J University of California Berkeley v IS, J)yei?..<* 6- 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