A DAY IN POMPEII. 93 
 
 travels, and to keep merely the facts of the town's 
 luxurious life and agonizing death, with such inci- 
 dents of the eruption as he can remember from the 
 description of Pliny. These are the spells to which 
 the sorcery yields, and with these in your thought 
 you can rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems to 
 be a valet de place of the fiirst century, and your- 
 selves a set of blond barbarians to whom he is show- 
 ing off the splendors of one of the most brilliant 
 towns of the empire of Titus. Those sad furrows 
 in the pavement become vocal with the joyous rattle 
 of chariot-wheels on a sudden, and you prudently 
 step up on the narrow sidewalks and rub along by 
 the little shops of wine, and grain, and oil, with 
 which the thrifty voluptuaries of Pompeii flanked 
 their street-doors. The counters of these shops run 
 across their fronts, and are pierced with round holes 
 on the top, through which you see dark depths of 
 oil in the jars below, and not sullen lumps of ashes ; 
 those stately amphorae behind are full of wine, and in 
 the corners are bags of wheat. 
 
 " This house, with a shop on either side, whose is 
 it, XXVI. ? " 
 
 " It is the house of the great Sallust, my masters. 
 "Would you like his autograph ? I know one of his 
 slaves who would sell it." 
 
 You are a good deal stared at, naturally, as you 
 pass by, for people in Pompeii have not much to do, 
 and, besides, a Briton is not an every- day sight there, 
 as he will be one of these centuries. The skins of 
 wild beasts are little worn in Pompeii ; and those 
 
94 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 bold-eyed Roman women think it rather odd that we 
 should like to powder our shaggy heads with brick- 
 dust. However, these are matters of taste. We, 
 for our part, cannot repress a feeling of disgust at 
 the loungers in the street, who, XXVI. tells us, are 
 all going to soak themselves half the day in the 
 baths yonder ; for, if there is in Pompeii one thing 
 more offensive than another to our savage sense of 
 propriety, it is the personal cleanliness of the inhab- 
 itants. We little know what a change for the better 
 will be wrought in these people with the lapse of 
 time, and that they will yet come to wash themselves 
 but once a year, as we do. 
 
 (The reader may go on doing this sort of thing 
 at some length for himself; and may imagine, if he 
 pleases, a boastful conversation among the Pompeians 
 at the baths, in which the barbarians hear how Agric- 
 ola has broken the backbone of a rebellion in Brit- 
 ain ; and in which all the speakers begin their ob- 
 servations with " Ho ! my Lepidus ! " and " Ha ! 
 my Diomed ! " In the mean time we return to the 
 present day, and step down the Street of Plenty 
 along with Ventisei.) 
 
 in. 
 
 IT is proper, after seeing the sites of some of the 
 principal temples in Pompeii (such as those of Jupi- 
 ter and Venus), to cross the fields that cover a great 
 breadth of the buried citv, and look into the amphi- 
 theatre, where, as every body knows, the lions had 
 
A DAY IN POMPEII. 95 
 
 no stomach for Glaucus on the morning of the fatal 
 eruption. The fields are now planted with cotton, 
 and of course we thought those commonplaces about 
 the wonder the Pompeians would feel could they 
 come back to see that New- World plant growing 
 above their buried homes. We might have told 
 them, the day of our visit, that this cruel plant, so 
 long watered with the tears of slaves, and fed with 
 the blood of men, was now an exile from its native 
 fields, where war was plowing with sword and shot 
 the guilty land, and rooting up the subtlest fibres of 
 the oppression in which cotton had grown king. And 
 the ghosts of wicked old Pompeii, remembering the 
 manifold sins that called the fires of hell to devour 
 her, and thinking on this exiled plant, the latest wit- 
 ness of God's unforgetting justice, might well have 
 shuddered, through all their shadow, to feel how 
 terribly He destroys the enemies of Nature and man. 
 But the only Pompeian presences which haunted 
 our passage of the cotton-field were certain small 
 
 " Phantoms of delight," 
 
 with soft black eyes and graceful ways, who ran 
 before us and plucked the bolls of the cotton and 
 sold them to us. Embassies bearing red and white 
 grapes were also sent out of the cottages to our ex- 
 cellencies ; and there was some doubt of the cur- 
 rency of the coin which we gave these poor children 
 in return. 
 
 There are now but few peasants living on the land 
 over the head of Pompeii, and the Government al- 
 
96 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 lows no sales of real estate to be made except to 
 itself. The people who still dwell here can hardly 
 be said to own their possessions, for they are merely 
 allowed to cultivate the soil. A guard stationed 
 night and day prevents them from making excava- 
 tions, and they are severely restricted from entering 
 the excavated quarters of the city alone. 
 
 The cotton whitens over two thirds of Pompeii yet 
 interred : happy the generation that lives to learn 
 the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre ! For, when 
 you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the 
 past takes deeper hold on your imagination than any 
 living city, and becomes and is the metropolis of your 
 dreamland forever. O marvelous city ! who shall 
 reveal the cunning of your spell? Something not 
 death, something not life something that is the one 
 when you turn to determine its essence as the other ! 
 What is it comes to me at this distance of that which 
 I saw in Pompeii? The narrow and curving, but 
 not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that Nea- 
 politan November falling into them, or clouding their 
 wheel-worn lava with the black, black shadows of the 
 many-tinted walls ; the houses, and the gay columns 
 of white, yellow, and red ; the delicate pavements of 
 mosaic ; the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead foun- 
 tains ; inanimate garden spaces with pygmy statues 
 suited to their littleness ; suites of fairy bed-cham- 
 bers, painted with exquisite frescos ; dining - halls 
 with joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their 
 walls ; the ruinous sites of temples ; the melancholy 
 emptiness of booths and shops and jolly drinking- 
 
A DAY IN POMPEII. 97 
 
 houses ; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern 
 Pompeian drawing water from a well there ; the baths 
 with their roofs perfect yet, and the stucco bass-reliefs 
 all but unharmed ; around the whole, the city wall 
 crowned with slender poplars ; outside the gates, the 
 long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretch- 
 ing on to Stabias ; and, in the distance, Vesuvius, 
 brown and bare, with his fiery breath scarce visible 
 against the cloudless heaven ; these are the things 
 that float before my fancy as I turn back to look at 
 myself walking those enchanted streets, and to won- 
 der if I could ever have been so blest. 
 
 For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like 
 Pompeii. 
 
 The amphitheatre, to which we came now, after 
 our stroll across the cotton-fields, was small, like the 
 vastest things in Pompeii, and had nothing of the 
 stately magnificence of the Arena at Verona, nor 
 any thing of the Roman Coliseum's melancholy and 
 ruinous grandeur. But its littleness made it all the 
 more comfortable and social, and, seated upon its 
 benches under a cool awning, one could have almost 
 chatted across the arena with one's friends ; could 
 have witnessed the spectacle on the sands without 
 losing a movement of the quick gladiators, or an 
 agony of the victim given to the beasts which must 
 have been very delightful to a Pompeian of compan- 
 ionable habits and fine feelings. It is quite impossi- 
 ble, however, that the bouts described by Bulwer as 
 taking place all at the same time on the arena should 
 really have done so : the combatants would have 
 
98 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 rolled and tumbled and trampled over each other an 
 hundred times in the narrow space. 
 
 Of all the voices with which it once rang the poor 
 little amphitheatre has kept only an echo. But this 
 echo is one of the most perfect ever heard : prompt, 
 clear, 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 Ventisei to know our names ? And there 
 was no one else to call them but ourselves. Our 
 " dolce duca " gathered a nosegay from the crum- 
 bling 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 into Pompeii. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE plans of nearly all the houses in the city are 
 alike : the entrance-room next the door ; the parlor 
 or drawing-room next that ; then the impluviwm, or 
 unroofed space in the middle of the house, where the 
 rains were caught and drained into the cistern, and 
 where the household used to come to wash itself, 
 primitively, as at a pump ; the 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 the better sort, is very delicate and beauti- 
 
A DAY IN POMPEII. 99 
 
 ful, and is found sometimes perfectly uninjured. An 
 exquisite pattern, often repeated, is a ground of tiny 
 cubes of white marble with dots of black dropped reg- 
 ularly into it. Of course there were many pictur- 
 esque and fanciful designs, of which the best have 
 been removed to the Museum in Naples ; but sev- 
 eral 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 wonder, the glory, of these 
 Pompeian houses is in their frescos. If I tried to 
 give an idea of the luxury of color 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 get- 
 ting 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 ex- 
 humed, 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 repro- 
 duce 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 
 
100 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 cups of Vesuvian wine ! What a piece of Katzen- 
 jammer (I can use no milder term) would that work- 
 man think it when he woke again ! Alas ! what is 
 history and the progress of the arts and sciences but 
 one long Katzen yammer ! 
 
 Photography cannot give, any more than I, the 
 colors of the frescos, but it can do the drawing better, 
 and, I suspect, the spirit also. I used the word work- 
 man, and not artist, in speaking of the decoration 
 of the walls, for in most cases the painter was only 
 an artisan, and did his work probably by the yard, as 
 the artisan who paints walls and ceilings in Italy does 
 at this day. But the old workman did his work 
 much more skillfully and tastefully than the modern 
 threw on expanses of mellow color, delicately 
 paneled off the places for the scenes, and penciled 
 in the figures and draperies (there are usually more 
 of the one than the other) with a deft hand. Of 
 course, the houses of the rich were adorned by 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 fables 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 Bac- 
 chus 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 
 
A DAY IN POMPEII. 101 
 
 loved to depict. One of the most pleasing of all the 
 scenes is that in one of the houses, of the Judgment 
 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. Nat- 
 urally 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 frescos is the mystery of 
 the eyes still, beautiful, unhuman. You cannot be- 
 lieve that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and 
 women to do evil, they look so calm and so uncon- 
 scious 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 sense (nothing gives the 
 idea) of the stare of these gods, except that magnifi- 
 cent line of Kingsley's, describing the advance over 
 the sea toward Andromeda of the oblivious and un- 
 sympathizing Nereids. They floated slowly up, and 
 their eyes 
 
 " Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house of the 
 idols." 
 
102 ITALIAN JOUKNEYS. 
 
 The colors of this fresco of the Judgment of 
 Paris are still so fresh and bright, that it photographs 
 very well, but there are other frescos wherein there 
 is more visible perfection of line, but in which the 
 colors 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 which the 
 story is treated with a playful pathos wonderfully 
 charming. The fair boy leans in the languor of his 
 hurt toward Venus, who sits utterly disconsolate be- 
 side him, while the Cupids busy themselves with such 
 slight surgical offices as Cupids may render : one pre- 
 pares 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 colors of this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, 
 and a greater pity that most of the other frescos 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. In nearly all cases they could be pre- 
 served by throwing a roof above the walls, and it is 
 a wonder that the Government does not take this 
 slight trouble to save them. 
 
 Among the frescos which told no story but their 
 own, we were most pleased with one in a delicately 
 painted little bed - chamber. This represented an 
 alarmed and furtive man, whom we at once pro- 
 
A DAY IN POMPEII. 103 
 
 nounced 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 applying 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, and Roman gladiators," " Pansa, and 
 Christians to the Beasts," was the platform), and he 
 had left his placens uxor at home alone with the 
 children, and now within this door that placens uxor 
 awaited him ! 
 
 v. 
 
 You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a 
 year or two since, in making an excavation in a 
 Pompeian street, the molds of four human bodies, 
 three women and a man, who fell down, blind and 
 writhing, in the storm of fire eighteen hundred years 
 ago ; whose shape the settling and hardening ashes 
 took ; whose flesh wasted away, and 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. 
 There 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 effi- 
 gies 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 sub- 
 
104 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 lime 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 fingers 
 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. With- 
 out, 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 sell photographs, on which, 
 if you please, Ventisei has his bottle, or drink- 
 money. So we escape from the doom of the ca- 
 lamity, and so, at last, the severely forbidden buona- 
 mano is paid. A dog may die many deaths besides 
 choking with butter. 
 
A DAY IN POMPEII. 105 
 
 We return slowly through the city, where we have 
 spent the whole day, from nine till four o'clock. "We 
 linger on the 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 
 happiness. 
 
IX. 
 
 A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 
 I. 
 
 THE 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 every thing is belonging to marine 
 life in Italy. Sea-faring 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 cutlery, and iced drinks to sell 
 at various booths ; and Commerce is exceedingly 
 dramatic and boisterous over the bargains she of- 
 fers ; and equally, of course, murderous drinking 
 shops lurk at intervals along the pavement, and lure 
 into their recesses mariners of foreign birth, briefly 
 ashore from their ships. The New York Coffee 
 
A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 107 
 
 House is there to attract my maritime fellow-coun- 
 trymen, and I know that if I look into that place 
 of refreshment I shall see their honest, foolish faces 
 flushed with drink, and with the excitement of buy- 
 ing 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 wan- 
 der away under Antonino's guidance to seek the pro- 
 tection of the Consul ; or, taking the law into their 
 own hands, shall proceed to clean out, more Ameri- 
 cano, the New York Coffee House, when Antonino 
 shall develop into one of the landlords, and deal them 
 the most artistic stab in Naples : handsome, worthy 
 Antonino ; tender-eyed, subtle, pitiless ! 
 
 n. 
 
 WHERE the road to Herculaneum leaves the bay 
 and its seafaring life, it enters, between the walls of 
 lofty, fly-blown houses, a world of maccaroni haunted 
 by foul odors, beggars, poultry, and insects. 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 maccaroni ; grinding 
 maccaroni, rolling it, cutting it, hanging it in mighty 
 skeins to dry, and gathering it when dried, and put- 
 ting 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 
 
108 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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 phle- 
 botomy. We had found that, as we came south 
 from Venice, science grew more and more sanguin- 
 ary 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 tum- 
 bler. Further south the same arm was seen to bleed 
 at the wrist also ; and at Naples an exhaustive treat- 
 ment of the subject appeared, the favorite study of 
 the artist being to represent a nude figure reclining 
 in a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant green- 
 sward, and bleeding from the elbows, wrists, hands, 
 ankles, and feet. 
 
 in. 
 
 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 the 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 neighborhood seemed to be a fa- 
 vorite summer resort, and there were villas, as I said, 
 nearly the whole way to Portici. Those which stood 
 with their gardens toward the bay would have been 
 tolerable, no doubt, if they could have kept their 
 
A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 109 
 
 windows shut to the vile street before their doors ; 
 but the houses opposite could have had no escape 
 from its stench and noisomeness. It was absolutely 
 the filthiest street I have seen anywhere 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 Hercula- 
 neum stands, buried under its half-score of successive 
 layers of lava, and ashes, and Portici. We had the 
 aid of all the virtuous poverty and leisure of the 
 modern town there was a vast deal of both, we 
 found in our search for the staircase by which you 
 descend to the classic plain, and it proved a dis- 
 covery 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 -Sn the old time 
 to see a play of Plautus or Terence. 
 
 As for the theatre, " the large and highly orna- 
 mented theatre " of which I read, only a little while 
 ago, in an encyclopedia, we found it, by the light 
 of our candles, a series of gloomy hollows, of the 
 general complexion of coal-bins and potato-cellars. 
 It was never perfectly dug out of the lava, and, as is 
 
110 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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 upon the poor prop- 
 erty-holders of Portici. I suppose I should not my- 
 self, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowl- 
 edge of classic civilization, like to have my house 
 tumbled about my ears.) But though it was im- 
 possible 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 
 did a hasty reverence to the place. Indeed, it is 
 amazing, when one sees how small a part of Hercu- 
 laneum has been uncovered, to consider the number 
 of fine works of art in the Museo Borbonico which 
 were taken thence, and which argue a much richer 
 and more refined community than that of Pompeii. 
 A third of the latter city has now been restored to 
 the light of day ; but though it has yielded abun- 
 dance 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 frescos. 
 
 The effect of this fact is to stimulate the imagina- 
 tion of the visitor to that degree that nothing short 
 of the instant destruction of Portici and the exca- 
 vation of all Herculaneum will satisfy him. If the 
 opening of one theatre, and the uncovering of a 
 
A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. Ill 
 
 basilica and two or three houses, have given such 
 richness to us, what delight and knowledge would 
 not the removal of these obdurate hills of ashes and 
 lava bestow ! 
 
 Emerging from the coal-bins and potato-cellars, 
 the visitor extinguishes his candle with a pathetic 
 sigh, profusely rewards the custodian (whom he con- 
 nects in some mysterious way with the ancient popu- 
 lation of the injured city about him), and, thought- 
 fully removing the tallow from his fingers, follows the 
 course of the vile stream already sung, and soon ar- 
 rives at the gate opening into the exhumed quarter 
 of Herculaneum. And there he finds a custodian 
 who enters perfectly into his feelings ; a custodian 
 who has once been a guide in Pompeii, but now de- 
 spises that wretched town, and would not be guide 
 there for any money since he has known the supe- 
 rior life of Herculaneum ; who, in fine, feels toward 
 Pompeii as a Bostonian feels toward New York. Yet 
 the reader would be wrong to form the idea that 
 there is bitterness in the disdain of this custodian. 
 On the contrary, he is one of the best-natured men 
 in the world. He is a mighty mass of pinguid 
 bronze, with a fat lisp, and a broad, sunflower smile, 
 and he lectures us with a vast and genial breadth of 
 manner on the ruins, contradicting all our guesses at 
 
 things with a sweet " Perdoni, signori ! ma ." At 
 
 the end, we find that he has some medallions of lava 
 to sell : there is Victor Emanuel, or, if we are of the 
 partita d'azione, there is Garibaldi ; both warm yet 
 from the crater of Vesuvius, and of the same material 
 
112 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 which destroyed Herculaneum. We decline to buy, 
 and the custodian makes the national shrug and 
 grimace (signifying that we are masters of the situa- 
 tion, and that he washes his hands of the consequence 
 of our folly) on the largest scale that we have ever 
 seen : his mighty hands are rigidly thrust forth, his 
 great lip protruded, his enormous head thrown back 
 to bring his face on a level with his chin. The effect 
 is tremendous, but we nevertheless feel that he loves 
 us the same. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE afternoon on which we visited Herculaneum 
 was in melancholy contrast to the day we spent in 
 Pompeii. The lingering summer had at last saddened 
 into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, 
 blue sky of Naples was overcast. So, this second 
 draught of the spirit of the past had not only some- 
 thing of the insipidity of custom, but brought rather 
 a depression than a lightness to our hearts. There 
 was so little 4 of Herculaneum : only a few hundred 
 yards square are exhumed, and we counted the 
 houses easily on the fingers of one hand, leaving the 
 thumb to stand for the few rods of street that, with 
 its flagging of lava and narrow border of foot-walks, 
 lay between ; and though the custodian, apparently 
 moved at our dejection, said that the excavation was 
 to be resumed the very next week, the assurance 
 did little to restore our cheerfulness. Indeed, I 
 fancy that these old cities must needs be seen in the 
 sunshine by those who would feel what gay lives 
 
A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 113 
 
 they once led ; by dimmer light they are very sullen 
 spectres, and their doom still seems to brood upon 
 them. I know that even Pompeii could not have 
 been joyous that sunless afternoon, for what there 
 was to see of mournful Herculaneum was as brilliant 
 with colors as any thing in the former city. Nay, I 
 believe that the tints of the frescos and painted col- 
 umns were even brighter, and that the walls of the 
 houses were far less ruinous than those of Pompeii. 
 But no house was wholly freed from lava, and the 
 little street ran at the rear of the buildings which 
 were supposed to front on some grander avenue not 
 yet exhumed. It led down, as the custodian pre- 
 tended, to a wharf, and he showed an iron ring in 
 the wall of the House of Argo, standing at the end 
 of the street, to which, he said, his former fellow- 
 citizens used to fasten their boats, though it was all 
 dry enough there now. 
 
 There is evidence in Herculaneum of much more 
 ambitious domestic architecture than seems to have 
 been known in Pompeii. The ground-plan of the 
 houses in the two cities is alike ; but in the former 
 there was often a second story, as was proven by the 
 charred ends of, beams still protruding from the 
 walls, while in the latter there is only one house 
 which is thought to have aspired to a second floor. 
 The House of Argo is also much larger than any in 
 Pompeii, and its appointments were more magnifi- 
 cent. Indeed, we imagined that in this more purely 
 Greek town we felt an atmosphere of better taste in 
 every thing than prevailed in the fashionable Roman 
 
114 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 watering-place, though this, too, was a summer resort 
 of the " best society " of the empire. The mosaic 
 pavements were exquisite, and the little bed-cham- 
 bers dainty and delicious in their decorations. The 
 lavish delight in color found expression in the vividest 
 hues upon the walls, and not only were the columns 
 of the garden painted, but the foliage of the capitals 
 was variously tinted. The garden of the House of 
 Argo was vaster than any of the classic world which 
 we had yet seen, and was superb with a long colon- 
 nade of unbroken columns. Between these and the 
 walls of the houses was a pretty pathway of mosaic, 
 and in the midst once stood marble tables, under 
 which the workmen exhuming the city found certain 
 crouching skeletons. At one end was the dining- 
 room, of course, and painted on the wall was a lady 
 with a parasol. 
 
 I thought all Herculaneum sad enough, but the 
 profusion of flowers growing wild in this garden gave 
 it a yet more tender and pathetic charm. Here 
 where so long ago the flowers had bloomed, and 
 perished in the terrible blossoming of the mountain 
 that sent up its fires in the awful similitude of Na- 
 .ture's harmless and lovely forms, #nd showered its 
 destroying petals all abroad was it not tragic to 
 find again the soft tints, the graceful shapes, the 
 sweet perfumes of the earth's immortal life ? Of 
 them that planted and tended and plucked and bore 
 in their bosoms and twined in their hair these fragile 
 children of the summer, what witness in the world? 
 Only the crouching skeletons under the tables. Alas 
 and alas ! 
 
A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 115 
 
 V. 
 
 THE skeletons went with us throughout Hercula- 
 neum, and descended into the cell, all green with 
 damp, under the basilica, and lay down, fettered and 
 manacled in the place of those found there beside 
 the big bronze kettle in which the prisoners used to 
 cook their dinners. How ghastly the thought of it 
 was ! If we had really seen this kettle and the 
 skeletons there as we did not we could not have 
 suffered more than we did. They took all the life 
 out of the House of Perseus, and the beauty from his 
 pretty little domestic temple to the Penates, and this 
 was all there was left in Herculaneum to see. 
 
 " Is there nothing else ? " we demand of the cus- 
 todian. 
 
 " Signori, this is all." 
 
 " It is mighty little." 
 
 " Perdoni, signori ! ma ." 
 
 " Well," we say sourly to each other, glancing 
 round at the walls of the pit, on the bottom of which 
 the bit of city stands, " it is a good thing to know 
 that Herculaneum amounts to nothing." 
 
X. 
 
 CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 
 
 I. 
 
 t 
 
 I HAVE no doubt 
 
 " Calm Capri waits," 
 
 where we left it, in the Gulf of Salerno, for any trav- 
 eller who may choose to pay it a visit ; but at the 
 time we were there we felt that it was on exhibition 
 for that day only, and would, when we departed, dis- 
 appear in its sapphire sea, and be no more ; just as 
 Niagara ceases to play as soon as your back is turned, 
 and Venice goes out like a pyrotechnic display, and 
 all marvelously grand and lovely things make haste 
 to prove their impermanence. 
 
 We delayed some days in Naples in hopes of fine 
 weather, and at last chose a morning that was warm 
 and cloudy at nine o'clock, and burst into frequent 
 passions of rain before we reached Sorrento at noon. 
 The first half of the journey was made by rail, and 
 brought us to Castellamare, whence we took carriage 
 for Sorrento, and oranges, and rapture, winding 
 along the steep shore of the sea, and under the brows 
 of wooded hills that rose high above us into the misty 
 weather, and caught here and there the sunshine on 
 
CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 117 
 
 their tops. In that heavenly climate no day can 
 long be out of humor, and at Sorrento we found 
 ours very pleasant, and rode delightedly through the 
 devious streets, looking up to the terraced orange- 
 groves on one hand, and down to the terraced orange- 
 groves on the other, until at a certain turning of the 
 way we encountered Antonino Occhio d'Argento, 
 whom fate had appointed to be our boatman to Capri. 
 We had never heard of Antonino before, and indeed 
 had intended to take a boat from one of the hotels ; 
 but when this corsair offered us his services, there 
 was that guile in his handsome face, that cunning in 
 his dark eyes, that heart could not resist, and we 
 halted our carriage and took him at once. 
 
 He kept his boat in one of those caverns which 
 honey-comb the cliff under Sorrento, and afford a 
 natural and admirable shelter for such small craft as 
 may be dragged up out of reach of the waves, and 
 here I bargained with him before finally agreeing to 
 go with him to Capri. In Italy it is customary for a 
 public carrier when engaged to give his employer as 
 a pledge the sum agreed upon for the service, which 
 is returned with the amount due him, at the end, if 
 the service has been satisfactory ; and I demanded of 
 Antonino this caparra, as it is called. " What ca- 
 parra? " said he, lifting the lid of his wicked eye with 
 his forefinger ; " this is the best caparra^' meaning a 
 face as honest and trustworthy as the devil's. The 
 stroke confirmed my subjection to Antonino, and I 
 took his boat without further parley, declining even 
 to feel the muscle of his boatmen's arms, which he ex- 
 
118 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 posed to my touch in evidence that they were strong 
 enough to row us swiftly to Capri. The men were 
 but two in number, but they tossed the boat lightly 
 into the surf, and then lifted me aboard, and rowed 
 to the little pier from which the ladies and T. 
 got in. 
 
 The sun shone, the water danced and sparkled, 
 and presently we raised our sail, and took the gale 
 that blew for Capri an oblong height rising ten 
 miles beyond out of the heart of the azure gulf. On 
 the way thither there was little interest but that of 
 natural beauty in the bold, picturesque coast we 
 skirted for some distance ; though on one mighty 
 rock there were the ruins of a seaward-looking Tem- 
 ple of Hercules, with arches of the unmistakable 
 Roman masonry, below which the receding waves 
 rushed and poured over a jetting ledge in a thun- 
 derous cataract. 
 
 Antonino did his best to entertain us, and lect- 
 ured us unceasingly upon his virtue and his wisdom, 
 dwelling greatly on the propriety and good policy 
 of always speaking the truth. This spectacle of ve- 
 racity became intolerable after a while, and I was 
 goaded to say : " Oh then, if you never tell lies, you 
 expect to go to Paradise." " Not at all," answered 
 Antonino compassionately, " for I have sinned much. 
 But ^he lie does n't go ahead " (non va avanti), added 
 this Machiavelli of boatmen ; yet I think he was 
 mistaken, for he deceived us with perfect ease and 
 admirable success. All along, he had pretended that 
 we could see Capri, visit the Blue Grotto, and return 
 
CAPRI AND CAPEIOTES. 119 
 
 that day ; but as we drew near the island, painful 
 doubts began to trouble him, and he feared the sea 
 would be too rough for the Grotto part of the affair. 
 " But there will be an old man," he said, with a sub- 
 tile air of prophecy, " waiting for us on the beach. 
 This old man is one of the Government guides to the 
 Grotto, and he will say whether it is to be seen to- 
 day." 
 
 And certainly there was the old man on the beach 
 a short patriarch, with his baldness covered by a 
 kind of bloated wollen sock a blear-eyed sage, and 
 a bare-legged. He waded through the surf toward 
 the boat, and when we asked him whether the 
 Grotto was to be seen, he paused knee- deep in the 
 water, (at a secret signal from Antonino, as I shall 
 always believe,) put on a face of tender solemnity, 
 threw back his head a little, brought his hand to his 
 cheek, expanded it, and said, " No ; to-day, no ! To- 
 morrow, yes ! " Antonino leaped joyously ashore, 
 and delivered us over to the old man, to be guided 
 to the Hotel di Londra, while he drew his boat upon 
 the land. He had reason to be contented, for this 
 artifice of the patriarch of Capri relieved him from 
 the necessity of verifying to me the existence of an 
 officer of extraordinary powers in the nature of a 
 consul, who, he said, would not permit boats to leave 
 Capri for the main -land after five o'clock in the even- 
 ing. 
 
 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 
 
120 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 Hotel di Londra, that we resolved to ascend the 
 mountain to the ruins of the palaces of Tiberius, and 
 to this end we contracted for the services of certain 
 of the muletresses that had gathered about the inn- 
 gate, clamorously offering their beasts. The mule- 
 tresses 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 Capri, 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 through narrow streets bor- 
 dered by dirty houses ; and then again by gardens, 
 but now of a better sort than the first, and belong- 
 ing to handsome villas. 
 
 On the road our pretty muletress gossiped cheer- 
 fully, and our patriarch gloomily, and between the 
 two we 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 re- 
 member that they said most of the land-owners at 
 Capri were Neapolitans, and that these villas were 
 
CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 121 
 
 their country-houses ; though they pointed out one 
 of the stateliest of the edifices as belonging to a 
 certain English physician who had come to visit 
 Capri for a few days, and had now been living on the 
 island twenty years, having married (said the mule- 
 tress) the prettiest and poorest girl in the town. 
 From this romance something like which the 
 muletress seemed to think might well happen con- 
 cerning herself we passed lightly to speak of 
 kindred things, the muletress responding gayly be- 
 tween the blows she bestowed upon her beast. The 
 accent of these Capriotes has something of German 
 harshness and heaviness : they say non bosso instead 
 of nonposso, and monto instead of mondo, and inter- 
 change the t 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. 
 
 I. What is your name ? 
 
 She. Caterina, little sir (signorin). 
 
 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. 
 
 I. 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 
 
122 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 of marrying. We are four sisters, and we have only 
 the buonamano from hiring these mules, and we must 
 spin and cook. 
 
 The Patriarch. Don't believe her ; she has two 
 lovers. 
 
 She. Ah, no ! It is n'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 maccaroni once a day, and 
 she talked constantly of eating it just as the North- 
 ern Italians always talk of polenta. She was a true 
 daughter of the isle, and had never left it but once 
 in her life, when she went to Naples. " Naples was 
 beautiful, yes ; but one always loves one's own coun- 
 try the best." She was very attentive and good, 
 but at the end was rapacious of more and more 
 buonamano. " Have patience with her, sir," said 
 the blameless Antonino, who witnessed her greedi- 
 ness ; " they do not understand certain- matters here, 
 poor little things ! '' 
 
 As for the patriarch, he was full of learning rela- 
 tive to himself and to Capri ; and told me witli 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 paid the 
 
CAPEI AND CAPRIOTES. 123 
 
 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 we 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 of Tiberius." 
 We obediently entered the hostelry, and the land- 
 lord a white-toothed, brown-faced, good-humored 
 peasant gallantly ran forward 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 
 whisper, " you can see the Tarantella danced for two 
 francs ; whereas down at your inn, if you hire the 
 dancers through your landlord, it will cost you five 
 or six francs." The difference was tempting, and 
 decided us in favor 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 land- 
 lord, and took their places vis-d-vis, while the land- 
 lord seized his tambourine and beat from it a wild 
 and lively measure. The women were barefooted 
 
124 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 and hoopless, 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, ad- 
 vanced and retreated and whirled away ; snapping 
 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 pictures 
 of delight that remained upon the brain like the ef- 
 fect of long-pondered vivid colors, 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, I must confess, could only burlesque some of 
 her niece's airiest movements, and whose hard-bought 
 buoyancy was at once pathetic and laughable. She 
 earned her share of the spoils certainly, and she 
 seemed glad when the dance was over, and went 
 contentedly back to her mule. 
 
 The patriarch had early retired from the scene as 
 from a vanity with which he was too familiar for en- 
 joyment, and I found him, w r hen the Tarantella was 
 done, leaning on the curb of the precipitous 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 imagination as Christian 
 
CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 125 
 
 martyrs, though it is probable that the poor souls 
 were any thing but Nazarenes. It took a stone 
 thrown from the brink of the rock twenty seconds to 
 send back a response from the water below, and the 
 depth was too dizzying to look into. So we looked 
 instead toward Amalfi, across the Gulf of Salerno, 
 and toward Naples, across her bay. On every hand 
 the sea was flushed with sunset, and an unspeakable 
 calm dwelt upon it, while the heights rising from it 
 softened and softened in the distance, and withdrew 
 themselves into dreams of ghostly solitude and phan- 
 tom city. His late majesty the Emperor Tiberius 
 is well known to have been a man of sentiment, and 
 he may often have sought this spot to enjoy the even- 
 ing hour. It; was convenient to his palace, and he 
 could here give a fillip to his jaded sensibilities by 
 popping a boon companion over the cliff, and thus 
 enjoy the fine poetic contrast which his perturbed 
 and horrible spirit afforded to that scene of innocence 
 and peace. Later he may have come hither also, 
 when lust failed, when all the lewd plays and devices 
 of his fancy palled upon his senses, when sin had 
 grown insipid and even murder ceased to amuse, and 
 his majesty uttered his despair to the Senate in that 
 terrible letter : " What to write to you, or how to 
 write, I know not ; and what not to write at this 
 time, may all the gods and goddesses torment me 
 more than I daily feel that I suffer if I do know." 
 
 The poor patriarch was also a rascal in his small 
 way, and he presently turned to me with a counte- 
 nance full of cowardly trouble and base remorse. 
 
126 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 " I pray you, little sir, not to tell the landlord below 
 there that you have seen the Tarantella danced 
 here ; for he has daughters and friends to dance it 
 for strangers, and gets a deal of money by it. So, 
 if he asks you to see it, do me the pleasure to say, 
 lest he should take on (^pigliarsi) with me about it : 
 ' Thanks, but we saw the Tarantella at Pompeii ! ' 
 It was the last place in Italy where we were likely to 
 have seen the Tarantella ; but these simple people 
 are improvident in lying, as in every thing else. 
 
 The patriarch Had a curious spice of malice in 
 him, which prompted him to speak evil of all, and to 
 as many as he dared. After we had inspected the 
 ruins of the emperor's villa, a clownish imbecile of a 
 woman, professing to be the wife of the peasant who 
 had made the excavations, came forth out of a cleft 
 in the rock and received tribute of us why, I do 
 not know. The patriarch abetted the extortion, but 
 Parthianly remarked, as we turned away, " Her 
 husband ought to be here ; but this is a,festa, and 
 he is drinking and gaming in the village," while the 
 woman protested that he was sick at home. There 
 was also a hermit living in great publicity among the 
 ruins, and the patriarch did not spare him a sneering 
 comment.* He had even a bad word for Tiberius, 
 and reproached the emperor for throwing people over 
 the cliff, though I think it a sport in which he would 
 
 * This hermit I have heard was not brought up to the profession 
 of anchorite, but was formerly a shoemaker, and according to his 
 own confession abandoned his trade because he could better in- 
 dulge a lethargic habit in the character of religious recluse. 
 
CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 127 
 
 himself have liked to join. The only human creat- 
 ures with whom he seemed to be in sympathy were 
 the brigands of the main-land, of whom he spoke 
 poetically as exiles and fugitives. 
 
 As for the palace of Tiberius, which we had come 
 so far and so toilsomely to see, it must be confessed 
 there was very little left of it. When that well- 
 meaning but mistaken prince died, the Senate de- 
 molished his pleasure-houses at Capri, and left only 
 those fragments of the beautiful brick masonry which 
 yet remain, clinging indestructible to the rocks, and 
 strewing the ground with rubbish. The recent ex- 
 cavations have discovered nothing besides the unin- 
 teresting foundations of the building, except a sub- 
 terranean avenue leading from one part of the palace 
 to another : this is walled with delicate brickwork, 
 and exquisitely paved with white marble mosaic ; and 
 this was all that witnessed of the splendor of the 
 wicked emperor. Nature, the all-forgetting, all-for- 
 giving, that takes the red battle-field into her arms 
 and hides it with blossom and hardest, could not 
 remember his iniquity, greater than the multitudi- 
 nous murder of war. The sea, which the despot's 
 lust and fear had made so lonely, slept with the white 
 sails of boats secure upon its breast ; the little bays 
 and inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells, had for- 
 gotten their desecration ; and the gathering twilight, 
 the sweetness of the garden-bordered pathway, and 
 the serenity of the lonely landscape, helped us to 
 doubt history. 
 
 We slowly returned to the inn by the road we had 
 
128 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 ascended, noting again the mansion of the surprising 
 Englishman who had come to Capri for three months 
 and had remained thirty years ; passed through the 
 darkness of the village, dropped here and there 
 with the vivid red of a lamp, and so reached the 
 inn at last, where we found the landlord ready to 
 have the Tarantella danced for us. We framed a 
 discreeter fiction than that prepared for us by the pa- 
 triarch, and went in to dinner, where there were two 
 Danish gentlemen in dispute with as many rogues 
 of boatmen, who, having contracted to take them 
 back that night to Naples, were now trying to fly 
 their bargain and remain at Capri till the morrow. 
 The Danes beat them, however, and then sat down 
 to dinner, and to long stories of the imposture and 
 villany of the Italians. One of them chiefly bewailed 
 himself that the day before, having unwisely eaten a 
 dozen oysters without agreeing first with the oyster- 
 man upon the price, he had been obliged to pay this 
 scamp's extortionate demand to the full, since he was 
 unable to restore him his property. We thought 
 that something like this might have happened to an 
 imprudent man in any country, but we did not the 
 less join him in abusing the Italians the purpose 
 for which foreigners chiefly visit Italy. 
 
 ii. 
 
 STANDING on the height among the ruins of Ti- 
 berius's palace, the patriarch had looked out over 
 the waters, and predicted for the morrow the finest 
 
CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 129 
 
 weather that had ever been known in that region ; 
 but in spite of this prophecy the day dawned storm- 
 ily, and at breakfast time we looked out doubtfully on 
 waves lashed by driving rain. The entrance to the 
 Blue Grotto, to visit which we had come to Capri, is 
 by a semicircular opening, some three feet in width 
 and two feet in height, and just large enough to ad- 
 mit a small boat. One lies flat in the bottom of this, 
 waits for the impulse of a beneficent wave, and is 
 carried through the mouth of the cavern, and res- 
 cued from it in like manner by some receding billow. 
 When the wind is in the wrong quarter, it is impos- 
 sible to enter the grot at all ; and we waited till nine 
 o'clock for the storm to abate before we ventured 
 forth. In the mean time one of the Danish gentle- 
 men, who after assisting his companion to compel 
 the boatmen to justice the night before had stayed 
 at Capri, and had risen early to see the grotto, re- 
 turned from it, and we besieged him with a hundred 
 questions concerning it. But he preserved the wise 
 silence of the boy who goes in to see the six-legged 
 calf, and comes out impervious to the curiosity of all 
 the boys who are doubtful whether the monster is 
 worth their money. Our Dane would merely say 
 that it was now possible to visit the Blue Grotto ; 
 that he had seen it ; that he was glad he had seen it. 
 As to its blueness, Messieurs yes, it is blue. (Test 
 
 d dire 
 
 The ladies had been amusing themselves with a 
 perusal of the hotel register, and the notes of admi- 
 ration or disgust with which the different sojourners 
 
 9 
 
130 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 at the inn had filled it. As a rule, the English peo- 
 ple found fault with the poor little hostelry and the 
 French people praised it. Commander Joshing and 
 Lieutenant Prattent, R. N., of the former nation, 
 " were cheated by the donkey women, and thought 
 themselves extremely fortunate to have escaped with 
 their lives from the effects of Capri vintage. The 
 landlord was an old Cossack." On fhe other hand, 
 we read, " J. Cruttard, homme de lettres, a passS 
 quinze jours ici, et n'a eu que des felicity's du patron 
 de cet hotel et de sa famille." Cheerful man of let- 
 ters ! His good-natured record will keep green a 
 name little known to literature. Who are G. Brad- 
 shaw, Duke of New York, and Signori Jones and 
 Andrews, Hereditary Princes of the United States ? 
 Their patrician names followed the titles of several 
 English nobles in the register. But that which most 
 interested the ladies in this record was the warning 
 of a terrified British matron against any visit to the 
 Blue Grotto except in the very calmest weather. 
 The British matron penned her caution after an all 
 but fatal experience. The ladies read it aloud to us, 
 and announced that for themselves they would be 
 contented with pictures of the Blue Grotto and our 
 account of its marvels. 
 
 On the beach below the hotel lay the small boats 
 of the guides to the Blue Grotto, and we descended 
 to take one of them. The fixed rate is a franc for 
 each person. The boatmen wanted five francs for 
 each of us. "We explained that although not indige- 
 nous to Capri, or even Italy, we were not of the sue- 
 
CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 131 
 
 culent growth of travellers, and would not be eaten. 
 We retired to our vantage ground on the heights. 
 The guides called us to the beach again. They 
 would take us for three francs apiece, or say six 
 francs for both of us. We withdrew furious to the 
 heights again, where we found honest Antonino, who 
 did us the pleasure to yell to his fellow-scoundrels on 
 the beach, " You had better take these signori for a 
 just price. They are going to the syndic to com- 
 plain of you." At which there arose a lamentable 
 outcry among the boatmen, and they called with one 
 voice for us to come down and go for a franc apiece. 
 This fable teaches that common-carriers are rogues 
 everywhere ; but that whereas we are helpless in 
 their hands at home, we may bully them into recti- 
 tude in Italy, where they are afraid of the law. 
 
 We had scarcely left the landing of the hotel in 
 the boat of the patriarch for I need hardly say he 
 was first and most rapacious of the plundering crew 
 
 when we found ourselves in very turbulent waters, 
 in the face of mighty bluffs, rising inaccessible from 
 the sea. Here and there, where their swarthy fronts 
 were softened with a little verdure, goat- paths wound 
 up and down among the rocks ; and midway between 
 the hotel and the grotto, in a sort of sheltered nook, 
 we saw the Roman masonry of certain antique baths 
 
 baths of Augustus, says Valery ; baths of Tiberius, 
 say the Capriotes, zealous for the honor of their in- 
 famous hero. Howbeit, this was all we saw on the 
 way to the Blue Grotto. Every moment the waves 
 rose higher, emulous of the bluffs, which would not 
 
132 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 have afforded a foothold, or any thing to cling to, had 
 we been upset and washed against them and we 
 began to talk of the immortality of the soul. As we 
 neared the grotto, the patriarch entertained us with 
 stories of the perilous adventures of people who in- 
 sisted upon entering it in stormy weather, espe- 
 cially of a French painter who had been imprisoned 
 in it four days, and kept alive only on rum, which 
 the patriarch supplied him, swimming into the grotto 
 with a bottle-full at a time. " And behold us ar- 
 rived, gentlemen ! " said he, as he brought the boat 
 skillfully around in front of the small semicircular 
 opening at the base of the lofty bluff. We lie flat on 
 the bottom of the boat, and complete the immersion 
 of that part of our clothing which the driving tor- 
 rents of rain had spared. The wave of destiny rises 
 with us upon its breast sinks, and we are inside of 
 the Blue Grotto. Not so much blue as gray, how- 
 ever, and the water about the rnouth of it green 
 rather than azure. They say that on a sunny day 
 both the water and the roof of the cavern are of the 
 vividest cerulean tint and I saw the grotto so rep- 
 resented in the windows of the paint-shops at Na- 
 ples. But to my own experience it did not differ 
 from other caves in color or form: there was the 
 customary clamminess in the air ; the sound of drop- 
 ping water ; the sense of dull and stupid solitude, 
 a little relieved in this case by the mighty music of 
 the waves breaking against the rocks outside. The 
 grot is not great in extent, and the roof in the rear 
 shelves gradually down to the water. Valery says 
 
CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 133 
 
 that some remains of a gallery have caused the sup- 
 position that the grotto was once the scene of Tibe- 
 rius's pleasures ; and the Prussian painter who dis- 
 covered the cave was led to seek it by something 
 he had read of a staircase by which Barbarossa used 
 to descend into a subterranean retreat from the town 
 of Anacapri on the mountain top. The slight frag- 
 ment of ruin which we saw in one corner of the cave 
 might be taken in confirmation of both theories ; 
 but the patriarch attributed the work to Barbarossa, 
 being probably tired at last of hearing Tiberius so 
 much talked about. 
 
 We returned, soaked and disappointed, to the ho- 
 tel, where w,e found Antonino very doubtful about 
 the possibility of getting back that day to Sorrento, 
 and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of 
 bad weather, to revive the fiction of a prohibitory 
 consul. He was staying in Capri at our expense, 
 and the honest fellow would willingly have spent a 
 fortnight there. 
 
 We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he 
 came with all his household to present the account, 
 each one full of visible longing, yet restrained 
 from asking buonamano 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 the beau- 
 tiful town, we saw how it lay on a plateau, at the 
 
134 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 foot of the mountains, but high above the sea. An- 
 tonino pointed out to us the house of Tasso, in 
 which the novelist Cooper also resided when in Sor- 
 rento, a white house not handsomer nor uglier 
 than the rest, with a terrace looking out over the 
 water. The bluffs are pierced by numerous arched 
 caverns, as I have said, giving shelter to the fisher- 
 men's boats, and here and there a devious stairway 
 mounts to their crests. Up one of these we walked, 
 noting how in 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 ; and as for the grove of slender, 
 graceful orange-trees in the midst of which the hotel 
 stood, and which had lavished the fruit in every di- 
 rection on the ground, why, I would willingly give 
 for it all the currant-bushes, with their promises of 
 jelly and jam, on which I gaze at this moment. 
 
 Antonino attended us to our carriage when we 
 went away. He had kept us all night at Capri, it is 
 true, and he had brought us in at the end for a pro- 
 digious buonamano ; yet I cannot escape the convic- 
 tion that he parted from us with an unfulfilled pur- 
 pose of greater plunder, and I have a compassion, 
 which I here declare, for the strangers who fell next 
 into his hands. He was good enough at the last 
 moment to say that his name, Silver-Eye, was a 
 nickname 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. 
 
CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 135 
 
 At the station of Castellamare 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 cripple twirling and twisting 
 himself about in every way for the tailor's conven- 
 ience. Nobody was surprised or amused at the sight, 
 and when his measure was thus publicly taken, the 
 cripple gravely swung himself out as he had swung 
 himself in. 
 
XL 
 
 THE PROTESTANT BAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 
 
 I HAD the pleasure one day of visiting nearly all 
 the free schools which the wise philanthropy of the 
 Protestant residents of Naples has established in that 
 city. The schools had a peculiar interest for me, be- 
 cause I had noticed (in an un careful fashion enough, 
 no doubt) the great changes which had taken place 
 in Italy under its new national government, and was 
 desirous to see for myself the sort of progress the 
 Italians of the south were making in avenues so long 
 closed to them. I believe I have no mania for mis- 
 sionaries ; I have heard of the converted Jew-and-a- 
 half, and I have thought it a good joke ; but I cannot 
 help offering a very cordial homage to the truth that 
 the missionaries are doing a vast deal of good in Na- 
 ples, where they are not only spreading the gospel, but 
 the spelling-book, the arithmetic, and the geography. 
 
 It is not to be understood from the word mission- 
 aries, that this work is done by men especially sent 
 from England or America to perform it. The free 
 Protestant schools in Naples are conducted under the 
 auspices of the Evangelical Aid Committee, com- 
 posed of members of the English Church, the Swiss 
 Church, and the Presbyterian Church ; the Presi- 
 
PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 137 
 
 dent of this committee is Dr. Strange, an English- 
 man, and the Treasurer is Mr. Rogers, the American 
 banker. The missionaries in Naples, therefore, are 
 men who have themselves found out their work and 
 appointed themselves to do it. The gentleman by 
 whose kindness I was permitted to visit the schools 
 was one of these men, the Rev. Mr. Buscarlet, the 
 pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Naples, a Swiss 
 by birth, who had received his education chiefly in 
 Scotland. 
 
 He accompanied me to the different schools, and as 
 we walked up the long Toledo, and threaded our 
 way through the sprightly Neapolitan crowd, he told 
 me of the origin of the schools, and of the peculiar 
 difficulties encountered in their foundation and main- 
 tenance. They are no older than the union of Na- 
 ples with the Kingdom of Italy, when toleration of 
 Protestantism was decreed by law ; and from the 
 first, their managers proceeded upon a principle of 
 perfect openness and candor with the parents who 
 wished to send their children to them. They an- 
 nounced that the children would be taught certain 
 branches of learning, and that the whole Bible would 
 be placed in their hands, to be studied and under- 
 stood. In spite of this declaration of the Protestant 
 character of the schools, the parents of the chil- 
 dren were so anxious to secure them the benefits of 
 education, that they willingly ran the risk of their 
 becoming heretics. They were principally people of 
 the lower classes, laborers, hackmen, fishermen, 
 domestics, and very small shopkeepers, but occasion- 
 
138 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 ally among them were parents able to send their 
 children to other schools, yet preferring the thorough 
 and conscientious system practiced in these. So the 
 children came, and thanks to the peaceful, uncom- 
 bative nature of Italian boys, who get on with much 
 less waylaying and thumping and bullying than boys 
 of northern blood, they have not been molested by 
 their companions who still live the wild life of the 
 streets, and they have only once suffered through in- 
 terference of the priests. On complaint to the au- 
 thorities the wrong was promptly redressed, and was 
 not again inflicted. Of course these poor little peo- 
 ple, picked up out of the vileness and ignorance of a 
 city that had suffered for ages the most degrading op- 
 pression, are by no means regenerate yet, but there 
 seems to be great hope for them. Now at least they 
 are taught a reasonable and logical morality and 
 who can tell what wonders the novel instruction may 
 not work ? They learn for the first time that it is a 
 foolish shame to lie and cheat, and it would scarcely 
 be surprising if some of them were finally persuaded 
 that Honesty is the best Policy a maxim that few 
 Italians believe. And here lies the trouble, in the 
 unfathomable, disheartening duplicity of the race. 
 The children are not quarrelsome, nor cruel, nor 
 brutal ; but the servile defect of falsehood fixed by 
 long generations of slavery in the Italians, is almost 
 ineradicable. The fault is worse in Naples than else- 
 where in Italy ; but how bad it is everywhere, not 
 merely travellers, but all residents in Italy, must bear 
 witness. 
 
PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 139 
 
 The first school which we visited was a girls' 
 school, in which some forty-four little women of all 
 ages, from four to fifteen years, were assembled un- 
 der the charge of a young Corfute girl, an Italian 
 Protestant, who had delegated her authority to dif- 
 ferent children under her. The small maidens 
 gathered around their chiefs in groups, and read 
 from the book in which they were studying when we 
 appeared. Some allowance must be made for differ- 
 ence of the languages, Italian being logically spelled 
 and easily pronounced ; but I certainly never heard 
 American children of their age read nearly so well. 
 They seemed also to have a lively understanding of 
 what they read, and to be greatly interested in the 
 scriptural stories of which their books were made up. 
 They repeated verses from the Bible, and stanzas of 
 poetry, all very eagerly^ and prettily. As bashfulness 
 is scarcely known to their race, they had no hesita- 
 tion in showing off their accomplishments before a 
 stranger, and seemed quite delighted with his ap- 
 plause. They were not particularly quiet ; perhaps 
 with young Neapolitans that would be impossible. 
 I saw their copy-books, in which the writing was 
 very good, (I am sure the printer would like mine 
 to be as legible,) and the books were kept neat and 
 clean, as were the hands and faces of the children. 
 Taking the children as one goes in the streets of Na- 
 ples, it would require a day perhaps to find as many 
 clean ones as I saw in these schools, where cleanli- 
 ness is resolutely insisted upon. Many of the chil- 
 dren were ragged ; here and there was one hideous 
 
140 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 with ophthalmia; but there was not a clouded coun- 
 tenance, nor a dirty hand among them. We should 
 have great hopes for a nation of which the children 
 can be taught to wash themselves. 
 
 There were fourteen pupils in the boys' superior 
 school, where geography, mathematics, linear draw- 
 ing, French, Italian history, and ancient history were 
 taught. A brief examination showed the boys to be 
 well up in their studies ; indeed they furnished 
 some recondite information about Baffin's Bay for 
 which I should not myself have liked to be called on 
 suddenly. Their drawing-books were prodigies of 
 neatness, and betrayed that aptness for form and 
 facility of execution which are natural to the Ital- 
 ians. Some of these boys had been in the schools 
 nearly three years ; they were nearly all of the 
 class which must otherwise have grown up to hope- 
 less vagabondage ; but here they were receiving 
 gratis an education that would fit them for em- 
 ployments wherein trained intellectual capacity is 
 required. If their education went no higher than 
 this, what an advance it would be upon their origi- 
 nal condition ! 
 
 In the room devoted to boys of lower grade, I en- 
 tangled myself in difficulties with a bright-eyed 
 young gentleman, whom I asked if he liked Italian 
 history better than ancient history. He said he 
 liked the latter, especially that of the Romans, much 
 better. " Why, that is strange. I should think an 
 Italian boy would like Italian history best." " But 
 were not the Romans also Italians, Signore ? " 1 
 
PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 141 
 
 blush to say that I basely sneaked out of this trouble 
 by answering that they were not like the Italians of 
 the present day, whatever that meant. But in- 
 deed all these young persons were startlingly quick 
 with their information, and knowing that I knew 
 very little on any subject with certainty, I think I 
 was wise to refuse all offers to examine them in their 
 studies. 
 
 We left this school and returned to the Toledo by 
 one of those wonderful little side streets already men- 
 tioned, which are forever tumultuous with the oddest 
 Neapolitan life with men quarreling themselves 
 purple over small quantities of fish with asses 
 braying loud and clear above their discord with 
 women roasting pine-cones at charcoal fires with 
 children in the agonies of having their hair combed 
 
 with degraded poultry and homeless dogs with 
 fruit-stands and green groceries, and the little edifices 
 of ecclesiastical architecture for the sale of lemonade 
 
 with wandering bag-pipers, and herds of noncha- 
 lant goats with horses, and grooms currying them 
 
 and over all, from vast heights of balcony, with 
 people lazily hanging upon rails and looking down 
 on the riot. Re entering the stream of the Toledo, 
 it carried us almost to the Museo Borbonico before 
 we again struck aside into one of the smaller streets, 
 whence we climbed quite to the top of one of those 
 incredibly high Neapolitan houses. Here, crossing 
 an open terrace on the roof, we visited three small 
 rooms, in which there were altogether some hundred 
 boys in the first stages of reclamation. They were 
 
142 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 under the immediate superintendence of Mr. Buscar- 
 let, and he seemed to feel the fondest interest in 
 them. Indeed, there was sufficient reason for this : 
 up to a certain point, the Neapolitan children learn 
 so rapidly and willingly that it can hardly be other 
 than a pleasure to teach them. After this, their 
 zeal flags ; they know enough ; and their parents and 
 friends, far more ignorant than they, are perfectly 
 satisfied with their progress. Then the difficulties 
 of their teachers begin ; but here, in these lowest 
 grade schools, they had not yet begun. The boys 
 were still eager to learn, and were ardently following 
 the lead of their teachers. They were little fellows, 
 nearly all, and none of them had been in school 
 more than a year and a half, while some had been 
 there only three or four months. They rose up 
 with " Buon giorno, signori" as we entered, and 
 could hardly be persuaded to lapse back to the duties 
 of life during our stay. They had very good faces, 
 indeed, for the most part, and even the vicious had 
 intellectual brightness. Just and consistent usage 
 has the best influence on them ; and one boy was 
 pointed out as quite docile and manageable, whose 
 parents had given him up as incorrigible before he 
 entered the school. As it was, there was something 
 almost pathetic in his good behavior, as being pos- 
 sible to him, but utterly alien to his instincts. The 
 boys of these schools seldom play truant, and they 
 are never severely beaten in school ; when quite in- 
 tractable, notice is given to their parents, and they 
 usually return in a more docile state. It sometimes 
 
PROTESTANT BAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 143 
 
 happens that the boys are taken away by their 
 parents, from one motive or another ; but they find 
 their way back again, and are received as if nothing 
 had happened. 
 
 The teacher in the first room here is a handsome 
 young Calabrian, with the gentlest face and manner, 
 one of the most efficient teachers under Mr. 
 Buscarlet. The boys had out their Bibles when we 
 entered, and one after another read passages to us. 
 There were children of seven, eight, and nine years, 
 who had been in the school only three months, and 
 who read any part of their Bibles with facility and 
 correctness ; of course, before coming to school they 
 had not known one letter from another. The most 
 accomplished scholar was a youngster, named Sag- 
 giomo, who had received eighteen months' schooling. 
 He was consequently very quick indeed, and wanted 
 to answer all the hard questions put to the other 
 boys. In fact, all of them were ready enough, and 
 there was a great deal of writhing and snapping 
 of fingers among those who longed to answer some 
 hesitator's question just as you see in schools at 
 home. They were examined in geography, and 
 then in Bible history particularly Joseph's story. 
 They responded in chorus to all demands on this 
 part of study, and could hardly be quieted sufficiently 
 to give Saggiomo's little brother, aged five, a chance 
 to tell why Joseph's brethren sold him. As soon as 
 he could be heard he piped out : " Perche Giuseppe 
 aveva dei sogni ! " (Because Joseph had dreams.) 
 It was not exactly the right answer, but nobody 
 
144 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 laughed at the little fellow, though they all roared 
 out in correction when permitted. 
 
 In the next room, boys somewhat older were ex- 
 amined in Italian history, and responded correctly 
 and promptly. They were given a sum which they 
 performed in a miraculously short time ; and their 
 copy-books, when shown, were equally creditable to 
 them. Their teacher was a Bolognese, a natural- 
 ized Swiss, who had been a soldier, and who 
 maintained strict discipline among his irregulars, 
 without, however, any perceptible terrorism. 
 
 The amount of work these teachers accomplish in 
 a day is incredible : the boys' school opens at eight 
 in the morning and closes at four, with intermission 
 of an hour at noon. Then in the evening the same 
 men teach a school for adults, and on Sunday have 
 their classes in the Sunday-schools. And this the 
 whole year round. Their pay is not great, being 
 about twenty dollars a month, and they are evidently 
 not wholly self-interested from this fact. The 
 amount of good they accomplish under the direction 
 of their superiors is in proportion to the work done. 
 To appreciate it, the reader must consider that they 
 take the children of the most ignorant and degraded 
 of all the Italians ; that they cause them to be 
 washed corporeally, first of all, and then set about 
 cleansing them morally ; and having cleared away as 
 much of the inherited corruption of ages as possible, 
 they begin to educate them in the various branches 
 of learning. There is no direct proselyting in the 
 schools, but the Bible is the first study, and the chil- 
 
PROTESTANT BAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES. 145 
 
 dren are constantly examined in it ; and the result is 
 at least not superstition. The advance upon the old 
 condition of things is incalculably great ; for till the 
 revolution under Garibaldi in 1860, the schools of 
 Naples were all in the hands of the priests or their 
 creatures, and the little learning there imparted was 
 as dangerous as it could well be made. Now these 
 schools are free, the children are honestly and thor- 
 oughly taught, and if they are not directly instructed 
 in Protestantism, are at least instructed to associate 
 religion with morality, probably for the first time in 
 their lives. Too much credit cannot be given to the 
 Italian government which has acted in such good 
 faith with the men engaged in this work, protecting 
 them from all interruption and persecution ; but af- 
 ter all, the great praise is due to their own wise, 
 unflagging zeal. They have worked unostenta- 
 tiously, making no idle attacks on time-honored prej- 
 udices, but still having a purpose of enlightenment 
 which they frankly avowed. The people whom 
 they seek to benefit judge them by their works, and 
 the result is that they have quite as much before 
 them as they can do. Their discouragements are 
 great. The day's teaching is often undone at home ; 
 the boys forget as aptly as they learn ; and from the 
 fact that only the baser feelings of fear and interest 
 have ever been appealed to before in the Neapolitans, 
 they have often to build in treacherous places with- 
 out foundation of good faith or gratitude. Embar- 
 rassments for want of adequate funds are sometimes 
 10 
 
146 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 felt also. But no one can study their operations 
 without feeling that success must attend their efforts, 
 with honor to them, and with inestimable benefits to 
 the generation which shall one day help to govern 
 free Italy. 
 
XII. 
 
 BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES. 
 
 ONE day it became plain even to our reluctance 
 that we could not stay in Naples forever, and the 
 next morning we took the train for Rome. The 
 Villa Reale put on its most alluring charm to him 
 that ran down before breakfast to thrid once more 
 its pathways bordered with palms and fountains and 
 statues ; the bay beside it purpled and twinkled in 
 the light that made silver of the fishermen's sails ; 
 far away rose Vesuvius with his nightcap of mist still 
 hanging about his shoulders ; all around rang and rat- 
 tled Naples. The city was never so fair before, nor 
 could ever have been so hard to leave ; and at the 
 last moment the landlord of the Hotel Washington 
 must needs add a supreme pang by developing into a 
 poet, and presenting me with a copy of a comedy he 
 had written. The reader who has received at part- 
 ing from the gentlemanly proprietor of one of our 
 palatial hotels his " Ode on the Steam Elevator," 
 will conceive of the shame and regret with which I 
 thought of having upbraided our landlord about our 
 rooms, of having stickled at small preliminaries con- 
 cerning our contract for board, and for having alto- 
 gether treated him as one of the uninspired. Let me 
 
148 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 do him the tardy justice to say that he keeps, after 
 the Stella d'Oro at Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, 
 and that his comedy was really very sprightly. It is 
 no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we 
 know, and a poet who does it ought to have a double 
 acclaim. 
 
 Nobody who cares to travel with decency and 
 comfort can take the second-class cars on the road 
 between Naples and Rome, though these are per- 
 fectly good everywhere else in Italy. The Papal 
 city makes her influence felt for shabbiness and un- 
 cleanliness wherever she can, and her management 
 seems to prevail on this railway. A glance into the 
 second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class, 
 which in themselves were bad, and we took our 
 places almost contentedly. 
 
 The road passed through the wildest country we 
 had seen in Italy ; and presently a rain began to fall 
 and made it drearier than ever. The land was much 
 grown up with thickets of hazel, and was here and 
 there sparsely wooded with oaks. Under these, hogs 
 were feeding upon the acorns, and the wet swine- 
 herds were steaming over fires built at their roots. 
 In some places the forest was quite dense ; in other 
 places it fell entirely away, and left the rocky hill- 
 sides 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, ster- 
 ile, stony heights, without a patch of verdure on their 
 
BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES. 149 
 
 nakedness, and at last abruptly dropped into the 
 gloomy expanse of the Campagna. 
 
 The towns along the route had little to interest us 
 in their looks, though at San Germano we caught a 
 glimpse of the famous old convent of Monte-Cassino, 
 perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of the 
 rock on which it was built. Fancy now loves to 
 climb that steep acclivity, and wander through the 
 many-volumed library of the ancient Benedictine re- 
 treat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and cer- 
 tainly less expensive than actual ascent and acquaint- 
 ance with the monastery would have been. Two 
 Croatian priests, who shared our compartment of the 
 railway carriage, first drew our notice to the place, 
 and were enthusiastic about it for many miles after it 
 was out of sight. What gentle and pleasant men 
 they were, and how hard it seemed that they should 
 be priests and Croats ! They told us all about the 
 city of Spalato, where they lived, and gave us such a 
 glowing account of Dalmatian poets and poetry that 
 we began to doubt at last if the seat of literature 
 were not somewhere on the east coast of the Adri- 
 atic ; and I hope we left them the impression that 
 the literary centre of the world was not a thousand 
 miles from the horse-car office in Harvard Square. 
 
 Here and there repairs were going forward on the 
 railroad, and most of the laborers were women. 
 They were straight and handsome girls, and moved 
 with a stately grace under the baskets of earth bal- 
 anced on their heads. Brave black eyes they had, 
 such as love to look and to be looked at ; they were 
 not in the least hurried by their work, but desisted 
 
150 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 from it to gaze at the passengers whenever the train 
 stopped. They all wore their beautiful peasant cos- 
 tume, the square white linen head-dress falling to 
 the shoulders, the crimson bodice, and the red scant 
 skirt ; and how they contrived to keep themselves so 
 clean at their work, and to look so spectacular in it 
 all, remains one of the many Italian mysteries. 
 
 Another of these mysteries we beheld in the little 
 beggar-boy at Isoletta. He stood at the corner of 
 the station quite mute and motionless during our 
 pause, and made no sign of supplication or entreaty. 
 He let his looks beg for him. He was perfectly 
 beautiful and exceedingly picturesque. Where his 
 body was not quite naked, his jacket and trousers 
 hung in shreds and points ; his long hair grew 
 through the top of his hat, and fell over like a plume. 
 Nobody could resist him ; people ran out of the cars, 
 at the risk of being left behind, to put coppers into 
 the little dirty hand held languidly out to receive 
 them. The boy thanked none, smiled on none, but 
 looked curiously and cautiously at all, with the quick 
 perception and the illogical conclusions of his class 
 and race. As we started he did not move, but re- 
 mained in his attitude of listless tranquillity. As we 
 glanced back, the mystery of him seemed to be 
 solved for a moment : he would stand there till he 
 grew up into a graceful, prayerful, pitiless brigand, 
 and then he would rend from travel the tribute now 
 so freely given him. But after all, though his future 
 seemed clear, and he appeared the type of a strange 
 and hardly reclaimable people, he was not quite a 
 solution of the Neapolitan puzzle. 
 
XIII. 
 
 ROMAN PEARLS. 
 I. 
 
 THE first view of the ruins in the Forum brought 
 a keen sense of disappointment. I knew that they 
 could only be mere fragments and rubbish, but I was 
 not prepared to find them so. I learned that I had 
 all along secretly hoped for some dignity of neighbor- 
 hood, some affectionate solicitude on the part of Na- 
 ture to redeem these works of Art from the destruction 
 that had befallen them. But in hollows below the 
 level of the dirty cowfield, wandered over by evil- 
 eyed buffaloes, and obscenely defiled by wild beasts 
 of men, there stood here an arch, there a pillar, yon- 
 der a cluster of columns crowned by a bit of frieze ; 
 and yonder again, a fragment of temple, half-gorged 
 by the facade of a hideous Renaissance church ; then 
 a height of vaulted brick-work, and, leading on to the 
 Coliseum, another arch, and then incoherent columns 
 overthrown and mixed with dilapidated walls mere 
 phonographic consonants, dumbly representing the 
 past, out of which all vocal glory had departed. The 
 Coliseum itself does not much better express a cer- 
 tain phase vof Roman life than does the Arena at 
 Verona ; it is larger only to the foot-rule, and it 
 
152 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 seemed not grander otherwise, while it is vastly 
 more ruinous. Even the Pantheon failed to impress 
 me at first sight, though I found myself disposed to 
 return to it again and again, and to be more and more 
 affected by it. 
 
 Modern Rome appeared, first and last, hideous. 
 It is the least interesting town in Italy, and the archi- 
 tecture is hopelessly ugly especially the architect- 
 ure of the churches. The Papal city contrives at 
 the beginning to hide the Imperial city from your 
 thought, as it hides it in such a great degree from 
 your eye, and old Rome only occurs to you in a sort 
 of stupid wonder over the depth at which it is buried. 
 I confess that I was glad to get altogether away 
 from it after a first look at the ruins in the Forum, 
 and to take refuge in the Conservatorio delle Mendi- 
 canti, where we were charged to see the little Vir- 
 ginia G. The Conservatorio, though a charitable in- 
 stitution, is not so entirely meant for mendicants as its 
 name would imply, but none of the many young girls 
 there were the children of rich men. They were 
 often enough of parentage actually hungry and rag- 
 ged, but they were often also the daughters of honest 
 poor folk, who paid a certain sum toward their 
 maintenance and education in the Conservatorio. 
 Such was the case with little Virginia, whose father 
 was at Florence, doubly impeded from seeing her by 
 the fact that he had fought against the Pope for the 
 Republic of 1848, and by the other fact that he had 
 since wrought the Pope a yet deadlier injury by turn- 
 ing Protestant. 
 
ROMAN PEARLS. 153 
 
 Ringing a garrulous bell that continued to jingle 
 some time after we were admitted, we found our- 
 selves in a sort of reception-room, of the general 
 quality of a cellar, and in the presence of a portress 
 who was perceptibly preserved from mold only by 
 the great pot of coals that stood in the centre of 
 the place. Some young girls, rather pretty than 
 not, attended the ancient woman, and kindly acted 
 as the ear-trumpet through which our wishes were 
 conveyed to her mind. The Conservatorio was not, 
 so far, as conventual as we had imagined it ; but as 
 the gentleman of the party was strongly guarded 
 by female friends, and asked at once to see the Su- 
 perior, he concluded that there was, perhaps, some- 
 thing so unusually reassuring to the recluses in his 
 appearance and manner that they had not thought it 
 necessary to behave very rigidly. It later occurred to 
 this gentleman that the promptness with which the 
 pretty mendicants procured him an interview with the 
 Superior had a flavor of self-interest in it, and that 
 he who came to the Conservatorio in the place of a fa- 
 ther might have been for a moment ignorantly viewed 
 as a yet dearer and tenderer possibility. From what- 
 ever danger there was in this error the Superior soon 
 appeared to rescue him, and we were invited into a 
 more ceremonious apartment on the first floor, and 
 the little Virginia was sent for. The visit of the 
 strangers caused a tumult and interest in the quiet 
 old Conservatorio of which it is hard to conceive 
 now, and the excitement grew tremendous when it 
 appeared that the signori were Ainericani and Prot- 
 
154 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 estanti. We imparted a savor of novelty and im- 
 portance to Virginia herself, and when she appeared, 
 the Superior and her assistant looked at her with no 
 small curiosity and awe, of which the little maiden 
 instantly became conscious, and began to take ad- 
 vantage. Accompanying us over the building and 
 through the grounds, she cut her small friends 
 wherever she met them, and was not more than 
 respectful to the assistant. 
 
 It was from an instinct of hospitality that we were 
 shown the Conservatorio, and instructed in regard to 
 all its purposes. We saw the neat dormitories with 
 their battalions of little white beds ; the kitchen with 
 its gigantic coppers for boiling broth, and the refec- 
 tory with the smell of the frugal dinners of genera- 
 tions of mendicants in it. The assistant was very 
 proud of the neatness of every thing, and was glad 
 to talk of that, or, indeed, any thing else. It ap- 
 peared that the girls were taught reading, writing, 
 and plain sewing when they were young, and that 
 the Conservatorio was chiefly sustained by pious 
 contributions and bequests. Any lingering notion 
 of the conventual character of the place was dispelled 
 by the assistant's hurrying to say, "And when we 
 can get the poor things well married, we are glad 
 to do so." 
 
 " But how does any one ever see them ? " 
 " Eh ! well, that is easily managed. Once a 
 month we dress the marriageable girls in their best, 
 and take them for a walk in the street. If an hon- 
 est young man falls in love with one of them going 
 
BOM AN PEARLS. 155 
 
 by, he comes to the Superior, and describes her as 
 well as he can, and demands to see her. She is 
 called, and if both are pleased, the marriage is ar- 
 ranged. You see it is a very simple affair." 
 
 And there was, to the assistant's mind, nothing odd 
 in the whole business, insomuch that I felt almost 
 ashamed of marveling at it. 
 
 Issuing from the backdoor of the convent, we as- 
 cended by stairs and gateways into garden spaces, 
 chiefly planted with turnips and the like poor but 
 respectable vegetables, and curiously adorned with 
 fragments of antique statuary, and here and there a 
 fountain in a corner, trickling from moss-grown rocks, 
 and falling into a trough of travertine, about the feet 
 of some poor old goddess or Virtue who had forgot- 
 ten what her name was. 
 
 Once, the assistant said, speaking as if the thing 
 had been within her recollection, though it must 
 have been centuries before, the antiquities of the 
 Conservatorio were much more numerous and strik- 
 ing ; but they were now removed to the different 
 museums. Nevertheless they had still a beautiful 
 prospect left, which we were welcome to enjoy if we 
 would follow her ; and presently, to our surprise, we 
 stepped from the garden upon the roof of the Temple 
 of Peace. The assistant had not boasted without 
 reason : away before us stretched the Campagna, a 
 level waste, and empty, but for the umbrella-palms 
 that here and there waved like black plumes upon 
 it, and for the arched lengths of the acqueducts that 
 seemed to stalk down from the ages across the 
 
156 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 melancholy expanse like files of giants, with now 
 and then a ruinous gap in the line, as if one had 
 fallen out weary by the way. The city all around 
 us glittered asleep in the dim December sunshine, 
 and far below us, on the length of the Forum over 
 which the^Appian Way stretched from the Capito- 
 line Hill under the Arch of Septimius Severus and 
 the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantino, leav- 
 ing the Coliseum on the left, and losing itself in 
 the foliage of the suburbs, the Past seemed strug- 
 gling to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape 
 and animate itself anew. The effort was more suc- 
 cessful than that which we had helped the Past to 
 make when standing on the level of the Forum ; 
 but Antiquity must have been painfully conscious of 
 the incongruity of the red-legged Zouaves wander- 
 ins over the grass, and of the bewildered tourists 
 
 O O * 
 
 trying to make her out with their Hurrays. 
 
 In a day or two after this we returned again to 
 our Conservatorio, where we found that the excite- 
 ment created by our first visit had been kept fully 
 alive by the events attending the photographing of 
 Virginia for her father. Not only Virginia was 
 there to receive us, but her grandmother also an 
 old, old woman, dumb through some infirmity of 
 age, who could only weep and smile in token of her 
 content. I think she had but a dim idea, after all, 
 of what went on beyond the visible fact of Virginia's 
 photograph, and that she did not quite understand 
 how we could cause it to be taken for her son. 
 She was deeply compassionated by the Superior, who 
 
ROMAN PEARLS. 157 
 
 rendered her pity with a great deal of gesticulation, 
 casting up her eyes, shrugging her shoulders, and 
 sighing grievously. But the assistant's cheerfulness 
 could not be abated even by the spectacle of extreme 
 age ; and she made the most of the whole occasion, 
 recounting with great minuteness all the incidents of 
 the visit to the photographer's, and running to get 
 the dress Virginia sat in, that we might see how ex- 
 actly it was given in the picture. Then she gave us 
 much discourse concerning the Conservatorio and its 
 usages, and seemed not to wish us to think that life 
 there was altogether eventless. " Here we have a 
 little amusement also,"' she said. " The girls have 
 their relatives to visit them sometimes, and then in 
 the evening they dance. Oh, they enjoy themselves ! 
 I am half old (mezzo-vecchia). I am done with 
 these things. But for youth, always kept down, 
 something lively is wanted." 
 
 When we took leave of these simple folks, we 
 took leave of almost the only natural and unprepared 
 aspect of Italian life which we were to see in Rome ; 
 but we did not know this at the time. 
 
 n. 
 
 INDEED, it seems to me that all moisture of ro- 
 mance and adventure has been wellnigh sucked out 
 of travel in Italy, and that compared with the old 
 time, when the happy wayfarer journeyed by vettura 
 through the innumerable little states of the Penin- 
 sula, - halted every other mile to show his passport, 
 
158 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 and robbed by customs officers in every color of 
 shabby uniform and every variety of cocked hat, 
 the present railroad period is one of but stale and 
 insipid flavor. Much of local life and color re- 
 mains, of course ; but the hurried traveller sees little 
 of it, and, passed from one grand hotel to another, 
 without material change in the cooking or the meth- 
 ods of extortion, he might nearly as well remain at 
 Paris. The Italians, who live to so great extent by 
 the travel through their country, learn our abomina- 
 ble languages and minister to our detestable comfort 
 and propriety, till we have slight chance to know 
 them as we once could, musical, picturesque, and 
 full of sweet, natural knaveries, graceful falsehood, 
 and all uncleanness. Rome really belongs to the 
 Anglo-Saxon nations, and the Pope and the past 
 seem to be carried on entirely for our diversion. 
 Every thing is systematized as thoroughly as in a 
 museum where the objects are all ticketed ; and our 
 prejudices are consulted even down to alms-giving. 
 Honest Beppo is gone from the steps in the Piazza, di 
 Spagna, and now the beggars are labeled like police- 
 men, with an immense plate bearing the image of St. 
 Peter, so that you may know you give to a worthy 
 person when you bestow charity on one of them, and 
 not, alas ! to some abandoned impostor, as in former 
 days. One of these highly recommended mendicants 
 gave the last finish to the system, and begged of us 
 in English ! No custodian will answer you, if he 
 can help it, in the Italian which he speaks so ex- 
 quisitely, preferring to speak bad French instead ; 
 
ROMAN PEARLS. 159 
 
 and in all the shops on the Corso the English tongue 
 is de rigueur. 
 
 After our dear friends at the Conservatorio, I think 
 we found one of the most simple and interesting of 
 Romans in the monk who showed us the Catacombs 
 of St. Sebastian. These catacombs, he assured us, 
 were not restored like those of St. Calixtus, but 
 were just as the martyrs left them ; and, as I do not 
 remember to have read anywhere that they are 
 formed merely of long, low, narrow, wandering un- 
 der-ground passages, lined on either side with tombs 
 in tiers like berths on a steamer, and expanding here 
 and there into small square chambers, bearing the 
 traces of ancient frescos, and evidently used as chap- 
 els, I venture to offer the information here. The 
 reader is to keep in his mind a darkness broken by 
 the light of wax tapers, a close smell, and crookedness 
 and narrowness, or he cannot realize the catacombs 
 as they are in fact. Our monkish guide, before en- 
 tering the passage leading from the floor of the church 
 to the tombs, in which there was still some " fine 
 small dust " of the martyrs, warned us that to touch 
 it was to incur the penalty of excommunication, and 
 then gently craved pardon for having mentioned the 
 fact. But, indeed, it was only to persons who showed 
 a certain degree of reverence that these places were 
 now exhibited ; for some Protestants who had been 
 permitted there had stolen handfuls of the precious 
 ashes, merely to throw away. I assured him that I 
 thought them beasts to do it ; and I was afterwards 
 puzzled to know what should attract their wantonness 
 
160 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 in the remnants of mortality, hardly to be distin- 
 guished from the common earth out of which the 
 
 catacombs were dug. 
 
 in. 
 
 RETURNING to the church above we found, kneel- 
 ing before one of the altars, two pilgrims, a man 
 and a woman. The latter was habited in a nun- 
 like dress of black, and the former in a long pilgrim's 
 coat of coarse blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim's staff in 
 his hand, and showed under his close hood a fine, 
 handsome, reverent face, full of a sort of tender awe, 
 touched with the pathos of penitence. In attendance 
 upon the two was a dapper little silk-hatted man, 
 with rogue so plainly written in his devotional coun- 
 tenance that I was not surprised to be told that he 
 was a species of spiritual valet de place, whose occu- 
 pation it was to attend pilgrims on their tour to the 
 Seven Churches at which these devotees pray in 
 Rome, and there to direct their orisons and join in 
 them. 
 
 It was not to the pilgrims, but to the heretics that 
 the monk now uncovered the precious marble slab on 
 which Christ stood when he met Peter flying from 
 Rome and turned him back. You are shown the 
 prints of the divine feet, which the conscious stone 
 received and keeps forever ; and near at hand is one 
 of the arrows with which St. Sebastian was shot. 
 We looked at these things critically, having to pay 
 for the spectacle ; but the pilgrims and their guide 
 were all faith and wonder. 
 
ROMAN PEARLS. 161 
 
 I remember seeing nothing else so finely super- 
 stitious at Rome. In a chapel near the Church of 
 St. John Late ran are, as is well known, the marble 
 steps which once belonged to Pilate's house, and 
 which the Saviour is said to have ascended when he 
 went to trial before Pilate. The steps are protected 
 against the wear and tear of devotion by a stout 
 casing of wood, and they are constantly covered with 
 penitents, who ascend and descend them upon their 
 knees. Most o the pious people whom I saw in this 
 act were children, and the boys enjoyed it with a 
 good deal of giggling, as a very amusing feat. Some 
 old and haggard women gave the scene all the dignity 
 which it possessed ; but certain well-dressed ladies 
 and gentlemen were undeniably awkward and ab- 
 surd, and I was led to doubt if there were not an 
 incompatibility between the abandon of simple faith 
 and the respectability of good clothes. 
 
 IV. 
 
 IN all other parts of Italy one hears constant talk 
 among travellers of the malaria at Rome, and having 
 seen a case of Roman fever, I know it is a thing 
 not to be trifled with. But in Rome itself the mala- 
 ria 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 popu- 
 lation. The cheeks of tho French soldiers, too, whom 
 11 
 
162 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 we met at every turn, were red as their trousers, and 
 they seemed to flourish on the imputed unwholesome- 
 ness of the atmosphere. 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 square, and you are never 
 out of the sound of falling water. The Corso 
 and some of the principal streets do not so much im- 
 press you with their filth as with their dullness ; 
 but that part of the city where some of the most 
 memorable relics of antiquity are to be found is un- 
 imaginably 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 im- 
 passable, and the so-called House of Rienzi is a stable, 
 fortified against approach by a fosse of excrement. 
 A noisome smell seems to be esteemed the most ap- 
 propriate offering to the memory of ancient Rome, 
 and I am not sure that the moderns are mistaken in 
 this. In the rascal streets in the neighborhood 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 puzzle 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 
 
ROMAN PEARLS. 163 
 
 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 com- 
 pared to that in our fancy. We were somewhat dis- 
 appointed ; but then Niagara disappoints one ; and as 
 for Mont Blanc 
 
 v. 
 
 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 every one 
 to go up into the bronze globe on the top of the 
 cupola. In fact, this is a great labor, 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 lady 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 upon 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 
 
164 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 related to his boy, then in England, whom he called 
 Jack Spratt, and considered the grandest and great- 
 est of boys. With the 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 rotundity, 
 and made not the slightest motion to follow us. 
 
 I should be loth to vex the reader with any de- 
 scription 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 playing in the square before the 
 church, and the harmony in which the city grew in 
 every 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 rap- 
 ture in reflecting that I had underpaid three hack- 
 men during my stay in Rome, and thus contributed 
 to avenge my 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 inside of the dome, and in comparing 
 one's own littleness with the greatness of all the 
 neighboring mosaics. But as to the beauty of the 
 temple, I could not find it,without or within. 
 
ROMAN PEARLS. 165 
 
 VI. 
 
 IN Rome one's fellow -tourists are a constant 
 source of gratification and surprise. I thought that 
 American travellers were by no means the most ab- 
 surd among those we saw, nor even the loudest in 
 their approval of the Eternal City. A certain orcjer 
 of German greenness affords, perhaps, the pleasant- 
 est pasturage for the ruminating mind. For example, 
 at the Villa Ludovisi there was, beside numerous 
 Englishry in detached bodies, a troop of Germans, 
 chiefly young men, frugally pursuing the Sehens- 
 wiirdigkeiten in the social manner ofrtheir nation. 
 They took their enjoyment very noisily, and wran- 
 gled 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 us to the top 
 of the Casino. There they caught sight of their 
 friends in the arbor, and the spectacle appeared to 
 overwhelm them. They bowed, they took off their 
 hats, they waved their handkerchiefs. It was not 
 enough : one young fellow mounted on the balus- 
 trade 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 arbor, from whom he had parted two 
 minutes before. 
 
 In strange contrast to the producer of this enthusi- 
 asm, 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 land- 
 
166 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 scape. And she and the blonde young English girl 
 beside her pronounced a little dialogue together, winch 
 I give, because I saw that they meant it for the public : 
 
 The Young Girl. I wonder, you knoa, you don't 
 draw-ow St. Petuh's ! 
 
 The Artist. O ah, you knoa, I can draw-ow St. 
 Petuh's from so mennee powints. 
 
 I am afraid that the worst form of American green- 
 ness appears abroad in a desire to be perfectly up in 
 critical appreciation of the arts, and to approach the 
 great works in the spirit of the connoisseur. The 
 ambition is not altogether a bad one. Still I could 
 not help laughing at a fellow-countryman when he 
 told me that he had not yet seen Raphael's " Trans- 
 figuration," because he wished to prepare his mind 
 for understanding the original by first looking at all 
 the copies he could find. 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE Basilica San Paolo fuori le Mura surpasses 
 every thing in splendor of marble and costly stone 
 porphyry, malachite, alabaster and luxury of gild- 
 ing that is to be seen at Rome. But I chiefly remem- 
 ber it because on the road that leads to it, through 
 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 men- 
 tioned 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 
 
ROMAN PEARLS. 167 
 
 of a curved Hebrew nose. Perhaps a Christian could 
 not be found in Rome to take charge of these here- 
 tic graves, though Christians can be got to do almost 
 any thing there for money. However, I do not think 
 a Catholic would have kept the place in better order, 
 or more intelligently understood our reverent curi- 
 osity. It was the new burial-ground which we had 
 entered, and which is a little to the right of the elder 
 cemetery. It was very beautiful and tasteful in every 
 way ; the names upon the stones were chiefly Eng- 
 lish and Scotch, with here and there an American's. 
 But affection drew us only to the prostrate tablet in- 
 scribed 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 tender- 
 ness. The grave of John Keats is one of few in the 
 old burying-ground, and lies almost in the shadow of 
 the pyramid of Caius Cestius ; and I could not help 
 thinking of the wonder the Roman would have felt 
 could he have known into what unnamable richness 
 and beauty his Greek faith had ripened in the heart 
 of the poor poet, where it was mixed with so much 
 sorrow. Doubtless, in his time, a prominent citizen 
 like Caius Cestius was a leading member of the 
 temple in his neighborhood, 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 surprise the inner and more fra- 
 grant meaning of the symbols with the outside of 
 which his life was satisfied ; and I was glad to reflect 
 that in our day such a thing is impossible. 
 
168 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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. While 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 this 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 mys- 
 tery which had puzzled him ever since he had learned 
 English, namely, why the stone should say " writ on 
 water," and not written, he kept plucking mechan- 
 ically at one of the fragrant shrubs, pinching away 
 the leaves, and rending the tender twig, till I, re- 
 membering the once -sensitive dust from which it 
 grew, waited for the tortured tree to cry out to 
 him with a voice of words and blood, " Perche mi 
 schianti ? " 
 
 VIII. 
 
 IT seems to me that a candid person will wish to 
 pause a little before condemning Gibson's colored 
 
ROMAN PEARLS. 169 
 
 statues. They have been grossly -misrepresented. 
 They do not impress one at all as wax-work, and 
 there is great wrong in saying that their tinted na- 
 kedness suggests impurity any more than tliQ white 
 nakedness of other statues. The coloring is quite 
 conventional ; the flesh is merely warmed with the 
 hue representing life ; the hair is always a very deli- 
 cate yellow, the eyes a tender violet, and there is no 
 other particularization of color ; a fillet binding the 
 hair may be gilded, the hem of a robe traced in 
 blue. I, who had just come from seeing the frag- 
 ments of antique statuary in Naples Museum, tinted 
 in the same way, could not feel that there was any 
 thing preposterous in Gibson's works, and I am not 
 ashamed to say that they gave me pleasure. 
 
 As we passed, in his studio, from one room to an- 
 other, the workman who showed the marbles sur- 
 prised and delighted us by asking if we would like to 
 see the sculptor, and took us up into the little room 
 where Gibson worked. He was engaged upon a 
 bass-relief, a visit of Psyche to the Zephyrs, or 
 something equally aerial and mythological, and re- 
 ceived us very simply and naturally, and at once 
 began with some quaint talk about the subject in 
 hand. When we mentioned our pleasure in his 
 colored marbles we touched the right spring, and he 
 went on to speak of his favorite theory with visible 
 delight, making occasional pauses to bestow a touch 
 on the bass-relief, and coming back to his theme with 
 that self-corroborative " Yes ! " of his, which Haw- 
 thorne has immortalized. He was dressed with ex- 
 
170 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 traordinary slovenliness and indifference to clothes ; 
 had no collar, I think, and evidently did not know 
 what he had on. Every thing about him hespoke 
 the utmost unconsciousness and democratic plainness 
 of life, so that I could readily believe a story I heard 
 of him. Having dined the greater part of his life in 
 Roman restaurants, where it is but wholesome to go 
 over your plate, glass, spoon, and knife and fork witli 
 your napkin before using them, the great sculptor had 
 acquired such habits of neatness that at table in the 
 most aristocratic house in England he absent-mind- 
 edly went through all that ceremony of cleansing and 
 wiping. It is a story they tell in Rome, where every 
 body is anecdoted, and not always so good-naturedly. 
 
 IX. 
 
 ONE Sunday afternoon we went with some artistic 
 friends to visit the studio of the great German paint- 
 er, 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 the themes of medieval 
 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 realize to themselves something of the ear- 
 nestness which animated the elder Christian artists. 
 Overbeck's work is beautiful, but it is unreal, and 
 
ROMAN PEARLS. 171 
 
 expresses the sentiment of no time ; as the work of 
 the romantic German poets seems without relation 
 to any world men ever lived in. 
 
 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 Lorenzo out upon the 
 Campagna, w r hich tempts and tempts the 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 
 has once been in Rome to go again that will not 
 be cured by all the cool contemptuous things he 
 may think or say of the Eternal City ; that fills him 
 with fond memories of its fascination, and makes it 
 forever 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 Campagna. They 
 were weedy 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 over- 
 hung with grasses, and opening like a great eye 
 the evening sky looked marvelously 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 
 
172 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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 opportunity it gave me to weary myself upon 
 that many-memoried ground as freely as if it had 
 been a woods-pasture in Ohio. Nature, where his- 
 tory was so august, was perfectly simple and moth- 
 erly, and did so much to make me at home, that, as 
 the night thickened and we plunged here tind 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. 
 
 x. 
 
 PASQUINO, like most other great people, is not very 
 interesting 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 nothing 
 but a shapeless mass of stone, but the life can never 
 
ROMAN PEARLS. 173 
 
 die out of that which has been shaped by art to 
 the likeness of a man, arid 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. 
 
 XI. 
 
 REGARDING the face of Pompey's statue in the 
 Spada Palace, I was more struck than ever with a 
 resemblance to American politicians which I had 
 noted in all the Roman statues. It is a type of 
 face not now to be found in Rome, but frequent 
 enough here, and rather in the South than in the 
 North. Pompey was like the pictures of so many 
 Southern Congressmen that I wondered whether 
 race had not less to do with producing types than 
 had similarity of circumstances ; whether a republi- 
 canism based upon slavery could not so far assimi- 
 late character as to produce a common aspect in 
 people widely separated by time and creeds, but hav- 
 ing the same unquestioned habits of command, and 
 the same boundless and unscrupulous ambition. 
 
 XII. 
 
 WHEN the Tiber, according to its frequent habit, 
 rises and inundates the city, the Pantheon is one of 
 the first places to be flooded the sacristan told 
 us. The water climbs above the altar-tops, sapping, 
 in its recession, the cement of the fine marbles which 
 
174 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 incrust the columns, so that about their bases the 
 pieces have to be continually renewed. Nothing 
 vexes you so much in the Pantheon as your con- 
 sciousness of these and other repairs. Bad as ruin 
 is, I think I would rather have the old temple ru- 
 inous 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 every thing" (C7 hanno levato 
 tutto) ; 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 lurk- 
 ing 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 cook- 
 ing their supper at it, the light of the flames luridly 
 painting their swarthy faces ! 
 
 XIII. 
 
 POOR little Numero Cinque Via del Gambero has 
 seldom, I imagine, known so violent a sensation as 
 that it experienced when, on the day of the Immac- 
 ulate 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 ap- 
 peared 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 
 
ROMAN PEARLS. 175 
 
 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 al- 
 ready advertised us that the sex were not permitted 
 to ride in the red coach. As they appeared, how- 
 ever, he renewed his expressions of desolation 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 ! 
 Monsignore was in full costume, with his best ec- 
 clesiastical clothes on, and with his great gold chain 
 about his neck. The dress was richer than that of 
 the western archbishops ; and the long white beard 
 of Monsiornore made him look much more like a 
 
 & 
 
 Scriptural monsignore than these. He lacked, per- 
 haps, the fine spiritual grace of his brother, the 
 Archbishop at Venice, to whose letter of introduc- 
 tion we owed his acquaintance and untiring civili- 
 ties; but if a man cannot be plump and spiritual, 
 he can be plump and pleasant, as Monsignore was to 
 the last degree. He enlivened our ride with dis- 
 course about the Armenians at Venice, equally be- 
 loved of us ; and, arrived at the Sistine Chapel, he 
 marshaled the ladies before him, and won them early 
 entrance through the crowd of English people crush- 
 ing 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 of the uninfluential and insignificant 
 priests that About describes the archbishops at Rome 
 
176 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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 mon- 
 signore ! " Even the chief of these handsome fellows 
 had nothing but respect and obedience for our Arch- 
 bishop. 
 
 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 were 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 " Griu, signore, giu ! " Otherwise the 
 guard kept good order in the chapel, and were no 
 doubt as useful and genuine as any thing about the 
 poor old Pope. What gorgeous fellows they were, 
 and, as soldiers, how absurd ! The weapons they 
 bore were as obsolete as the excommunication. It 
 was amusing to pass one of these play-soldiers on 
 guard at the door of the Vatican tall, straight, 
 beautiful, superb, with his halberd on his shoulder 
 and then come 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 choir which 
 was angelically sweet, and heavenly far above all 
 praise the religious ceremonies affected me, like 
 all others of that faith, as tedious and empty. Each 
 
ROMAN PEARLS. 177 
 
 of the cardinals, as he entered the chapel, blew a 
 sonorous nose ; and was received standing by his 
 brother prelates a grotesque company of old-wom- 
 anish old men in gaudy gowns. One of the last to 
 come was Antonelli, who has the very wickedest face 
 in the world. He sat with his eyes fastened upon his 
 book, but obviously open at every pore to all that 
 went on about him. As he passed out he cast gleam- 
 ing, terrible, sidelong looks upon the people, full of 
 hate and guile. 
 
 From where I stood I saw the Pope's face only in 
 profile : it was gentle and benign enough, but not 
 great in expression, and the smile on it almost de- 
 generated into a simper. His Holiness had a cold ; 
 and his recitative, though full, was not smooth. He 
 was all priest when, in the midst of the service, he 
 hawked, held his handkerchief up before his face, a 
 little way off, and ruthlessly spat in it I 
 
 12 
 
FORZA MAGGIORE. 
 
 I IMAGINE that Grossetto is not a town much 
 known to travel, for it is absent from all the guide- 
 books I have looked at. However, it is chief in the 
 Maremma, where sweet Pia de' Tolommei lan- 
 guished and perished of the poisonous air and her 
 love's cruelty, and where, so many mute centuries 
 since, the Etrurian cities flourished and fell. Further, 
 one may say that Grossetto is on the diligence road 
 from Civita Vecchia to Leghorn, and that in the very 
 heart of the place there is a lovely palm-tree, rare, 
 if not sole, in that latitude. This palm stands in a 
 well-sheltered, dull little court, out of every thing's 
 way, and turns tenderly toward the wall that shields 
 it on the north. It has no other company but a beau- 
 tiful 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 
 was looking pathetically to the northward, while the 
 palm softly stirred and opened its plumes, as a bird 
 does when his song is finished ; and there is very lit- 
 tle question but it had just been singing to her that 
 song of which the palms are so fond, 
 
 " Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam 
 Im Norden auf kahler HohV 
 
FORZA MAGGIORE. 179 
 
 Grossetto does her utmost to hide the secret of this 
 tree's existence, as if a hard, matter-of-fact place 
 ought to be ashamed of a sentimentality of the kind. 
 It pretended to be a very worldly town, and tried to 
 keep us in the neighborhood of its cathedral, where 
 the caffS and shops are, and where, in the evening, 
 four or five officers of the garrison clinked their sa- 
 bres on the stones, and promenaded up and down, 
 and as many ladies shopped for gloves ; and as many 
 citizens sat at the principal caff and drank black 
 coffee. This was lively enough ; and we knew that 
 the citizens were talking of the last week's news and 
 the Roman question ; that the ladies were really 
 looking for loves, not gloves ; that such of the offi- 
 cers as had no local intrigue to keep their hearts 
 at rest were terribly bored, and longed for Florence 
 or Milan or Turin. 
 
 Besides the social charms of her piazza, Grossetto 
 put forth others of an artistic nature. The cathedral 
 was very old and very beautiful, built of alternate 
 lines of red and white marble, and lately restored in 
 the best spirit of fidelity and reverence. But it was 
 not open, and we were obliged to turn from it to the 
 group of statuary in the middle of the piazza, repre- 
 sentative of the Maremma and Family returning 
 thanks to the Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany 
 for his^goodness in causing her swamps to be drained. 
 The Maremma and her children are arrayed in the 
 scant draperies of Allegory, but the Grand Duke is 
 fully dressed, and is shown looking down with some 
 surprise at their figures, and with a visible doubt 
 
180 ITALIAN JOUENEYS. 
 
 of the propriety of their public appearance in that 
 state. 
 
 There was also a Museum at Grossetto, and I won- 
 der what was in it ? 
 
 The wall of the town was perfect yet, though the 
 moat at its feet had been so long dry that it was only 
 to be known from the adjacent fields by the richness 
 of its soil. The top of the wall had been leveled, 
 and planted with shade, and turned into a peaceful 
 promenade, like most of such medieval defenses in 
 Italy ; though I am not sure that a little military 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 believe that the only armed 
 men we saw, beside the officers in the piazza, were 
 the numerous sportsmen resorting at that season to 
 Grossetto for the excellent shooting in the marshes. 
 All the way to Florence we continued to meet them 
 and their dogs ; and our inn at Grossetto 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 con- 
 stantly plucked, and from which the great, noble, 
 beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed, 
 broiled, and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these 
 generous birds during our sojourn, and found, when 
 we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that the very 
 genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas 
 beyond them. He was part of the repairs and im- 
 provements which that hostelry had recently under- 
 
FORZA MAGGIORE. 181 
 
 gone, and had evidently come in with the four- 
 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 blandishment to the rusticity of life in the 
 Maremma ; and we felt sure that he must know 
 what beefsteak was. When we ordered it, he as- 
 sumed to be perfectly conversant with it, started to 
 bring it, paused, turned, and, with a great sacrifice 
 of personal dignity, demanded, " Bifsteca di manzo, 
 o Ufsteca di motone f " " Beefsteak of beef, or 
 beefsteak of mutton ? " 
 
 Of Grossetto proper, this is all I remember, if I 
 except a boy whom I heard singing after dark in the 
 streets, 
 
 " Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi ! " 
 
 The cause of our sojourn there was an instance of 
 forza maggiore, as the agent of the diligence com- 
 pany 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 
 Venice, and we were traveling northward by dili- 
 gence because the railways were still more or less 
 interrupted by the storms and floods predicted of 
 Matthieu de la Drome, the only reliable prophet 
 France has produced since Voltaire ; and if our 
 accident was caused by an overruling Providence, the 
 company, according to the very law of its existence, 
 
182 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 was not responsible. 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 traveled by railway, we 
 were masters to have taken the steamer instead of 
 the diligence at Civita Vecchia. 
 
 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 lay dancing a hornpipe upon 
 the short, chopping waves, while we approached by 
 railway. We had leisure enough to make the deci- 
 sion, 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 desolating and depressing influence 
 of the weather and the landscape, 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 with 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 
 
FORZA MAGGIOBE. 183 
 
 mute appeal 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 upon 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 ; and in a state of pitiable dismay we ate five 
 francs' worth at the restaurant of the Civita Vecchia 
 station before we knew it, and long before we had 
 made up our minds. Still we might have lingered 
 and hesitated, and perhaps returned to Rome at last, 
 but for the dramatic resolution of the old man who 
 solicited passengers for the diligence, and carried 
 their passports for a final Papal visa 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 parts for honesty and truthfulness ; and he be- 
 sought us, out of that affectionate interest 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 favor. 
 
184 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 From the passports he learned that there was offi- 
 cial dignity among us, and addressed the unworthy 
 bearer of public honors as Eccellenza, and, at parting 
 bequeathed his advantage to the conductor, commend- 
 ing us all in set terms to his courtesy. He hovered 
 caressingly about us as long as we remained, strain- 
 ing 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. 
 
 We laughed together at this silly old man, when 
 out of sight ; but we confessed that, if travel in our 
 own country ever came, with advancing corruption, 
 to be treated with the small deceits practiced upon it 
 in Italy, it was not likely to be treated with the small 
 civilities also there attendant on it, and so tried to 
 console ourselves. 
 
 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 Rurope, and finally at Civita Vecchia he had 
 turned up, a silent spectator of our scene with the 
 agent of the diligence, and had gone off apparently 
 a confirmed passenger by steamer. Perhaps a nearer 
 view of the sailor's hornpipe, as danced by that ves- 
 sel in the harbor, 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 Portland, though he was not. For the 
 
FORZA MAGGIORE. 185 
 
 first time in our long acquaintance with one another's 
 faces, we entered into conversation, and wondered 
 whether we should find brigands or any thing to eat 
 on the road, without expectation of finding either. 
 In respect of robbers, we were not disappointed ; but 
 shortly after nightfall we stopped at a lonely post- 
 house 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 gamy flavor ; 
 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 
 Follonica. 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 gray and 
 windy night, though not rainy, exulted that we had 
 not taken the steamer. With very little change, 
 the wisdom of our decision in favor of the diligence 
 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 re- 
 
186 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 member 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 pul- 
 sating light of their cigars illumined their faces, and 
 to discover among them that Italian, common to all 
 large companies, who speaks English, and is very 
 eager to practice it with you, who is such a bene- 
 factor if you do not know his own language, and 
 such a 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 abys- 
 mal impalpability, while all the grim shapes of our 
 dreams fled to the spectral line of small boats sus- 
 taining the ferry-barge, and swaying slowly from it 
 as the drowned men at their keels tugged them 
 against the tide. 
 
 " S J accommodino, Signori ! " cries the cheerful 
 voice of the conductor, and we ascend to our places 
 in the diligence. The nightmares are brought out 
 again ; we mount, and renew the steeple-chase as be- 
 fore. 
 
 Suddenly, it all comes to an end, and we sit wide 
 awake in the diligence, amid a silence only broken 
 by the hiss of rain against the windows, and the 
 sweep of gusts upon the roof. The diligence stands 
 still ; there is no rattle of harness, nor other sound 
 to prove that we have arrived at the spot by other 
 means than dropping from the clouds. The idea 
 that we are passengers in the last diligence destroyed 
 
FORZA MAGGIORE. 187 
 
 before the Deluge, and are now waiting our fate on 
 the highest ground accessible to wheels, fades away 
 as the day dimly breaks, and we find ourselves 
 planted, as the Italians say, on the banks of another 
 river. There is no longer any visible conductor, the 
 horses have been spirited away, the driver has van- 
 ished. 
 
 "The rain beats and beats upon the roof, and begins 
 to drop through upon us in great, wrathful tears, 
 while the river before us rushes away with a mo- 
 mently swelling flood. Enter now from the depths 
 of the storm a number of rainy peasants, with our 
 conductor and driver perfectly waterlogged, and 
 group themselves on the low, muddy shore, near a 
 flat ferry-barge, evidently wanting but a hint of 
 forza maggiore to go down with any thing put into it. 
 A moment they dispute in pantomime, sending now 
 and then a windy tone of protest and expostulation 
 to our ears, and then they drop into a motionless si- 
 lence, and stand there in the tempest, not braving it, 
 but enduring it with the pathetic resignation of their 
 race, as if it were some form of hopeless political op- 
 pression. At last comes the conductor to us and says, 
 It is impossible for our diligences to cross in the boat, 
 and he has sent for others to meet us on the opposite 
 shore. He expected them long before this, but we 
 see ! They are not come. Patience and malediction ! 
 Remaining planted in these unfriendly circum- 
 stances from four o'clock till ten, we' have still the 
 effrontery to be glad that we did not take the steamer. 
 What a storm that must be at sea ! When at last 
 
188 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 our connecting diligences appear on the other shore, 
 we are almost light-hearted, and make a jest of the 
 Ombrone, as we perilously pass it in the ferry-boat 
 too weak for our diligences. Between the landing 
 and the vehicles there is a space of heavy mud to 
 cross, and when we reach them we find the coupe 
 appointed us occupied by three young Englishmen, 
 who insist that they shall be driven to the boat. 
 With that graceful superiority which endears their 
 nation to the world, and makes the traveling Eng- 
 lishman a universal favorite, they keep the seats to 
 which they have no longer any right, while the tem- 
 pest drenches the ladies to whom the places belong ; 
 and it is only by theforza maggiore of our conductor 
 that they can be dislodged. In the mean time the 
 Portland man exchanges with them the assurances 
 of personal and national esteem, which that mighty 
 bond of friendship, the language of Shakespeare and 
 Milton, enables us to offer so idiomatically to our 
 transatlantic cousins. 
 
 What Grossetto was like, as we first rode through 
 it, we scarcely looked to see. In four or five hours 
 we should strike the railroad at Follonica ; and we 
 merely asked of intermediate places that they should 
 not detain us. We dined in Grossetto at an inn of 
 the Larthian period, a cold inn and a damp, which 
 seemed never to have been swept since the broom 
 dropped from the grasp of the last Etrurian cham- 
 bermaid, and we ate with the two-pronged iron 
 forks of an extinct civilization. All the while we 
 dined, a boy tried to kindle a fire to warm us, and 
 
FORZA MAGGIORE. 189 
 
 beguiled his incessant failures with stories of inunda- 
 tion on the road ahead of us. But we believed him so 
 little, that when he said a certain stream near Gros- 
 setto was impassable, our company all but hissed him. 
 
 When we left the town and hurried into the open 
 country, we perceived that he had only too great 
 reason to be an alarmist. Every little rill was risen, 
 and boiling over with the pride of harm, and the 
 broad fields lay hid under the yellow waters that 
 here and there washed over the road. Yet the 
 freshet only presented itself to us as a pleasant ex- 
 citement ; and even when we came to a place where 
 the road itself was covered for a quarter of a mile, 
 we scarcely looked outside the diligence to see how 
 deep the water was. We were surprised when our 
 horses were brought to a stand on a rising ground, 
 and the conductor, cap in hand, appeared at the door. 
 He was a fat, well-natured man, full of a smiling good- 
 will ; and he stood before us in a radiant desperation. 
 
 Would Eccellenza descend, look at the water in 
 front, and decide whether to go on ? The conductor 
 desired to content ; it displeased him to delay, ma, 
 in somma ! the rest was confided to the conduct- 
 or's eloquent shoulders and eyebrows. 
 
 Eccellenza, descending, beheld but a dishearten- 
 ing prospect. On every hand the country was un- 
 der water. The two diligences stood on a stone 
 bridge spanning the stream, that, now swollen to an 
 angry torrent, brawled over a hundred yards of the 
 road before us. Beyond, the ground rose, and on 
 its slope stood a farm-house up to its second story in 
 
190 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 water. Without the slightest hope in his purpose, 
 and merely as an experiment, Eccellenza suggested 
 that a man should be sent in on horseback ; which 
 being done, man and horse in a moment floundered 
 into swimming depths. 
 
 The conductor, vigilantly regarding Eccellenza, 
 gave a great shrug of desolation. 
 
 Eccellenza replied with a foreigner's broken shrug, 
 a shrug of sufficiently correct construction, but 
 wanting the tonic accent, as one may say, though ex- 
 pressing, however imperfectly, an equal desolation. 
 
 It appeared to be the part of wisdom not to go 
 ahead, but to go back if we could ; and we reentered 
 the water we had just crossed. It had risen a little 
 meanwhile, and the road could now be traced only 
 by the telegraph-poles. The diligence before us 
 went safely through ; but our driver, trusting rather 
 to inspiration than precedent, did not follow it care- 
 fully, and directly drove us over the side of a small 
 viaduct. All the baggage of the train having been 
 
 oo o o 
 
 lodged upon the roof of our diligence, the unwieldy 
 vehicle now lurched heavily, hesitated, as if prepar- 
 ing, like Csesar, to fall decently, and went over on its 
 side with a stately deliberation that gave us ample 
 time to arrange our plans for getting out. 
 
 The torrent was only some three feet deep, but it 
 was swift and muddy, and it was with a fine sense of 
 shipwreck that Eccellenza felt his boots filling with 
 water, while a conviction that it would have been 
 better, after all, to have taken the steamer, struck 
 coldly home to him. We opened the window in the 
 
FORZA MAGGIORE. 191 
 
 top side of the diligence, and lifted the ladies through 
 it, and the conductor, in the character of life-boat, 
 bore them ashore ; while the driver cursed his horses 
 in a sullen whisper, and could with difficulty be di- 
 verted from that employment to cut the lines and 
 save one of them from drowning. 
 
 Here our compatriot, whose conversation with the 
 Englishman at the Ombrone we had lately admired, 
 showed traits of strict and severe method which af- 
 terward came into even bolder relief. The ladies 
 being rescued, he applied himself to the rescue of 
 their hats, cloaks, rubbers, muffs, books, and bags, and 
 handed them up through the window with tireless 
 perseverance, making an effort to wring or dry each 
 article in turn. The other gentleman on top received 
 them all rather grimly, and had not perhaps been 
 amused by the situation but for the exploit of his 
 hat. It was of the sort called in Italian as in Eng- 
 lish slang a stove-pipe (canna), and having been 
 made in Italy, it was of course too large for its 
 wearer. It had never been any thing but a horror 
 and reproach to him, and he was now inexpressibly 
 delighted to see it steal out of the diligence in com- 
 pany with one of the red-leather cushions, and glide 
 darkly down the flood. It nodded and nodded to the 
 cushion with a superhuman tenderness and elegance, 
 and had a preposterous air of whispering, as it 
 drifted out of sight, 
 
 "It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles, 
 It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down." 
 
 The romantic interest of this episode had hardly 
 
192 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 died away, when our adventure acquired an idyllic 
 flavor from the appearance on the scene of four peas- 
 ants in an ox-cart. These the conductor tried to en- 
 gage to bring out the baggage and right the fallen 
 diligence ; and they, after making him a little speech 
 upon the value of their health, which might be in- 
 jured, asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs 
 for the service. The simple incident enforced the 
 fact already known to us, that, if Italians some- 
 times take advantage of strangers, they are equally 
 willing to prey upon each other ; but I doubt if any 
 thing could have taught a foreigner the sweetness 
 with which our conductor bore the enormity, and 
 turned quietly from those brigands to carry the Port- 
 land man from the wreck, on which he lingered, to 
 the shore. 
 
 Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of 
 both diligences grouped themselves, and made merry 
 over the common disaster. As the conductor and 
 the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose 
 with the arrival of each trunk, and we were pleased 
 or not as we found it soaked or dry. We applauded 
 and admired the greater sufferers among us : a lady 
 who opened a dripping box was felt to have perpe- 
 trated a pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, 
 whose luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered 
 in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as 
 a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to 
 these witty passages was the epigrammatic display 
 of a reeking trunk full of the pretty rubbish people 
 bring away from Rome and Naples, copies of Pom- 
 
FORZA MAGGIOflE. 193 
 
 peian frescos more ruinous than the originals ; photo- 
 graphs floating loose from their cards ; little earthen 
 busts reduced to the lumpishness of common clay ; 
 Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of all memory 
 of their recent hues ; Roman pearls clinging together 
 in clammy masses. 
 
 We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all 
 crowded into one diligence and returned to Grossetto. 
 Arrived there, our party, knowing that a public con- 
 veyance in Italy and everywhere else always 
 stops at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek 
 another, and found it without ado, though the person 
 who undertook to show it spoke of it mysteriously 
 and as of difficult access, and tried to make the sim- 
 ple affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could. 
 
 We took one of the ancient rooms in which there 
 was a vast fire-place, as already mentioned, and we 
 there kindled such a fire as could not have been 
 known in that fuel-sparing land for ages. The dry- 
 ing of the clothes was an affair that drew out all the 
 energy and method of our compatriot, and at a late 
 hour we left him moving about among the garments 
 that dangled and dripped from pegs and hooks and 
 lines, dealing with them as a physician with his sick, 
 and tenderly nursing his dress-coat, which he wrung 
 and shook and smoothed and pulled this way and 
 that with a never-satisfied anxiety. At midnight, he 
 hired a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the 
 steaming raiment, and, returning at four o'clock, 
 found his watcher dead asleep before the empty fire- 
 place. But I rather applaud than blame the watcher 
 
 13 
 
194 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 for this. He must have been a man of iron nerve 
 to fall asleep amid all that phantasmal show of masks 
 and disguises. What if those reeking silks had for- 
 saken their nails, and, decking themselves with the 
 blotted Roman scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, 
 had invited the dress-coats to look over the dripping 
 photographs? Or if all those drowned garments 
 had assumed the characters of the people whom they 
 had grown to resemble, and had sat down to hear 
 the shade of Pia de' Tolommei rehearse the story of 
 her sad fate in the Maremma ? I say, if a watcher 
 could sleep in such company, he was right to do so. 
 
 On the third day after our return to Grossetto, we 
 gathered together our damaged effects, and packed 
 them into refractory trunks. Then we held the cus- 
 tomary discussion with the landlord concerning the 
 effrontery of his account, and drove off once more 
 toward Follonica. We could scarcely recognize the 
 route for the one we had recently passed over ; and 
 it was not until w r e came to the scene of our wreck, 
 and found the diligence stranded high and dry upon 
 the roadside, that we could believe the whole land- 
 scape about us had been flooded three days before. 
 The offending stream had shrunk back to its channel, 
 and now seemed to feign an unconsciousness of its 
 late excess, and had a virtuous air of not knowing 
 how in the world to account for that upturned dili- 
 gence. The waters, we learned, had begun to sub- 
 side the night after our disaster ; and the vehicle 
 might -have been righted and drawn off for it was 
 
FORZA MAGGIORE. 195 
 
 not in the least injured forty-eight hours previ- 
 ously ; but I suppose it was not en regie to touch it 
 without orders from Rome. I picture it to myself 
 still lying there, in the heart of the marshes, and 
 thrilling sympathetic travel with the spectacle of its 
 ultimate ruin : 
 
 " Disfecemi Maremma." 
 
 We reached Follonica at last, and then the cars 
 hurried us to Leghorn. We were thoroughly hum- 
 bled in spirit, and had no longer any doubt that we 
 did ill to take the diligence at Civita Vecchia instead 
 of the steamer ; for we had been, not nineteen hours, 
 but four days on the road, and we had suffered as 
 aforementioned. 
 
 But we were destined to be partially restored to 
 our self-esteem, if not entirely comforted for our 
 losses, when we sat down to dinner in the Hotel 
 Washington, and the urbane head-waiter, catching 
 the drift of our English discourse, asked us, 
 
 " Have the signori heard that the French steamer, 
 which left Civita Vecchia the same day with their 
 diligence, had to put back and lie in port more than 
 two days on account of the storm ? She is but now 
 come into Leghorn, after a very dangerous passage." 
 
AT PADUA. 
 
 i. 
 
 THOSE 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 ex- 
 cellent opportunity for the flirtation of lovers by day 
 and the vengeance of rivals by night. They have 
 seen the now- vacant streets thronged with maskers, 
 and the Venetian 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 do, for having been bored 
 and hungry there, for having had toothache there, 
 upon one occasion, for having rejoiced more in a 
 
AT PADUA. 197 
 
 cup of coffee at Pedrocclii'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 salti 
 mortali * of a waiter who summed up my account at 
 a Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with 
 which the city has been many times captured and re- 
 captured. Had I viewed Padua only over the wall 
 of Doctor Rappaccini's garden, how different my im- 
 pressions 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?" asked Heine of The*ophile Gautier setting 
 out on a journey thither. 
 
 Nevertheless it seems to me that I remember 
 something about Padua with a sort of romantic pleas- 
 ure. There was a certain charm which I can dimly 
 recall, in sauntering along the top of the old wall of 
 the city, and looking down upon the plumy crests of 
 the Indian corn that flourished up so mightily from 
 the dry bed of the moat. At such times 1 could not 
 help figuring 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 
 
 * Salti mortali are those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic 
 by which Italian waiters, in verbally presenting your account, ar- 
 rive at six as the product of two and two. 
 
198 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 against the defenses 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 museums of armor and from cabi- 
 nets of antiquities ; but they were very vivid for all 
 that. 
 
 I was never able, in passing a certain one of the 
 city gates, to divest myself of an historic interest in 
 the great loads of hay waiting admission on the out- 
 side. For an instant they masked again the Vene- 
 tian troops that, in the War of the League of Cam- 
 bray, entered the city in the hay-carts, shot down 
 the landsknechts at the gates, and, uniting with the 
 citizens, cut the German garrison to pieces. But it 
 was a thing long past. The German garrison was 
 here again ; and the heirs of the landsknechts went 
 clanking through the gate to the parade-ground, with 
 that fierce clamor of their kettle-drums which is so 
 much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of 
 fifes. Once more now the Germans are gone, and, 
 let us trust, forever ; but when I saw them, there 
 seemed little hope of their going. They had a great 
 Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set 
 up the altars of their heavy Bacchus in many parts 
 of the city. 
 
 I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on 
 such a spring day as this in the arcaded Paduan 
 streets, I should catch glimpses, through the gate- 
 
AT PADUA. 199 
 
 ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom, 
 and of fountains that tinkle there forever. If it were 
 autumn, and I were in the great market-place before 
 the Palazzo della Ragione, I should hear the baskets 
 of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with 
 the murmur of multitudinous bees, and 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 gay stores of fruits and 
 vegetables, 'brought thither by the world-old peasant- 
 women who have been bringing fruits and vegetables 
 to the 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 "Coman- 
 dala ?" as you linger to look at their grapes. They 
 have each a pair of scales, the emblem of Injus- 
 tice, and will weigh you out a scant measure of 
 the fruit if you like. Their faces are yellow as parch- 
 ment, and Time has written them so full of wrinkles 
 that there is not room for another line. Doubtless 
 these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and 
 would tell the whole history of Padua if you could 
 get at each 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 was a 
 
200 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 blooming girl, and paid nothing for either privi- 
 lege. What wild and confused reminiscences on the 
 wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the 
 fierce republican times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, 
 of the Venetian rule ! And is it not sad to think of 
 systems and peoples all passing away, and these an- 
 cient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in 
 front of the Palazzo della 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 completed. I know that, if I entered it, 
 I should be sure of finding the great hall of the pal- 
 ace the vastest hall in the world dim and dull 
 and dusty and delightful, with nothing in it except 
 at one end Donatello's colossal marble-headed wooden 
 horse of Troy, stared at from the other end by the 
 two dog-faced Egyptian women in basalt placed 
 there by Belzoni. 
 
 Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should 
 have the Court of the University all to myself, and 
 might study unmolested the blazons of the noble 
 youth who have attended the school in different cen- 
 turies ever since 1200, and have left their escutch- 
 eons on the walls to commemorate them. At the 
 foot of the stairway ascending to the schools from 
 the court is the statue of the learned lady who was 
 once a professor in the University, and who, if her 
 likeness belie not her looks, must have given a great 
 charm to student life in other times. At present 
 
AT PADUA. 201 
 
 there are no lady professors at Padua any more 
 than at Harvard ; and during late years the schools 
 have suffered greatly from the interference of the 
 Austrian 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-honored University will doubtless regain its an- 
 cient importance. Even in 1864 it had nearly fif- 
 teen hundred students, and one met them every- 
 where under the arcades, and could not well mistake 
 them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy 
 which these studious young men loved to assume. 
 They were to be seen a good deal on the prome- 
 nades outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are 
 driven in their 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 no- 
 tion of horse-races ; but these are now discontinued, 
 and there is nothing to be found there but the stat- 
 ues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen, posted in 
 a circle around the old race-course. If you strolled 
 thither about dusk on such a day as this, you might 
 see the statues unbend a little from their stony rigid- 
 ity, 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 
 
202 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 strange and splendid growths of our hemisphere, 
 the garden where Doctor Rappaccini doubtless found 
 the germ of his mortal plant ? 
 
 On the whole, I believe I would rather go this mo- 
 ment to Padua than to Lowell or Lawrence, or even 
 to Worcester ; and as to the disadvantage of having 
 seen Padua, I begin to think the whole place has 
 now assumed so fantastic a character in my mind 
 that I am almost as well qualified to write of it as if 
 I had merely dreamed it. 
 
 The day that we first visited the city was very 
 rainy, and we spent most of the time in viewing the 
 churches. These, even after the churches of Ven- 
 ice, one finds rich in art and historic interest, and 
 they in no instance fall into the maniacal excesses of 
 the Renaissance to which some of the temples of the 
 latter city abandon themselves. Their architecture 
 forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine 
 of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The su- 
 perb domes of St. Anthony's emulate those of St. 
 Mark's ; and the porticos of other Paduan churches 
 rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards 
 that fascinate with their mystery and beauty. 
 
 It was the wish to see the attributive Giottos in 
 the Chapter which drew us first to St. Anthony's, 
 and we saw them with the satisfaction naturally at- 
 tending the contemplation of frescos discovered only 
 since 1858, after having been hidden under plaster 
 and whitewash for many centuries; but we could 
 not believe that Giotto's fame was destined to gain 
 much by their rescue from oblivion. They are in 
 
AT PADUA. 203 
 
 nowise to be compared with this master's frescos in 
 the Chapel of the Annunziata, which, indeed, is 
 in every way a place of wonder and delight. You 
 reach it by passing through a garden lane bordered 
 with roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with 
 clinking keys, and lets you into the chapel, where 
 there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor seems to 
 have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous 
 smell, as a sacred place should be ; a blessed bench- 
 ing goes round the walls, and you sit down and take 
 unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener 
 leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in 
 which the talk of the painter and the exile is plain 
 enough. Their contemporaries and yours are cor- 
 dial in their gay companionship : through the half- 
 open door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sun- 
 shine that they saw lie there ; the deathless birds 
 that they heard sing out in the garden trees ; it is 
 the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hun- 
 dred years ago that breathes through all the lovely 
 garden grounds. 
 
 But in the midst of this pleasant communion with 
 the past, you have a lurking pain ; for you have 
 hired your brougham by the hour ; and you pres- 
 ently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account. 
 
 We had chosen our driver from 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 signer who had selected him, 
 "how much is your brougham an hour ? " 
 
204 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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 re- 
 ceived his due, and a handsome mancia besides, he 
 was still unsatisfied, and referred to the tariff in 
 proof that he had been under-paid. On that con- 
 fronted and defeated, he thanked us very cordially, 
 gave us the number of his brougham, and begged us 
 to ask for him when we came next to Padua and 
 needed a carriage. 
 
 From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us 
 to the Church of Santa Giustina, where is a very 
 famous and noble picture by 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 
 my own sake, I try always to wonder at things with- 
 out the least critical reservation. I therefore, in the 
 
AT PADUA. 205 
 
 sense of deglutition, bolted this prison at 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 swal- 
 low, being only three feet wide by about ten feet in 
 length. In this limited space, Santa Giustina passed 
 five years of the paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous 
 and a long-suffering prince, whom, singularly enough, 
 no historic artist has yet arisen to whitewash), and 
 was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining, 
 to suffer a blessed martyrdom. I am not sure now 
 whether the sacristan said she was dashed to death 
 on the stones, or cut to pieces with knives ; but 
 whatever the form of martyrdom, an iron ring in the 
 ceiling was employed in it, as I know from seeing 
 the ring, a curiously well-preserved piece of iron- 
 mongery. Within the narrow prison of the saint, 
 and just under the grating, through which the sacris- 
 tan thrust his candle to illuminate it, was a mountain 
 of candle-drippings, a monument to the fact that 
 faith still largely exists in this doubting world. My 
 own credulity, not only with regard to this prison, 
 but also touching the coffin of 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 I looked through 
 a certain screen work there, I could see the bones. 
 
206 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 On experiment I could not see the bones, but this 
 circumstance did not cause me to doubt their pres- 
 ence, particularly as I did see upon the screen a 
 great number of coins offered for the repose of the 
 martyrs' souls. I threw down some soldi, and thus 
 enthralled the sacristan. 
 
 If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the 
 driver must take him to those of Ecelino, at present 
 the property of a private gentleman near by. As I 
 had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great bar- 
 gain, from a second-hand book-stall, and had a lively 
 interest in all the enormities of that nobleman, I 
 sped the driver instantly to the villa of the Signor 
 P . 
 
 It depends here altogether upon the freshness or 
 mustiness of the reader's historical reading whether 
 he cares to be reminded more particularly who Ece- 
 lino was. He flourished balefully in the early half 
 of the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, 
 Padua, and Brescia, and was defeated and hurt to 
 death in an attempt to possess himself of Milan. He 
 was in every respect a remarkable man for that time, 
 fearless, abstemious, continent, avaricious, hardy, 
 and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He survived 
 and suppressed innumerable conspiracies, escaping 
 even the thrust of the assassin whom the fame of his 
 enormous wickedness had caused the Old Man of the 
 Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua 
 
 O 
 
 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 
 
AT PADUA. 207 
 
 against him. He extirpated whole families on sus- 
 picion that a single member had been concerned in 
 a meditated revolt. Little children and helpless 
 women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his 
 hands. Six prisons in Padua were constantly filled 
 by his arrests. The whole country was traversed by 
 witnesses of his cruelties, men and women de- 
 prived of an arm or leg, and begging from door to 
 door. He had long been excommunicated ; at last 
 the Church proclaimed a crusade against him, and 
 his lieutenant and nephew more demoniacal, if 
 possible, than himself was driven out of Padua 
 while he was operating against Mantua. Ecelino 
 retired to Verona, and maintained a struggle against 
 the crusade for nearly two years longer, with a cour- 
 age which never failed him. Wounded and taken 
 prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious army gathered 
 about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon 
 him ; and one furious peasant, whose brother's feet 
 had been cut off by Ecelino's command, dealt the 
 helpless monster four blows upon the head with a 
 scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of 
 these wounds alone ; but by others it is related that 
 his death was a kind of suicide, inasmuch as he him- 
 self put the case past surgery by tearing off the 
 bandages from his hurts, and refusing all medicines. 
 
 n. 
 
 ENTERING at the enchanted portal of the Villa 
 , we found ourselves in a realm of wonder. 
 
208 ' ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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 monumental and mor- 
 tuary effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, 
 and beyond this dripped and glimmered the garden. 
 The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscrip- 
 tions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy 
 and piety of all ages concerning life and death ; we 
 began with Confucius, and we ended with Benja- 
 mino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality 
 were not sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signer 
 
 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 labeled with the name its il- 
 lustrious dust had borne in life ; and if one escaped 
 with comparative cheerfulness from the thought that 
 Seneca had died, there were in the very next pot the 
 cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense of 
 his mortality. 
 
 We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of 
 these objects broken by the custodian, who ap- 
 proached to ask if we wished to see the prisons of 
 Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the rain 
 out of our sepulchral shelter. 
 
 Between the vestibule and the towers of the ty- 
 rant lay that garden already mentioned, and our guide 
 
AT PADUA 209 
 
 led us through ranks of weeping statuary, and rainy 
 bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we 
 reached the door jof his cottage. While he entered 
 to fetch the key to the prisons, we noted that the 
 towers were freshly painted and in perfect repair; 
 and indeed the custodian said frankly enough, on re- 
 appearing, that they were merely built over the pris- 
 ons on the site of the original towers. The storied 
 stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps through the 
 grounds, and now, swollen by the rainfall, it roared, 
 a yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The 
 towers rise from masses of foliage, and form no un- 
 pleasing feature of what must be, in spite of 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 picturesqueness 1 to 
 the place. But as we were come in search of hor- 
 rors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and has- 
 tened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. 
 The custodian, lighting a candle, (which ought, we 
 felt, to have been a torch,) went before. 
 
 We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not 
 uncomfortable, and the guide conceded that they had 
 undergone some repairs since Ecelino's time. But 
 all the horrors for which we had come were there in 
 perfect grisliness, and labeled by the ingenious Signer 
 P with Latin inscriptions. 
 
 In the first cell was a shrine of the Virgin, set in 
 
 the wall. Beneath this, while the wretched prisoner 
 
 knelt in prayer, a trap-door opened and precipitated 
 
 him upon the points of knives, from which his body 
 
 u 
 
210 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 fell into the Bacchiglione below. In the next cell, 
 held by some rusty iron rings to the wall, was a skel- 
 eton, hanging by the wrists. : 
 
 " This," said the guide, " was another punishment 
 of which Ecelino was very fond." 
 
 A dreadful doubt seized my mind. " Was this 
 skeleton found here ? " I demanded. 
 
 Without faltering an instant, without so much as 
 winking an eye, the custodian replied, "Appunto" 
 
 It was a great relief, and restored me to confi- 
 dence in the establishment. I am at a loss to ex- 
 plain how my faith should have been confirmed 
 afterwards by coming upon a guillotine an awful 
 instrument in the likeness of a straw-cutter, with a 
 decapitated wooden figure under its blade which 
 the custodian confessed to be a modern improvement 
 
 placed there by Signer P . Yet my credulity 
 
 was so strengthened by his candor, that I accepted 
 without hesitation the torture of the water-drop 
 when we came to it. The water-jar was as well pre- 
 served as if placed there but yesterday, and the 
 skeleton beneath it found as we saw it was en- 
 tire and perfect. 
 
 In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton found as we 
 saw it with its neck in the clutch of the garrote, 
 which was one of Ecelino's more merciful punish- 
 ments ; while in still another cell the ferocity of the 
 tyrant appeared in the penalty inflicted upon the 
 wretch whose skeleton had been hanging for ages 
 as we saw it head downwards from the ceiling. 
 
 Beyond these, in a yet darker and drearier dun- 
 
AT PADUA. 211 
 
 geon, stood a heavy oblong wooden box, with two 
 apertures near the top, peering through which we 
 found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets 
 of a skull. Within this box Ecelino had immured 
 the victim we beheld there, and left him to perish in 
 view of the platters of food and goblets of drink 
 placed just beyond the reach of his hands. The 
 food we saw was of course not the 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 
 floor. Fixed to the block by an immense spike 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 perfectly 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, shrill, horrible screech 
 following the blow that drove in the spike, the mer- 
 ciful swoon after the mutilation, his companion, 
 with a sudden pallor, demanded to be taken instantly 
 away. 
 
 In their swift withdrawal, they only glanced at a 
 few detached instruments of torture, all original 
 Ecelinos, but intended for the infliction of minor and 
 comparatively unimportant torments, and then 
 they passed from that place of fear. 
 
212 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 III. 
 
 IN the evening we sat talking at the Gaffe Pe- 
 drocchi with an abbate, an acquaintance of ours, who 
 was a Professor in the University of Padua. Pe- 
 drocchi's is the great caffS of Padua, a granite edifice 
 of Egyptian architecture, which is the mausoleum of 
 the proprietor's fortune. The pecuniary skeleton at 
 the feast, however, does not much trouble the guests. 
 They begin early in the evening to gather into the 
 elegant saloons of the caffe, somewhat too large 
 for so small a city as Padua, and they sit there 
 late in the night over their cheerful cups and their 
 ices, with their newspapers and their talk. Not so 
 many ladies are to be seen as at the caffe in Venice, 
 for it is only in the greater cities that they go much 
 to these public places. There are few students at 
 Pedrocchi's, for they frequent the cheaper caffS ; but 
 you may nearly always find there some Professor of 
 the University, and on the evening of which I speak 
 there were two present besides our abbate. Our 
 friend's great passion was the English language, 
 which he understood too well to venture to speak a 
 great deal. He had been translating from that 
 tongue into Italian certain American poems, and our 
 talk was of these at first. Then we began to talk 
 of distinguished American writers, of whom intelli- 
 gent Italians always know at least four, in this suc- 
 cession, Cooper, Mrs. Stowe, Longfellow, and Ir- 
 ving. Mrs. Stowe's Gapanna di Zio Tom is, of course, 
 
AT PADUA. 213 
 
 universally read; and my friend had also read 11 
 Fiore di Maggio, " The May-flower." Of Long- 
 fellow, the " Evangeline " is familiar to Italians, 
 through a translation of the poem ; but our abbate 
 knew all the poet's works, and one of the other pro- 
 fessors present that evening had made such faithful 
 study of them as to have produced some translations 
 rendering the original with remarkable fidelity and 
 spirit. I have before me here his brochure, printed 
 last year at Padua, and containing versions of " En- 
 celadus," " Excelsior," " A Psalm of Life," " The 
 Old Clock on the Stairs," " Sand of the Desert in 
 an Hour-Glass," " Twilight," " Daybreak," " The 
 Quadroon Girl," and " Torquemada," pieces 
 which give the Italians a fair notion of our poet's 
 lyrical range, and which bear witness to Professor 
 Messadaglia's sympathetic and familiar knowledge of 
 his works. A young and gifted lady of Parma, now 
 unhappily no more, lately published a translation of 
 " The Golden Legend ; " and Professor Messadaglia, 
 in his Preface, mentions a version of another of 
 our poet's longer works on which the translator of 
 the " Evangeline " is now engaged. 
 
 At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the 
 gentle abbate of our day's adventures, and eagerly 
 related that of the Ecelino prisons. To have seen 
 them was the most terrific 'pleasure of our lives. 
 
 " Eh I " said our friend, " I believe you." 
 
 " We mean those under the Villa P ." 
 
 " Exactly." 
 
214 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 There was a tone of politely suppressed amuse- 
 ment in the abbate's voice ; and after a moment's 
 pause, in which we felt our awful experience slip- 
 ping and sliding away from us, we ventured to say, 
 " You don't mean that those are not the veritable 
 Ecelino prisons ? " 
 
 " Certainly they are nothing of the kind. The 
 Ecelino prisons were destroyed when the Crusaders 
 took Padua, with the exception of the tower, which 
 the Venetian Republic converted into an observa- 
 tory." 
 
 " But at least these prisons are on the site of Ece- 
 lino's castle ? " 
 
 " Nothing of the sort. His castle in that case 
 would have been outside of the old city walls." 
 
 " And those tortures and the prisons are all" 
 
 " Things got up for show. No doubt, Ecelino 
 used such things, and many worse, of which even 
 
 the ingenuity of Signof P cannot conceive. But 
 
 he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, 
 and what he can do to realize them he has done in 
 his prisons." 
 
 " But the custodian how could he lie so ? " 
 
 Our friend shrugged his shoulders. " Eh ! easily. 
 And perhaps he even believed what he said." 
 
 The world began to assume an aspect of bewilder- 
 ing ungenuineness, and there seemed to be a treach- 
 erous quality of fiction in the ground under our feet. 
 Even the play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale, 
 where we went to pass the rest of the evening, 
 
AT PADUA. 215 
 
 appeared hollow and improbable. We thought the 
 hero something of a bore, with his patience and 
 goodness ; and as for the heroine, pursued by the at- 
 tentions of the rich profligate, we doubted if she 
 were any better than she should be. 
 
A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE 
 AT ARQUl. 
 
 i. 
 
 WE said, during summer days at Venice, when 
 every campo was a furnace seven times heated, and 
 every canal was filled with boiling bathers, " As soon 
 as it rains we will go to Arqua." Remembering the 
 ardors of an April sun on the long, level roads of 
 plain, we could not think of them in August with- 
 out a sense of dust clogging every pore, and eyes 
 that shrank from the vision of their blinding white- 
 ness. So we stayed in Venice, waiting for rain, 
 until the summer had almost lapsed into autumn ; 
 and as the 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 car- 
 riage thence to Arqua upon the road to Ferrara. I 
 believe no rule of human experience was violated 
 when it began to rain directly after we reached 
 Padua, and continued to rain violently the whole 
 day. We gave up this day entirely to the rain, and 
 did not leave Padua until the following morning, 
 when we count that our pilgrimage to Petrarch's 
 house actually began. 
 
A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 217 
 
 The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it 
 was already too late in the season for the summer to 
 recover herself with the elastic brilliancy that follows 
 the rain of July or early August ; and there was I 
 know not what vague sentiment of autumn in the 
 weather. There was not yet enough of it to stir the 
 
 " Tears from the depth" of some divine despair ; " 
 
 but in here and there a faded leaf (for in Europe 
 death is not glorified to the foliage as in our own 
 land), in the purple of the ripening grapes, and in 
 the tawny grass of the pastures, there was autumn 
 enough to touch our spirits, and while it hardly 
 affected the tone of the landscape, to lay upon us 
 the gentle and pensive spell of its presence. Of all 
 the days in the year I would have chosen this to go 
 pilgrim to the house of Petrarch. 
 
 The Euganean Hills, on one of which the poet's 
 house is built, are those mellow heights which you 
 see when you look southwest across the lagoon at 
 Venice. In 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 draw nearer to them from the rich 
 plain that washes their feet with endless harvests 
 of oil and wine. 
 
 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 
 
218 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 of the story occurs in Petrarch's house at Arqua, 
 and we carried the volumes with us on our pilgrim- 
 age. I would here quote the description of the vil- 
 lage, the house, and the hills from this work, as fault- 
 lessly true, and as affording no just idea of either ; 
 but nothing of it has remained in my mind except 
 the geological fact that the hills are a volcanic range. 
 To tell the truth, the landscape, as we rode along, 
 continually took my mind off the book, and I could 
 not give that attention either to the elegant language 
 of its descriptions, or the adventures of its well-born 
 characters, which they deserved. I was even more 
 interested in the disreputable-looking person who 
 mounted the box beside our driver directly we got 
 out of the city gate, and who invariably commits this 
 infringement upon your rights in Italy, no matter 
 how strictly and cunningly you frame your contract 
 that no one else is to occupy any part of the carriage 
 but yourself. He does not seem to be the acquaint- 
 ance of the driver, for they never exchange a word, 
 and he does not seem to pay any thing for the ride. 
 He got down, in this instance, just before we reached 
 the little town at which our driver stopped, and asked 
 us if we wished to drink a glass of the wine of the 
 country. We did not, but his own thirst seemed to 
 answer equally well, and he slaked it cheerfully at 
 our cost. 
 
 The fields did not present the busy appearance 
 which had delighted us on the same road in the 
 spring, but they had that autumnal charm already 
 mentioned. Many of the vine-leaves were sear ; the 
 
A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 219 
 
 red grapes were already purple, and the white 
 grapes pearly ripe, and they formed a gorgeous neck- 
 lace for the trees, around which they clung in opu- 
 lent festoons. Then, dearer to our American hearts 
 than this southern splendor, were the russet fields 
 of Indian corn, and, scattered among the shrunken 
 stalks, great nuggets of the " harmless gold " of 
 pumpkins. 
 
 At Battaglia (the village just beyond which you 
 turn off to go to Arqua) there was a fair, on the 
 blessed occasion of some saint's day, and there were 
 many booths full of fruits, agricultural implements, 
 toys, clothes, wooden ware, and the like. There 
 was a great crowd and a noise, but, according to the 
 mysterious Italian custom, nobody seemed to be buy- 
 ing or selling. I am in the belief that a small pur- 
 chase of grapes we made here on our return was the 
 great transaction of the day, unless, indeed, the neat 
 operation in alms achieved at our expense by a men- 
 dicant villager may be classed commercially. 
 
 When we turned off from the Rovigo road at Bat- 
 taglia we were only three miles from Arqua. 
 
 n. 
 
 Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of 
 the hill on which the village was stretched asleep in 
 the tender sunshine, there was on either side of the 
 road a stream of living water. There was no other 
 barrier than this between the road and the fields 
 (unless the vines swinging from tree to tree formed 
 
220 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 a barrier), and, as if in graceful excuse for the inter- 
 position of even these slender streams, Nature had 
 lavished such growth of wild flowers and wild berries 
 on the banks that it was like a garden avenue, 
 through the fragrance and beauty of which we rolled, 
 delighted to silence, almost to sadness. 
 
 When we began to climb the hill to Arqu^, and 
 the driver stopped to breathe his horse, I got out and 
 finished the easy ascent on foot. The great marvel 
 to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on 
 which, turning back, I feasted my vision, should be 
 there yet, and always. It had the rare and sadden- 
 ing beauty of evanescence, and awoke in me the 
 memory of all beautiful scenery, so that I embroid- 
 ered the landscape with the silver threads of west- 
 ern streams, and bordered it with Ohio hills. Ohio 
 hills ? When I looked again it was the storied Eu- 
 ganean group. But what trans-oceanic bird, voyag- 
 ing hither, dropped from its mouth the blackberry 
 which took root and grew and blossomed and ripened, 
 that I might taste Home in it on these classic hills ? 
 
 I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road 
 from his house just above ? I figured him coming 
 to meet me with his book in his hand, in his rever- 
 end poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that 
 curious kind of bandaging which he seems to have 
 been fond of looking, in a word, for all the world 
 like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures. 
 
 Drawing nearer, I discerned the apparition to be a 
 robeless, laureless lout, who belonged at the village 
 inn. Yet this lout, though not Petrarch, had merits. 
 
A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 221 
 
 His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from his 
 knees down, had the tone of the richest bronze ; he 
 wore a mountain cap with a long tasseled fall to the 
 back of it ; his face was comely and his eye beauti- 
 ful ; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing 
 that a colt or young bullock could not have been bet- 
 ter company. He merely offered to guide us to Pe- 
 trarch's house, and was silent, except when spoken 
 to, from that instant. 
 
 I am here tempted to say : Arqua is in the figure 
 of a man stretched upon the hill slope. The head, 
 which is Petrarch's house, rests upon the summit. 
 The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in 
 one direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter. 
 It is a very lank and shambling figure, without ele- 
 gance or much proportion, and the attitude is the last 
 wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout up 
 the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in 
 the general likeness of a street. World-old stone 
 cottages crouch on either side ; here and there is a 
 more ambitious house in decay ; trees wave over the 
 street, and down its distance comes an occasional 
 donkey-cart very musically and leisurely. By all 
 odds, Arqua and its kind of villages are to be pre- 
 ferred to those hamlets of the plain which in Italy 
 cling to the white-hot highway without a tree to 
 shelter them, and bake and burn there in the merci- 
 less sun. Their houses of stuccoed stone are crowded 
 as thickly together as city houses, and these wretched 
 little villages do their worst to unite the discomforts 
 of town and country with a success dreadful to think 
 
222 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 of. In all countries villages are hateful to the heart 
 of civilized man. In the Lombard plains I wonder 
 that one stone of them rests upon another. 
 
 We reached Petrarch's house before the custodian 
 had arrived to admit us, and stood before the high 
 stone wall which shuts in the front of the house, and 
 quite hides it from those without. This wall bears 
 the inscription, Oasa Petrarca, and a marble tablet 
 lettered to the following effect : 
 
 SE TI AGITA 
 
 SACRO AMOEE DI PATRIA, 
 
 T'INCHINA A QUESTE MURA 
 
 OVE SPIRO LA GRAND' ANIMA, 
 
 IL CANTOR DEI SCIP1ONI 
 
 E DI LAURA. 
 
 Which may be translated : " If thou art stirred by 
 love of country, bow to these walls, whence passed 
 the great soul, the singer of the Scipios and of 
 Laura." 
 
 Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the 
 youths of Arqua, who had kindly attended our prog- 
 ress in gradually increasing numbers from the moment 
 we had entered the village. They were dear little 
 girls and boys, and mountain babies, all with sunburnt 
 faces and the gentle and the winning ways native to 
 this race, which Nature loves better than us of the 
 North. The blonde pilgrim seemed to please them, 
 and they evidently took us for Tedeschi. You learn 
 to submit to this fate in Northern Italy, however un- 
 gracefully, for it is the one that constantly befalls 
 you outside of the greatest cities. The people know 
 but two varieties of foreigners the Englishman 
 
A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 223 
 
 and the German. If, therefore, you have not rosbif 
 expressed in every lineament of your countenance ; 
 if the soles of your boots are less than an inch thick, 
 and your clothes are not reduced in color to the in- 
 variable and maddening tone of the English tweed, 
 you must resign yourself to be a German. All this 
 is grievous to the soul which loves to spread its eagle 
 in every land and to be known as American, with 
 star-spangled conspicuousness all over the world : 
 but it cannot be helped. I vainly tried to explain 
 the geographical, political, and natural difference 
 between Tedeschi and American] 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 celeb- 
 rity of a poet on the spot where he lived and died, 
 on his very hearthstone, as it were. So I asked 
 the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting 
 his weight from one foot to the other, 
 
 " When did Petrarch live here ? ' 
 
 " Ah ! I don't remember him." 
 
 "Who was he?" 
 
 "A poet, signor." 
 
 Certainly the first response was not encouraging, 
 but the last revealed that even to the heavy and 
 clouded soul of this lout the divine fame of the poet 
 had penetrated 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 
 
224 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 year ago, perhaps, or many centuries, but he knew 
 that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of doubt was 
 lifted from my spirit, and I responded cheerfully to 
 some observations on the weather offered by a rustic 
 matron who was Ditching manure on the little hill- 
 slope near the house.. When, at last, the custodian 
 came and opened the gate to us, we entered a little 
 grassy yard from which 'a flight of steps led to Pe- 
 trarch's door. A few flowers grew wild among the 
 grass, and a fig-tree leaned its boughs against the 
 wall. The figs on it were green, though they hung 
 ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arqua. 
 Some ivy clung to the stones, and from this and the 
 fig-tree, as we came away, we plucked memorial 
 leaves, and blended them with flowers which the 
 youth of Arqua picked and forced upon us for re- 
 membrance. 
 
 A quaint old door opened into the little stone 
 house, and admitted us to a kind of wide passage-way 
 with rooms on either side ; and at the end opposite 
 to which we entered, another door opened upon a 
 balcony. From this balcony we looked down on Pe- 
 trarch's garden, which, presently speaking, is but a 
 narrow space with more fruit than flowers in it. Did 
 Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden ? For 
 me I should better have liked a chair on the balcony, 
 with the further and lovelier prospect on every hand 
 of village-roofs, sloping hills all gray with olives, and 
 the broad, blue Lombard plain, sweeping from heaven 
 to heaven below. 
 
 The walls of the passage-way are frescoed (now 
 
A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 225 
 
 very faintly) in illustration of the loves of Petrarch 
 and Laura, with verses from the sonnets inscribed to 
 explain the illustrations. In all these Laura prevails 
 as a lady of a singularly long waist and stiff move- 
 ments, and Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily 
 in his hand, contemplates the flower in mingled bot- 
 any and toothache. There is occasionally a startling 
 literalness in the way the painter has rendered some 
 of the verses. I remember with peculiar interest 
 the illustration of a lachrymose passage concerning 
 a river of tears, wherein the weeping Petrarch, 
 stretched beneath a tree, had already started a small 
 creek of tears, which was rapidly swelling to a flood 
 with the torrent from his eyes. I attribute these 
 frescos to a later date than that of the poet's resi- 
 dence, but the portrait over the door of the bedroom 
 inside of the chamber, was of his own time, and 
 taken from him the custodian said. As it seemed 
 to look like all the Petrarchian portraits, I did not 
 remark it closely, but rather turned my attention to 
 the walls of the chamber, which were thickly over- 
 scribbled with names. They were nearly all Italian, 
 and none English so far as I saw. This passion for 
 allying one's self to the great, by inscribing one's 
 name on places hallowed by them, is certainly 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. People have thus writ- 
 ten themselves down, to the contempt of sensible 
 futurity, all over Petrarch's house. 
 
 The custodian insisted that the bedroom was just 
 
 15 
 
226 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 as in the poet's time ; some rooms beyond it had 
 been restored ; the kitchen at its side was also re- 
 paired. Crossing the passage-way, we now entered 
 the dining-room, which was comparatively large and 
 lofty, with a mighty and generous fire-place at one 
 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 the floors and window-panes of all the other 
 rooms. A gaudy fresco, representing some indeli- 
 cate female deity, adorned the front of the fire-place, 
 which sloped expanding from the ceiling and termi- 
 nated at the mouth without a mantel-piece. The 
 chimney was deep, and told of the cold winters in 
 the hills, of which, afterward, the landlady of the 
 village inn prattled less eloquently. 
 
 From this dining-room opens, to the right, the 
 door of the room which they call Petrarch's library ; 
 and above the door, set in a marble frame, with a 
 glass before it, is all that is mortal of Petrarch's cat, 
 except the hair. Whether or not the fur was found 
 incompatible with the process of embalming, and 
 therefore removed, or whether it has slowly dropped 
 away with the lapse of centuries, I do not know ; 
 but it is certain the cat is now quite hairless, and has 
 the effect of a wash-leather invention in the likeness 
 of a young lamb. On the marble slab below there 
 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 
 
A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 227 
 
 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 en- 
 thusiasm of visitors by a heavy wire netting, are the 
 desk and chair of Petrarch, which I know of no form 
 of words to describe perfectly. The front of the 
 desk is of a kind of mosaic in cubes of wood, most 
 of which have been carried away. The chair is 
 wide-armed and carved, but the bottom is gone, and 
 it has been rudely repaired. The custodian said Pe- 
 trarch died in this chair while he sat writing at his 
 desk in the little nook lighted by a single window 
 opening on the left from his library. He loved to 
 sit there. As I entered I found he had stepped out 
 for a moment, but I know he returned directly after 
 I withdrew. 
 
 On one wall of the library (which is a simple ob- 
 long room, in nowise remarkable) was a copy of verses 
 in a frame, by Cesarotti, and on the wall opposite a 
 tribute from Alfieri, both manu proprid. Over and 
 above these are many other scribblings ; and hang- 
 ing over the door of the poet's little nook was a crim- 
 inal French lithograph likeness of " Pe*trarque " 
 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 Pe- 
 
228 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 trarch's house in Alfieri's autobiography, though the 
 visit must have taken place in 1783, when he so- 
 journed at Padua, and " made the acquaintance of 
 the celebrated Cesarotti, with whose lively and court- 
 eous manners he was no less satisfied than he had 
 always been in reading his (Cesarotti's) most mas- 
 terly version of ' Ossian.' ' It is probable that the 
 friends visited the house together. At any rate, I 
 care to believe that while Cesarotti sat " composing " 
 his tribute comfortably at the table, Alfieri's impetu- 
 ous soul was lifting his tall body on tiptoe to 'scrawl 
 its inspirations on the plastering. 
 
 Do you care, gentle reader, to be reminded that 
 just before this visit Alfieri had heard in Venice of 
 the " peace between England and the United Colo- 
 nies," and that he then and there " wrote the fifth 
 ode of the ' America Libera,' " and thus finished 
 that poem ? 
 
 After copying these verses we returned to the 
 dining-room, and while one pilgrim strayed idly 
 through the names in the visitor's book, the other 
 sketched Petrarch's cat, before mentioned, and Pe- 
 trarch's inkstand of bronze a graceful little thing, 
 having a cover surmounted by a roguish cupid, while 
 the lower part is supported on three lion's claws, and 
 just above the feet, at either of the three corners, 
 is an exquisite little female bust and head. Thus 
 sketching and idling, we held spell-bound our friends 
 the youth of Arqua, as well as our driver, who, hav- 
 ing brought innumerable people to see the house of 
 Petrarch, now for the first time, with great astonish- 
 ment, beheld the inside of it himself. 
 
A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 229 
 
 As to the authenticity of the house I think there 
 can be no doubt, and as to the genuineness of the 
 relics there, nothing in the world could shake my 
 faith in them, though Muratori certainly characterizes 
 them as " superstitions." The great poet was sixty- 
 five years old when he came to rest at Arqua, and 
 when, in his own pathetic words, " there remained 
 to him only to consider and to desire how to make a 
 good end." He says further, at the close of his au- 
 tobiography : "In one of the Euganean hills, near 
 to ten. miles from the city of Padua, I have built me 
 a house, small but pleasant and decent, in the midst 
 of slopes clothed with vines and olives, abundantly 
 sufficient for a family not large and discreet. Here 
 I lead my life, and although, as I have said, infirm 
 of body, yet tranquil of mind, without excitements, 
 without distractions, without cares, reading always, 
 and writing and praising God, and thanking God as 
 well for evil as for good ; which evil, if I err not, is 
 trial merely and not punishment. And all the while 
 I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my 
 life, and have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even 
 forget my youthful sins ; wherefore, in this solitude, 
 no words are so sweet to my lips as these of the 
 psalm : ' Delicta juventutis mece, et ignorantias meas ne 
 memineris.' And with every feeling of the heart I 
 pray God, when it please Him, to bridle my thoughts, 
 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 
 
230 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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 Petrarcse ; 
 Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam ; sate Virgine, parce 
 Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce." 
 
 A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. 
 The housekeeper of the parish priest, who ran out to 
 enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me a wild lo- 
 cal tradition of an attempt on the part of the Flor- 
 entines to steal the bones of Petrarch away from 
 Arqu&, in proof of which she showed me a block of 
 marble set into the ark, whence she said a fragment 
 had been removed by the Florentines. This local 
 tradition I afterwards found verified, with names and 
 dates, in a little " Life of Petrarch," by F. Leoni, 
 published at Padua in 1843. It appears that this 
 curious attempt of the Florentines to do doubtful 
 honor to the great citizen whose hereditary civic 
 rights they restored too late (about the time he was 
 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 
 important thing of Petrarch's " that he could ; and 
 it occurred to this ill-advised friar to " move his 
 bones." He succeeded on a night of the year 1630 
 
231 
 
 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 any 
 account. The Republic removed the rest of Pe- 
 trarth's body, which is now said to be in the Royal 
 Museum of Madrid. 
 
 I was willing to know more of this quaint village of 
 Arqua, and I rang at the parish priest's door to beg 
 of him some account of the place, if any were printed. 
 But already at one o'clock he had gone to bed for a 
 nap, and must on no account be roused till four. It 
 is but a quiet life men lead in Arqua, and their souls 
 are in drowsy hands. The amount of sleep which 
 this good man gives himself (if he goes to bed at 9 p. 
 M. and rises at 9 A. M., with a nap of three hours dur- 
 ing the day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a good di- 
 gestion, and uneventful days. As I turned this notion 
 over in my mind, my longing to behold his reverence 
 increased, that I might read life at Arqua in the 
 smooth curves of his well-padded countenance. 1 
 thought it must be that his " bowels of compas- 
 sion w^ere well-rounded," and, making sure of abso- 
 lution, I was half-minded, if I got speech with him, 
 to improve the occasion by confessing one or two of 
 my blackest sins. 
 
 Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a sec- 
 ond visit to Arqua, I succeeded in finding this excel- 
 lent ecclesiastic wide awake at two o'clock in the 
 afternoon, and that he granted me an interview at 
 
232 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 that hour ? Justice to him, I think, demands this 
 admission of me. He was not at all a fat priest, as 
 I had prefigured him, but rather of a spare person, 
 and of a brisk and lively manner. At the village 
 inn, after listening half an hour to a discourse on 
 nothing but white wine from a young priest, who had 
 stopped to drink a glass of it, I was put in the way 
 of seeing the priest of Arqua by the former's court- 
 esy. Happily enough, his reverence chanced to 
 have the very thing I wanted to see no other than 
 Leoni's " Life of Petrarch," to which I have already 
 referred. Courtesy is the blood in an Italian's veins, 
 and I need not say that the ecclesiastic of Arqua, 
 seeing my interest in the place, was very polite and 
 obliging. But he continued to sleep throughout our 
 first stay in Arqua, and I did not see him then. 
 
 I strolled up and down the lazy, rambling streets, 
 and chiefly devoted myself to watching the young 
 women who were washing clothes at the stream run- 
 ning from the " Fountain of Petrarch." Their arms 
 and legs were bronzed and bare, and they chattered 
 and laughed gayly at their work. Their wash-tubs 
 were formed by a long marble conduit from the foun- 
 tain ; their wash-boards, by the inward-sloping con- 
 duit-sides ; and they thrashed and beat the garments 
 clean upon the smooth stone. To a girl, their waists 
 were broad and their ankles thick. Above their fore- 
 heads the hair was cut short, and their " back hair " 
 was gathered into a mass, and held together by a 
 converging circle of silver pins. 
 
 The Piazza della Fohtana, in Arqua, is a place 
 
A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE. 233 
 
 some fifty feet in length and breadth, and seems to 
 be a favorite place of public resort. In the evening, 
 doubtless, it is alive with gossipers, as now with 
 workers. It may be that then his reverence, risen 
 from his nap, saunters by, and pauses long enough to 
 chuck a pretty girl under the chin or pinch an ur- 
 chin's cheek. 
 
 Our dinner was ready by the time I got back to 
 the inn, and we sat down to a chicken stewed in oil 
 and a stoup of the white wine of Arqua. It was 
 a modest feast, but, being a friend to oil, I found it 
 savory, and the wine was both good and strong. 
 While we lingered over* the repast we speculated 
 somewhat carelessly whether Arqua had retained 
 among its simplicities the primitive Italian cheap- 
 ness of which you read much. When our landlord 
 leaned over the table and made out our account on 
 it with a bit of chalk, the bill was as follows : 
 
 Soldi. 
 Chicken . . . . . 70 
 
 Bread 8 
 
 Wine 20 
 
 Total . . . .98 
 
 It surely was not a costly dinner, yet I could have 
 bought the same chicken in Venice for half the 
 money ; which is but another proof that the demand 
 of the producer is often much larger than the supply 
 of the consumer, and that to buy poultry cheaply 
 you must not purchase it where raised, 
 
234 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 ..." On misty mountain ground, 
 Its own vast shadow glory crowned," 
 
 but rather in a large city after it has been transported 
 forty miles or more. Not that we begrudged the 
 thrifty inn-keeper his fee. We paid it cheerfully, as 
 well for his own sake as for that of his pleasant and 
 neat little wife, who kept the whole inn so sweet and 
 clean ; and we bade them a most cordial farewell as 
 we drove away from their door. 
 
 in. 
 
 RETURNING, we stopped at the great castle of the 
 Obizzi (now the property of the Duke of Modena), 
 through which we were conducted by a surly and 
 humorous cmtode, whose pride in life was that castle 
 and its treasures, so that he resented as a personal 
 affront the slightest interest in any thing else. He 
 stopped us abruptly in the midst of the museum, 
 and, regarding the precious antiques and curiosities 
 around him, demanded : 
 
 "Does this castle please you?" Then, with a 
 scornful glance at us, *' Your driver tells me you 
 have been at Arqua ? And what did you see at 
 Arqud ? A shabby little house and a cat without 
 any hair on. I would not," said this disdainful cus- 
 tode, " go to Arqua if you gave me a lemonade." 
 
A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 
 
 I HAD often heard in Venice of that ancient peo- 
 ple, settled in the Alpine hills about the pretty town 
 of Bassano, on the Brenta, whom common fame de- 
 clares to be a remnant of the Cimbrian invaders of 
 Rome, broken up in battle, and dispersed along the 
 borders of North Italy, by Marius, many centuries 
 ago. So when the soft September weather came, 
 last year, we sallied out of Venice, in three, to make 
 conquest of whatever was curious in the life and tra- 
 ditions of these mountaineers, who dwell in seven 
 villages, and are therefore called the people of the 
 Sette Communi among their Italian neighbors. We 
 went fully armed with note-book and sketch-book, 
 and prepared to take literary possession of our con- 
 quest. 
 
 From Venice to the city of Vicenza by railroad, 
 it is two hours ; and thence one must take a carriage 
 to Bassano (which is an opulent and busy little grain 
 mart, of some twelve thousand souls, about thirty 
 miles north of Venice). We were very glad of the 
 ride across the country. By the time we reached 
 the town it was nine o'clock, and moonlight, and as 
 we glanced out of our windows we saw the quaint 
 up-and-down-hill streets peopled with promenaders, 
 
236 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 and every body in Bassano seemed to be making love. 
 Young girls strolled about the picturesque ways with 
 their lovers, and tender couples were cooing at the 
 doorways and windows, and the scene had all that 
 surface of romance with which the Italians contrive 
 to varnish the real commonplaceness of their life. 
 Our ride through the twilight landscape had pre- 
 pared us for the sentiment of Bassano ; we had 
 pleased ourselves with the spectacle of the peasants 
 returning from their labor in the fields, led in troops 
 of eight or ten by stalwart, white-teethed, bare- 
 legged maids ; and we had reveled in the moment- 
 ary lordship of an old walled town we passed, which 
 at dusk seemed more Gothic and Middle- Age than 
 any thing after Verona, with a fine church, and tur- 
 rets and battlements in great plenty. What town 
 it was, or what it had been doing there so many ages, 
 I have never sought to know, and I should be sorry 
 to learn any thing about it. 
 
 The next morning we began those researches for 
 preliminary information concerning the Cimbri which 
 turned out so vain. Indeed, as we drew near the 
 lurking-places of that ancient people, all knowledge 
 relating to them diffused itself into shadowy conject- 
 ure. The barber and the bookseller differed as to 
 the best means of getting to the Sette Communi, and 
 the oaffetiere at whose place we took breakfast knew 
 nothing at all of the road, except that it was up the 
 mountains, and commanded views of scenery which, 
 verily, it would not grieve us to see. As to the 
 Cimbri, he only knew that they had their own Ian- 
 
A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 237 
 
 guage, which was yet harder than the German. The 
 German was hard enough, but the Cimbrian ! Corpo ! 
 
 At last, hearing of a famous cave there is at Oli- 
 ero, a town some miles further up the Brenta, we 
 determined to go there, and it was a fortunate 
 thought, for there we found a nobleman in charge 
 of the cave who told us exactly how to reach the 
 Sette Communi. You pass a bridge to get out of 
 Bassano a bridge which spans the crystal swift- 
 ness of the Brenta, rushing down to the Adriatic 
 from the feet of the Alps on the north, and full of 
 voluble mills at Bassano. All along the road to 
 Oliero was the finest mountain scenery, Brenta- 
 washed, and picturesque with ever-changing lines. 
 Maize grows in the bottom-lands, and tobacco, which 
 is guarded in the fields by soldiers for the monopo- 
 list government. Farm-houses dot the valley, and 
 now and then we passed villages, abounding in blonde 
 girls, so rare elsewhere in Italy, but here so numer- 
 ous as to give Titian that type from which he 
 painted. 
 
 At Oliero we learned not only which was the 
 road to the Sette Communi, but that we were in it, 
 and it was settled that we should come the next day 
 and continue in it, with the custodian of the cave, 
 who for his breakfast and dinner, and what else we 
 pleased, offered to accompany us. We were early 
 at Oliero on the following morning, and found our 
 friend in waiting ; he mounted beside our driver, 
 and we rode up the Brenta to the town of Valstagna 
 where our journey by wheels ended, and where we 
 
238 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 were to take mules for the mountain ascent. Our 
 guide, Count Giovanni Bonato (for I may as well 
 give him his title, though at this stage of our prog- 
 ress we did not know into what patrician care we 
 had fallen), had already told us what the charge for 
 mules would be, but it was necessary to go through 
 the ceremony of bargain with the muleteer before 
 taking the beasts. Their owner was a Cimbrian, 
 with a broad sheepish face, and a heavy, awkward 
 accent of Italian which at once more marked his 
 northern race, and made us feel comparatively se- 
 cure from plunder in his hands. He had come down 
 from the mountain top the night before, bringing 
 three mules laden with charcoal, and he had waited 
 for us till the morning. His beasts were furnished 
 with comfortable pads, covered with linen, to ride 
 upon, and with halters instead of bridles, and we 
 were prayed to let them have their heads in the 
 ascent, and not to try to guide them. 
 
 The elegant leisure of Valstagna (and in an Ital- 
 ian town nearly the whole population is elegantly at 
 leisure) turned out to witness the departure of our 
 expedition ; the pretty little blonde wife of our inn- 
 keeper, who was to get dinner ready against our re- 
 turn, held up her baby to wish us boun viaggio, and 
 waved us adieu with the infant as with a handker- 
 chief; the chickens and children scattered to right 
 and left before our advance ; and with Count Gio- 
 vanni going splendidly ahead on foot, and the Cim- 
 brian bringing up the rear, we struck on the broad 
 rocky valley between the heights, and presently 
 
A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 239 
 
 began the ascent. It was a lovely morning ; the sun 
 was on the heads of the hills, and the shadows 
 clothed them like robes to their feet ; and I should 
 be glad to feel here and now the sweetness, fresh- 
 ness, and purity of the mountain air, that seemed 
 to bathe our souls in a childlike delight of life. A 
 noisy brook gurgled through the valley ; the birds 
 sang from the trees ; the Alps rose, crest on crest, 
 around us ; and soft before us, among the bald peaks 
 showed the wooded height where the Cimbrian vil- 
 lage of Fozza stood, with a white chapel gleaming 
 from the heart of the lofty grove. Along the moun- 
 tain sides the smoke curled from the lonely huts of 
 shepherds, and now and then we came upon one of 
 those melancholy refuges which are built in the hills 
 for such travelers as are belated in their ways, or 
 are overtaken there by storms. 
 
 The road for the most part winds by the brink of 
 precipices, walled in with masonry of small stones, 
 where Nature has not shored it up with vast mono- 
 liths, and is paved with limestone. It is, of course, 
 merely a mule-path, and it was curious to see, and 
 thrilling to experience, how the mules, vain of the 
 safety of their foothold, kept as near the border of 
 the precipices as possible. For my own part, I 
 abandoned to my beast the entire responsibility in- 
 volved by this line of conduct ; let the halter hang 
 loose upon his neck, and gave him no aid except such 
 slight service as was occasionally to be rendered by 
 shutting my eyes and holding my breath. The mule 
 of the fairer traveler behind me was not only ambi- 
 
240 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 tious of peril like my own, but was envious of my 
 beast's captaincy, and continually tried to pass him 
 on the outside of the path, to the great dismay of 
 the gentle rider ; while half-suppressed wails of ter- 
 ror from the second lady in the train gave evidence 
 of equal vanity and daring in her mule. Count 
 Giovanni strode stolidly before, the Cimbrian came 
 behind, and we had little coherent conversation until 
 we stopped under a spreading haw-tree, half-way up 
 the mountain, to breathe our adventurous beasts. 
 
 Here two of us dismounted, and while one of the 
 ladies sketched the other in her novel attitude of cav- 
 alier, I listened to the talk of Count Giovanni and 
 the Cimbrian. This Cimbrian's name in Italian was 
 Lazzaretti, and in his own tongue Briick, which, pro- 
 nouncing less regularly, we made Brick, in compli- 
 ment to his qualities of good fellowship. His broad, 
 honest visage was bordered by a hedge of red beard, 
 and a light of dry humor shone upon it : he looked, 
 we thought, like a Cornishman, and the contrast be- 
 tween him and the visa sciolto, pensieri stretti expres- 
 sion of Count Giovanni was curious enough. 
 
 Concerning his people, he knew little ; but the 
 Capo-gente of Fozza could tell me every thing. Va- 
 rious traditions of their origin were believed among 
 them ; Brick himself held to one that they had first 
 come from Denmark. As we sat there under the 
 spreading haw-tree, Count Giovanni and I made him 
 give us the Cimbrian equivalent of some Italian 
 phrases, which the curious may care to see in cor- 
 respondence with English and German. Of course, 
 German pronunciation must be given to the words : 
 
A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 
 
 241 
 
 English. 
 
 Cimbrian. 
 
 German. 
 
 I go, 
 
 I gehe, 
 
 Ich gehe. 
 
 Thou goest, 
 
 Du gehst, 
 
 Du gehst. 
 
 He goes, 
 
 Ar geht, 
 
 Er geht. 
 
 We go, 
 
 Hamish gehen, 
 
 Wir gehen. 
 
 You go, 
 
 Hamish setender gehnt, 
 
 Ihr geht. 
 
 They go, 
 
 Dandern gehnt, 
 
 Sie gehen. 
 
 I went, 
 
 I bin gegehnt, 
 
 Ich bin gegangen. 
 
 Thou wentest, 
 
 Du bist gegehnt, 
 
 Du bist gegangen. 
 
 He went, 
 
 Der iganget, 
 
 Er ist gegangen. 
 
 Good day, 
 
 Uter tag, 
 
 Guten Tag. 
 
 Good night, 
 
 Uter nast, 
 
 Gute Nacht. 
 
 How do you do ? 
 
 Bie estater ? , 
 
 Wie steht's ? 
 
 How goes it ? 
 
 Bie gehts ? 
 
 Wie geht's ? 
 
 I, 
 
 I, 
 
 Ich. 
 
 Thou, 
 
 Du, 
 
 Du. 
 
 He, she, 
 
 Di, 
 
 Er, sie. 
 
 We, 
 
 Borandern, 
 
 Wir. 
 
 You, 
 
 Ihrt, 
 
 Ihr. 
 
 They, 
 
 Dandern, 
 
 Sie. 
 
 The head, 
 
 Da kof, 
 
 Der Kopf. 
 
 Breast, 
 
 Petten, 
 
 Brust (Italian petto). 
 
 Face, 
 
 Denne, 
 
 Gesicht. 
 
 Arm, 
 
 Arm, 
 
 Arm. 
 
 Foot, 
 
 Vuss, 
 
 Fuss. 
 
 Finger, 
 
 Vinger, 
 
 Finger. 
 
 Hand, 
 
 Hant, 
 
 Hand. 
 
 Tree, 
 
 Pom, 
 
 Baum. 
 
 Hat, 
 
 Hoit, 
 
 Hut. 
 
 God, 
 
 Got, 
 
 Gott. 
 
 Heaven, 
 
 Debelt, 
 
 Ilimmel. 
 
 Earth, 
 
 Erda, 
 
 Erde. 
 
 Mountain, 
 
 Perk, 
 
 Berg. 
 
 Valley, 
 
 Tal, 
 
 Thai. 
 
 Man, 
 
 Mann, 
 
 Mann. 
 
 Woman, 
 
 Beip, 
 
 Weib. 
 
 Lady, 
 
 Vrau, 
 
 Frau. 
 
 Child, 
 
 Hint, 
 
 Kind. 
 
 Brother, 
 
 Pruder, 
 
 Bruder. 
 
 Father, 
 
 Vada, 
 
 Vater. 
 
 16 
 
242 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 English. Cimbrian. German. 
 
 Mother, Muter, Mutter. 
 
 Sister, Schwester, Schwester. 
 
 Stone, Stone, Stein. 
 
 A general resemblance to German and English 
 will have been observed in these fragments of Cim- 
 brian, while other words will have been noticed as 
 quite foreign to either. 
 
 There was a poor little house of refreshment be- 
 side our spreading haw, and a withered old woman 
 came out of it and refreshed us with clear spring 
 water, and our guides and friends with some bitter 
 berries of the mountain, which they admitted were 
 unpleasant to the taste, but declared were very good 
 for the blood. When they had sufficiently improved 
 their blood, we mounted our mules again, and set 
 out with the journey of an hour and a quarter still 
 between us and Fozza. 
 
 As we drew near the summit of the mountain our 
 road grew more level, and instead of creeping along 
 by the brinks of precipices, we began to wind through 
 bits of meadow and pleasant valley walled in by 
 lofty heights of rock. 
 
 Though September was bland as June at the foot 
 of the mountain, we found its breath harsh and cold 
 on these heights ; and we remarked that though 
 there were here and there breadths of wheat, the 
 land was for the most part in sheep pasturage, and 
 the grass looked poor and stinted of summer warmth. 
 We met, at times, the shepherds, who seemed to be 
 of Italian race, and were of the conventional type 
 of shepherds, with regular faces, and two elaborate 
 
A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 243 
 
 curls trained upon their cheeks, as shepherds are 
 always represented in stone over the gates of villas. 
 They bore staves, and their flocks went before them. 
 Encountering us, they saluted us courteously, and 
 when we had returned their greeting, they cried with 
 one voice, " Ah, lords ! is not this a miserable 
 country ? The people are poor and the air is cold. 
 It is an unhappy land ! " And so passed on, pro- 
 foundly sad ; but we could not help smiling at the 
 vehement popular desire to have the region abused. 
 We answered cheerfully that it was a lovely country. 
 If the air was cold, it was also pure. 
 
 We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last 
 moment, just before parting with Brick, we learned 
 that he had passed a whole year in Venice, where he 
 had brought milk from the main-land and sold it in 
 the city. He declared frankly that he counted that 
 year worth all the other years of his life, and that he 
 would never have come back to his native heights 
 but that his father had died, and left his mother and 
 young brothers helpless. He was an honest soul, 
 and I gave him two florins, which I had tacitly ap- 
 pointed him over and above the bargain, with some- 
 thing for the small Brick-bats at home, whom he 
 presently brought to kiss our hands at the house of 
 the Capo-gente. 
 
 The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong 
 plain on the crest of the- mountain, which declines 
 from it on three sides, and on the north rises high 
 above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder ac- 
 clivities. There are not more than thirty houses in 
 
244 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 the village, and I do not think it numbers more than 
 a hundred and fifty souls, if it numbers so many. 
 Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette Com- 
 muni, of which the capital, Asiago, contains some 
 thousands of people, and lies not far from Vicenza. 
 The poor Fozzatti had a church, however, in their 
 village, in spite of its littleness, and they had just 
 completed a fine new bell tower, which the Capo- 
 gente deplored, and was proud of when I praised it. 
 The church, like all the other edifices, was built of 
 stone ; and the village at a little distance might look 
 like broken crags of rock, so well it consorted with 
 the harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadow- 
 lands, pathetic with tufts of a certain pale-blue, tear- 
 ful flower, stretched about the village and southward 
 as far as to that wooded point which had all day been 
 our landmark in the ascent. 
 
 Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo- 
 gente (in Fozza all doors are alike humble), and, 
 leaving our mules, we entered by his wife's invita- 
 tion, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of 
 the kitchen welcome, though we knew that all the 
 sunny Lombard plain below was purple with grapea 
 and black with figs. Again came from the women 
 here the wail of the shepherds : " Ah, lords I is it not 
 a miserable land ? " and I began to doubt whether 
 the love which I had heard mountaineers bore to their 
 inclement heights was not altogether fabulous. They 
 made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before 
 us with some unhappy wine, and while we were eat- 
 ing, the Capo-gente came in. 
 
A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 245 
 
 He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of 
 course, the bashfulness naturally resulting from lonely 
 life at that altitude, where contact with the world 
 must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens seemed to 
 regard him with a kind of 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 tradi- 
 tion existed among them, he said, that their ances- 
 tors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that 
 they had dwelt for a long time in the hollows and 
 caves of the mountains, living and burying their dead 
 in the same secret places. At what time they had 
 been converted to Christianity he could not tell ; 
 they had, up to the beginning of the present century, 
 had little or no intercourse with the Italian popula- 
 tion by which they were surrounded on all sides. 
 Formerly, they did not intermarry with that race, 
 and it was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its lan- 
 guage. But now intermarriage is very frequent ; 
 both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all 
 the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling 
 into disuse. They still, however, have books of re- 
 ligious instruction in their ancient dialect, and until 
 very lately the services of their church were per- 
 formed in Cimbrian. 
 
 I begged the Capo to show us some of their books, 
 
246 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 and he brought us two, one a catechism for chil- 
 dren, entitled " Dar Kloane Catechism vor z' Belose- 
 land vortraghet in z' gaprecht von siben Komiinen, 
 un vier Halghe Gasang. 1842. Padova." The other 
 book it grieved me to see, for it proved that I was 
 not the only one tempted in recent times to visit 
 these ancient people, ambitious to bear to them the 
 relation of discoverer, as it were. A High-Dutch 
 Columbus, from Vienna, had been before me, and I 
 could only come in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered 
 glory. This German savant had dwelt a week in 
 these lonely places, patiently compiling a dictionary 
 of their tongue, which, when it was printed, he had 
 sent to the Capo. I am magnanimous enough to 
 give the name of his book, that the curious may 
 buy it if they like. It is called " Johann Andreas 
 Schweller's Cimbrisches Worterbuch. Joseph Berg- 
 man. Vienna, 1855." 
 
 Concerning the present Cimbri, the Capo said that 
 in his community they were chiefly hunters, wood- 
 cutters, and charcoal-burners, and that they prac- 
 ticed their primitive crafts in those gloomier and 
 wilder heights we saw to the northward, and de- 
 scended to the towns of the plain to make sale of 
 their fagots, charcoal, and wild-beast skins. In Asi- 
 ago and the larger communities they were farmers 
 and tradesmen like the Italians ; and the Capo be- 
 lieved that the Cimbri, in all their villages, num- 
 bered near ten thousand. He could tell me of no 
 particular customs or usages, and believed they did 
 
A VISIT TO THE CIMBEI. 247 
 
 not differ from the Italians now except in race and 
 language.* They are, of course, subject to the Aus- 
 trian Government, but not so strictly as the Italians 
 are ; and though they are taxed and made to do mili- 
 tary service, they are otherwise left to regulate their 
 affairs pretty much at their pleasure. 
 
 The Capo ended his discourse with much polite re- 
 gret that he had nothing more worthy to tell us ; 
 and, as if to make us amends for having come so far 
 to learn so little, he said there was a hermit living 
 near, whom we might like to see, and sent his son to 
 conduct us to the 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 which we found the hermit cutting fagots. 
 
 * The English traveler Rose, who (to my further discomfiture, 
 I find) visited Asiago in 1817, mentions that the Cimbri have the 
 Celtic custom of waking the dead. " If a traveler 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 worshiped their 
 divinities, but the origin of the custom is forgot amongst them- 
 selves." If a man dies by violence, they lay him out with his hat 
 and shoes on, as if to give him the appearance of a wayfarer, and 
 " symbolize one surprised in the great journey of life." A woman 
 dying in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal ornaments. 
 Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people are Cim- 
 bri, and holds that it is " more consonant to all the evidence of 
 history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders at 
 different periods deposited this backwater of barbarians " in the 
 district they now inhabit. " The whole space, which in addition 
 to the seven burghs contains twenty-four villages, is bounded by 
 rivers, alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are the Brenta to 
 the east, and the Astico to the west." 
 
248 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 He was warmly dressed in clothes without rent, and 
 wore the clerical knee-breeches. He saluted us with 
 a cricket-like chirpiness of manner, and was greatly 
 amazed to hear that we had come all the way from 
 America to visit him. His hermitage was built upon 
 the side of a white-washed chapel to St. Francis, and 
 contained three or four little rooms or cupboards, in 
 which the hermit dwelt and meditated. They 
 opened into the chapel, of which the hermit had the 
 care, and which he kept neat and clean like himself. 
 He told us proudly that once a year, on the day of 
 the titular saint, a priest came and said mass in that 
 chapel, and it was easy to see that this was the great 
 occasion of the old man's life. For forty years, he 
 said, he had been devout ; and for twenty-five he 
 had dwelt in this place, where the goodness of God 
 and the charity of the poor people around had kept 
 him from want. Altogether, he was a pleasant 
 enough hermit, not in the least spiritual, but gentle, 
 simple, and evidently sincere. We gave some small 
 coins of silver to aid him to continue his life of devo- 
 tion, and Count Giovanni bestowed some coppers 
 with the stately blessing, " Iddio vi benedica, padre 
 mio ! " 
 
 So we left the hermitage, left Fozza, and started 
 down the mountain on foot, for no one may ride 
 down those steeps. Long before we reached the bot- 
 tom, we had learned to loathe mountains and to long 
 for dead levels during the rest of life. Yet the de- 
 scent was picturesque, and in some things even more 
 interesting than the ascent had been. We met more 
 
A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. 249 
 
 people : now melancholy shepherds with their flocks ; 
 now swine-herds and swine-herdesses with herds of 
 wild black pigs of the Italian breed ; now men driv- 
 ing asses that brayed and woke long, loud, and most 
 musical echoes in the hills ; now whole peasant fam- 
 ilies driving cows, horses, and mules to the plains 
 below. On the way down, fragments of autobiog- 
 raphy began, with the opportunities of conversation, 
 to come from the Count Giovanni, and we learned 
 that he was a private soldier at home on that permesso 
 which the Austrian Government frequently gives its 
 less able-bodied men in times of peace. He had 
 been at home some years, and did not expect to be 
 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 to- 
 ward strangers who visited the cave. He held it an 
 error in most custodians to show discontent when 
 travelers gave them little ; and he said that if he re- 
 ceived never so much, he believed it wise not to be- 
 tray exultation. " Always be contented, and nothing 
 more," said Count Giovanni. 
 
 " It is what you people always promise beforehand," 
 I said, " when you bargain with strangers, to do them 
 a certain service for what they please ; but after- 
 ward they must pay what you please or have trouble. 
 I know you will not be content with what I give 
 you." 
 
250 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 " If I am not content," cried Count Giovanni, 
 44 call me the greatest ass in the world ! " 
 
 And I am bound to say that, for all I could see 
 through the mask of his face, he was satisfied with 
 what I gave him, though it was not much. 
 
 He had told us casually that he was nephew of a 
 nobleman of a certain rich and ancient family in Ven- 
 ice, who sent him money while in the army, but this 
 made no great impression on me ; and though I 
 knew there was enough noble poverty in Italy to 
 have given rise to the proverb, Un conte che non con- 
 ta, non conta niente, yet I confess that it was with a 
 shock of surprise I heard our guide and servant sa- 
 luted by a lounger in Valstagna with " Sior conte, 
 servitor suo ! " I looked narrowly at him, but there 
 was no ray of feeling or pride visible in his pale, lan- 
 guid visage as he responded, " Buona sera, caro" 
 
 Still, after that revelation we simple plebeians, who 
 had been all day heaping shawls and guide-books upon 
 Count Giovanni, demanding menial offices from him, 
 and treating him with good-natured slight, felt un- 
 comfortable in his presence, and welcomed the ap- 
 pearance of our carriage with our driver, who, hav- 
 ing started drunk from Bassano in the morning, had 
 kept drunk all day at Valstagna, and who now drove 
 us back wildly over the road, and almost made us 
 sigh for the security of mules ambitious of the brinks 
 of precipices. 
 
MINOR TRAVELS, 
 i. 
 
 PISA. 
 
 I AM afraid that the talk of the modern railway 
 traveler, if he is honest, must be a great deal of the 
 custodians, the vetturini, and the facchini, whose agree- 
 able acquaintance constitutes his chief knowledge of 
 the population among which he journeys. We do not 
 nowadays carry letters recommending us to citizens 
 of the different places. If we did, consider the 
 calamity we should be to the be-traveled Italian com 
 munities we now bless ! No, we buy our through- 
 tickets, and we put up at the hotels praised in the 
 hand-book, and are very glad of a little conversation 
 with any native, however adulterated he be by con- 
 tact with the world to which we belong. I do not 
 blush to own that I love the whole rascal race which 
 ministers to our curiosity and preys upon us, and I 
 am not ashamed to have spoken so often in this book 
 of the lowly and rapacious but interesting porters 
 who opened to me the different gates of that great 
 realm of wonders, Italy. I doubt if they can be 
 much known to the dwellers in the land, though they 
 
252 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers ; 
 and if I have any regret in the matter, it is that I 
 did not more diligently study them when I could. 
 The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs ; they are 
 all but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself. 
 I remember that years ago when I first visited Cam- 
 bridge, there was an old man appeared to me in the 
 character of Genius of the College Grounds, who 
 showed me all the notable things in our city, 
 its treasures of art, its monuments, and ended 
 by taking me into his wood-house, and sawing me 
 off from a wind-fallen branch of the Washington 
 Elm a bit of the sacred wood for a remembrancer. 
 Where now is that old man ? He no longer exists 
 for me, neither he nor his wood-house nor his dwell- 
 ing-house. Let me look for a month about the 
 College Grounds, and I shall not see him. But some- 
 where in the regions of traveler's faery he still lives, 
 and he appears instantly to the new-comer ; he has 
 an understanding with the dryads, who keep him 
 supplied with boughs from the Washington Elm, and 
 his wood-house is full of them. 
 
 Among memorable custodians in Italy was one 
 whom we saw at Pisa, where we stopped on our way 
 from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma, 
 and spent an hour in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. 
 The beautiful old town, which every one knows from 
 the report of travelers, one yet finds possessed of the 
 incommunicable charm which keeps it forever novel 
 to the visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad 
 Arno, it mirrors in the flood architecture almost as 
 
PISA. 253 
 
 fair and noble as that glassed in the Canalazzo, 
 and its other streets seemed as tranquil as the canals 
 of Venice. Those over which we drove, on the day 
 of our visit, were paved with broad flag-stones, and 
 gave out scarcely a sound under our wheels. It was 
 Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet the empty 
 and silent city inspired us with no sense of desolation. 
 The palaces were in perfect repair; the pavements 
 were clean ; behind those windows we felt that there 
 must be a good deal of easy, comfortable life. It is 
 said that Pisa is one of the few places in Europe 
 where the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness 
 everywhere pursued by Railways still lingers, 
 and that you find cheap apartments in those well-pre- 
 served old palaces. No doubt it would be worth more 
 to live in Pisa than it would cost, for the history of 
 the place would alone be to any reasonable sojourner 
 a perpetual recompense, and a princely income far 
 exceeding his expenditure. To be sure, the Tower 
 of Famine, with which we chiefly associate the name 
 of Pisa, has been long razed to the ground, and built 
 piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but you may 
 still visit the dead wall which hides from view the 
 place where it stood ; and you may thense drive on, 
 as we did, to the great Piazza where stands the un- 
 rivaledest group of architecture in the world, after 
 that of St. Mark's Place in Venice. There is 
 the wonderful Leaning Tower, there is the old and 
 beautiful Duomo, there is the noble Baptistery, there 
 is the lovely Campo-Santo, and there somewhere 
 lurking in portal or behind pillar, and keeping out 
 
254 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger is the 
 much-experienced cicerone who shows you through 
 the edifices. Yours is the fourteen-thousandth Amer- 
 ican family to which he has had the honor of acting 
 as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfac- 
 tion in thus becoming a contribution to statistics. 
 
 We entered the Duomo, in our new friend's cus- 
 tody, and we saw the things which it was well to see. 
 There was mass, or some other ceremony, transacting ; 
 but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as possi- 
 ble, and there was not much to weaken the sense 
 of proprietorship with which travelers view objects 
 of interest. Then we ascended the Leaning Tower, 
 skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by 
 an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to 
 the tower's inclination, but perhaps not receiving a 
 full justification of the Campanile's appearance in pict- 
 ures, till we stood at its base, and saw its vast bulk 
 and height as it seemed to sway and threaten in the 
 blue sky above our heads. There the sensation was 
 too terrible for endurance, even the architectural 
 beauty of the tower could not save it from being 
 monstrous to us, and we were glad to hurry away 
 from it to ^;he serenity and solemn loveliness of the 
 Campo Santo. 
 
 Here are the frescos painted five hundred years 
 ago to be ruinous and ready against the time of your 
 arrival in 1864, and you feel that you are the first to 
 enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade 
 who peers through her fingers at the shameful condi- 
 tion of deboshed father Noah, and seems to wink one 
 
PISA. 255 
 
 eye of wicked amusement at you. Turning after- 
 ward to any book written about Italy during the 
 time specified, you find your impression of exclusive 
 possession of the frescos erroneous, and your muse 
 naturally despairs, where so many muses have labored 
 in vain, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo. Yet it 
 is most worthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched 
 and traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim 
 cypresses out of the sainted earth of Jerusalem ; and 
 those old paintings, made when Art was if ever 
 a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce 
 more effectively than their authors conceived the 
 lessons of life and death ; for they are themselves 
 becoming part of the triumphant decay they repre- 
 sent. If it was awful once to look upon that strange 
 scene where the gay lords and ladies of the chase 
 come suddenly upon three dead men in their coffins, 
 while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace of a dismal 
 righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet 
 more tragic to behold it now when the dead men are 
 hardly discernible in their coffins, and the hermits 
 are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy bliss. Alas ! 
 Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor 
 fears and hopes : with dust he wipes out dust, and 
 with decay he blots the image of decay. 
 
 I assure the reader that I made none of these apt 
 reflections in the Campo Santo at Pisa, but have writ- 
 ten them out this morning in Cambridge because there 
 happens to be an east wind blowing. No one could 
 have been sad in the company of our cheerful and 
 patient cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get 
 
256 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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 harbor to prevent the entrance of the 
 hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great trouble 
 carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward 
 till 1860, when Pisa was united to the kingdom of 
 Italy. Then the trophy was restored to the Pisans, 
 and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo 
 Santo, an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual 
 amity between ancient foes.* It is not a very good 
 world, e pur si muove. 
 
 The Baptistery stands but a step away from the 
 Campo Santo, and our guide ushered us into it with 
 the air of. one who had till now held in reserve his 
 great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think 
 he waited till we had looked at some comparatively 
 trifling sculptures by Nicolo Pisano before he raised 
 his voice, and uttered a melodious specie^ of howl. 
 While we stood in some amazement at this, the 
 conscious structure of the dome caught the sound 
 and prolonged it with a variety and sweetness of 
 which I could not have dreamed. The man poured 
 
 * I read in Mr. Norton's Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, that he 
 saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, " the chains that marked 
 the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is of course pos- 
 sible 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 com' 
 memoration of one fact only. 
 
PISA. 257 
 
 out in quick succession his musical wails, and then 
 ceased, and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in 
 response. There was a supernatural beauty in these 
 harmonies of which I despair of giving any true idea : 
 they were of such tender and exalted rapture that we 
 might well have thought them the voices of young- 
 eyed cherubim, singing as they passed through Para- 
 dise over that spot of earth where we stood. They 
 seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and 
 soothed, and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, 
 leaving us poor and penitent and humbled. 
 
 We were long silent, and then broke forth with 
 cries of admiration of which the marvelous echo 
 made eloquence. 
 
 " Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had 
 left the building, " hear such music as that? " 
 
 " The papal choir does not equal it," we answered 
 with one voice. 
 
 The cicerone was not to be silenced even with 
 such a tribute, and he went on : 
 
 " Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu 
 Feelmore, the President ? No ? Ah, what a fine 
 man ! You saw that he had his heart actually in his 
 hand ! Well, one day he said to me here, when I 
 told him of the Baptistery echo, ' We have the 
 finest echo in the world in the Hall of Congress.' 
 I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a 
 little, thus ! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said 
 he, 'There is no other echo in the world besides 
 this. You are right.' I am unique," pursued the 
 cicerone, " for making this echo. But," he added 
 
 17 
 
258 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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 sense 
 of injury in his tone, " to howl half an hour without 
 ceasing." 
 
II. 
 
 THE FERRARA ROAD. 
 
 THE delight of one of our first journeys over the 
 road between Padua and Ferrara was a Roman 
 cameriere out of place, who got into the diligence at 
 Ponte Lagoscuro. We were six in all : The Eng- 
 lishman who thought it particularly Italian to say 
 " Si" three times for every assent; the Veneto (as 
 the citizen of the province calls himself, the native 
 of the city being Veneziano) going home to his farm 
 near Padua ; the German lady of a sour and dreadful 
 countenance ; our two selves, and the Roman came" 
 riere. The last was worth all the rest being a man 
 of vast general information acquired in the course of 
 service with families of all nations, and agreeably 
 communicative. A brisk and lively little man, with 
 dancing eyes, beard cut to the mode of the Emperor 
 Napoleon, and the impressive habit of tapping him- 
 self on the teeth with his railroad-guide, and lifting 
 his eyebrows when he says any thing specially worthy 
 of remark. He, also, long after the conclusion of an 
 observation, comes back to himself approvingly, with 
 "$2/" " Vabene!" "Ecco!" He speaks beauti- 
 ful Italian and constantly, and in a little while we 
 know that he was born at Ferrara, bred at Venice, 
 
260 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 and is now a citizen of Rome. " St. Peter's, Signori, 
 have you ever seen it? is the first church of the 
 world. At Ferrara lived Tasso and Ariosto. Venice 
 is a lovely city. Ah ! what beauty ! But unique. 
 My second country. Si, Signori, la mia seconda 
 patriot" After a pause, " Va lene" 
 
 We hint to him that he is extremely fortunate in 
 having so many countries, and that it will be difficult 
 to exile so universal a citizen, which he takes as a 
 tribute to his worth, smiles and says, " Ecco ! " 
 
 Then he turns to the Veneto, and describes to him 
 the English manner of living. " Wonderfully well 
 they eat the English. Four times a day. With 
 rosbif at the dinner. Always, always, always ! And 
 tea in the evening, with rosbif cold. Mangiano 
 sempre. Ma bene, dico" After a pause, " Si / " " And 
 the Venetians, they eat well, too. Whence the 
 proverb : ' Sulla Riva degli Schiavoni, si mangiano 
 lei bocconi.'* (' On the Riva degli Schiavoni, you eat 
 fine mouthfuls.') Signori, I am going to Venice," 
 concludes the cameriere. 
 
 He is the politest man in the world, and the most 
 attentive to ladies. The German lady has not spoken 
 a word, possibly not knowing the language. Our 
 good cameriere cannot bear this, and commiserates 
 her weariness with noble elegance and originality. 
 " La Signora si trova un poco sagrificata ? " (" The 
 lady feels slightly sacrificed ! ") We all smile, and 
 the little man very gladly with us. 
 
 "An elegant way of expressing it,*' we venture to 
 suggest. The Veneto roars and roars again, and we 
 
THE FERRARA ROAD. 261 
 
 all shriek, none louder than the Roman himself. 
 We never can get over that idea of being slightly 
 sacrificed, and it lasts us the whole way to Padua ; 
 and when the Veneto gets down at his farm-gate, 
 he first " reverences " us, and then says, " I am very 
 sorry for you others who must be still more slightly 
 sacrificed." 
 
 At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our came- 
 riere. He is not so gay, quite, as he was, and I fan- 
 cy that he has not found so many bei bocconi on the 
 Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine 
 temperament led him to expect. Do I happen to 
 know, he asks, any American family going to Rome 
 and desiring a cameriere ? 
 
 As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and 
 I cannot help thinking, with a little heartache, of how 
 the Spring came to meet us once as we rode south- 
 ward from Venice toward Florence on that road from 
 Padua to Ferrara. It had been May for some time 
 in Tuscany, and all through the wide plains of 
 Venetia this was the railroad landscape : fields tilled 
 and tended as jealously as gardens, and waving in 
 wheat, oats, and grass, with here and there the hay 
 cut already, and here and there acres of Indian 
 corn. The green of the fields was all dashed with 
 the bloody red of poppies ; the fig-trees hung full 
 of half-grown fruit ; the orchards were garlanded 
 with vines, which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, 
 but train from tree to tree, leaving them to droop in 
 festoons and sway in the wind, with the slender na- 
 
262 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 tive grace of vines. Huge stone farm-houses shelter 
 under the same roof the family and all the live stock 
 of the farm ; thatched cottages thickly dotting the 
 fields, send forth to their cultivation the most pictur- 
 esque peasants, men and women, pretty young 
 girls in broad hats, and wonderful old brown and 
 crooked crones, who seem never to have been 
 younger nor fairer. Country roads, level, straight, 
 and white, stretch away on either hand, and the con- 
 stant files of poplars escort them wherever they go. 
 All about, the birds sing, and the butterflies dance. 
 The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn 
 up their patient heads, with wide-spreading horns and 
 mellow eyes, at the passing train ; the sunburnt lout 
 behind them suspends the application of the goad ; 
 unwonted acquiescence stirs in the bosom of the firm- 
 minded donkey, and even the matter-of-fact locomo- 
 tive seems to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may 
 along these plains of Spring. 
 
 At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, 
 and having fought the customary battle with the vet- 
 turino before arriving at the terms of contract ; having 
 submitted to the successive pillage of the man who 
 had held our horses a moment, of the man who tied 
 on the trunk, and of the man who hovered obligingly 
 about the carriage, and desired to drink our health 
 with prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of 
 wheels, we rattle out of the Stella d'Oro, and set 
 forth from the gate of the old city. 
 
 I confess that I like posting. There is a freedom 
 and a fine sense of proprietorship in that mode of 
 
THE FERRARA ROAD. 263 
 
 travel, combined with sufficient speed, which you do 
 not feel on the railroad. For twenty francs and buona 
 mano, I had bought my carriage and horses and dri- 
 ver for the journey of forty miles, and I began to 
 look round on the landscape with a cumulative feel- 
 ing of ownership in every thing I saw. For me, old 
 women spinning in old-world fashion, with distaff and 
 spindle, flax as white as their own hair, came to road- 
 side doors, or moved back and forth under orchard 
 trees. For me, the peasants toiled in the fields to- 
 gether, wearing for my sake wide straw hats, or 
 gay ribbons, or red caps. The white oxen were 
 willing to mass themselves in effective groups, as the 
 ploughman turned the end of his furrow ; young 
 girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to 
 springs as we passed ; children had larger eyes and 
 finer faces and played more about the cottage doors, 
 on account of our posting. As for the vine-garland- 
 ed trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the end- 
 less fertile plain ; the white distance of the road be- 
 fore us with its guardian poplars, I doubt if people 
 in a diligence could have got so much of these things 
 as we. Certainly they could not have had all to 
 themselves the lordly splendor with which we dashed 
 through gaping villages, taking the street from every 
 body, and fading magnificently away upon the road. 
 
III. 
 
 TRIESTE. 
 
 IF you take the midnight steamer at Venice you 
 reach Trieste by six o'clock in the morning, and the 
 hills rise to meet you as you enter the broad bay 
 dotted with the sail of fishing-craft. The hills are 
 bald and bare, and you find, as you draw near, that 
 the city lies at their feet under a veil of mist, or 
 climbs earlier into view along their sides. The pros- 
 pect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing feat- 
 ures, and looking at those rugged acclivities, with 
 their aspect of continual bleakness, you readily believe 
 all the stories you have heard of that fierce wind 
 called the Bora which sweeps from them through 
 Trieste at certain seasons. While it blows, ladies 
 walking near the quays are sometimes caught up and 
 set afloat, involuntary Galateas, in the bay, and people 
 keep in-doors as much as possible. But the Bora, 
 though so sudden and so savage, does give warning 
 of its rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this 
 characteristic. They station a man on one of the 
 mountain tops, and when he feels the first breath of 
 the Bora, he sounds a horn, which is a signal for all 
 within hearing to lay hold of something that cannot 
 be blown away, and cling to it till the wind falls. 
 
TRIESTE. 265 
 
 This may happen in three days or in nine, according 
 to the popular proverbs. " The spectacle of the sea," 
 says Dall' Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, 
 " while the Bora blows, is sublime, and when it ceases 
 the prospect of the surrounding hills is delightful. 
 The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them 
 with a rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly 
 softened, even in the heart of winter." 
 
 The city itself, as you penetrate it, makes good 
 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 move- 
 ment of a prosperous port ; but, better than this, so 
 far as the mere sight-seer is concerned, it wins a 
 novel charm from the many public staircases by 
 which you ascend and descend its hillier quarters, 
 and which are made of stone, and lightly railed and 
 balustraded with iron. 
 
 Something of all this I noticed in my ride from the 
 landing of the steamer to the house of friends in the 
 suburbs, and there I grew better disposed toward 
 the hills, which, as I strolled over them, I found 
 dotted with lovely villas, and everywhere trav- 
 ersed by perfectly- kept carriage-roads, and easy and 
 pleasant foot-paths. It was in the spring-time, and 
 the peach-trees and almond-trees hung full of blos- 
 soms and bees, the lizards lay in the walks absorbing 
 the vernal sunshine, the violets and cowslips sweet- 
 ened all the grassy borders. The scene did not want 
 a human interest, for the peasant girls were going to 
 market at that hour, and I met them everywhere, 
 
266 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 bearing heavy burdens on their own heads, or hurry- 
 ing forward with their wares on the backs of donkeys. 
 They were as handsome as heart could wish, and 
 they wore that Italian costume which is not to be seen 
 anywhere in Italy except at Trieste and in the Ro- 
 man and Neapolitan provinces, a bright bodice and 
 gown, with the head-dress of dazzling white linen, 
 square upon the crown, and dropping lightly to the 
 shoulders. Later I saw these comely maidens crouch- 
 ing on the ground in the market-place, and selling 
 their wares, with much glitter of eyes, teeth, and ear- 
 rings, and a continual babble of bargaining. 
 
 It seemed to me that the average of good looks 
 was greater among the women of Trieste than among 
 those of Venice, but that the instances of striking 
 and exquisite beauty were rarer. At Trieste, too, 
 the Italian type, so pure at Venice, is lost or contin- 
 ually modified by the mixed character of the popula- 
 tion, which perhaps is most noticeable at the Mer- 
 chants' Exchange. This is a vast edifice roofed with 
 glass, where are the offices of the great steam naviga- 
 tion company, the Austrian Lloyds, which, far 
 more than the favor of the Imperial government, has 
 contributed to the prosperity of Trieste, and where 
 the traffickers of all races meet daily to gossip over 
 the news and the prices. Here a Greek or Dalmat 
 talks with an eager Italian or a slow, sure English- 
 man ; here the hated Austrian button-holes the Ve- 
 netian or the Magyar ; here the Jew meets the Gen- 
 tile on common ground ; here Christianity encounters 
 the hoary superstitions of the East, and makes a good 
 
TRIESTE. 267 
 
 thing out of them in cotton or grain. All costumes 
 are seen here, and all tongues are heard, the native 
 Triestines contributing almost as much to the variety 
 of the latter as the foreigners. " In regard to lan- 
 guage," says Cantii, " though the country is peopled 
 by Slavonians, yet the Italian tongue is spreading into 
 the remotest villages where a few years since it was not 
 understood. In the city it is the common and famil- 
 iar 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 employes of the civil courts the Ital- 
 ian or the German, the schools now German and now 
 Italian, the bar and the pulpit Italian. Most of the 
 inhabitants, indeed, are bi-lingual, and very many 
 tri-lingual, without counting French, which is under- 
 stood and spoken from infancy. Italian, German, and 
 Greek are written, but the Slavonic little, this having 
 remained in the condition of a vulgar tongue. But 
 it would be idle to distinguish the population accord- 
 ing to language, for the son adopts a language differ- 
 ent from the father's, and now prefers one language 
 and now another ; the women incline to the Italian ; 
 but those of the upper class prefer now German, now 
 French, now English, as, from one decade to another, 
 affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the sa- 
 lons ; in the squares and streets, the Venetian dialect 
 is heard.*' 
 
 And with the introduction of the Venetian dialect, 
 Venetian discontent seems also to have crept in, and 
 
268 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 I once heard a Triestine declaim against the Imperial 
 government quite in the manner of Venice. It struck 
 me that this desire for union with Italy, which he 
 declared prevalent in Trieste must be of very recent 
 growth, since even so late as 1848, Trieste had re- 
 fused to join Venice in the expulsion of the Austrians. 
 Indeed, the Triestines have fought the Venetians from 
 the first ; they stole the Brides of Venice in one of 
 their piratical cruises in the lagoons ; gave aid and 
 comfort to those enemies of Venice, the Visconti, the 
 Carraras, and the Genoese ; revolted from St. Mark 
 whenever subjected to his banner, and finally, rather 
 than remain under his sway, gave themselves five 
 centuries ago to Austria. 
 
 The objects of interest in Trieste are not many. 
 There are remains of an attributive temple of Jupiter 
 under the Duomo, and there is near at hand the 
 Museum of Classical Antiquities founded in honor of 
 Winckelmann, murdered at Trieste by that ill-advised 
 Pistojese, Ancangeli, who had seen the medals be- 
 stowed on the antiquary by Maria Theresa and 
 believed him rich. There is also a scientific museum 
 founded by the Archduke Maximilian, and, above 
 all, there is the beautiful residence of that ill-starred 
 prince, the Miramare, where the half-crazed Em- 
 press of the Mexicans vainly waits her husband's re- 
 turn from the experiment of paternal government in 
 the New World. It would be hard to tell how Art 
 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 
 
TRIESTE. 269 
 
 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 arbors. 
 Where horizontal, they are diversified with mimic 
 seas for swans to sail upon, and summer-houses for 
 people to lounge in and look at the swans from. On 
 the point of land furthest from the acclivity stands 
 the Castle of Miramare, half at sea, and half adrift 
 in the clouds above : 
 
 " And fain it would stoop downward 
 
 To the mirrored wave below ; 
 And fain it would soar upward 
 In the evening's crimson glow." 
 
 I remember that a little yacht lay beside the pier 
 at the castle's foot, and lazily flapped its sail, while 
 the sea beat inward with as languid a pulse. That 
 was some years ago, before Mexico was dreamed of 
 at Miramare : now, perchance, she who is one of the 
 most unhappy among women looks 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 have brought 
 so many woes. 
 
 It was the midnight following my visit to Mira- 
 mare when the fiacre in which I had quitted my 
 friend's house was drawn up by its greatly bewil- 
 
270 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 dered driver on the quay near the place where the 
 steamer for Venice 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 lights, green 
 lights to be seen at different points. To a light, 
 they were ignorant, though eloquent, and to pass the 
 time, we drove up and down the quay, and stopped 
 at the landings of all the steamers that touch at 
 Trieste. It 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, de- 
 clared that it was not the night for the Venice 
 steamer ; another admitted that it might be ; a third 
 conversed with the driver in low tones, and then 
 leaped upon the box. We drove rapidly away, and 
 before I had, in view of this mysterious proceeding, 
 composed a fitting paragraph for the Fatti Diversi of 
 the Osservatore Triestino, descriptive of the state in 
 which the Guardie di Polizia should find me floating 
 in the bay, exanimate and evidently the prey of a 
 triste evvenimento the driver pulled up once more, 
 and now beside a steamer. It was the steamer for 
 Venice, he said, in precisely the tone which he would 
 have used had he driven me directly to it without 
 blundering. It was breathing heavily, and was just 
 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 
 
TRIESTE. 271 
 
 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 paneled doors and wainscotings the sort of 
 illumination usual in that humble craft. I rang the 
 small silver bell on the long table, and the mute 
 steward appeared. 
 
 Was this the steamer for Venice ? 
 
 Sicuro ! 
 
 All that I could do in comment was to sit down ; 
 and in the mean time the steamer trembled, groaned, 
 choked, cleared its throat, and we were under way. 
 
 " The other passengers have all gone to bed, I sup- 
 pose," I argued acutely, seeing none of them. Never- 
 theless, I thought it odd, and it seemed a shrewd 
 means of relief to ring the bell, and pretending 
 drowsiness, to ask the steward which was my state- 
 room. 
 
 He replied with a curious smile that I could have 
 any of them. Amazed, I yet selected a state-room, 
 and while the steward was gone for the sheets and 
 pillow-cases, I occupied my time by opening the doors 
 of all the other state-rooms. They were empty. 
 
 " Am I the only passenger ? " I asked, when he 
 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. 
 
272 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 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 underwent a total change. I had 
 gone down into the Maelstrom with the Ancient 
 Mariner I was a Manuscript Found in a Bottle ! 
 
 Coining to the surface about six o'clock A. M., I 
 found a daylight as cheerful as need be upon the 
 appointments of the elegant cabin, and upon the good- 
 natured face of the steward when he brought me 
 the caffe latte, and the buttered toast for my break 
 fast. He said "Servitor suo!" in a loud and com- 
 fortable voice, and I perceived the absurdity of hav- 
 ing thought that he was in any way related to the 
 Nightmare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man's-blood-with- 
 cold. 
 
 " This is not the regular Venice steamer, I sup- 
 pose," I remarked to the steward as he laid my 
 breakfast in state upon the long table. 
 
 No. Properly, no boat should have left for Venice 
 last night, which was not one of the times of the tri- 
 weekly departure. This was one of the steamers 
 of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it 
 was going at present to take on an extraordinary 
 freight at Venice for Egypt. I had been permitted 
 to come on board because my driver said I had a 
 return ticket, and would go. 
 
 Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever 
 mysterious in the management of the steamer. The 
 captain met me with a bow in the gangway ; seamen 
 
TRIESTE. 273 
 
 were coiling wet ropes at different points, as they 
 always are ; the mate was promenading the bridge, 
 and taking the rainy weather as it came, with his 
 oil-cloth coat and hat on. The wheel of the steamer 
 was as usual chewing the sea, and finding it unpala- 
 table, and making vain efforts at expectoration. 
 
 We were in sight of the breakwater outside Mala- 
 mocco, and a pilot-boat was making us from the land. 
 Even at this point the innumerable fortifications of 
 the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we drew 
 near Venice, till we entered the lagoon, and found 
 it a nest of fortresses one with another. 
 
 Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not 
 spring resplendent from the sea, as I had always read 
 she would. She rose slowly and languidly from the 
 water, not like a queen, but like the gray, slovenly, 
 bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was. 
 
 18 
 
IV. 
 
 BASSANO. 
 
 I HAVE already told, in recounting the story of our 
 visit to the Cimbri, how full of courtship we found 
 the little city of Bassano on the evening of our arrival 
 there. Bassano is the birthplace of the painter Jacopo 
 da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters 
 to treat scriptural story as accessory to mere land- 
 scape, and who had a peculiar fondness for painting 
 Entrances into the Ark, for in these he could indulge 
 without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired 
 from observation of local customs in his native town. 
 This was the theory offered by one who had imbibed 
 the spirit of subtile speculation from Ruskin, and I 
 think it reasonable. At least it does not conflict 
 with the fact that there is at Bassano a most excel- 
 lent gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the works 
 of Jacopo da Ponte, and his four sons, who are here 
 to be seen to better advantage than anywhere else. 
 As few strangers visit Bassano, the gallery is little 
 frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man, 
 who will not allow people to look at the pictures till 
 he has shown them the adjoining cabinet of geological 
 specimens. It is in vain that you assure him of your 
 indifference to these scientific seccature ; he is deaf, 
 
BASSANO. 275 
 
 and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. 
 He asked us a hundred questions, and understood 
 nothing in reply, insomuch that when he came to his 
 last inquiry, " Have the Protestants the same God 
 as the Catholics ? " we were rather glad that he 
 should 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 
 passed out, the master gave these poor busy bees an 
 atom of holiday, and they all swarmed forth together 
 to look at the strangers. The teacher was a long, 
 lank man, in a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap 
 exactly like the schoolmaster in " The Deserted 
 Village." We made a pretense of asking him our 
 way to somewhere, and went wrong, and came by 
 accident upon a wide flat space, bare as a brick-yard, 
 beside which was lettered on a fragment of the old 
 city wall, " Giuoco di Palla." It was evidently the 
 playground of the whole city, and it gave us a pleas- 
 anter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet con- 
 ceived, to think of its entire population playing ball 
 there in the spring afternoons. We respected Bas- 
 sano as much for this as for her diligent remembrance 
 of her illustrious dead, of whom she has very great 
 numbers. It appeared to us that nearly every other 
 house bore a tablet announcing that " Here was born," 
 or " Here died," some great or good man of whom no 
 one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough ce- 
 lebrity in Bassano to supply the world ; but as laurel 
 
276 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 is a thing that grows anywhere, I covet rather from 
 Bassano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions 
 of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where 
 visible, is seen to be of a pebbly rough-cast, but it 
 is clad almost from the ground in glossy ivy, that 
 glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast shoul- 
 ders of some giant warrior. The moat beneath is 
 turned into a lovely promenade bordered by quiet vil- 
 las, with rococo shepherds and shepherdesses in mar- 
 ble on their gates; where the wall is built to the 
 verge of the high ground on 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 suc- 
 cession of natural compartments with dome-like roofs. 
 From the hill overhead hang stalactites of all gro- 
 tesque and fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is 
 embroidered with fantastic designs wrought by the 
 water in the silence and darkness of the endless night. 
 At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cav- 
 ern is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging 
 to the centre of the pool your attention is drawn to 
 the dome above you, which contracts into a shaft 
 rising upward to a height as yet unmeasured and 
 even unpierced by light. From somewhere in its 
 
BASSANO. 
 
 277 
 
 mysterious ascent, an auroral boy, with a tallow can- 
 dle, produces a so-called effect of sunrise, and sheds a 
 sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the cav- 
 ern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind 
 creatures of subterranean waters are to those of waves 
 that laugh and dance above ground. But all caverns 
 are much alike in their depressing and gloomy influ- 
 ences, and since there is so great opportunity to be 
 wretched on the surface of the earth, why do people 
 visit them ? I do not know that this is more dispirit- 
 ing or its stream more Stygian than another. 
 
 The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives 
 everywhere in this part of Italy, and near the en- 
 trance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the hill 
 something like the apsis of a church, which is popu- 
 larly believed to have been the hiding-place of Ce- 
 cilia da Baone, one of the many unhappy wives of 
 one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino 
 family. It is not quite clear when Cecilia should 
 have employed this as a place of refuge, and it is 
 certain that she was not the wife of Ecelino da Ro- 
 mano, as the neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ece- 
 lino il Monaco, his father ; yet since her name is asso- 
 ciated with the grot, let us have her story, which is 
 curiously illustrative of the life of the best society 
 in Italy during the thirteenth century. She was the 
 only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, 
 Count of Baone and Abano, who died leaving his 
 heiress to the guardianship of Spinabello da Xendrico. 
 When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello cast 
 about him to find a suitable husband for her, and it 
 
278 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 appeared to him that a match with the son of Tiso du 
 Camposampiero promised the greatest advantages. 
 Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was delighted, 
 but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon 
 so important a matter, he confided it for advice to his 
 .brother-in-law and closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. 
 It had just happened that Balbo's son, Ecelino il 
 Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having been 
 recently divorced from his first wife, the lovely but 
 light Speronella ; and Balbo falsely went to the greedy 
 guardian of Cecilia, and offering him better terms 
 than he could hope for from Tiso, secured Cecilia 
 for his son. At this treachery the Camposampieri 
 were furious ; but they dissembled their anger till 
 the moment of revenge arrived, when Cecilia's re- 
 jected suitor encountering her upon a journey be- 
 yond the protection of her husband, violently dis- 
 honored his successful rival. The unhappy lady 
 returning to Ecelino at Bassano, recounted her 
 wrong, and was with a horrible injustice repudiated 
 and sent home, while her husband arranged schemes 
 of vengeance in due time consummated. Cecilia 
 next married a Venetian noble, and being in due 
 time divorced, married yet again, and died the 
 mother of a large family of children. 
 
 This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was 
 an habitue of the caffd in Bassano who could have 
 given some of its particulars from personal recollec- 
 tion. He was an old and smoothly shaven gentle- 
 man, in a scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we 
 saw every evening in a corner of the caffe playing 
 
BASSANO. 279 
 
 solitaire. He talked with no one, saluted no one. 
 He drank his glasses of water with anisette, and 
 silently played solitaire. There is no good reason to 
 doubt that he had been doing the same thing every 
 evening for six hundred years. 
 
V. 
 
 POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE. 
 
 IT did not take a long time to exhaust the interest 
 of Bassano, but we were sorry to leave the place 
 because of the excellence of the inn at which we 
 tarried. It was called "II Mondo," and it had 
 every thing in it that heart could wish. Our rooms 
 were miracles of neatness and comfort ; they had the 
 freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair, and they 
 opened into the dining-hall, where we were served 
 with indescribable salads and risotti. During our 
 sojourn we simply enjoyed the house ; when we were 
 come away we wondered that so much perfection of 
 hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano. It 
 is one of the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that 
 you are everywhere introduced in character, that 
 you become fictitious and play a part as in a novel. 
 To this inn of The World, our driver had brought us 
 with a clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee re- 
 ceived from us, and when, in response to his haughty 
 summons, the cameriere, who had been gossiping 
 with the cook, threw open the kitchen door, and 
 stood out to welcome us in a broad square of forth- 
 streaming rud(Jy light, amid the lovely odors of broil- 
 ing and roasting, our driver saluted him with, " Re- 
 
POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE. 281 
 
 ceive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very 
 best. They are worthy of any thing." This at once 
 put us back several centuries, and we never ceased 
 to be lords and ladies of the period of Don Quixote 
 as long as we rested in that inn. 
 
 It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left 
 " II Mondo," and gayly journeyed toward Treviso, 
 intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace of Canova, 
 on our way. The road to the latter place passes 
 through a beautiful country, that gently undulates 
 on either hand till in the distance it rises into pleasant 
 hills and green mountain heights. Possagno itself 
 lies upon the brink of a 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 edi- 
 fice with which Canova has honored his humble 
 birthplace. It is a copy of the Pantheon, and it 
 cannot help being beautiful and imposing, but it 
 would be utterly out of place in any other than an 
 Italian village. Here, however, it consorted well 
 enough with the lingering qualities of the old pagan 
 civilization still perceptible in Italy. A sense of 
 that past was so strong with us as we ascended 
 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 
 
282 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 worship : through the open doorway and between 
 the columns of the portico we could see the priests 
 moving to and fro, and the voice of their chant- 
 ing came out to us like the sound of hymns to some 
 of the deities long disowned; and I remembered 
 
 how Padre L had said to me in Venice, " Our 
 
 blessed saints are only the old gods baptized and 
 christened anew." Within as without, the temple 
 resembled the Pantheon, but it had little to show us. 
 The niches designed by Canova for statues of the 
 saints are empty yet ; but there are busts by his own 
 hand of himself and his brother, the Bishop Canova. 
 Among the people was the sculptor's niece, whom 
 our guide pointed out to us, and who was evidently 
 used to being looked at. She seemed not to dislike 
 it, and stared back at us amiably enough, being 
 a good-natured, plump, comely dark-faced lady of 
 perhaps fifty years. 
 
 Possagno is nothing if not Canova, and our guide, 
 a boy, knew all about him, how, more especially, 
 he had first manifested his wonderful genius by 
 modeling a group of sheep out of the dust of the 
 highway, and how an Inglese happening along in his 
 carriage, saw the boy's work and gave him a plate- 
 ful of gold napoleons. I dare say this is as near the 
 truth as most facts. And is it not better for the his- 
 toric Canova to have begun in this way than to have 
 poorly picked up the rudiments of his art in the 
 workshop of his father, a maker of altar-pieces and 
 the like for country churches ? The Canova family 
 has intermarried with the Venetian nobility, and will 
 
283 
 
 not credit those stories of Canova's beginnings which 
 his townsmen so fondly cherish. 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 Venuses present themselves in every 
 variety of attitude, where Sorrows sit upon hard, 
 straight-backed classic chairs, and mourn in the 
 society of faithful Storks ; where the Bereft of this 
 century surround death-beds in Greek costume appro- 
 priate to the scene ; where Muses and Graces sweetly 
 pose themselves and insipidly srnile, and where the 
 Dancers and Passions, though nakeder, are no wick- 
 eder than the Saints and Virtues. In all, there are 
 a hundred and ninety-five pieces in the gallery, and 
 among the rest the statue named George Washing- 
 ton, which was sent to America in 1820, and after- 
 wards destroyed by fire in the Capitol. The figure 
 is in a sitting posture ; naturally, it is in the dress of 
 a Roman general ; and if it does not look much like 
 George Washington, it does resemble Julius 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 imperial Washing- 
 
284 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 ton, and our pleasure in the whole gallery, which we 
 viewed with the homage due to the man who had 
 rescued the world from Swaggering in sculpture. 
 When we were satisfied, he invited us, with his 
 mistress's permission, into the house of the Canovas 
 adjoining the gallery ; and there we saw many paint- 
 ings by the sculptor, pausing longest in a lovely 
 little room decorated after the Pompeian manner with 
 scherzi in miniature panels representing the jocose 
 classic usualities : Cupids escaping from cages, and 
 being sold from them, and playing many pranks and 
 games with Nymphs and Graces. 
 
 Then Canova was done, and Possagno was fin- 
 ished ; and we resumed our way to Treviso, a town 
 nearly as much porticoed as Padua, and having a 
 memory and hardly any other consciousness. The 
 Duomo, which is perhaps the ugliest duomo in the 
 world, contains an " Annunciation," by Titian, one 
 of his best paintings ; and in the Monte di Pietd is 
 the grand and beautiful " Entombment," by which 
 Giorgione is perhaps most worthily remembered. 
 The church of San Nicolo is interesting from its 
 quaint and pleasing frescos by the school of Giotto. 
 At the railway station an admirable old man sells the 
 most delicious white and purple grapes. 
 
VI. 
 COMO. 
 
 MY visit to Lake Como has become to me a dream 
 of summer, a vision that remains faded the whole 
 year round, till the blazing heats of July bring out 
 the sympathetic tints in which it was vividly painted. 
 Then I behold myself again in burning Milan, amidst 
 noises and fervors and bustle that seem intolerable 
 after my first six months in tranquil, cool, mute Ven- 
 ice. Looking at the great white Cathedral, with its 
 infinite pinnacles piercing the cloudless blue, and 
 gathering the fierce sun upon it, I half expect to see 
 the whole mass calcined by the heat, and crumbling, 
 statue by statue, finial by finial, arch by arch, into a 
 vast heap of lime on the Piazza, with a few charred 
 English tourists blackening here and there upon the 
 ruin, and contributing a smell of burnt leather and 
 Scotch tweed to the horror of the scene. All round 
 Milan smokes the great Lombard plain, and to the 
 north rises Monte Rosa, her dark head coifed with 
 tantalizing snows as with a peasant's white linen ker- 
 chief. And I am walking out upon that fuming 
 plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which the 
 bronze horses may melt any minute ; or I am swel- 
 tering through the city's noonday streets, in search 
 
286 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 of Sant' Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo of Da Vinci, or 
 what know I ? Coming back to our hotel, " Alia 
 Bella Venezia," and greeted on entering by the im- 
 mense fresco which covers one whole side of the 
 court, it appeared to my friend and me no wonder 
 that Garibaldi should look so longingly from the 
 prow of a gondola toward the airy towers and bal- 
 loon-like domes that swim above the unattainable la- 
 goons of Venice, where the Austrian then lorded it 
 in coolness and quietness, while hot, red-shirted Italy 
 was shut out upon the dusty plains and stony hills. 
 Our desire for water became insufferable ; we paid 
 our modest bills, and at six o'clock we took the train 
 for Como, where we arrived about the hour when 
 Don Abbondio, walking down the lonely path with 
 his book of devotions in his hand, gave himself to 
 the Devil on meeting the bravos of Don Rodrigo. I 
 counsel the reader to turn to I Promessi Sposi, if 
 he would know how all the lovely Como country 
 looks at that hour. For me, the ride through the 
 evening landscape, and the faint sentiment of pen- 
 siveness provoked by the smell of the ripening maize, 
 which exhales the same sweetness on the way to 
 Como that it does on any Ohio bottom-land, have 
 given me an appetite, and I am to dine before woo- 
 ing the descriptive Muse. 
 
 After dinner, we find at the door of the hotel an 
 English architect whom we know, and we take a 
 boat together for a moonlight row upon the lake, and 
 voyage -far up the placid water through air that 
 bathes our heated senses like dew. How far we have 
 
COMO. 287 
 
 left Milan behind ! On the lake lies the moon, but 
 the hills are held by mysterious shadows, which for 
 the time are as substantial to us as the hills them- 
 selves. Hints of habitation appear in the twinkling 
 lights along the water's edge, and we suspect an ala- 
 baster lamp in every casement, and in every invisible 
 house a villa such as Claude Melnotte described to 
 Pauline, and some one mouths that well-worn fus- 
 tian. The rags of sentimentality flutter from every 
 crag and olive-tree and orange-tree in all Italy like 
 the wilted paper collars which vulgar tourists leave 
 by our own mountains and streams, to commemorate 
 their enjoyment of the landscape. 
 
 The town of Como lies, a swarm of lights, behind 
 us ; the hills and shadows gloom around ; the lake is 
 a sheet of tremulous silver. There is no telling how 
 we get back to our hotel, or with what satisfied 
 hearts we fall asleep in our room there. The steamer 
 starts for the head of the lake at eight o'clock in the 
 morning, and we go on board at that hour. 
 
 There is some pretense of shelter in the awning 
 stretched over the after part of the boat ; but we do 
 not feel the need of it in the fresh morning air, and 
 we get as near the bow as possible, that we may be 
 the very first to enjoy the famous beauty of the 
 scenes opening before us. A few sails dot the water, 
 and everywhere there are small, canopied row-boats, 
 such as we went pleasuring in last night. We reach 
 a bend in the lake, and all the roofs and towers of 
 the city of Como pass from view, as if they had 
 been so much architecture painted on a scene and 
 
288 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 shifted out of sight at a theatre. But other roofs and 
 towers constantly succeed them, not less lovely and 
 picturesque than they, with every curve of the many- 
 curving lake. We advance over charming expanses 
 of water lying between lofty hills ; and as the lake is 
 narrow, the voyage is like that of a winding river, 
 like that of the Ohio, but for the primeval wild- 
 ness of the acclivities that guard our Western stream, 
 and the tawniness of its current. Wherever the hills 
 do not descend sheer into Como, a pretty town nest- 
 les on the brink, or, if not a town, then a villa, or 
 else a cottage, if there is room for nothing more. 
 Many little towns climb the heights half-way, and 
 where the hills are green and cultivated in vines or 
 olives, peasants' houses scale them to the crest. 
 They grow loftier and loftier as we leave our start- 
 ing-place farther behind, and as we draw near Col- 
 ico they wear light wreaths of cloud and snow. So 
 cool a breeze has drawn down between them all the 
 way that we fancy it to have come from them till we 
 stop at Colico, and find that, but for the efforts of 
 our honest engine, sweating and toiling in the dark 
 below, we should have had no current of air. A 
 burning calm is in the atmosphere, and on the broad, 
 flat valley, out of which a marshy stream oozes 
 into the lake, and on the snow-crowned hills upon 
 the left, and on the dirty village of Colico upon the 
 right, and on the indolent beggars waiting to wel- 
 come us, and sunning their goitres at the landing. 
 
 The name Colico, indeed, might be literally taken 
 in English as descriptive of the local insalubrity. 
 
COMO. 289 
 
 The place was once large, but it has fallen away 
 much from sickness, and we found a bill posted in its 
 public places inviting emigrants to America on the 
 part of a German steamship company. It was the 
 only advertisement of the kind I ever saw in Italy, 
 and I judged that the people must be notoriously 
 discontented there to make it worth the while of a 
 steamship company to tempt from home any of the 
 home-keeping Italian race. And yet Colico, though 
 undeniably hot, and openly dirty, and tacitly un- 
 healthy, had merits, though the dinner we got there 
 was not among its virtues. It had an accessible 
 country about it ; that is, its woods and fields were 
 not impenetrably walled in from the vagabond foot ; 
 and after we had dined we went and lay down under 
 some greenly waving trees beside a field of corn, and 
 heard the plumed and panoplied maize talking to 
 itself of its kindred in America. It always has a 
 welcome for tourists of our nation wherever it finds 
 us in Italy ; and sometimes its sympathy, expressed 
 in a rustling and clashing of its long green blades, or 
 in its strong sweet perfume, has, as already hinted, 
 made me homesick, though I have been uniformly 
 unaffected by potato-patches and tobacco-fields. If 
 only the maize could impart to the Italian cooks the 
 beautiful mystery of roasting-ears ! Ah ! then indeed 
 it might claim a full and perfect fraternization from 
 its compatriots abroad. 
 
 From where we lay beside the corn-field, we could 
 see, through the twinkling leaves and the twinkling 
 atmosphere, the great hills across the lake, taking 
 19 
 
290 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 their afternoon naps, with their clouds drawn like 
 handkerchiefs over their heads. It was very hot, 
 and the red and purple ooze of the unwholesome 
 river below "burnt like a witch's oils." It was in- 
 deed but a fevered joy we snatched from Nature 
 there ; and I am afraid that we got nothing more 
 comfortable from sentiment, when, rising, we wan- 
 dered off through the unguarded fields toward a 
 ruined tower on a hill. It must have been a relic of 
 feudal times, and I could easily believe it had been 
 the hold of one of those wicked lords who used 
 to rule in the terror of the people beside peaceful 
 and happy Como. But the life, good or bad, was 
 utterly gone out of it now, and what was left of 
 the tower was a burden to the sense. A few 
 scrawny blackberries and other brambles grew out 
 of its fallen stones ; harsh, dust-dry mosses painted 
 its weather-worn walls with their blanched gray and 
 yellow. From its foot, looking out over the valley, 
 we saw the road to the Splugen Pass lying white-hot 
 in the valley ; and while we looked, the diligence ap- 
 peared, and dashed through the dust that rose like a 
 flame before. After that it was a relief to stroll in 
 dirty by-ways, past cottages of saffron peasants, and , 
 poor stony fields that begrudged them a scanty veg- 
 etation, back to the steamer blistering in the sun. 
 
 Now indeed we were glad of the awning, under 
 which a silent crowd of people with sunburnt faces 
 waited for the departure of the boat. The breeze 
 rose again as the engine resumed its unappreciated 
 labors, and, with our head toward Como, we pushed 
 
COMO. 291 
 
 out into the lake. The company on board was such 
 as might be expected. There was a German land- 
 scape-painter, with three heart's-friends beside him ; 
 there were some German ladies; there were the un- 
 failing Americans and the unfailing Englishman ; 
 there were some French people ; there were Italians 
 from the meridional provinces, dark, thin, and enthu- 
 siastic, with fat silent wives, and a rhythmical speech ; 
 there were Milanese with their families, out for a 
 holiday, round-bodied men, with blunt square feat- 
 ures, and hair and vowels clipped surprisingly short , 
 there was a young girl whose face was of the exact 
 type affected in rococo sculpture, and at whom one 
 gazed without being able to decide whether she was 
 a nymph descended from a villa gate, or a saint come 
 from under a broken arch in a Renaissance church. 
 At one of the little towns two young Englishmen in 
 knickerbockers came on board, who were devoured 
 by the eyes of their fellow-passengers, and between 
 whom and our kindly architect there was instantly 
 ratified the tacit treaty of non-intercourse which 
 traveling Englishmen observe. 
 
 Nothing further interested us on the way to Como, 
 except the gathering coolness of the evening air ; the 
 shadows creeping higher and higher on the hills ; the 
 songs of the girls winding yellow silk on the reels 
 that hummed through the open windows of the fac- 
 tories on the shore ; and the appearance of a flag 
 that floated from a shallop before the landing of a 
 stately villa. The Italians did not know this banner, 
 and the Germans loudly debated its nationality. 
 
292 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 The Englishmen grinned, and the Americans 
 blushed in silence. Of all my memories of that hot 
 day on Lake Como, this is burnt the deepest ; for the 
 flag was that insolent banner which in 1862 pro- 
 claimed us a broken people, and persuaded willing 
 Europe of our ruin. It has gone down long ago 
 from ship and fort and regiment, as well as from the 
 shallop on the fair Italian lake. Still, I say, it made 
 Como too hot for us that afternoon, and even breath- 
 less Milan was afterwards a pleasant contrast. 
 
STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND 
 PARMA. 
 
 i. 
 
 IT was after sunset when we arrived in the birth- 
 place of Palladio, which we found a fair city in the 
 lap of caressing hills. There are pretty villas upon 
 these slopes, and an abundance of shaded walks and 
 drives about the houses which were pointed out to 
 us, by the boy who carried our light luggage from 
 the railway station, as the property of rich citizens 
 " but little less than lords " in quality. A lovely 
 grove lay between the station and the city, and our 
 guide not only took us voluntarily by the longest 
 route through this, but, after reaching the streets, led 
 us by labyrinthine ways to the hotel, in order, he af- 
 terwards confessed, to show us the city. He was a 
 poet, though in that lowly walk of life, and he had 
 done well. No other moment of our stay would 
 have served us so well for a first general impression 
 of Vicenza as that twilight hour. In its uncertain 
 glimmer we seemed to get quite back to the dawn of 
 feudal civilization, when Theodoric founded the great 
 Basilica of the city ; and as we stood before the fa- 
 mous Clock Tower, which rises light and straight as 
 a mast eighty-two metres into the air from a base of 
 
294 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 seven metres, the wavering obscurity enhanced the 
 effect by half concealing the tower's crest, and let- 
 ting it soar endlessly upward in the fancy. The Ba- 
 silica is greatly restored by Palladio, arid the cold 
 hand of that friend of virtuous poverty in architect- 
 ure lies heavy upon his native city in many places. 
 Yet there is still a great deal of Lombardic architect- 
 ure in Vicenza ; and we walked through one street 
 of palaces in which Venetian Gothic prevailed, so 
 that it seemed as if the Grand Canal had but just 
 shrunk away from their bases. When we threw 
 open our window at the hotel, we found that it over- 
 looked one of the city gates, from which rose a Ghi- 
 belline tower with a great bulging cornice, full of the 
 beauty and memory of times long before Palladio. 
 
 They were rather troublous times, and not to be 
 recalled here in all their circumstance ; but I think it 
 due to Vicenza, which is now little spoken of, even 
 in Italy, and is scarcely known in America, where 
 her straw-braid is bought for that of Leghorn, to 
 remind the reader that the city was for a long time 
 a republic of very independent and warlike stomach. 
 Before she arrived at that state, however, she had 
 undergone a great variety of fortunes. The Gauls 
 founded the city (as I learn from " The Chronicles 
 of Vicenza," by Battista Pagliarino, published at Vi- 
 cenza in 1563) when Gideon was Judge in Israel, 
 and were driven out by the Romans some centuries 
 later. As a matter of course, Vicenza was sacked 
 by Attila and conquered by Alboin ; after which 
 she was ruled by some lords of her own, until she 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 295 
 
 was made an imperial city by Henry I. Then she 
 had a government more or less republican in form 
 till Frederick Barbarossa burnt her, and " wrapped 
 her in ashes," and gave her to his vicar Ecelino da 
 Romano, who " held her in cruel tyranny " from 
 1236 to 1259. The Paduans next ruled her forty 
 years, and the Veronese seventy-seven, and the Mi- 
 lanese seventeen years ; then she reposed in the 
 arms of the Venetian Republic till these fell weak 
 and helpless from all the Venetian possessions at the 
 threat of Napoleon. Vicenza belonged again to 
 Venice during the brief Republic of 1848, but the 
 most memorable battle of that heroic but unhappy 
 epoch gave her back to Austria. Now at last, and 
 for the first time, she is Italian. 
 Vicenza is 
 
 " Of kindred that have greatly expiated 
 And greatly wept," 
 
 and but that I so long fought against Ecelino da Ro- 
 mano, and the imperial interest in Italy, I could read- 
 ily forgive her all her past errors. To us of the Lom- 
 bard League, it was grievous that she should remain 
 so doggishly faithful to her tyrant ; though it is to be 
 granted that perhaps fear had as much to do with 
 her devotion as favor. The defense of 1848 was 
 greatly to her honor, and she took an active part in 
 that demonstration against the Austrians which en- 
 dured from 1859 till 1866. 
 
 Of the demonstration we travelers saw an amus- 
 ing phase at the opera which we attended the evening 
 of our arrival in Vicenza. " Nabucodonosor " was the 
 
296 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 piece to be given in the new open-air theatre outside 
 the city walls, whither we walked under the starlight. 
 It was a pretty structure of fresh white stucco, oval 
 in form, with some graceful architectural pretensions 
 without, and within very charmingly galleried ; while 
 overhead it was roofed with a blue dome set with 
 such starry mosaic as never covered temple or thea- 
 tre since they used to leave their houses of play and 
 worship open to the Attic skies. The old Hebrew 
 story had, on this stage brought so near to Nature, 
 effects seldom known to opera, and the scene evoked 
 from far-off days the awful interest of the Bible his- 
 tories, the vague, unfigured oriental splendor 
 the desert the captive people by the waters of the 
 river of Babylon the shadow and mystery of the 
 prophecies. When the Hebrews, chained and toil- 
 ing on the banks of the Euphrates, lifted their voices 
 in lamentation, the sublime music so transfigured the 
 commonplaceness of the words, that they meant all 
 deep and unutterable affliction, and for a while swept 
 away whatever was false and tawdry in the show, 
 and thrilled our hearts with a rapture rarely felt. 
 Yet, as but a moment before we had laughed to see 
 Nebuchadnezzar's crown shot off his head by a squib 
 visibly directed from the side scenes, at the point 
 when, according to the libretto, " the thunder roars, 
 and a bolt descends upon the head of the king," so 
 but a moment after some new absurdity marred the 
 illusion, and we began to look about the theatre at the 
 audience. We then beheld that act of dimostrazione 
 which I have mentioned. In one of the few boxes, 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 297 
 
 sat a young and very beautiful woman in a dress of 
 white, with a fan which she kept in constant move- 
 ment. It was red on one side, and green on the 
 other, and gave, with the white dress, the forbidden 
 Italian colors, while, looked at alone, it was innocent 
 of offense. I do not think a soul in the theatre was 
 ignorant of the demonstration. A satisfied conscious- 
 ness was reflected from the faces of the Italians, and 
 I saw two Austrian officers exchange looks of good- 
 natured intelligence, after a glance at the fair patriot. 
 I wonder what those poor people do, now they are 
 free, and deprived of the sweet, perilous luxury of 
 defying their tyrants by constant acts of subtle dis- 
 dain ? Life in Venetia must be very dull : no more 
 explosion of pasteboard petards ; no more treason in 
 bouquets ; no more stealthy inscriptions on the walls 
 it must be insufferably dull. JUbbene, pazienza ! 
 Perhaps Victor Emanuel may betray them yet. 
 
 A spirit of lawless effrontery, indeed, seemed to 
 pervade the whole audience in the theatre that night 
 at Vicenza, and to extend to the ministers of the law 
 themselves. There were large placards everywhere 
 posted, notifying the people that it was forbidden to 
 smoke in the theatre, and that smokers were liable 
 to expulsion ; but except for ourselves, and the fair 
 patriot in the box, I think every body there was 
 smoking, and the policemen set the example of an- 
 archy by smoking the longest and worst cigars of all. 
 I am sure that the captive Hebrews all held lighted 
 cigarettes behind their backs, and that Nebuchadnez- 
 zar, condemned to the grass of the field, conscien- 
 
298 ITALIAN JOUKNEYS. 
 
 tiously gave himself up to the Virginia weed behind 
 the scenes. 
 
 Before I fell asleep that night, the moon rose 
 over the top of the feudal tower, in front of our 
 hotel, and produced some very pretty effects with 
 the battlements. Early in the morning a regiment 
 of Croats marched through the gate below the 
 tower, their band playing " The Young Recruit." 
 These advantages of situation were not charged 
 in our bill ; but, even if they had been, I should 
 still advise my reader to go, when in Vicenza, if 
 he loves a pleasant landlord and a good dinner, to 
 the Hotel de la Ville, which he will find almost 
 at his sole disposition for however long time he 
 may stay. His meals will be served him in a vast 
 dining-hall, as bare as a barn or a palace, but for 
 the pleasant, absurd old paintings on the wall, repre- 
 senting, as I suppose, Cleopatra applying the Asp, 
 Susannah and the Elders, the Roman Lucrezia, and 
 other moral and appetizing histories. I take it there 
 is a quaint side-table or two lost midway of the wall, 
 and that an old woodcut picture of the Most Noble 
 City of Venice hangs over each. I know that there 
 is a screen at one end of the apartment behind which 
 the landlord invisibly assumes the head waiter ; and 
 I suspect that at the moment of sitting down at 
 meat, you hear two Englishmen talking as they 
 pass along the neighboring corridor of wine, in 
 dissatisfied chest-tones. This hotel is of course built 
 round a court, in which there is a stable and ex- 
 posed to the weather a diligence, and two or three 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 299 
 
 carriages and a driver, and an ostler chewing straw, 
 and a pump and a .grape-vine. Why the hotel, there- 
 fore, does not smell like a stable, from garret to cellar, 
 I am utterly at a loss to know. I state the fact that 
 it does not, and that every other hotel in Italy does 
 smell of stable as if cattle had been immemorially 
 pastured in its halls, and horses housed in its bed- 
 chambers, or as if its only guests were centaurs 
 on their travels. 
 
 From the Museo Civico, whither we repaired first 
 in the morning, and where there are some beautiful 
 Montagnas, and an assortment of good and bad works 
 by other masters, we went to the Campo Santo, 
 which is worthy to be seen, if only because of the 
 beautiful Laschi monument by Vela, one of the 
 greatest modern sculptors. It is nothing more than 
 a very simple tomb, at the door of which stands a 
 figure in flowing drapery, with folded hands and up- 
 lifted eyes in an attitude exquisitely expressive of 
 grief. The figure is said to be the portrait statue of 
 the widow of him within the tomb, and the face is 
 very beautiful. We asked if the widow was still 
 young, and the custodian answered us in terms that 
 ought to endear him to all women, if not to our 
 whole mortal race, " Oh quite young, yet. She is 
 perhaps fifty years old." 
 
 After the Campo Santo one ought to go to that 
 theatre which Palladio built for the representation of 
 classic tragedy, and which is perhaps the perfectest 
 reproduction of the Greek theatre in the world. Al- 
 fieri is the only poet of modern times, whose works 
 
300 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 have been judged worthy of this stage, and no drama 
 has been given on it since 1857, when the " (Edipus 
 Tyrannus " of Sophocles was played. We found it 
 very silent and dusty, and were much sadder as we 
 walked through its gayly frescoed, desolate ante- 
 rooms than we had been in the Campo Santo. Here 
 used to sit, at coffee and bassett, the merry people 
 who owned the now empty seats of the theatre, 
 lord, and lady, and abbe*, who affected to be en- 
 tertained by the scenes upon the stage. Upon my 
 word, I should like to know what has become, in 
 the other world, of those poor pleasurers of the past 
 whose memory makes one so sad upon the scenes 
 of their enjoyment here ! I suppose they have 
 something quite as unreal, yonder, to satisfy them 
 as they had on earth, and that they still play at 
 happiness in the old rococo way, though it is hard 
 to conceive of any fiction outside of Italy so per- 
 fect and so entirely suited to their unreality as this 
 classic theatre. It is a Greek theatre, for Greek 
 tragedies ; but it could never have been for popular 
 amusement, and it was not open to the air, though it 
 had a sky skillfully painted in the centre of the roof. 
 The proscenium is a Greek fagade, in three stories, 
 such as never was seen in Greece ; and the architect- 
 ure of the three streets running back from the prosce- 
 nium, and forming the one unchangeable scene of all 
 the dramas, is like the statues in the niches and 
 on the gallery inclosing the auditorium Greek in 
 the most fashionable Vicentine taste. It must have 
 been but an operatic chorus that sang in the semi- 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 301 
 
 circular space just below the stage and in front of 
 the audience. Admit and forget these small blem- 
 ishes and aberrations, however, and what a marvel- 
 ous thing Palladio's theatre is ! The sky above the 
 stage is a wonderful trick, and those three streets 
 one in the centre and serving as entrance for the 
 royal persons of the drama, one at the right for the 
 nobles, and one at the left for the citizens present 
 unsurpassed effects of illusion. They are not painted, 
 but modeled in stucco. In perspective they seem 
 each half a mile long, but entering them you find 
 that they run back from the proscenium only some 
 fifteen feet, the fronts of the houses and the statues 
 upon them decreasing in recession with a well-or- 
 dered abruptness. The semicircular gallery above 
 the auditorium is of stone, and forty statues of mar- 
 ble crown its colonnade, or occupy niches between 
 the columns. 
 
 n. 
 
 IT was curious to pass, with the impression left by 
 this costly and ingenious toy upon our minds, at once 
 to the amphitheatre in Verona, which, next to the 
 Coliseum, has, of all the works bequeathed us by the 
 ancient Roman world, the greatest claim upon the 
 wonder and imagination. Indeed, it makes even a 
 stronger appeal to the fancy. We know who built 
 the Coliseum, but in its unstoried origin, the Veronese 
 Arena has the mystery of the Pyramids. Was its 
 founder Augustus, or Vitellius, or Antoninus, or 
 Maximian, or the Republic of Verona ? Nothing is 
 
302 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 certain but that it was conceived and reared by some 
 mighty prince or people, and that it yet remains in 
 such perfection that the great shows of two thousand 
 years ago might take place in it to-day. It is so sug- 
 gestive of the fierce and splendid spectacles of Ro- 
 man times that the ring left by a modern circus on 
 the arena, and absurdly dwarfed by the vast space 
 of the oval, had an impertinence which we hotly re- 
 sented, looking down on it from the highest grade of 
 the interior. It then lay fifty feet below us, in the 
 middle of an ellipse five hundred feet in length and 
 four hundred in breadth, and capable of holding fifty 
 thousand spectators. The seats that the multitudes 
 pressed of old are perfect yet ; scarce a stone has 
 been removed from the interior ; the sedile and the 
 prefect might take their places again in the balus- 
 traded tribunes above the great entrance at either 
 end of the arena, and scarcely see that they were 
 changed. Nay, the victims and the gladiators might 
 return to the cells below the seats of the people, and 
 not know they had left them for a day; the wild 
 beasts might leap into the arena from dens as 
 secure and strong as when first built. The ruin 
 within seems only to begin with the aqueduct, which 
 was used to flood the arena for the naval shows, but 
 which is now choked with the dust of ages. With- 
 out, however, is plain enough the doom which is 
 written against all the work of human hands, and 
 which, unknown of the builders, is among the memor- 
 able things placed in the corner-stone of every edi- 
 fice. Of the outer wall that rose high over the high- 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 303 
 
 est seats of the amphitheatre, and encircled it with 
 stately corridors, giving it vaster amplitude and 
 grace, the earthquake of six centuries ago spared 
 only a fragment that now threatens above one of the 
 narrow Veronese streets. Blacksmiths, wagon-mak- 
 ers, and workers in clangorous metals have made 
 shops of the lower corridors of the old arena, and it 
 is friends and neighbors with the modern life about 
 it, as such things usually are in Italy. Fortunately 
 for the stranger, the Piazza Bra flanks it on one 
 hand, and across this it has a magnificent approach. 
 It is not less happy in being little known to senti- 
 ment, and the traveler who visits it by moonlight, 
 has a full sense of grandeur and pathos, without any 
 of the sheepishness attending homage to that bat- 
 tered old coquette, the Coliseum, which so many 
 emotional people have sighed over, kissing and after- 
 wards telling. 
 
 But he who would know the innocent charm of a 
 ruin as yet almost wholly uncourted by travel, must 
 go to the Roman theatre in Verona. It is not a fa- 
 vorite of the hand-books ; and we were decided to 
 see it chiefly by a visit to the Museum, where, besides 
 an admirable gallery of paintings, there is a most in- 
 teresting collection of antiques in bronze and marble 
 found in excavating the theatre. The ancient edi- 
 fice had been completely buried, and a quarter of 
 the town was built over it, as Portici is built over 
 Herculaneum, and on the very top stood a Jesuit 
 convent. One day, some children, playing in the 
 garden of one of the shabby houses, suddenly van- 
 
304 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 ished from sight. Their mother ran like one mad 
 (I am telling the story in the words of the peasant 
 who related it to me) to the spot where they had 
 last been seen, and fell herself into an opening of the 
 earth there. The outcry raised by these unfortu- 
 nates brought a number of men to their aid, and in 
 digging to get them out, an old marble stairway was 
 discovered. This was about twenty-five years ago. 
 A certain gentleman named Monga owned the land, 
 and he immediately began to make excavations. He 
 was a rich man, but considered rather whimsical (if 
 my peasant represented the opinion of his neigh- 
 bors), and as the excavation ate a great deal of 
 money (mangiava molti soldi), his sons discontinued 
 the work after his death, and nothing has been done 
 for some time, now. The peasant in charge was not 
 a person of imaginative mind, though he said the 
 theatre (supposed to have been built in the time of 
 Augustus) was completed two thousand years before 
 Christ. He had a purely conventional admiration of 
 the work, which he expressed at regular intervals, 
 by stopping short in his course, waving both hands 
 over the ruins, and crying in a sepulchral voice, 
 " QuaV opera ! " However, as he took us faithfully 
 into every part of it, there is no reason to complain 
 of him. 
 
 We crossed three or four streets, and entered at 
 several different gates, in order to see the uncovered 
 parts of the work, which could have been but a small 
 proportion of the whole. The excavation has been 
 carried down thirty and forty feet below the founda- 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 305 
 
 tions of the modern houses, revealing the stone seats 
 of the auditorium, the corridors beneath them, and 
 the canals and other apparatus for naval shows, as 
 in the great Amphitheatre. These works are even 
 more stupendous than those of the Amphitheatre, 
 for in many cases they are not constructed, but 
 hewn out of the living rock, so that in this light 
 the theatre is a gigantic sculpture. Below all are 
 cut channels to collect and carry off the water of 
 the springs in which the rock abounds. The depth 
 of one of these channels near the Jesuit convent 
 must be fifty feet below the present surface. Only 
 in one place does the ancient edifice rise near 
 the top of the ground, and there is uncovered the 
 arched front of what was once a family-box at the 
 theatre, with the owner's name graven upon the 
 arch. Many poor little houses have of course been 
 demolished to carry on the excavations, and to the 
 walls that joined them cling memorials of the simple 
 life that once inhabited them. To one of the build- 
 ings hung a melancholy fire-place left blackened 
 with smoke, and battered with use, but witnessing 
 that it had once been the heart of a home. It was 
 far more touching than any thing in the elder ruin ; 
 and I think nothing could have so vividly expressed 
 the difference which, in spite of all the resemblances 
 noticeable in Italy, exists between the ancient and 
 modern civilization, as that family-box at the theatre 
 and this simple fireside. 
 
 I do not now remember what fortunate chance it 
 was that discovered to us the house of the Capu- 
 
306 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 lets, and I incline to believe that we gravitated to- 
 ward it by operation of well-known natural principles 
 which bring travelers acquainted with improbabili- 
 ties wherever they go. We found it a very old and 
 time-worn edifice, built round an ample court, and 
 we knew it, as we had been told we should, by the 
 cap carven in stone above the interior of the grand 
 portal. The family, anciently one of the principal 
 of Verona, has fallen from much of its former great- 
 ness. On the occasion of our visit, Juliet, very 
 dowdily dressed, looked down from the top of a long, 
 dirty staircase which descended into the court, and 
 seemed interested to see us ; while her mother ca- 
 ressed with one hand a large yellow mastiff, and 
 distracted it from its first impulse to fly upon us poor 
 children of sentiment. There was a great deal of 
 stable litter, and many empty carts standing about 
 in the court ; and if I might hazard the opinion 
 formed upon these and other appearances, I should 
 say that old Capulet has now gone to keeping a hotel, 
 united with the retail liquor business, both in a small 
 way. 
 
 Nothing could be more natural, after seeing the 
 house of the Capulets, than a wish to see Juliet's 
 Tomb, which is visited by all strangers, and is the 
 common property of the hand-books. It formerly 
 stood in a garden, where, up to the beginning of this 
 century, it served, says my " Viaggio in Italia," 
 " for the basest uses," just as the sacred prison of 
 Tasso was used for a charcoal bin. We found the 
 sarcophagus under a shed in one corner of the gar- 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 307 
 
 den of the Orfanotrofio delle Franceschine, and had 
 to confess to each other that it looked like a horse- 
 trough roughly hewn out of stone. The garden, said 
 the boy in charge of the moving monument, had been 
 the burial-place of the Capulets, and this tomb being 
 found in the middle of the garden, was easily recog- 
 nized as that of Juliet. Its genuineness, as well as 
 its employment in the ruse of the lovers, was proven 
 beyond cavil by a slight hollow cut for the head to 
 rest in, and a hole at the foot " to breathe through," 
 as the boy said. Does not the fact that this relic has 
 to be protected from the depredations of travelers, 
 who could otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak 
 eloquently of a large amount of vulgar and rapacious 
 innocence drifting about the world ? 
 
 It is well to see even such idle and foolish curiosi- 
 ties, however, in a city like Verona, for the mere go- 
 ing to and fro in search of them through her streets 
 is full of instruction and delight. To my mind, 
 no city has a fairer place than she that sits beside 
 the eager Adige, and breathes the keen air of moun- 
 tains white with snows in winter, green and purple 
 with vineyards in summer, and forever rich with mar- 
 ble. Around Verona stretch those gardened plains 
 of Lombardy, on which Nature, who dotes on Italy, 
 and seems but a step-mother to all transalpine lands, 
 has lavished every gift of beauty and fertility. 
 Within the city's walls, what store of art and his- 
 tory ! Her market-places have been the scenes of a 
 thousand tragic or ridiculous dramas ; her quaint 
 and narrow streets are ballads and legends full of 
 
308 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 love-making and murder ; the empty, grass-grown 
 piazzas before her churches are tales that are told of 
 municipal and ecclesiastical splendor. Her nobles 
 sleep in marble tombs so beautiful that the dust in 
 them ought to be envied by living men in Verona ; 
 her lords lie in perpetual state in the heart of the 
 city, in magnificent sepulchres of such grace and op- 
 ulence, that, unless a language be invented full of 
 lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch 
 and finial, flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can 
 never be described* Sacred be their rest from pen 
 of mine, Verona ! Nay, while I would fain bring the 
 whole city before my reader's fancy, I am loath and 
 afraid to touch any thing in it with my poor art : 
 either the tawny river, spanned with many beautiful 
 bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat and turned 
 by the rapid current ; or the thoroughfares with 
 their passengers and bright shops and caffes ; or the 
 grim old feudal towers ; or the age-embrowned pal- 
 aces, eloquent in their haughty strength of the times 
 when they were family fortresses ; or the churches 
 with the red pillars of their porticos resting upon the 
 backs of eagle-headed lions ; or even the white-coated 
 garrison (now there no more), with its heavy-footed 
 rank and file, its handsome and resplendent officers, 
 its bristling fortifications, its horses and artillery, 
 crowding the piazzas of churches turned into barracks. 
 All these things haunt my memory, but I could only 
 at best thinly sketch them in meagre black and white. 
 Verona is an almost purely Gothic city in her archi- 
 tecture, and her churches are more worthy to be 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 309 
 
 seen than any others in North Italy, outside of Ven- 
 ice. San Zenone, with the quaint bronzes on its 
 doors representing in the rudeness of the first period 
 of art the incidents of the Old Testament and the 
 miracles of the saints with the allegorical sculptures 
 surrounding the interior and exterior of the portico, 
 and illustrating, among other things, the creation of 
 Eve with absolute literalness with its beautiful and 
 solemn crypt in which the dust of the titular saint 
 lies entombed with its minute windows, and its 
 vast columns sustaining the roof upon capitals of 
 every bizarre and fantastic device is doubtless most 
 abundant in that Gothic spirit, now grotesque and 
 now earnest, which somewhere appears in all the 
 churches of Verona ; which has carven upon the fa- 
 ade of the Duomo the statues of Orlando and Ollivi- 
 ero, heroes of romance, and near them has placed the 
 scandalous figure of a pig in a monk's robe and cowl, 
 with a breviary in his paw ; which has reared the ex- 
 quisite monument of Guglielmo da Castelbarco before 
 the church of St. Anastasia, and has produced the 
 tombs of the Scaligeri before the chapel of Santa 
 Maria Antica. 
 
 I have already pledged myself not to attempt any 
 description of these tombs, and shall not fall now. 
 But I bought in the English tongue, as written at 
 Verona, some " Notices," kept for sale by the sacris- 
 tan, " of the Ancient Churg of Our Lady, and of the 
 Tombs of the most illustrious Family Della-Scala," 
 and from these I think it no dereliction to quote ver- 
 batim. First is the tomb of Can Francesco, who was 
 
310 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 " surnamed the Great by reason of his valor." 
 44 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 en- 
 closes the ashes of Martin I.," " who was traitor- 
 ously killed on the 17th of October 1277 by Scara- 
 mello of the Scaramelli, w r ho wished to revenge the 
 honor of a young lady of his family." " The Mau- 
 soleum that is in the side facing the Place encloses 
 the Martin II.'s ashes. . . . This building is sumpt- 
 uous and wonderful because it stands on four col- 
 umns, each of which has an architrave of nine feet. 
 On the beams stands a very large square of marble 
 that forms the floor, on which stands the urn of the 
 Defunct. Four other columns support the vault 
 that covers the urn ; and the rest is adorned by facts 
 of Old Testament. Upon the Summit is the eques- 
 trian statue as large as life." Of " Can Signo- 
 rius," whose tomb is the most splendid of all, the 
 " Notices " say : " He spent two thousand florins of 
 gold, in order to prepare his own sepulchre w r hile he 
 was yet alive, and to surpass the magnificence of his 
 predecessors. The monument is as magnificent as 
 the contracted space allows. Six columns support 
 the floor of marble on which it stands covered with 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 311 
 
 figures. Six other columns support the top, on that 
 is the Scaliger's statues. . . . The monument is sur- 
 rounded by an enclosure of red marble, with six pil- 
 lars, on which are square capitols with armed Saints. 
 The rails of iron with the Arms of the Scala, are 
 worked with a beauty wonderful for that age," or, I 
 may add, for any age. These " rails " are an exqui- 
 site net-work of iron wrought by hand, with an art 
 emulous of that of Nicolo Caparra at Florence. The 
 chief device employed is a ladder (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 " par- 
 ticularly mention that of Alboin della Scala : " He 
 was one of the Ghibelline party, as the arms on his urn 
 schew, that is a staircase risen by an eagle where- 
 fore Dante said, In sulla /Scala porta il santo 
 Uccello." 
 
 I should have been glad to meet the author of 
 these delightful histories, but in his absence we 
 fared well enough with the sacristan. When, a few 
 hours before we left Verona, we came for a last look 
 at the beautiful sepulchres, he recognized us, and see- 
 ing a sketch-book in the party, he invited us within 
 the inclosure again, and then ran and fetched chairs 
 for us to sit upon nay, even placed chairs for us to 
 rest our feet on. Winning and exuberant courtesy 
 of the Italian race ! If I had never acknowledged 
 it before, I must do homage to it now, remembering 
 
312 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 the sweetness of the sacristans and custodians of 
 Verona. They were all men of the most sympa- 
 thetic natures. He at San Zenone seemed never to 
 have met with real friends till we expressed pleasure 
 in the magnificent Mantegna, which is the pride of 
 his church. " What coloring I " he cried, and then 
 triumphantly took us into the crypt : " What a mag- 
 nificent crypt ! What works they executed in those 
 days, there ! " At San Giorgio Maggiore, where 
 there are a Tintoretto and a Veronese, and four hor- 
 rible swindling big pictures by Romanino, I discov- 
 ered to my great dismay that I had in my pocket 
 but five soldi, which I offered with much abasement 
 and many apologies to the sacristan ; but he received 
 them as if they had been so many napoleons, prayed 
 me not to speak of embarrassment, and declared that 
 his labors in our behalf had been nothing but pleas- 
 ure. At Santa Maria in Organo, where are the 
 wonderful intagli of Fra Giovanni da Verona, the 
 sacristan fully shared our sorrow that the best pict- 
 ures could not be unveiled as it was Holy Week. 
 He was also moved with us at the gradual decay of 
 the intagli, and led us to believe that, to a man of so 
 much sensibility, the general ruinous state of the 
 church was an inexpressible affliction ; and we re- 
 joiced 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 rep- 
 resented in a group of wooden figures The Death of 
 St. Joseph. The Virgin and Christ supported the 
 dying saint on either hand ; and as the whole was 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 313 
 
 vividly colored, and rays of glory in pink and yellow 
 gauze descended upon Joseph's head, nothing could 
 have been more impressive. 
 
 in. 
 
 PARMA is laid out with a regularity which may be 
 called characteristic of the great ducal cities of Italy, 
 and which it fully shares with Mantua, Ferrara, and 
 Bologna. The signorial cities, Verona, Vicenza, 
 Padua, and Treviso, are far more picturesque, and 
 Parma excels only in the number and beauty of her 
 fountains. It is a city of gloomy aspect, says Valery, 
 who possibly entered it in a pensive frame of mind, 
 for its sadness did not impress us. We had just 
 come from Modena, where the badness of our hotel 
 enveloped the city in an atmosphere of profound 
 melancholy. In fact, it will not do to trust to trav- 
 elers in any thing. I, for example, have just now 
 spoken of the many beautiful fountains in Parma be- 
 cause I think it right to uphold the statement of M. 
 Richard's hand-book ; but I only remember seeing 
 one fountain, passably handsome, there. My Lord 
 Corke, who was at Parma in 1754, says nothing of 
 fountains, and Richard Lasells, Gent., who was 
 there a century earlier, merely speaks of the foun- 
 tains in the Duke's gardens, which, together with 
 his Grace's " wild beasts" and " exquisite coaches," 
 and " admirable Theater to exhibit Operas in," " the 
 Domo, whose Cupola was painted by the rare hand 
 of Corregio," and the church of the Capuchins, where 
 
314 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 Alexander Farnese is buried, were " the Chief things 
 to be seen in Parma " at that day. 
 
 The wild beasts have long ago run away with the 
 exquisite coaches, but the other wonders named by 
 Master Lasells are still extant in Parma, together 
 with some things he does not name. Our minds, in 
 going thither, were mainly bent upon Correggio and 
 his works, and while our dinner was cooking at the 
 admirable Albergo della Posta, we went off to feast 
 upon the perennial Hash of Frogs in the dome of the 
 Cathedral. This is one of the finest Gothic churches 
 in Italy, and vividly recalls Verona, while it has a 
 quite unique and most beautiful feature in the three 
 light-columned galleries, that traverse the facade one 
 above another. Close at hand stands the ancient Bap- 
 tistery, hardly less peculiar and beautiful ; but, after 
 all, it is the work of the great painter which gives 
 the temple its chief right to wonder and reverence. 
 We found the fresco, of course, much wasted, and 
 at first glance, before the innumerable arms and 
 legs had time to order and attribute themselves 
 to their respective bodies, we felt the justice of the 
 undying spite which called this divinest of frescos 
 a guazzetto di rane. But in another moment it ap- 
 peared to us the most sublime conception of the As- 
 sumption ever painted, and we did not find Carac- 
 ci's praise too warm where he says : " And I still 
 remain stupefied with the sight of so grand a work 
 every thing so well conceived so well seen from 
 below - with so much severity, yet with so much 
 judgment and so much grace ; with a coloring which 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 315 
 
 is of very flesh." The height of the fresco above 
 the floor of the church is so vast that it might well 
 appear like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense 
 of the spectator. Brain, nerve, and muscle were 
 strained to utter exhaustion in a very few minutes, 
 and we came away with our admiration only half- 
 satisfied, and resolved to ascend the cupola next day, 
 and see the fresco on something like equal terms. 
 In one sort we did thus approach it, and as we 
 looked at the gracious floating figures of the heavenly 
 company through the apertures of the dome, they 
 did seem to adopt us and make us part of the paint- 
 ing. But the tremendous depth, over which they 
 drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to look into ; and I 
 am not certain that I should counsel travelers to 
 repeat our experience. Where still perfect, the 
 fresco can only gain from close inspection, it is 
 painted with such exquisite and jealous perfection, 
 yet the whole effect is now better from below, for 
 the decay is less apparent ; and besides, life is short, 
 and the stairway by which one ascends to the dome 
 is in every way too exigent. It is with the most 
 astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the 
 Assumption to the contemplation of that other famous 
 roof frescoed by Correggio, in the Monastero di San 
 Paolo. You might almost touch the ceiling with your 
 hand, it hovers so low with its counterfeit of vine- 
 clambered trellis-work, and its pretty boys looking 
 roguishly through the embowering leaves. It is alto- 
 gether the loveliest room in the world ; and if the 
 Diana in her car on the chimney is truly a portrait of 
 
316 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 the abbess for whom the chamber was decorated, she 
 was altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think 
 of her enjoying life in the fashion amiably permit- 
 ted to nuns in the fifteenth century. What curious 
 scenes the gayety of this little chamber conjures up, 
 and what a vivid comment it is upon the age and peo- 
 ple that produced it ! This is one of the things that 
 makes a single hour of travel worth whole years of 
 historic study, and which casts its light upon all fu- 
 ture reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little ab- 
 bess, with the noblest and prettiest of her nuns 
 about her, received the polite world, and made a 
 cheerful thing of devotion, while all over trans- 
 alpine Europe the sour-hearted Reformers were de- 
 stroying pleasant monasteries like this. The light- 
 hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen friends looked 
 on heresy as a deadly sin, and they had little reason 
 to regard it with favor. It certainly made life harder 
 for them in time, for it made reform within the 
 Church as well as without, so that at last the lovely 
 Chamber of St. Paul was closed against the public 
 for more than two centuries. 
 
 All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of 
 Titian and Tintoretto, as Naples of Spagnoletto, as 
 Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of Palladio, 
 as Bassano of Da Ponte, as Bologna of Guido Reni. 
 I have elsewhere noticed how ineffaceably and exclu- 
 sively the manner of the masters seems to have 
 stamped itself upon the art of the cities where they 
 severally wrought, how at Parma Correggio yet 
 lives in all the sketchy mouths of all the pictures 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 317 
 
 painted there since his time. One might almost be- 
 lieve, hearing the Parmesans talk, that his manner 
 had infected their dialect, and that they fashioned 
 their lazy, incomplete utterance with the careless 
 lips of his nymphs and angels. They almost en- 
 tirely suppress the last syllable of every word, and 
 not with a quick precision, as people do in Venice 
 or Milan, but with an ineffable languor, as if lan- 
 guage were not worth the effort of enunciation ; 
 while they rise and lapse several times in each sen- 
 tence, and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the 
 closing vocable that the listener can scarcely repress 
 his tears. In this melancholy rhythm, one of the citi- 
 zens recounted to me the whole story of the assassin- 
 ation of the last Duke of Parma in 1850 ; and left 
 me as softly moved as if I had been listening to a 
 tale of hapless love. Yet it was an ugly story, and 
 after the enchantment of the recital passed away, I 
 perceived that when the Duke was killed justice was 
 done on one of the maddest and wickedest tyrants 
 that ever harassed an unhappy city. 
 
 The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napo- 
 leon's wife, with pleasant enough feelings, and she 
 seems to have been good to them after the manner 
 of sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beau- 
 tifying it in many ways, besides doing works of pri- 
 vate charity and beneficence. Her daughter by a 
 second marriage, the Countess Sanvitali, still lives in 
 Parma ; and in one of the halls of the Academy of 
 Fine Arts the Duchess herself survives in the marble 
 of Canova. It was she who caused the two great 
 
318 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 pictures of Correggio, the St. Jerome and the Ma- 
 donna della Scodella, to be placed alone in separate 
 apartments hung with silk, in which the painter's 
 initial A is endlessly interwoven. " The Night," to 
 which the St. Jerome is " The Day," is in the gal- 
 lery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing 
 more representative of her great painter's power 
 than this " Day." It is " the bridal of the earth and 
 sky," and all sweetness, brightness, and tender 
 shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of 
 Correggio, Caracci, Parmigianino, and masters of 
 different schools are in this gallery, but it is the good 
 fortune of travelers, who have to see so much, that 
 the memory of the very best alone distinctly remains. 
 Nay, in the presence of prime beauty nothing else 
 exists, and we found that the church of the Steccata, 
 where Parmigianino's sublime " Moses breaking the 
 Tables of the Law " is visible in the midst of a mul- 
 titude of other figures on the vault, really contained 
 nothing at last but that august and awful presence. 
 
 Undoubtedly the best gallery of classical antiquities 
 in North Italy is that of Parma, which has derived 
 all its precious relics from the little city of Valleja 
 alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii and the 
 wonders of the Museo Borbonico at Naples, with its 
 antique frescos, and marble, and bronzes^ I think 
 nothing better has come out of Herculaneum than 
 the comic statuette of " Hercules Drunk." He is 
 in bronze, and the drunkest man who has descended 
 to us from the elder world; he reels backward, 
 and leers knowingly upon you, while one hand 
 
VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. 319 
 
 hangs stiffly at his side, and the other faintly clasps a 
 wine-cup a burly, worthless, disgraceful demigod. 
 The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, 
 admired by Lasells ; but Lord Corke found it a 
 " useless structure " though immense. " The same 
 spirit that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, 
 " raised the theatre at Parma ; that insatiable spirit 
 and lust of Fame which would brave the Almighty 
 by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable being." 
 If it was indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it 
 did not build so wisely at Parma as at Rhodes. The 
 play-house that Ranuzio I. constructed in 1628, to 
 do honor to Cosmo II. de' Medici (pausing at Parma 
 on his way to visit the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), 
 and that for a century afterward was the scene of the 
 most brilliant spectacles in the world, is now one of 
 the dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This Theatrum 
 orbis miraculum was built and ornamented with the 
 most perishable materials, and even its size has 
 shrunken as the imaginations of men have contracted 
 under the strong light of later days. When it was 
 first opened, it was believed to hold fourteen thousand 
 spectators ; at a later fete it held only ten thousand ; 
 the last published description fixes its capacity at five 
 thousand ; and it is certain that for many and many 
 a year it has held only the stray tourists who have 
 looked in upon its desolation. The gay paintings 
 hang in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is 
 thick upon the seats and in the boxes, and on the 
 leads that line the space once flooded for naval 
 games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and 
 
320 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 
 
 forlorn amid the ruin of which they are part ; and 
 the great stage, from which the curtain has rotted 
 away, yawns dark and empty before the empty au- 
 ditorium. 
 
 THE END