Pictures from Italy
by Charles Dickens · English · Gutenberg #650 · 436,089 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Pictures from Italy
Author: Charles Dickens
Illustrator: Marcus Stone
Release date: September 1, 1996 [eBook #650]
Most recently updated: February 17, 2013
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/650
Credits: Transcribed from the 1913 Chapman & Hall, Ltd. edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PICTURES FROM ITALY ***
Transcribed from the 1913 Chapman & Hall, Ltd. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org
AMERICAN NOTES
FOR
GENERAL CIRCULATION {1}
AND
PICTURES FROM ITALY
BY
CHARLES DICKENS
* * * * *
WITH 8 ILLUSTRATIONS BY
MARCUS STONE, R.A.
* * * * *
LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
1913
* * * * *
CONTENTS
The Reader’s Passport 215
Going through France 218
Lyons, the Rhone, and the Goblin of Avignon 225
Avignon to Genoa 233
Genoa and its Neighbourhood 238
To Parma, Modena, and Bologna 264
Through Bologna and Ferrara 272
An Italian Dream 277
By Verona, Mantua, and Milan, across the Pass of the Simplon 284
into Switzerland
To Rome by Pisa and Siena 297
Rome 308
A Rapid Diorama 345
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
CIVIL AND MILITARY _Marcus Stone_, _R.A._ 218
ITALIAN PEASANTS ,, ,, ,, 250
THE CHIFFONIER ,, ,, ,, 294
IN THE CATACOMBS ,, ,, ,, 326
THE READER’S PASSPORT
IF the readers of this volume will be so kind as to take their
credentials for the different places which are the subject of its
author’s reminiscences, from the Author himself, perhaps they may visit
them, in fancy, the more agreeably, and with a better understanding of
what they are to expect.
Many books have been written upon Italy, affording many means of studying
the history of that interesting country, and the innumerable associations
entwined about it. I make but little reference to that stock of
information; not at all regarding it as a necessary consequence of my
having had recourse to the storehouse for my own benefit, that I should
reproduce its easily accessible contents before the eyes of my readers.
Neither will there be found, in these pages, any grave examination into
the government or misgovernment of any portion of the country. No
visitor of that beautiful land can fail to have a strong conviction on
the subject; but as I chose when residing there, a Foreigner, to abstain
from the discussion of any such questions with any order of Italians, so
I would rather not enter on the inquiry now. During my twelve months’
occupation of a house at Genoa, I never found that authorities
constitutionally jealous were distrustful of me; and I should be sorry to
give them occasion to regret their free courtesy, either to myself or any
of my countrymen.
There is, probably, not a famous Picture or Statue in all Italy, but
could be easily buried under a mountain of printed paper devoted to
dissertations on it. I do not, therefore, though an earnest admirer of
Painting and Sculpture, expatiate at any length on famous Pictures and
Statues.
This Book is a series of faint reflections—mere shadows in the water—of
places to which the imaginations of most people are attracted in a
greater or less degree, on which mine had dwelt for years, and which have
some interest for all. The greater part of the descriptions were written
on the spot, and sent home, from time to time, in private letters. I do
not mention the circumstance as an excuse for any defects they may
present, for it would be none; but as a guarantee to the Reader that they
were at least penned in the fulness of the subject, and with the
liveliest impressions of novelty and freshness.
If they have ever a fanciful and idle air, perhaps the reader will
suppose them written in the shade of a Sunny Day, in the midst of the
objects of which they treat, and will like them none the worse for having
such influences of the country upon them.
I hope I am not likely to be misunderstood by Professors of the Roman
Catholic faith, on account of anything contained in these pages. I have
done my best, in one of my former productions, to do justice to them; and
I trust, in this, they will do justice to me. When I mention any
exhibition that impressed me as absurd or disagreeable, I do not seek to
connect it, or recognise it as necessarily connected with, any essentials
of their creed. When I treat of the ceremonies of the Holy Week, I
merely treat of their effect, and do not challenge the good and learned
Dr. Wiseman’s interpretation of their meaning. When I hint a dislike of
nunneries for young girls who abjure the world before they have ever
proved or known it; or doubt the _ex officio_ sanctity of all Priests and
Friars; I do no more than many conscientious Catholics both abroad and at
home.
I have likened these Pictures to shadows in the water, and would fain
hope that I have, nowhere, stirred the water so roughly, as to mar the
shadows. I could never desire to be on better terms with all my friends
than now, when distant mountains rise, once more, in my path. For I need
not hesitate to avow, that, bent on correcting a brief mistake I made,
not long ago, in disturbing the old relations between myself and my
readers, and departing for a moment from my old pursuits, I am about to
resume them, joyfully, in Switzerland; where during another year of
absence, I can at once work out the themes I have now in my mind, without
interruption: and while I keep my English audience within speaking
distance, extend my knowledge of a noble country, inexpressibly
attractive to me. {216}
This book is made as accessible as possible, because it would be a great
pleasure to me if I could hope, through its means, to compare impressions
with some among the multitudes who will hereafter visit the scenes
described with interest and delight.
And I have only now, in passport wise, to sketch my reader’s portrait,
which I hope may be thus supposititiously traced for either sex:
Complexion Fair.
Eyes Very cheerful.
Nose Not supercilious.
Mouth Smiling.
Visage Beaming.
General Expression Extremely agreeable.
GOING THROUGH FRANCE
ON a fine Sunday morning in the Midsummer time and weather of eighteen
hundred and forty-four, it was, my good friend, when—don’t be alarmed;
not when two travellers might have been observed slowly making their way
over that picturesque and broken ground by which the first chapter of a
Middle Aged novel is usually attained—but when an English
travelling-carriage of considerable proportions, fresh from the shady
halls of the Pantechnicon near Belgrave Square, London, was observed (by
a very small French soldier; for I saw him look at it) to issue from the
gate of the Hôtel Meurice in the Rue Rivoli at Paris.
I am no more bound to explain why the English family travelling by this
carriage, inside and out, should be starting for Italy on a Sunday
morning, of all good days in the week, than I am to assign a reason for
all the little men in France being soldiers, and all the big men
postilions; which is the invariable rule. But, they had some sort of
reason for what they did, I have no doubt; and their reason for being
there at all, was, as you know, that they were going to live in fair
Genoa for a year; and that the head of the family purposed, in that space
of time, to stroll about, wherever his restless humour carried him.
And it would have been small comfort to me to have explained to the
population of Paris generally, that I was that Head and Chief; and not
the radiant embodiment of good humour who sat beside me in the person of
a French Courier—best of servants and most beaming of men! Truth to say,
he looked a great deal more patriarchal than I, who, in the shadow of his
portly presence, dwindled down to no account at all.
[Picture: Civil and military]
There was, of course, very little in the aspect of Paris—as we rattled
near the dismal Morgue and over the Pont Neuf—to reproach us for our
Sunday travelling. The wine-shops (every second house) were driving a
roaring trade; awnings were spreading, and chairs and tables arranging,
outside the cafés, preparatory to the eating of ices, and drinking of
cool liquids, later in the day; shoe-blacks were busy on the bridges;
shops were open; carts and waggons clattered to and fro; the narrow,
up-hill, funnel-like streets across the River, were so many dense
perspectives of crowd and bustle, parti-coloured nightcaps,
tobacco-pipes, blouses, large boots, and shaggy heads of hair; nothing at
that hour denoted a day of rest, unless it were the appearance, here and
there, of a family pleasure-party, crammed into a bulky old lumbering
cab; or of some contemplative holiday-maker in the freest and easiest
dishabille, leaning out of a low garret window, watching the drying of
his newly polished shoes on the little parapet outside (if a gentleman),
or the airing of her stockings in the sun (if a lady), with calm
anticipation.
Once clear of the never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven pavement which
surrounds Paris, the first three days of travelling towards Marseilles
are quiet and monotonous enough. To Sens. To Avallon. To Chalons. A
sketch of one day’s proceedings is a sketch of all three; and here it is.
We have four horses, and one postilion, who has a very long whip, and
drives his team, something like the Courier of Saint Petersburgh in the
circle at Astley’s or Franconi’s: only he sits his own horse instead of
standing on him. The immense jack-boots worn by these postilions, are
sometimes a century or two old; and are so ludicrously disproportionate
to the wearer’s foot, that the spur, which is put where his own heel
comes, is generally halfway up the leg of the boots. The man often comes
out of the stable-yard, with his whip in his hand and his shoes on, and
brings out, in both hands, one boot at a time, which he plants on the
ground by the side of his horse, with great gravity, until everything is
ready. When it is—and oh Heaven! the noise they make about it!—he gets
into the boots, shoes and all, or is hoisted into them by a couple of
friends; adjusts the rope harness, embossed by the labours of innumerable
pigeons in the stables; makes all the horses kick and plunge; cracks his
whip like a madman; shouts ‘En route—Hi!’ and away we go. He is sure to
have a contest with his horse before we have gone very far; and then he
calls him a Thief, and a Brigand, and a Pig, and what not; and beats him
about the head as if he were made of wood.
There is little more than one variety in the appearance of the country,
for the first two days. From a dreary plain, to an interminable avenue,
and from an interminable avenue to a dreary plain again. Plenty of vines
there are in the open fields, but of a short low kind, and not trained in
festoons, but about straight sticks. Beggars innumerable there are,
everywhere; but an extraordinarily scanty population, and fewer children
than I ever encountered. I don’t believe we saw a hundred children
between Paris and Chalons. Queer old towns, draw-bridged and walled:
with odd little towers at the angles, like grotesque faces, as if the
wall had put a mask on, and were staring down into the moat; other
strange little towers, in gardens and fields, and down lanes, and in
farm-yards: all alone, and always round, with a peaked roof, and never
used for any purpose at all; ruinous buildings of all sorts; sometimes an
hôtel de ville, sometimes a guard-house, sometimes a dwelling-house,
sometimes a château with a rank garden, prolific in dandelion, and
watched over by extinguisher-topped turrets, and blink-eyed little
casements; are the standard objects, repeated over and over again.
Sometimes we pass a village inn, with a crumbling wall belonging to it,
and a perfect town of out-houses; and painted over the gateway, ‘Stabling
for Sixty Horses;’ as indeed there might be stabling for sixty score,
were there any horses to be stabled there, or anybody resting there, or
anything stirring about the place but a dangling bush, indicative of the
wine inside: which flutters idly in the wind, in lazy keeping with
everything else, and certainly is never in a green old age, though always
so old as to be dropping to pieces. And all day long, strange little
narrow waggons, in strings of six or eight, bringing cheese from
Switzerland, and frequently in charge, the whole line, of one man, or
even boy—and he very often asleep in the foremost cart—come jingling
past: the horses drowsily ringing the bells upon their harness, and
looking as if they thought (no doubt they do) their great blue woolly
furniture, of immense weight and thickness, with a pair of grotesque
horns growing out of the collar, very much too warm for the Midsummer
weather.
Then, there is the Diligence, twice or thrice a-day; with the dusty
outsides in blue frocks, like butchers; and the insides in white
nightcaps; and its cabriolet head on the roof, nodding and shaking, like
an idiot’s head; and its Young-France passengers staring out of window,
with beards down to their waists, and blue spectacles awfully shading
their warlike eyes, and very big sticks clenched in their National grasp.
Also the Malle Poste, with only a couple of passengers, tearing along at
a real good dare-devil pace, and out of sight in no time. Steady old
Curés come jolting past, now and then, in such ramshackle, rusty, musty,
clattering coaches as no Englishman would believe in; and bony women
dawdle about in solitary places, holding cows by ropes while they feed,
or digging and hoeing or doing field-work of a more laborious kind, or
representing real shepherdesses with their flocks—to obtain an adequate
idea of which pursuit and its followers, in any country, it is only
necessary to take any pastoral poem, or picture, and imagine to yourself
whatever is most exquisitely and widely unlike the descriptions therein
contained.
You have been travelling along, stupidly enough, as you generally do in
the last stage of the day; and the ninety-six bells upon the
horses—twenty-four apiece—have been ringing sleepily in your ears for
half an hour or so; and it has become a very jog-trot, monotonous,
tiresome sort of business; and you have been thinking deeply about the
dinner you will have at the next stage; when, down at the end of the long
avenue of trees through which you are travelling, the first indication of
a town appears, in the shape of some straggling cottages: and the
carriage begins to rattle and roll over a horribly uneven pavement. As
if the equipage were a great firework, and the mere sight of a smoking
cottage chimney had lighted it, instantly it begins to crack and
splutter, as if the very devil were in it. Crack, crack, crack, crack.
Crack-crack-crack. Crick-crack. Crick-crack. Helo! Hola! Vite!
Voleur! Brigand! Hi hi hi! En r-r-r-r-r-route! Whip, wheels, driver,
stones, beggars, children, crack, crack, crack; helo! hola! charité pour
l’amour de Dieu! crick-crack-crick-crack; crick, crick, crick; bump,
jolt, crack, bump, crick-crack; round the corner, up the narrow street,
down the paved hill on the other side; in the gutter; bump, bump; jolt,
jog, crick, crick, crick; crack, crack, crack; into the shop-windows on
the left-hand side of the street, preliminary to a sweeping turn into the
wooden archway on the right; rumble, rumble, rumble; clatter, clatter,
clatter; crick, crick, crick; and here we are in the yard of the Hôtel de
l’Ecu d’Or; used up, gone out, smoking, spent, exhausted; but sometimes
making a false start unexpectedly, with nothing coming of it—like a
firework to the last!
The landlady of the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or is here; and the landlord of the
Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or is here; and the femme de chambre of the Hôtel de
l’Ecu d’Or is here; and a gentleman in a glazed cap, with a red beard
like a bosom friend, who is staying at the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or, is here;
and Monsieur le Curé is walking up and down in a corner of the yard by
himself, with a shovel hat upon his head, and a black gown on his back,
and a book in one hand, and an umbrella in the other; and everybody,
except Monsieur le Curé, is open-mouthed and open-eyed, for the opening
of the carriage-door. The landlord of the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or, dotes to
that extent upon the Courier, that he can hardly wait for his coming down
from the box, but embraces his very legs and boot-heels as he descends.
‘My Courier! My brave Courier! My friend! My brother!’ The landlady
loves him, the femme de chambre blesses him, the garçon worships him.
The Courier asks if his letter has been received? It has, it has. Are
the rooms prepared? They are, they are. The best rooms for my noble
Courier. The rooms of state for my gallant Courier; the whole house is
at the service of my best of friends! He keeps his hand upon the
carriage-door, and asks some other question to enhance the expectation.
He carries a green leathern purse outside his coat, suspended by a belt.
The idlers look at it; one touches it. It is full of five-franc pieces.
Murmurs of admiration are heard among the boys. The landlord falls upon
the Courier’s neck, and folds him to his breast. He is so much fatter
than he was, he says! He looks so rosy and so well!
The door is opened. Breathless expectation. The lady of the family gets
out. Ah sweet lady! Beautiful lady! The sister of the lady of the
family gets out. Great Heaven, Ma’amselle is charming! First little boy
gets out. Ah, what a beautiful little boy! First little girl gets out.
Oh, but this is an enchanting child! Second little girl gets out. The
landlady, yielding to the finest impulse of our common nature, catches
her up in her arms! Second little boy gets out. Oh, the sweet boy! Oh,
the tender little family! The baby is handed out. Angelic baby! The
baby has topped everything. All the rapture is expended on the baby!
Then the two nurses tumble out; and the enthusiasm swelling into madness,
the whole family are swept up-stairs as on a cloud; while the idlers
press about the carriage, and look into it, and walk round it, and touch
it. For it is something to touch a carriage that has held so many
people. It is a legacy to leave one’s children.
The rooms are on the first floor, except the nursery for the night, which
is a great rambling chamber, with four or five beds in it: through a dark
passage, up two steps, down four, past a pump, across a balcony, and next
door to the stable. The other sleeping apartments are large and lofty;
each with two small bedsteads, tastefully hung, like the windows, with
red and white drapery. The sitting-room is famous. Dinner is already
laid in it for three; and the napkins are folded in cocked-hat fashion.
The floors are of red tile. There are no carpets, and not much furniture
to speak of; but there is abundance of looking-glass, and there are large
vases under glass shades, filled with artificial flowers; and there are
plenty of clocks. The whole party are in motion. The brave Courier, in
particular, is everywhere: looking after the beds, having wine poured
down his throat by his dear brother the landlord, and picking up green
cucumbers—always cucumbers; Heaven knows where he gets them—with which he
walks about, one in each hand, like truncheons.
Dinner is announced. There is very thin soup; there are very large
loaves—one apiece; a fish; four dishes afterwards; some poultry
afterwards; a dessert afterwards; and no lack of wine. There is not much
in the dishes; but they are very good, and always ready instantly. When
it is nearly dark, the brave Courier, having eaten the two cucumbers,
sliced up in the contents of a pretty large decanter of oil, and another
of vinegar, emerges from his retreat below, and proposes a visit to the
Cathedral, whose massive tower frowns down upon the court-yard of the
inn. Off we go; and very solemn and grand it is, in the dim light: so
dim at last, that the polite, old, lanthorn-jawed Sacristan has a feeble
little bit of candle in his hand, to grope among the tombs with—and looks
among the grim columns, very like a lost ghost who is searching for his
own.
Underneath the balcony, when we return, the inferior servants of the inn
are supping in the open air, at a great table; the dish, a stew of meat
and vegetables, smoking hot, and served in the iron cauldron it was
boiled in. They have a pitcher of thin wine, and are very merry; merrier
than the gentleman with the red beard, who is playing billiards in the
light room on the left of the yard, where shadows, with cues in their
hands, and cigars in their mouths, cross and recross the window,
constantly. Still the thin Curé walks up and down alone, with his book
and umbrella. And there he walks, and there the billiard-balls rattle,
long after we are fast asleep.
We are astir at six next morning. It is a delightful day, shaming
yesterday’s mud upon the carriage, if anything could shame a carriage, in
a land where carriages are never cleaned. Everybody is brisk; and as we
finish breakfast, the horses come jingling into the yard from the
Post-house. Everything taken out of the carriage is put back again. The
brave Courier announces that all is ready, after walking into every room,
and looking all round it, to be certain that nothing is left behind.
Everybody gets in. Everybody connected with the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or is
again enchanted. The brave Courier runs into the house for a parcel
containing cold fowl, sliced ham, bread, and biscuits, for lunch; hands
it into the coach; and runs back again.
What has he got in his hand now? More cucumbers? No. A long strip of
paper. It’s the bill.
The brave Courier has two belts on, this morning: one supporting the
purse: another, a mighty good sort of leathern bottle, filled to the
throat with the best light Bordeaux wine in the house. He never pays the
bill till this bottle is full. Then he disputes it.
He disputes it now, violently. He is still the landlord’s brother, but
by another father or mother. He is not so nearly related to him as he
was last night. The landlord scratches his head. The brave Courier
points to certain figures in the bill, and intimates that if they remain
there, the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or is thenceforth and for ever an hôtel de
l’Ecu de cuivre. The landlord goes into a little counting-house. The
brave Courier follows, forces the bill and a pen into his hand, and talks
more rapidly than ever. The landlord takes the pen. The Courier smiles.
The landlord makes an alteration. The Courier cuts a joke. The landlord
is affectionate, but not weakly so. He bears it like a man. He shakes
hands with his brave brother, but he don’t hug him. Still, he loves his
brother; for he knows that he will be returning that way, one of these
fine days, with another family, and he foresees that his heart will yearn
towards him again. The brave Courier traverses all round the carriage
once, looks at the drag, inspects the wheels, jumps up, gives the word,
and away we go!
It is market morning. The market is held in the little square outside in
front of the cathedral. It is crowded with men and women, in blue, in
red, in green, in white; with canvassed stalls; and fluttering
merchandise. The country people are grouped about, with their clean
baskets before them. Here, the lace-sellers; there, the butter and
egg-sellers; there, the fruit-sellers; there, the shoe-makers. The whole
place looks as if it were the stage of some great theatre, and the
curtain had just run up, for a picturesque ballet. And there is the
cathedral to boot: scene-like: all grim, and swarthy, and mouldering, and
cold: just splashing the pavement in one place with faint purple drops,
as the morning sun, entering by a little window on the eastern side,
struggles through some stained glass panes, on the western.
In five minutes we have passed the iron cross, with a little ragged
kneeling-place of turf before it, in the outskirts of the town; and are
again upon the road.
LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON
CHALONS is a fair resting-place, in right of its good inn on the bank of
the river, and the little steamboats, gay with green and red paint, that
come and go upon it: which make up a pleasant and refreshing scene, after
the dusty roads. But, unless you would like to dwell on an enormous
plain, with jagged rows of irregular poplars on it, that look in the
distance like so many combs with broken teeth: and unless you would like
to pass your life without the possibility of going up-hill, or going up
anything but stairs: you would hardly approve of Chalons as a place of
residence.
You would probably like it better, however, than Lyons: which you may
reach, if you will, in one of the before-mentioned steamboats, in eight
hours.
What a city Lyons is! Talk about people feeling, at certain unlucky
times, as if they had tumbled from the clouds! Here is a whole town that
is tumbled, anyhow, out of the sky; having been first caught up, like
other stones that tumble down from that region, out of fens and barren
places, dismal to behold! The two great streets through which the two
great rivers dash, and all the little streets whose name is Legion, were
scorching, blistering, and sweltering. The houses, high and vast, dirty
to excess, rotten as old cheeses, and as thickly peopled. All up the
hills that hem the city in, these houses swarm; and the mites inside were
lolling out of the windows, and drying their ragged clothes on poles, and
crawling in and out at the doors, and coming out to pant and gasp upon
the pavement, and creeping in and out among huge piles and bales of
fusty, musty, stifling goods; and living, or rather not dying till their
time should come, in an exhausted receiver. Every manufacturing town,
melted into one, would hardly convey an impression of Lyons as it
presented itself to me: for all the undrained, unscavengered qualities of
a foreign town, seemed grafted, there, upon the native miseries of a
manufacturing one; and it bears such fruit as I would go some miles out
of my way to avoid encountering again.
In the cool of the evening: or rather in the faded heat of the day: we
went to see the Cathedral, where divers old women, and a few dogs, were
engaged in contemplation. There was no difference, in point of
cleanliness, between its stone pavement and that of the streets; and
there was a wax saint, in a little box like a berth aboard ship, with a
glass front to it, whom Madame Tussaud would have nothing to say to, on
any terms, and which even Westminster Abbey might be ashamed of. If you
would know all about the architecture of this church, or any other, its
dates, dimensions, endowments, and history, is it not written in Mr.
Murray’s Guide-Book, and may you not read it there, with thanks to him,
as I did!
For this reason, I should abstain from mentioning the curious clock in
Lyons Cathedral, if it were not for a small mistake I made, in connection
with that piece of mechanism. The keeper of the church was very anxious
it should be shown; partly for the honour of the establishment and the
town; and partly, perhaps, because of his deriving a percentage from the
additional consideration. However that may be, it was set in motion, and
thereupon a host of little doors flew open, and innumerable little
figures staggered out of them, and jerked themselves back again, with
that special unsteadiness of purpose, and hitching in the gait, which
usually attaches to figures that are moved by clock-work. Meanwhile, the
Sacristan stood explaining these wonders, and pointing them out,
severally, with a wand. There was a centre puppet of the Virgin Mary;
and close to her, a small pigeon-hole, out of which another and a very
ill-looking puppet made one of the most sudden plunges I ever saw
accomplished: instantly flopping back again at sight of her, and banging
his little door violently after him. Taking this to be emblematic of the
victory over Sin and Death, and not at all unwilling to show that I
perfectly understood the subject, in anticipation of the showman, I
rashly said, ‘Aha! The Evil Spirit. To be sure. He is very soon
disposed of.’ ‘Pardon, Monsieur,’ said the Sacristan, with a polite
motion of his hand towards the little door, as if introducing
somebody—‘The Angel Gabriel!’
Soon after daybreak next morning, we were steaming down the Arrowy Rhone,
at the rate of twenty miles an hour, in a very dirty vessel full of
merchandise, and with only three or four other passengers for our
companions: among whom, the most remarkable was a silly, old, meek-faced,
garlic-eating, immeasurably polite Chevalier, with a dirty scrap of red
ribbon hanging at his button-hole, as if he had tied it there to remind
himself of something; as Tom Noddy, in the farce, ties knots in his
pocket-handkerchief.
For the last two days, we had seen great sullen hills, the first
indications of the Alps, lowering in the distance. Now, we were rushing
on beside them: sometimes close beside them: sometimes with an
intervening slope, covered with vineyards. Villages and small towns
hanging in mid-air, with great woods of olives seen through the light
open towers of their churches, and clouds moving slowly on, upon the
steep acclivity behind them; ruined castles perched on every eminence;
and scattered houses in the clefts and gullies of the hills; made it very
beautiful. The great height of these, too, making the buildings look so
tiny, that they had all the charm of elegant models; their excessive
whiteness, as contrasted with the brown rocks, or the sombre, deep, dull,
heavy green of the olive-tree; and the puny size, and little slow walk of
the Lilliputian men and women on the bank; made a charming picture.
There were ferries out of number, too; bridges; the famous Pont d’Esprit,
with I don’t know how many arches; towns where memorable wines are made;
Vallence, where Napoleon studied; and the noble river, bringing at every
winding turn, new beauties into view.
There lay before us, that same afternoon, the broken bridge of Avignon,
and all the city baking in the sun; yet with an under-done-pie-crust,
battlemented wall, that never will be brown, though it bake for
centuries.
The grapes were hanging in clusters in the streets, and the brilliant
Oleander was in full bloom everywhere. The streets are old and very
narrow, but tolerably clean, and shaded by awnings stretched from house
to house. Bright stuffs and handkerchiefs, curiosities, ancient frames
of carved wood, old chairs, ghostly tables, saints, virgins, angels, and
staring daubs of portraits, being exposed for sale beneath, it was very
quaint and lively. All this was much set off, too, by the glimpses one
caught, through a rusty gate standing ajar, of quiet sleepy court-yards,
having stately old houses within, as silent as tombs. It was all very
like one of the descriptions in the Arabian Nights. The three one-eyed
Calenders might have knocked at any one of those doors till the street
rang again, and the porter who persisted in asking questions—the man who
had the delicious purchases put into his basket in the morning—might have
opened it quite naturally.
After breakfast next morning, we sallied forth to see the lions. Such a
delicious breeze was blowing in, from the north, as made the walk
delightful: though the pavement-stones, and stones of the walls and
houses, were far too hot to have a hand laid on them comfortably.
We went, first of all, up a rocky height, to the cathedral: where Mass
was performing to an auditory very like that of Lyons, namely, several
old women, a baby, and a very self-possessed dog, who had marked out for
himself a little course or platform for exercise, beginning at the
altar-rails and ending at the door, up and down which constitutional walk
he trotted, during the service, as methodically and calmly, as any old
gentleman out of doors.
It is a bare old church, and the paintings in the roof are sadly defaced
by time and damp weather; but the sun was shining in, splendidly, through
the red curtains of the windows, and glittering on the altar furniture;
and it looked as bright and cheerful as need be.
Going apart, in this church, to see some painting which was being
executed in fresco by a French artist and his pupil, I was led to observe
more closely than I might otherwise have done, a great number of votive
offerings with which the walls of the different chapels were profusely
hung. I will not say decorated, for they were very roughly and comically
got up; most likely by poor sign-painters, who eke out their living in
that way. They were all little pictures: each representing some sickness
or calamity from which the person placing it there, had escaped, through
the interposition of his or her patron saint, or of the Madonna; and I
may refer to them as good specimens of the class generally. They are
abundant in Italy.
In a grotesque squareness of outline, and impossibility of perspective,
they are not unlike the woodcuts in old books; but they were
oil-paintings, and the artist, like the painter of the Primrose family,
had not been sparing of his colours. In one, a lady was having a toe
amputated—an operation which a saintly personage had sailed into the
room, upon a couch, to superintend. In another, a lady was lying in bed,
tucked up very tight and prim, and staring with much composure at a
tripod, with a slop-basin on it; the usual form of washing-stand, and the
only piece of furniture, besides the bedstead, in her chamber. One would
never have supposed her to be labouring under any complaint, beyond the
inconvenience of being miraculously wide awake, if the painter had not
hit upon the idea of putting all her family on their knees in one corner,
with their legs sticking out behind them on the floor, like boot-trees.
Above whom, the Virgin, on a kind of blue divan, promised to restore the
patient. In another case, a lady was in the very act of being run over,
immediately outside the city walls, by a sort of piano-forte van. But
the Madonna was there again. Whether the supernatural appearance had
startled the horse (a bay griffin), or whether it was invisible to him, I
don’t know; but he was galloping away, ding dong, without the smallest
reverence or compunction. On every picture ‘Ex voto’ was painted in
yellow capitals in the sky.
Though votive offerings were not unknown in Pagan Temples, and are
evidently among the many compromises made between the false religion and
the true, when the true was in its infancy, I could wish that all the
other compromises were as harmless. Gratitude and Devotion are Christian
qualities; and a grateful, humble, Christian spirit may dictate the
observance.
Hard by the cathedral stands the ancient Palace of the Popes, of which
one portion is now a common jail, and another a noisy barrack: while
gloomy suites of state apartments, shut up and deserted, mock their own
old state and glory, like the embalmed bodies of kings. But we neither
went there, to see state rooms, nor soldiers’ quarters, nor a common
jail, though we dropped some money into a prisoners’ box outside, whilst
the prisoners, themselves, looked through the iron bars, high up, and
watched us eagerly. We went to see the ruins of the dreadful rooms in
which the Inquisition used to sit.
A little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black eyes,—proof
that the world hadn’t conjured down the devil within her, though it had
had between sixty and seventy years to do it in,—came out of the Barrack
Cabaret, of which she was the keeper, with some large keys in her hands,
and marshalled us the way that we should go. How she told us, on the
way, that she was a Government Officer (_concierge du palais a
apostolique_), and had been, for I don’t know how many years; and how she
had shown these dungeons to princes; and how she was the best of dungeon
demonstrators; and how she had resided in the palace from an infant,—had
been born there, if I recollect right,—I needn’t relate. But such a
fierce, little, rapid, sparkling, energetic she-devil I never beheld.
She was alight and flaming, all the time. Her action was violent in the
extreme. She never spoke, without stopping expressly for the purpose.
She stamped her feet, clutched us by the arms, flung herself into
attitudes, hammered against walls with her keys, for mere emphasis: now
whispered as if the Inquisition were there still: now shrieked as if she
were on the rack herself; and had a mysterious, hag-like way with her
forefinger, when approaching the remains of some new horror—looking back
and walking stealthily, and making horrible grimaces—that might alone
have qualified her to walk up and down a sick man’s counterpane, to the
exclusion of all other figures, through a whole fever.
Passing through the court-yard, among groups of idle soldiers, we turned
off by a gate, which this She-Goblin unlocked for our admission, and
locked again behind us: and entered a narrow court, rendered narrower by
fallen stones and heaps of rubbish; part of it choking up the mouth of a
ruined subterranean passage, that once communicated (or is said to have
done so) with another castle on the opposite bank of the river. Close to
this court-yard is a dungeon—we stood within it, in another minute—in the
dismal tower _des oubliettes_, where Rienzi was imprisoned, fastened by
an iron chain to the very wall that stands there now, but shut out from
the sky which now looks down into it. A few steps brought us to the
Cachots, in which the prisoners of the Inquisition were confined for
forty-eight hours after their capture, without food or drink, that their
constancy might be shaken, even before they were confronted with their
gloomy judges. The day has not got in there yet. They are still small
cells, shut in by four unyielding, close, hard walls; still profoundly
dark; still massively doored and fastened, as of old.
Goblin, looking back as I have described, went softly on, into a vaulted
chamber, now used as a store-room: once the chapel of the Holy Office.
The place where the tribunal sat, was plain. The platform might have
been removed but yesterday. Conceive the parable of the Good Samaritan
having been painted on the wall of one of these Inquisition chambers!
But it was, and may be traced there yet.
High up in the jealous wall, are niches where the faltering replies of
the accused were heard and noted down. Many of them had been brought out
of the very cell we had just looked into, so awfully; along the same
stone passage. We had trodden in their very footsteps.
I am gazing round me, with the horror that the place inspires, when
Goblin clutches me by the wrist, and lays, not her skinny finger, but the
handle of a key, upon her lip. She invites me, with a jerk, to follow
her. I do so. She leads me out into a room adjoining—a rugged room,
with a funnel-shaped, contracting roof, open at the top, to the bright
day. I ask her what it is. She folds her arms, leers hideously, and
stares. I ask again. She glances round, to see that all the little
company are there; sits down upon a mound of stones; throws up her arms,
and yells out, like a fiend, ‘La Salle de la Question!’
The Chamber of Torture! And the roof was made of that shape to stifle
the victim’s cries! Oh Goblin, Goblin, let us think of this awhile, in
silence. Peace, Goblin! Sit with your short arms crossed on your short
legs, upon that heap of stones, for only five minutes, and then flame out
again.
Minutes! Seconds are not marked upon the Palace clock, when, with her
eyes flashing fire, Goblin is up, in the middle of the chamber,
describing, with her sunburnt arms, a wheel of heavy blows. Thus it ran
round! cries Goblin. Mash, mash, mash! An endless routine of heavy
hammers. Mash, mash, mash! upon the sufferer’s limbs. See the stone
trough! says Goblin. For the water torture! Gurgle, swill, bloat,
burst, for the Redeemer’s honour! Suck the bloody rag, deep down into
your unbelieving body, Heretic, at every breath you draw! And when the
executioner plucks it out, reeking with the smaller mysteries of God’s
own Image, know us for His chosen servants, true believers in the Sermon
on the Mount, elect disciples of Him who never did a miracle but to heal:
who never struck a man with palsy, blindness, deafness, dumbness,
madness, any one affliction of mankind; and never stretched His blessed
hand out, but to give relief and ease!
See! cries Goblin. There the furnace was. There they made the irons
red-hot. Those holes supported the sharp stake, on which the tortured
persons hung poised: dangling with their whole weight from the roof.
‘But;’ and Goblin whispers this; ‘Monsieur has heard of this tower? Yes?
Let Monsieur look down, then!’
A cold air, laden with an earthy smell, falls upon the face of Monsieur;
for she has opened, while speaking, a trap-door in the wall. Monsieur
looks in. Downward to the bottom, upward to the top, of a steep, dark,
lofty tower: very dismal, very dark, very cold. The Executioner of the
Inquisition, says Goblin, edging in her head to look down also, flung
those who were past all further torturing, down here. ‘But look! does
Monsieur see the black stains on the wall?’ A glance, over his shoulder,
at Goblin’s keen eye, shows Monsieur—and would without the aid of the
directing key—where they are. ‘What are they?’ ‘Blood!’
In October, 1791, when the Revolution was at its height here, sixty
persons: men and women (‘and priests,’ says Goblin, ‘priests’): were
murdered, and hurled, the dying and the dead, into this dreadful pit,
where a quantity of quick-lime was tumbled down upon their bodies. Those
ghastly tokens of the massacre were soon no more; but while one stone of
the strong building in which the deed was done, remains upon another,
there they will lie in the memories of men, as plain to see as the
splashing of their blood upon the wall is now.
Was it a portion of the great scheme of Retribution, that the cruel deed
should be committed in this place! That a part of the atrocities and
monstrous institutions, which had been, for scores of years, at work, to
change men’s nature, should in its last service, tempt them with the
ready means of gratifying their furious and beastly rage! Should enable
them to show themselves, in the height of their frenzy, no worse than a
great, solemn, legal establishment, in the height of its power! No
worse! Much better. They used the Tower of the Forgotten, in the name
of Liberty—their liberty; an earth-born creature, nursed in the black mud
of the Bastile moats and dungeons, and necessarily betraying many
evidences of its unwholesome bringing-up—but the Inquisition used it in
the name of Heaven.
Goblin’s finger is lifted; and she steals out again, into the Chapel of
the Holy Office. She stops at a certain part of the flooring. Her great
effect is at hand. She waits for the rest. She darts at the brave
Courier, who is explaining something; hits him a sounding rap on the hat
with the largest key; and bids him be silent. She assembles us all,
round a little trap-door in the floor, as round a grave.
‘Voilà!’ she darts down at the ring, and flings the door open with a
crash, in her goblin energy, though it is no light weight. ‘Voilà les
oubliettes! Voilà les oubliettes! Subterranean! Frightful! Black!
Terrible! Deadly! Les oubliettes de l’Inquisition!’
My blood ran cold, as I looked from Goblin, down into the vaults, where
these forgotten creatures, with recollections of the world outside: of
wives, friends, children, brothers: starved to death, and made the stones
ring with their unavailing groans. But, the thrill I felt on seeing the
accursed wall below, decayed and broken through, and the sun shining in
through its gaping wounds, was like a sense of victory and triumph. I
felt exalted with the proud delight of living in these degenerate times,
to see it. As if I were the hero of some high achievement! The light in
the doleful vaults was typical of the light that has streamed in, on all
persecution in God’s name, but which is not yet at its noon! It cannot
look more lovely to a blind man newly restored to sight, than to a
traveller who sees it, calmly and majestically, treading down the
darkness of that Infernal Well.
AVIGNON TO GENOA
GOBLIN, having shown _les oubliettes_, felt that her great _coup_ was
struck. She let the door fall with a crash, and stood upon it with her
arms a-kimbo, sniffing prodigiously.
When we left the place, I accompanied her into her house, under the outer
gateway of the fortress, to buy a little history of the building. Her
cabaret, a dark, low room, lighted by small windows, sunk in the thick
wall—in the softened light, and with its forge-like chimney; its little
counter by the door, with bottles, jars, and glasses on it; its household
implements and scraps of dress against the wall; and a sober-looking
woman (she must have a congenial life of it, with Goblin,) knitting at
the door—looked exactly like a picture by OSTADE.
I walked round the building on the outside, in a sort of dream, and yet
with the delightful sense of having awakened from it, of which the light,
down in the vaults, had given me the assurance. The immense thickness
and giddy height of the walls, the enormous strength of the massive
towers, the great extent of the building, its gigantic proportions,
frowning aspect, and barbarous irregularity, awaken awe and wonder. The
recollection of its opposite old uses: an impregnable fortress, a
luxurious palace, a horrible prison, a place of torture, the court of the
Inquisition: at one and the same time, a house of feasting, fighting,
religion, and blood: gives to every stone in its huge form a fearful
interest, and imparts new meaning to its incongruities. I could think of
little, however, then, or long afterwards, but the sun in the dungeons.
The palace coming down to be the lounging-place of noisy soldiers, and
being forced to echo their rough talk, and common oaths, and to have
their garments fluttering from its dirty windows, was some reduction of
its state, and something to rejoice at; but the day in its cells, and the
sky for the roof of its chambers of cruelty—that was its desolation and
defeat! If I had seen it in a blaze from ditch to rampart, I should have
felt that not that light, nor all the light in all the fire that burns,
could waste it, like the sunbeams in its secret council-chamber, and its
prisons.
Before I quit this Palace of the Popes, let me translate from the little
history I mentioned just now, a short anecdote, quite appropriate to
itself, connected with its adventures.
‘An ancient tradition relates, that in 1441, a nephew of Pierre de Lude,
the Pope’s legate, seriously insulted some distinguished ladies of
Avignon, whose relations, in revenge, seized the young man, and horribly
mutilated him. For several years the legate kept _his_ revenge within
his own breast, but he was not the less resolved upon its gratification
at last. He even made, in the fulness of time, advances towards a
complete reconciliation; and when their apparent sincerity had prevailed,
he invited to a splendid banquet, in this palace, certain families, whole
families, whom he sought to exterminate. The utmost gaiety animated the
repast; but the measures of the legate were well taken. When the dessert
was on the board, a Swiss presented himself, with the announcement that a
strange ambassador solicited an extraordinary audience. The legate,
excusing himself, for the moment, to his guests, retired, followed by his
officers. Within a few minutes afterwards, five hundred persons were
reduced to ashes: the whole of that wing of the building having been
blown into the air with a terrible explosion!’
After seeing the churches (I will not trouble you with churches just
now), we left Avignon that afternoon. The heat being very great, the
roads outside the walls were strewn with people fast asleep in every
little slip of shade, and with lazy groups, half asleep and half awake,
who were waiting until the sun should be low enough to admit of their
playing bowls among the burnt-up trees, and on the dusty road. The
harvest here was already gathered in, and mules and horses were treading
out the corn in the fields. We came, at dusk, upon a wild and hilly
country, once famous for brigands; and travelled slowly up a steep
ascent. So we went on, until eleven at night, when we halted at the town
of Aix (within two stages of Marseilles) to sleep.
The hotel, with all the blinds and shutters closed to keep the light and
heat out, was comfortable and airy next morning, and the town was very
clean; but so hot, and so intensely light, that when I walked out at noon
it was like coming suddenly from the darkened room into crisp blue fire.
The air was so very clear, that distant hills and rocky points appeared
within an hour’s walk; while the town immediately at hand—with a kind of
blue wind between me and it—seemed to be white hot, and to be throwing
off a fiery air from the surface.
We left this town towards evening, and took the road to Marseilles. A
dusty road it was; the houses shut up close; and the vines powdered
white. At nearly all the cottage doors, women were peeling and slicing
onions into earthen bowls for supper. So they had been doing last night
all the way from Avignon. We passed one or two shady dark châteaux,
surrounded by trees, and embellished with cool basins of water: which
were the more refreshing to behold, from the great scarcity of such
residences on the road we had travelled. As we approached Marseilles,
the road began to be covered with holiday people. Outside the
public-houses were parties smoking, drinking, playing draughts and cards,
and (once) dancing. But dust, dust, dust, everywhere. We went on,
through a long, straggling, dirty suburb, thronged with people; having on
our left a dreary slope of land, on which the country-houses of the
Marseilles merchants, always staring white, are jumbled and heaped
without the slightest order: backs, fronts, sides, and gables towards all
points of the compass; until, at last, we entered the town.
I was there, twice or thrice afterwards, in fair weather and foul; and I
am afraid there is no doubt that it is a dirty and disagreeable place.
But the prospect, from the fortified heights, of the beautiful
Mediterranean, with its lovely rocks and islands, is most delightful.
These heights are a desirable retreat, for less picturesque reasons—as an
escape from a compound of vile smells perpetually arising from a great
harbour full of stagnant water, and befouled by the refuse of innumerable
ships with all sorts of cargoes: which, in hot weather, is dreadful in
the last degree.
There were foreign sailors, of all nations, in the streets; with red
shirts, blue shirts, buff shirts, tawny shirts, and shirts of orange
colour; with red caps, blue caps, green caps, great beards, and no
beards; in Turkish turbans, glazed English hats, and Neapolitan
head-dresses. There were the townspeople sitting in clusters on the
pavement, or airing themselves on the tops of their houses, or walking up
and down the closest and least airy of Boulevards; and there were crowds
of fierce-looking people of the lower sort, blocking up the way,
constantly. In the very heart of all this stir and uproar, was the
common madhouse; a low, contracted, miserable building, looking straight
upon the street, without the smallest screen or court-yard; where
chattering mad-men and mad-women were peeping out, through rusty bars, at
the staring faces below, while the sun, darting fiercely aslant into
their little cells, seemed to dry up their brains, and worry them, as if
they were baited by a pack of dogs.
We were pretty well accommodated at the Hôtel du Paradis, situated in a
narrow street of very high houses, with a hairdresser’s shop opposite,
exhibiting in one of its windows two full-length waxen ladies, twirling
round and round: which so enchanted the hairdresser himself, that he and
his family sat in arm-chairs, and in cool undresses, on the pavement
outside, enjoying the gratification of the passers-by, with lazy dignity.
The family had retired to rest when we went to bed, at midnight; but the
hairdresser (a corpulent man, in drab slippers) was still sitting there,
with his legs stretched out before him, and evidently couldn’t bear to
have the shutters put up.
Next day we went down to the harbour, where the sailors of all nations
were discharging and taking in cargoes of all kinds: fruits, wines, oils,
silks, stuffs, velvets, and every manner of merchandise. Taking one of a
great number of lively little boats with gay-striped awnings, we rowed
away, under the sterns of great ships, under tow-ropes and cables,
against and among other boats, and very much too near the sides of
vessels that were faint with oranges, to the _Marie Antoinette_, a
handsome steamer bound for Genoa, lying near the mouth of the harbour.
By-and-by, the carriage, that unwieldy ‘trifle from the Pantechnicon,’ on
a flat barge, bumping against everything, and giving occasion for a
prodigious quantity of oaths and grimaces, came stupidly alongside; and
by five o’clock we were steaming out in the open sea. The vessel was
beautifully clean; the meals were served under an awning on deck; the
night was calm and clear; the quiet beauty of the sea and sky
unspeakable.
We were off Nice, early next morning, and coasted along, within a few
miles of the Cornice road (of which more in its place) nearly all day.
We could see Genoa before three; and watching it as it gradually
developed its splendid amphitheatre, terrace rising above terrace, garden
above garden, palace above palace, height upon height, was ample
occupation for us, till we ran into the stately harbour. Having been
duly astonished, here, by the sight of a few Cappucini monks, who were
watching the fair-weighing of some wood upon the wharf, we drove off to
Albaro, two miles distant, where we had engaged a house.
The way lay through the main streets, but not through the Strada Nuova,
or the Strada Balbi, which are the famous streets of palaces. I never in
my life was so dismayed! The wonderful novelty of everything, the
unusual smells, the unaccountable filth (though it is reckoned the
cleanest of Italian towns), the disorderly jumbling of dirty houses, one
upon the roof of another; the passages more squalid and more close than
any in St. Giles’s or old Paris; in and out of which, not vagabonds, but
well-dressed women, with white veils and great fans, were passing and
repassing; the perfect absence of resemblance in any dwelling-house, or
shop, or wall, or post, or pillar, to anything one had ever seen before;
and the disheartening dirt, discomfort, and decay; perfectly confounded
me. I fell into a dismal reverie. I am conscious of a feverish and
bewildered vision of saints and virgins’ shrines at the street corners—of
great numbers of friars, monks, and soldiers—of vast red curtains, waving
in the doorways of the churches—of always going up hill, and yet seeing
every other street and passage going higher up—of fruit-stalls, with
fresh lemons and oranges hanging in garlands made of vine-leaves—of a
guard-house, and a drawbridge—and some gateways—and vendors of iced
water, sitting with little trays upon the margin of the kennel—and this
is all the consciousness I had, until I was set down in a rank, dull,
weedy court-yard, attached to a kind of pink jail; and was told I lived
there.
I little thought, that day, that I should ever come to have an attachment
for the very stones in the streets of Genoa, and to look back upon the
city with affection as connected with many hours of happiness and quiet!
But these are my first impressions honestly set down; and how they
changed, I will set down too. At present, let us breathe after this
long-winded journey.
GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
THE first impressions of such a place as ALBARO, the suburb of Genoa,
where I am now, as my American friends would say, ‘located,’ can hardly
fail, I should imagine, to be mournful and disappointing. It requires a
little time and use to overcome the feeling of depression consequent, at
first, on so much ruin and neglect. Novelty, pleasant to most people, is
particularly delightful, I think, to me. I am not easily dispirited when
I have the means of pursuing my own fancies and occupations; and I
believe I have some natural aptitude for accommodating myself to
circumstances. But, as yet, I stroll about here, in all the holes and
corners of the neighbourhood, in a perpetual state of forlorn surprise;
and returning to my villa: the Villa Bagnerello (it sounds romantic, but
Signor Bagnerello is a butcher hard by): have sufficient occupation in
pondering over my new experiences, and comparing them, very much to my
own amusement, with my expectations, until I wander out again.
The Villa Bagnerello: or the Pink Jail, a far more expressive name for
the mansion: is in one of the most splendid situations imaginable. The
noble bay of Genoa, with the deep blue Mediterranean, lies stretched out
near at hand; monstrous old desolate houses and palaces are dotted all
about; lofty hills, with their tops often hidden in the clouds, and with
strong forts perched high up on their craggy sides, are close upon the
left; and in front, stretching from the walls of the house, down to a
ruined chapel which stands upon the bold and picturesque rocks on the
sea-shore, are green vineyards, where you may wander all day long in
partial shade, through interminable vistas of grapes, trained on a rough
trellis-work across the narrow paths.
This sequestered spot is approached by lanes so very narrow, that when we
arrived at the Custom-house, we found the people here had _taken the
measure_ of the narrowest among them, and were waiting to apply it to the
carriage; which ceremony was gravely performed in the street, while we
all stood by in breathless suspense. It was found to be a very tight
fit, but just a possibility, and no more—as I am reminded every day, by
the sight of various large holes which it punched in the walls on either
side as it came along. We are more fortunate, I am told, than an old
lady, who took a house in these parts not long ago, and who stuck fast in
_her_ carriage in a lane; and as it was impossible to open one of the
doors, she was obliged to submit to the indignity of being hauled through
one of the little front windows, like a harlequin.
When you have got through these narrow lanes, you come to an archway,
imperfectly stopped up by a rusty old gate—my gate. The rusty old gate
has a bell to correspond, which you ring as long as you like, and which
nobody answers, as it has no connection whatever with the house. But
there is a rusty old knocker, too—very loose, so that it slides round
when you touch it—and if you learn the trick of it, and knock long
enough, somebody comes. The brave Courier comes, and gives you
admittance. You walk into a seedy little garden, all wild and weedy,
from which the vineyard opens; cross it, enter a square hall like a
cellar, walk up a cracked marble staircase, and pass into a most enormous
room with a vaulted roof and whitewashed walls: not unlike a great
Methodist chapel. This is the _sala_. It has five windows and five
doors, and is decorated with pictures which would gladden the heart of
one of those picture-cleaners in London who hang up, as a sign, a picture
divided, like death and the lady, at the top of the old ballad: which
always leaves you in a state of uncertainty whether the ingenious
professor has cleaned one half, or dirtied the other. The furniture of
this _sala_ is a sort of red brocade. All the chairs are immovable, and
the sofa weighs several tons.
On the same floor, and opening out of this same chamber, are dining-room,
drawing-room, and divers bedrooms: each with a multiplicity of doors and
windows. Up-stairs are divers other gaunt chambers, and a kitchen; and
down-stairs is another kitchen, which, with all sorts of strange
contrivances for burning charcoal, looks like an alchemical laboratory.
There are also some half-dozen small sitting-rooms, where the servants in
this hot July, may escape from the heat of the fire, and where the brave
Courier plays all sorts of musical instruments of his own manufacture,
all the evening long. A mighty old, wandering, ghostly, echoing, grim,
bare house it is, as ever I beheld or thought of.
There is a little vine-covered terrace, opening from the drawing-room;
and under this terrace, and forming one side of the little garden, is
what used to be the stable. It is now a cow-house, and has three cows in
it, so that we get new milk by the bucketful. There is no pasturage
near, and they never go out, but are constantly lying down, and
surfeiting themselves with vine-leaves—perfect Italian cows enjoying the
_dolce far’ niente_ all day long. They are presided over, and slept
with, by an old man named Antonio, and his son; two burnt-sienna natives
with naked legs and feet, who wear, each, a shirt, a pair of trousers,
and a red sash, with a relic, or some sacred charm like the bonbon off a
twelfth-cake, hanging round the neck. The old man is very anxious to
convert me to the Catholic faith, and exhorts me frequently. We sit upon
a stone by the door, sometimes in the evening, like Robinson Crusoe and
Friday reversed; and he generally relates, towards my conversion, an
abridgment of the History of Saint Peter—chiefly, I believe, from the
unspeakable delight he has in his imitation of the cock.
The view, as I have said, is charming; but in the day you must keep the
lattice-blinds close shut, or the sun would drive you mad; and when the
sun goes down you must shut up all the windows, or the mosquitoes would
tempt you to commit suicide. So at this time of the year, you don’t see
much of the prospect within doors. As for the flies, you don’t mind
them. Nor the fleas, whose size is prodigious, and whose name is Legion,
and who populate the coach-house to that extent that I daily expect to
see the carriage going off bodily, drawn by myriads of industrious fleas
in harness. The rats are kept away, quite comfortably, by scores of lean
cats, who roam about the garden for that purpose. The lizards, of
course, nobody cares for; they play in the sun, and don’t bite. The
little scorpions are merely curious. The beetles are rather late, and
have not appeared yet. The frogs are company. There is a preserve of
them in the grounds of the next villa; and after nightfall, one would
think that scores upon scores of women in pattens were going up and down
a wet stone pavement without a moment’s cessation. That is exactly the
noise they make.
The ruined chapel, on the picturesque and beautiful sea-shore, was
dedicated, once upon a time, to Saint John the Baptist. I believe there
is a legend that Saint John’s bones were received there, with various
solemnities, when they were first brought to Genoa; for Genoa possesses
them to this day. When there is any uncommon tempest at sea, they are
brought out and exhibited to the raging weather, which they never fail to
calm. In consequence of this connection of Saint John with the city,
great numbers of the common people are christened Giovanni Baptista,
which latter name is pronounced in the Genoese patois ‘Batcheetcha,’ like
a sneeze. To hear everybody calling everybody else Batcheetcha, on a
Sunday, or festa-day, when there are crowds in the streets, is not a
little singular and amusing to a stranger.
The narrow lanes have great villas opening into them, whose walls
(outside walls, I mean) are profusely painted with all sorts of subjects,
grim and holy. But time and the sea-air have nearly obliterated them;
and they look like the entrance to Vauxhall Gardens on a sunny day. The
court-yards of these houses are overgrown with grass and weeds; all sorts
of hideous patches cover the bases of the statues, as if they were
afflicted with a cutaneous disorder; the outer gates are rusty; and the
iron bars outside the lower windows are all tumbling down. Firewood is
kept in halls where costly treasures might be heaped up, mountains high;
waterfalls are dry and choked; fountains, too dull to play, and too lazy
to work, have just enough recollection of their identity, in their sleep,
to make the neighbourhood damp; and the sirocco wind is often blowing
over all these things for days together, like a gigantic oven out for a
holiday.
Not long ago, there was a festa-day, in honour of the _Virgin’s mother_,
when the young men of the neighbourhood, having worn green wreaths of the
vine in some procession or other, bathed in them, by scores. It looked
very odd and pretty. Though I am bound to confess (not knowing of the
festa at that time), that I thought, and was quite satisfied, they wore
them as horses do—to keep the flies off.
Soon afterwards, there was another festa-day, in honour of St. Nazaro.
One of the Albaro young men brought two large bouquets soon after
breakfast, and coming up-stairs into the great _sala_, presented them
himself. This was a polite way of begging for a contribution towards the
expenses of some music in the Saint’s honour, so we gave him whatever it
may have been, and his messenger departed: well satisfied. At six
o’clock in the evening we went to the church—close at hand—a very gaudy
place, hung all over with festoons and bright draperies, and filled, from
the altar to the main door, with women, all seated. They wear no bonnets
here, simply a long white veil—the ‘mezzero;’ and it was the most gauzy,
ethereal-looking audience I ever saw. The young women are not generally
pretty, but they walk remarkably well, and in their personal carriage and
the management of their veils, display much innate grace and elegance.
There were some men present: not very many: and a few of these were
kneeling about the aisles, while everybody else tumbled over them.
Innumerable tapers were burning in the church; the bits of silver and tin
about the saints (especially in the Virgin’s necklace) sparkled
brilliantly; the priests were seated about the chief altar; the organ
played away, lustily, and a full band did the like; while a conductor, in
a little gallery opposite to the band, hammered away on the desk before
him, with a scroll; and a tenor, without any voice, sang. The band
played one way, the organ played another, the singer went a third, and
the unfortunate conductor banged and banged, and flourished his scroll on
some principle of his own: apparently well satisfied with the whole
performance. I never did hear such a discordant din. The heat was
intense all the time.
The men, in red caps, and with loose coats hanging on their shoulders
(they never put them on), were playing bowls, and buying sweetmeats,
immediately outside the church. When half-a-dozen of them finished a
game, they came into the aisle, crossed themselves with the holy water,
knelt on one knee for an instant, and walked off again to play another
game at bowls. They are remarkably expert at this diversion, and will
play in the stony lanes and streets, and on the most uneven and
disastrous ground for such a purpose, with as much nicety as on a
billiard-table. But the most favourite game is the national one of Mora,
which they pursue with surprising ardour, and at which they will stake
everything they possess. It is a destructive kind of gambling, requiring
no accessories but the ten fingers, which are always—I intend no pun—at
hand. Two men play together. One calls a number—say the extreme one,
ten. He marks what portion of it he pleases by throwing out three, or
four, or five fingers; and his adversary has, in the same instant, at
hazard, and without seeing his hand, to throw out as many fingers, as
will make the exact balance. Their eyes and hands become so used to
this, and act with such astonishing rapidity, that an uninitiated
bystander would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to follow the
progress of the game. The initiated, however, of whom there is always an
eager group looking on, devour it with the most intense avidity; and as
they are always ready to champion one side or the other in case of a
dispute, and are frequently divided in their partisanship, it is often a
very noisy proceeding. It is never the quietest game in the world; for
the numbers are always called in a loud sharp voice, and follow as close
upon each other as they can be counted. On a holiday evening, standing
at a window, or walking in a garden, or passing through the streets, or
sauntering in any quiet place about the town, you will hear this game in
progress in a score of wine-shops at once; and looking over any vineyard
walk, or turning almost any corner, will come upon a knot of players in
full cry. It is observable that most men have a propensity to throw out
some particular number oftener than another; and the vigilance with which
two sharp-eyed players will mutually endeavour to detect this weakness,
and adapt their game to it, is very curious and entertaining. The effect
is greatly heightened by the universal suddenness and vehemence of
gesture; two men playing for half a farthing with an intensity as
all-absorbing as if the stake were life.
Hard by here is a large Palazzo, formerly belonging to some member of the
Brignole family, but just now hired by a school of Jesuits for their
summer quarters. I walked into its dismantled precincts the other
evening about sunset, and couldn’t help pacing up and down for a little
time, drowsily taking in the aspect of the place: which is repeated
hereabouts in all directions.
I loitered to and fro, under a colonnade, forming two sides of a weedy,
grass-grown court-yard, whereof the house formed a third side, and a low
terrace-walk, overlooking the garden and the neighbouring hills, the
fourth. I don’t believe there was an uncracked stone in the whole
pavement. In the centre was a melancholy statue, so piebald in its
decay, that it looked exactly as if it had been covered with
sticking-plaster, and afterwards powdered. The stables, coach-houses,
offices, were all empty, all ruinous, all utterly deserted.
Doors had lost their hinges, and were holding on by their latches;
windows were broken, painted plaster had peeled off, and was lying about
in clods; fowls and cats had so taken possession of the out-buildings,
that I couldn’t help thinking of the fairy tales, and eyeing them with
suspicion, as transformed retainers, waiting to be changed back again.
One old Tom in particular: a scraggy brute, with a hungry green eye (a
poor relation, in reality, I am inclined to think): came prowling round
and round me, as if he half believed, for the moment, that I might be the
hero come to marry the lady, and set all to-rights; but discovering his
mistake, he suddenly gave a grim snarl, and walked away with such a
tremendous tail, that he couldn’t get into the little hole where he
lived, but was obliged to wait outside, until his indignation and his
tail had gone down together.
In a sort of summer-house, or whatever it may be, in this colonnade, some
Englishmen had been living, like grubs in a nut; but the Jesuits had
given them notice to go, and they had gone, and _that_ was shut up too.
The house: a wandering, echoing, thundering barrack of a place, with the
lower windows barred up, as usual, was wide open at the door: and I have
no doubt I might have gone in, and gone to bed, and gone dead, and nobody
a bit the wiser. Only one suite of rooms on an upper floor was tenanted;
and from one of these, the voice of a young-lady vocalist, practising
bravura lustily, came flaunting out upon the silent evening.
I went down into the garden, intended to be prim and quaint, with
avenues, and terraces, and orange-trees, and statues, and water in stone
basins; and everything was green, gaunt, weedy, straggling, under grown
or over grown, mildewy, damp, redolent of all sorts of slabby, clammy,
creeping, and uncomfortable life. There was nothing bright in the whole
scene but a firefly—one solitary firefly—showing against the dark bushes
like the last little speck of the departed Glory of the house; and even
it went flitting up and down at sudden angles, and leaving a place with a
jerk, and describing an irregular circle, and returning to the same place
with a twitch that startled one: as if it were looking for the rest of
the Glory, and wondering (Heaven knows it might!) what had become of it.
* * * * *
In the course of two months, the flitting shapes and shadows of my dismal
entering reverie gradually resolved themselves into familiar forms and
substances; and I already began to think that when the time should come,
a year hence, for closing the long holiday and turning back to England, I
might part from Genoa with anything but a glad heart.
It is a place that ‘grows upon you’ every day. There seems to be always
something to find out in it. There are the most extraordinary alleys and
by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is,
when you are idle!) twenty times a day, if you like; and turn up again,
under the most unexpected and surprising difficulties. It abounds in the
strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean,
magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every
turn.
They who would know how beautiful the country immediately surrounding
Genoa is, should climb (in clear weather) to the top of Monte Faccio, or,
at least, ride round the city walls: a feat more easily performed. No
prospect can be more diversified and lovely than the changing views of
the harbour, and the valleys of the two rivers, the Polcevera and the
Bizagno, from the heights along which the strongly fortified walls are
carried, like the great wall of China in little. In not the least
picturesque part of this ride, there is a fair specimen of a real Genoese
tavern, where the visitor may derive good entertainment from real Genoese
dishes, such as Tagliarini; Ravioli; German sausages, strong of garlic,
sliced and eaten with fresh green figs; cocks’ combs and sheep-kidneys,
chopped up with mutton chops and liver; small pieces of some unknown part
of a calf, twisted into small shreds, fried, and served up in a great
dish like white-bait; and other curiosities of that kind. They often get
wine at these suburban Trattorie, from France and Spain and Portugal,
which is brought over by small captains in little trading-vessels. They
buy it at so much a bottle, without asking what it is, or caring to
remember if anybody tells them, and usually divide it into two heaps; of
which they label one Champagne, and the other Madeira. The various
opposite flavours, qualities, countries, ages, and vintages that are
comprised under these two general heads is quite extraordinary. The most
limited range is probably from cool Gruel up to old Marsala, and down
again to apple Tea.
The great majority of the streets are as narrow as any thoroughfare can
well be, where people (even Italian people) are supposed to live and walk
about; being mere lanes, with here and there a kind of well, or
breathing-place. The houses are immensely high, painted in all sorts of
colours, and are in every stage and state of damage, dirt, and lack of
repair. They are commonly let off in floors, or flats, like the houses
in the old town of Edinburgh, or many houses in Paris. There are few
street doors; the entrance halls are, for the most part, looked upon as
public property; and any moderately enterprising scavenger might make a
fine fortune by now and then clearing them out. As it is impossible for
coaches to penetrate into these streets, there are sedan chairs, gilded
and otherwise, for hire in divers places. A great many private chairs
are also kept among the nobility and gentry; and at night these are
trotted to and fro in all directions, preceded by bearers of great
lanthorns, made of linen stretched upon a frame. The sedans and
lanthorns are the legitimate successors of the long strings of patient
and much-abused mules, that go jingling their little bells through these
confined streets all day long. They follow them, as regularly as the
stars the sun.
When shall I forget the Streets of Palaces: the Strada Nuova and the
Strada Balbi! or how the former looked one summer day, when I first saw
it underneath the brightest and most intensely blue of summer skies:
which its narrow perspective of immense mansions, reduced to a tapering
and most precious strip of brightness, looking down upon the heavy shade
below! A brightness not too common, even in July and August, to be well
esteemed: for, if the Truth must out, there were not eight blue skies in
as many midsummer weeks, saving, sometimes, early in the morning; when,
looking out to sea, the water and the firmament were one world of deep
and brilliant blue. At other times, there were clouds and haze enough to
make an Englishman grumble in his own climate.
The endless details of these rich Palaces: the walls of some of them,
within, alive with masterpieces by Vandyke! The great, heavy, stone
balconies, one above another, and tier over tier: with here and there,
one larger than the rest, towering high up—a huge marble platform; the
doorless vestibules, massively barred lower windows, immense public
staircases, thick marble pillars, strong dungeon-like arches, and dreary,
dreaming, echoing vaulted chambers: among which the eye wanders again,
and again, and again, as every palace is succeeded by another—the terrace
gardens between house and house, with green arches of the vine, and
groves of orange-trees, and blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty,
thirty, forty feet above the street—the painted halls, mouldering, and
blotting, and rotting in the damp corners, and still shining out in
beautiful colours and voluptuous designs, where the walls are dry—the
faded figures on the outsides of the houses, holding wreaths, and crowns,
and flying upward, and downward, and standing in niches, and here and
there looking fainter and more feeble than elsewhere, by contrast with
some fresh little Cupids, who on a more recently decorated portion of the
front, are stretching out what seems to be the semblance of a blanket,
but is, indeed, a sun-dial—the steep, steep, up-hill streets of small
palaces (but very large palaces for all that), with marble terraces
looking down into close by-ways—the magnificent and innumerable Churches;
and the rapid passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of
the vilest squalor, steaming with unwholesome stenches, and swarming with
half-naked children and whole worlds of dirty people—make up, altogether,
such a scene of wonder: so lively, and yet so dead: so noisy, and yet so
quiet: so obtrusive, and yet so shy and lowering: so wide awake, and yet
so fast asleep: that it is a sort of intoxication to a stranger to walk
on, and on, and on, and look about him. A bewildering phantasmagoria,
with all the inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and all the
pleasure of an extravagant reality!
The different uses to which some of these Palaces are applied, all at
once, is characteristic. For instance, the English Banker (my excellent
and hospitable friend) has his office in a good-sized Palazzo in the
Strada Nuova. In the hall (every inch of which is elaborately painted,
but which is as dirty as a police-station in London), a hook-nosed
Saracen’s Head with an immense quantity of black hair (there is a man
attached to it) sells walking-sticks. On the other side of the doorway,
a lady with a showy handkerchief for head-dress (wife to the Saracen’s
Head, I believe) sells articles of her own knitting; and sometimes
flowers. A little further in, two or three blind men occasionally beg.
Sometimes, they are visited by a man without legs, on a little go-cart,
but who has such a fresh-coloured, lively face, and such a respectable,
well-conditioned body, that he looks as if he had sunk into the ground up
to his middle, or had come, but partially, up a flight of cellar-steps to
speak to somebody. A little further in, a few men, perhaps, lie asleep
in the middle of the day; or they may be chairmen waiting for their
absent freight. If so, they have brought their chairs in with them, and
there _they_ stand also. On the left of the hall is a little room: a
hatter’s shop. On the first floor, is the English bank. On the first
floor also, is a whole house, and a good large residence too. Heaven
knows what there may be above that; but when you are there, you have only
just begun to go up-stairs. And yet, coming down-stairs again, thinking
of this; and passing out at a great crazy door in the back of the hall,
instead of turning the other way, to get into the street again; it bangs
behind you, making the dismallest and most lonesome echoes, and you stand
in a yard (the yard of the same house) which seems to have been unvisited
by human foot, for a hundred years. Not a sound disturbs its repose.
Not a head, thrust out of any of the grim, dark, jealous windows, within
sight, makes the weeds in the cracked pavement faint of heart, by
suggesting the possibility of there being hands to grub them up.
Opposite to you, is a giant figure carved in stone, reclining, with an
urn, upon a lofty piece of artificial rockwork; and out of the urn,
dangles the fag end of a leaden pipe, which, once upon a time, poured a
small torrent down the rocks. But the eye-sockets of the giant are not
drier than this channel is now. He seems to have given his urn, which is
nearly upside down, a final tilt; and after crying, like a sepulchral
child, ‘All gone!’ to have lapsed into a stony silence.
In the streets of shops, the houses are much smaller, but of great size
notwithstanding, and extremely high. They are very dirty: quite
undrained, if my nose be at all reliable: and emit a peculiar fragrance,
like the smell of very bad cheese, kept in very hot blankets.
Notwithstanding the height of the houses, there would seem to have been a
lack of room in the City, for new houses are thrust in everywhere.
Wherever it has been possible to cram a tumble-down tenement into a crack
or corner, in it has gone. If there be a nook or angle in the wall of a
church, or a crevice in any other dead wall, of any sort, there you are
sure to find some kind of habitation: looking as if it had grown there,
like a fungus. Against the Government House, against the old Senate
House, round about any large building, little shops stick so close, like
parasite vermin to the great carcase. And for all this, look where you
may: up steps, down steps, anywhere, everywhere: there are irregular
houses, receding, starting forward, tumbling down, leaning against their
neighbours, crippling themselves or their friends by some means or other,
until one, more irregular than the rest, chokes up the way, and you can’t
see any further.
One of the rottenest-looking parts of the town, I think, is down by the
landing-wharf: though it may be, that its being associated with a great
deal of rottenness on the evening of our arrival, has stamped it deeper
in my mind. Here, again, the houses are very high, and are of an
infinite variety of deformed shapes, and have (as most of the houses
have) something hanging out of a great many windows, and wafting its
frowsy fragrance on the breeze. Sometimes, it is a curtain; sometimes,
it is a carpet; sometimes, it is a bed; sometimes, a whole line-full of
clothes; but there is almost always something. Before the basement of
these houses, is an arcade over the pavement: very massive, dark, and
low, like an old crypt. The stone, or plaster, of which it is made, has
turned quite black; and against every one of these black piles, all sorts
of filth and garbage seem to accumulate spontaneously. Beneath some of
the arches, the sellers of macaroni and polenta establish their stalls,
which are by no means inviting. The offal of a fish-market, near at
hand—that is to say, of a back lane, where people sit upon the ground and
on various old bulk-heads and sheds, and sell fish when they have any to
dispose of—and of a vegetable market, constructed on the same
principle—are contributed to the decoration of this quarter; and as all
the mercantile business is transacted here, and it is crowded all day, it
has a very decided flavour about it. The Porto Franco, or Free Port
(where goods brought in from foreign countries pay no duty until they are
sold and taken out, as in a bonded warehouse in England), is down here
also; and two portentous officials, in cocked hats, stand at the gate to
search you if they choose, and to keep out Monks and Ladies. For,
Sanctity as well as Beauty has been known to yield to the temptation of
smuggling, and in the same way: that is to say, by concealing the
smuggled property beneath the loose folds of its dress. So Sanctity and
Beauty may, by no means, enter.
The streets of Genoa would be all the better for the importation of a few
Priests of prepossessing appearance. Every fourth or fifth man in the
streets is a Priest or a Monk; and there is pretty sure to be at least
one itinerant ecclesiastic inside or outside every hackney carriage on
the neighbouring roads. I have no knowledge, elsewhere, of more
repulsive countenances than are to be found among these gentry. If
Nature’s handwriting be at all legible, greater varieties of sloth,
deceit, and intellectual torpor, could hardly be observed among any class
of men in the world.
MR. PEPYS once heard a clergyman assert in his sermon, in illustration of
his respect for the Priestly office, that if he could meet a Priest and
angel together, he would salute the Priest first. I am rather of the
opinion of PETRARCH, who, when his pupil BOCCACCIO wrote to him in great
tribulation, that he had been visited and admonished for his writings by
a Carthusian Friar who claimed to be a messenger immediately commissioned
by Heaven for that purpose, replied, that for his own part, he would take
the liberty of testing the reality of the commission by personal
observation of the Messenger’s face, eyes, forehead, behaviour, and
discourse. I cannot but believe myself, from similar observation, that
many unaccredited celestial messengers may be seen skulking through the
streets of Genoa, or droning away their lives in other Italian towns.
Perhaps the Cappuccíni, though not a learned body, are, as an order, the
best friends of the people. They seem to mingle with them more
immediately, as their counsellors and comforters; and to go among them
more, when they are sick; and to pry less than some other orders, into
the secrets of families, for the purpose of establishing a baleful
ascendency over their weaker members; and to be influenced by a less
fierce desire to make converts, and once made, to let them go to ruin,
soul and body. They may be seen, in their coarse dress, in all parts of
the town at all times, and begging in the markets early in the morning.
The Jesuits too, muster strong in the streets, and go slinking
noiselessly about, in pairs, like black cats.
In some of the narrow passages, distinct trades congregate. There is a
street of jewellers, and there is a row of booksellers; but even down in
places where nobody ever can, or ever could, penetrate in a carriage,
there are mighty old palaces shut in among the gloomiest and closest
walls, and almost shut out from the sun. Very few of the tradesmen have
any idea of setting forth their goods, or disposing them for show. If
you, a stranger, want to buy anything, you usually look round the shop
till you see it; then clutch it, if it be within reach, and inquire how
much. Everything is sold at the most unlikely place. If you want
coffee, you go to a sweetmeat shop; and if you want meat, you will
probably find it behind an old checked curtain, down half-a-dozen steps,
in some sequestered nook as hard to find as if the commodity were poison,
and Genoa’s law were death to any that uttered it.
Most of the apothecaries’ shops are great lounging-places. Here, grave
men with sticks, sit down in the shade for hours together, passing a
meagre Genoa paper from hand to hand, and talking, drowsily and
sparingly, about the News. Two or three of these are poor physicians,
ready to proclaim themselves on an emergency, and tear off with any
messenger who may arrive. You may know them by the way in which they
stretch their necks to listen, when you enter; and by the sigh with which
they fall back again into their dull corners, on finding that you only
want medicine. Few people lounge in the barbers’ shops; though they are
very numerous, as hardly any man shaves himself. But the apothecary’s
has its group of loungers, who sit back among the bottles, with their
hands folded over the tops of their sticks. So still and quiet, that
either you don’t see them in the darkened shop, or mistake them—as I did
one ghostly man in bottle-green, one day, with a hat like a stopper—for
Horse Medicine.
* * * * *
On a summer evening the Genoese are as fond of putting themselves, as
their ancestors were of putting houses, in every available inch of space
in and about the town. In all the lanes and alleys, and up every little
ascent, and on every dwarf wall, and on every flight of steps, they
cluster like bees. Meanwhile (and especially on festa-days) the bells of
the churches ring incessantly; not in peals, or any known form of sound,
but in a horrible, irregular, jerking, dingle, dingle, dingle: with a
sudden stop at every fifteenth dingle or so, which is maddening. This
performance is usually achieved by a boy up in the steeple, who takes
hold of the clapper, or a little rope attached to it, and tries to dingle
louder than every other boy similarly employed. The noise is supposed to
be particularly obnoxious to Evil Spirits; but looking up into the
steeples, and seeing (and hearing) these young Christians thus engaged,
one might very naturally mistake them for the Enemy.
Festa-days, early in the autumn, are very numerous. All the shops were
shut up, twice within a week, for these holidays; and one night, all the
houses in the neighbourhood of a particular church were illuminated,
while the church itself was lighted, outside, with torches; and a grove
of blazing links was erected, in an open space outside one of the city
gates. This part of the ceremony is prettier and more singular a little
way in the country, where you can trace the illuminated cottages all the
way up a steep hill-side; and where you pass festoons of tapers, wasting
away in the starlight night, before some lonely little house upon the
road.
On these days, they always dress the church of the saint in whose honour
the festa is holden, very gaily. Gold-embroidered festoons of different
colours, hang from the arches; the altar furniture is set forth; and
sometimes, even the lofty pillars are swathed from top to bottom in
tight-fitting draperies. The cathedral is dedicated to St. Lorenzo. On
St. Lorenzo’s day, we went into it, just as the sun was setting.
Although these decorations are usually in very indifferent taste, the
effect, just then, was very superb indeed. For the whole building was
dressed in red; and the sinking sun, streaming in, through a great red
curtain in the chief doorway, made all the gorgeousness its own. When
the sun went down, and it gradually grew quite dark inside, except for a
few twinkling tapers on the principal altar, and some small dangling
silver lamps, it was very mysterious and effective. But, sitting in any
of the churches towards evening, is like a mild dose of opium.
[Picture: Italian Romance]
With the money collected at a festa, they usually pay for the dressing of
the church, and for the hiring of the band, and for the tapers. If there
be any left (which seldom happens, I believe), the souls in Purgatory get
the benefit of it. They are also supposed to have the benefit of the
exertions of certain small boys, who shake money-boxes before some
mysterious little buildings like rural turnpikes, which (usually shut up
close) fly open on Red-letter days, and disclose an image and some
flowers inside.
Just without the city gate, on the Albara road, is a small house, with an
altar in it, and a stationary money-box: also for the benefit of the
souls in Purgatory. Still further to stimulate the charitable, there is
a monstrous painting on the plaster, on either side of the grated door,
representing a select party of souls, frying. One of them has a grey
moustache, and an elaborate head of grey hair: as if he had been taken
out of a hairdresser’s window and cast into the furnace. There he is: a
most grotesque and hideously comic old soul: for ever blistering in the
real sun, and melting in the mimic fire, for the gratification and
improvement (and the contributions) of the poor Genoese.
They are not a very joyous people, and are seldom seen to dance on their
holidays: the staple places of entertainment among the women, being the
churches and the public walks. They are very good-tempered, obliging,
and industrious. Industry has not made them clean, for their habitations
are extremely filthy, and their usual occupation on a fine Sunday
morning, is to sit at their doors, hunting in each other’s heads. But
their dwellings are so close and confined that if those parts of the city
had been beaten down by Massena in the time of the terrible Blockade, it
would have at least occasioned one public benefit among many misfortunes.
The Peasant Women, with naked feet and legs, are so constantly washing
clothes, in the public tanks, and in every stream and ditch, that one
cannot help wondering, in the midst of all this dirt, who wears them when
they are clean. The custom is to lay the wet linen which is being
operated upon, on a smooth stone, and hammer away at it, with a flat
wooden mallet. This they do, as furiously as if they were revenging
themselves on dress in general for being connected with the Fall of
Mankind.
It is not unusual to see, lying on the edge of the tank at these times,
or on another flat stone, an unfortunate baby, tightly swathed up, arms
and legs and all, in an enormous quantity of wrapper, so that it is
unable to move a toe or finger. This custom (which we often see
represented in old pictures) is universal among the common people. A
child is left anywhere without the possibility of crawling away, or is
accidentally knocked off a shelf, or tumbled out of bed, or is hung up to
a hook now and then, and left dangling like a doll at an English
rag-shop, without the least inconvenience to anybody.
I was sitting, one Sunday, soon after my arrival, in the little country
church of San Martino, a couple of miles from the city, while a baptism
took place. I saw the priest, and an attendant with a large taper, and a
man, and a woman, and some others; but I had no more idea, until the
ceremony was all over, that it was a baptism, or that the curious little
stiff instrument, that was passed from one to another, in the course of
the ceremony, by the handle—like a short poker—was a child, than I had
that it was my own christening. I borrowed the child afterwards, for a
minute or two (it was lying across the font then), and found it very red
in the face but perfectly quiet, and not to be bent on any terms. The
number of cripples in the streets, soon ceased to surprise me.
There are plenty of Saints’ and Virgin’s Shrines, of course; generally at
the corners of streets. The favourite memento to the Faithful, about
Genoa, is a painting, representing a peasant on his knees, with a spade
and some other agricultural implements beside him; and the Madonna, with
the Infant Saviour in her arms, appearing to him in a cloud. This is the
legend of the Madonna della Guardia: a chapel on a mountain within a few
miles, which is in high repute. It seems that this peasant lived all
alone by himself, tilling some land atop of the mountain, where, being a
devout man, he daily said his prayers to the Virgin in the open air; for
his hut was a very poor one. Upon a certain day, the Virgin appeared to
him, as in the picture, and said, ‘Why do you pray in the open air, and
without a priest?’ The peasant explained because there was neither
priest nor church at hand—a very uncommon complaint indeed in Italy. ‘I
should wish, then,’ said the Celestial Visitor, ‘to have a chapel built
here, in which the prayers of the Faithful may be offered up.’ ‘But,
Santissima Madonna,’ said the peasant, ‘I am a poor man; and chapels
cannot be built without money. They must be supported, too, Santissima;
for to have a chapel and not support it liberally, is a wickedness—a
deadly sin.’ This sentiment gave great satisfaction to the visitor.
‘Go!’ said she. ‘There is such a village in the valley on the left, and
such another village in the valley on the right, and such another village
elsewhere, that will gladly contribute to the building of a chapel. Go
to them! Relate what you have seen; and do not doubt that sufficient
money will be forthcoming to erect my chapel, or that it will,
afterwards, be handsomely maintained.’ All of which (miraculously)
turned out to be quite true. And in proof of this prediction and
revelation, there is the chapel of the Madonna della Guardia, rich and
flourishing at this day.
The splendour and variety of the Genoese churches, can hardly be
exaggerated. The church of the Annunciata especially: built, like many
of the others, at the cost of one noble family, and now in slow progress
of repair: from the outer door to the utmost height of the high cupola,
is so elaborately painted and set in gold, that it looks (as SIMOND
describes it, in his charming book on Italy) like a great enamelled
snuff-box. Most of the richer churches contain some beautiful pictures,
or other embellishments of great price, almost universally set, side by
side, with sprawling effigies of maudlin monks, and the veriest trash and
tinsel ever seen.
It may be a consequence of the frequent direction of the popular mind,
and pocket, to the souls in Purgatory, but there is very little
tenderness for the _bodies_ of the dead here. For the very poor, there
are, immediately outside one angle of the walls, and behind a jutting
point of the fortification, near the sea, certain common pits—one for
every day in the year—which all remain closed up, until the turn of each
comes for its daily reception of dead bodies. Among the troops in the
town, there are usually some Swiss: more or less. When any of these die,
they are buried out of a fund maintained by such of their countrymen as
are resident in Genoa. Their providing coffins for these men is matter
of great astonishment to the authorities.
Certainly, the effect of this promiscuous and indecent splashing down of
dead people in so many wells, is bad. It surrounds Death with revolting
associations, that insensibly become connected with those whom Death is
approaching. Indifference and avoidance are the natural result; and all
the softening influences of the great sorrow are harshly disturbed.
There is a ceremony when an old Cavaliére or the like, expires, of
erecting a pile of benches in the cathedral, to represent his bier;
covering them over with a pall of black velvet; putting his hat and sword
on the top; making a little square of seats about the whole; and sending
out formal invitations to his friends and acquaintances to come and sit
there, and hear Mass: which is performed at the principal Altar,
decorated with an infinity of candles for that purpose.
When the better kind of people die, or are at the point of death, their
nearest relations generally walk off: retiring into the country for a
little change, and leaving the body to be disposed of, without any
superintendence from them. The procession is usually formed, and the
coffin borne, and the funeral conducted, by a body of persons called a
Confratérnita, who, as a kind of voluntary penance, undertake to perform
these offices, in regular rotation, for the dead; but who, mingling
something of pride with their humility, are dressed in a loose garment
covering their whole person, and wear a hood concealing the face; with
breathing-holes and apertures for the eyes. The effect of this costume
is very ghastly: especially in the case of a certain Blue Confratérnita
belonging to Genoa, who, to say the least of them, are very ugly
customers, and who look—suddenly encountered in their pious ministration
in the streets—as if they were Ghoules or Demons, bearing off the body
for themselves.
Although such a custom may be liable to the abuse attendant on many
Italian customs, of being recognised as a means of establishing a current
account with Heaven, on which to draw, too easily, for future bad
actions, or as an expiation for past misdeeds, it must be admitted to be
a good one, and a practical one, and one involving unquestionably good
works. A voluntary service like this, is surely better than the imposed
penance (not at all an infrequent one) of giving so many licks to such
and such a stone in the pavement of the cathedral; or than a vow to the
Madonna to wear nothing but blue for a year or two. This is supposed to
give great delight above; blue being (as is well known) the Madonna’s
favourite colour. Women who have devoted themselves to this act of
Faith, are very commonly seen walking in the streets.
There are three theatres in the city, besides an old one now rarely
opened. The most important—the Carlo Felice: the opera-house of Genoa—is
a very splendid, commodious, and beautiful theatre. A company of
comedians were acting there, when we arrived: and soon after their
departure, a second-rate opera company came. The great season is not
until the carnival time—in the spring. Nothing impressed me, so much, in
my visits here (which were pretty numerous) as the uncommonly hard and
cruel character of the audience, who resent the slightest defect, take
nothing good-humouredly, seem to be always lying in wait for an
opportunity to hiss, and spare the actresses as little as the actors.
But, as there is nothing else of a public nature at which they are
allowed to express the least disapprobation, perhaps they are resolved to
make the most of this opportunity.
There are a great number of Piedmontese officers too, who are allowed the
privilege of kicking their heels in the pit, for next to nothing:
gratuitous, or cheap accommodation for these gentlemen being insisted on,
by the Governor, in all public or semi-public entertainments. They are
lofty critics in consequence, and infinitely more exacting than if they
made the unhappy manager’s fortune.
The TEATRO DIURNO, or Day Theatre, is a covered stage in the open air,
where the performances take place by daylight, in the cool of the
afternoon; commencing at four or five o’clock, and lasting, some three
hours. It is curious, sitting among the audience, to have a fine view of
the neighbouring hills and houses, and to see the neighbours at their
windows looking on, and to hear the bells of the churches and convents
ringing at most complete cross-purposes with the scene. Beyond this, and
the novelty of seeing a play in the fresh pleasant air, with the
darkening evening closing in, there is nothing very exciting or
characteristic in the performances. The actors are indifferent; and
though they sometimes represent one of Goldoni’s comedies, the staple of
the Drama is French. Anything like nationality is dangerous to despotic
governments, and Jesuit-beleaguered kings.
The Theatre of Puppets, or Marionetti—a famous company from Milan—is,
without any exception, the drollest exhibition I ever beheld in my life.
I never saw anything so exquisitely ridiculous. They _look_ between four
and five feet high, but are really much smaller; for when a musician in
the orchestra happens to put his hat on the stage, it becomes alarmingly
gigantic, and almost blots out an actor. They usually play a comedy, and
a ballet. The comic man in the comedy I saw one summer night, is a
waiter in an hotel. There never was such a locomotive actor, since the
world began. Great pains are taken with him. He has extra joints in his
legs: and a practical eye, with which he winks at the pit, in a manner
that is absolutely insupportable to a stranger, but which the initiated
audience, mainly composed of the common people, receive (so they do
everything else) quite as a matter of course, and as if he were a man.
His spirits are prodigious. He continually shakes his legs, and winks
his eye. And there is a heavy father with grey hair, who sits down on
the regular conventional stage-bank, and blesses his daughter in the
regular conventional way, who is tremendous. No one would suppose it
possible that anything short of a real man could be so tedious. It is
the triumph of art.
In the ballet, an Enchanter runs away with the Bride, in the very hour of
her nuptials, He brings her to his cave, and tries to soothe her. They
sit down on a sofa (the regular sofa! in the regular place, O. P. Second
Entrance!) and a procession of musicians enters; one creature playing a
drum, and knocking himself off his legs at every blow. These failing to
delight her, dancers appear. Four first; then two; _the_ two; the
flesh-coloured two. The way in which they dance; the height to which
they spring; the impossible and inhuman extent to which they pirouette;
the revelation of their preposterous legs; the coming down with a pause,
on the very tips of their toes, when the music requires it; the
gentleman’s retiring up, when it is the lady’s turn; and the lady’s
retiring up, when it is the gentleman’s turn; the final passion of a
pas-de-deux; and the going off with a bound!—I shall never see a real
ballet, with a composed countenance again.
I went, another night, to see these Puppets act a play called ‘St.
Helena, or the Death of Napoleon.’ It began by the disclosure of
Napoleon, with an immense head, seated on a sofa in his chamber at St.
Helena; to whom his valet entered with this obscure announcement:
‘Sir Yew ud se on Low?’ (the _ow_, as in cow).
Sir Hudson (that you could have seen his regimentals!) was a perfect
mammoth of a man, to Napoleon; hideously ugly, with a monstrously
disproportionate face, and a great clump for the lower-jaw, to express
his tyrannical and obdurate nature. He began his system of persecution,
by calling his prisoner ‘General Buonaparte;’ to which the latter
replied, with the deepest tragedy, ‘Sir Yew ud se on Low, call me not
thus. Repeat that phrase and leave me! I am Napoleon, Emperor of
France!’ Sir Yew ud se on, nothing daunted, proceeded to entertain him
with an ordinance of the British Government, regulating the state he
should preserve, and the furniture of his rooms: and limiting his
attendants to four or five persons. ‘Four or five for _me_!’ said
Napoleon. ‘Me! One hundred thousand men were lately at my sole command;
and this English officer talks of four or five for _me_!’ Throughout the
piece, Napoleon (who talked very like the real Napoleon, and was, for
ever, having small soliloquies by himself) was very bitter on ‘these
English officers,’ and ‘these English soldiers;’ to the great
satisfaction of the audience, who were perfectly delighted to have Low
bullied; and who, whenever Low said ‘General Buonaparte’ (which he always
did: always receiving the same correction), quite execrated him. It
would be hard to say why; for Italians have little cause to sympathise
with Napoleon, Heaven knows.
There was no plot at all, except that a French officer, disguised as an
Englishman, came to propound a plan of escape; and being discovered, but
not before Napoleon had magnanimously refused to steal his freedom, was
immediately ordered off by Low to be hanged. In two very long speeches,
which Low made memorable, by winding up with ‘Yas!’—to show that he was
English—which brought down thunders of applause. Napoleon was so
affected by this catastrophe, that he fainted away on the spot, and was
carried out by two other puppets. Judging from what followed, it would
appear that he never recovered the shock; for the next act showed him, in
a clean shirt, in his bed (curtains crimson and white), where a lady,
prematurely dressed in mourning, brought two little children, who kneeled
down by the bedside, while he made a decent end; the last word on his
lips being ‘Vatterlo.’
It was unspeakably ludicrous. Buonaparte’s boots were so wonderfully
beyond control, and did such marvellous things of their own accord:
doubling themselves up, and getting under tables, and dangling in the
air, and sometimes skating away with him, out of all human knowledge,
when he was in full speech—mischances which were not rendered the less
absurd, by a settled melancholy depicted in his face. To put an end to
one conference with Low, he had to go to a table, and read a book: when
it was the finest spectacle I ever beheld, to see his body bending over
the volume, like a boot-jack, and his sentimental eyes glaring
obstinately into the pit. He was prodigiously good, in bed, with an
immense collar to his shirt, and his little hands outside the coverlet.
So was Dr. Antommarchi, represented by a puppet with long lank hair, like
Mawworm’s, who, in consequence of some derangement of his wires, hovered
about the couch like a vulture, and gave medical opinions in the air. He
was almost as good as Low, though the latter was great at all times—a
decided brute and villain, beyond all possibility of mistake. Low was
especially fine at the last, when, hearing the doctor and the valet say,
‘The Emperor is dead!’ he pulled out his watch, and wound up the piece
(not the watch) by exclaiming, with characteristic brutality, ‘Ha! ha!
Eleven minutes to six! The General dead! and the spy hanged!’ This
brought the curtain down, triumphantly.
* * * * *
There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a lovelier
residence than the Palazzo Peschiere, or Palace of the Fishponds, whither
we removed as soon as our three months’ tenancy of the Pink Jail at
Albaro had ceased and determined.
It stands on a height within the walls of Genoa, but aloof from the town:
surrounded by beautiful gardens of its own, adorned with statues, vases,
fountains, marble basins, terraces, walks of orange-trees and
lemon-trees, groves of roses and camellias. All its apartments are
beautiful in their proportions and decorations; but the great hall, some
fifty feet in height, with three large windows at the end, overlooking
the whole town of Genoa, the harbour, and the neighbouring sea, affords
one of the most fascinating and delightful prospects in the world. Any
house more cheerful and habitable than the great rooms are, within, it
would be difficult to conceive; and certainly nothing more delicious than
the scene without, in sunshine or in moonlight, could be imagined. It is
more like an enchanted place in an Eastern story than a grave and sober
lodging.
How you may wander on, from room to room, and never tire of the wild
fancies on the walls and ceilings, as bright in their fresh colouring as
if they had been painted yesterday; or how one floor, or even the great
hall which opens on eight other rooms, is a spacious promenade; or how
there are corridors and bed-chambers above, which we never use and rarely
visit, and scarcely know the way through; or how there is a view of a
perfectly different character on each of the four sides of the building;
matters little. But that prospect from the hall is like a vision to me.
I go back to it, in fancy, as I have done in calm reality a hundred times
a day; and stand there, looking out, with the sweet scents from the
garden rising up about me, in a perfect dream of happiness.
There lies all Genoa, in beautiful confusion, with its many churches,
monasteries, and convents, pointing up into the sunny sky; and down below
me, just where the roofs begin, a solitary convent parapet, fashioned
like a gallery, with an iron across at the end, where sometimes early in
the morning, I have seen a little group of dark-veiled nuns gliding
sorrowfully to and fro, and stopping now and then to peep down upon the
waking world in which they have no part. Old Monte Faccio, brightest of
hills in good weather, but sulkiest when storms are coming on, is here,
upon the left. The Fort within the walls (the good King built it to
command the town, and beat the houses of the Genoese about their ears, in
case they should be discontented) commands that height upon the right.
The broad sea lies beyond, in front there; and that line of coast,
beginning by the light-house, and tapering away, a mere speck in the rosy
distance, is the beautiful coast road that leads to Nice. The garden
near at hand, among the roofs and houses: all red with roses and fresh
with little fountains: is the Acqua Sola—a public promenade, where the
military band plays gaily, and the white veils cluster thick, and the
Genoese nobility ride round, and round, and round, in state-clothes and
coaches at least, if not in absolute wisdom. Within a stone’s-throw, as
it seems, the audience of the Day Theatre sit: their faces turned this
way. But as the stage is hidden, it is very odd, without a knowledge of
the cause, to see their faces changed so suddenly from earnestness to
laughter; and odder still, to hear the rounds upon rounds of applause,
rattling in the evening air, to which the curtain falls. But, being
Sunday night, they act their best and most attractive play. And now, the
sun is going down, in such magnificent array of red, and green, and
golden light, as neither pen nor pencil could depict; and to the ringing
of the vesper bells, darkness sets in at once, without a twilight. Then,
lights begin to shine in Genoa, and on the country road; and the
revolving lanthorn out at sea there, flashing, for an instant, on this
palace front and portico, illuminates it as if there were a bright moon
bursting from behind a cloud; then, merges it in deep obscurity. And
this, so far as I know, is the only reason why the Genoese avoid it after
dark, and think it haunted.
My memory will haunt it, many nights, in time to come; but nothing worse,
I will engage. The same Ghost will occasionally sail away, as I did one
pleasant autumn evening, into the bright prospect, and sniff the morning
air at Marseilles.
The corpulent hairdresser was still sitting in his slippers outside his
shop-door there, but the twirling ladies in the window, with the natural
inconstancy of their sex, had ceased to twirl, and were languishing,
stock still, with their beautiful faces addressed to blind corners of the
establishment, where it was impossible for admirers to penetrate.
The steamer had come from Genoa in a delicious run of eighteen hours, and
we were going to run back again by the Cornice road from Nice: not being
satisfied to have seen only the outsides of the beautiful towns that rise
in picturesque white clusters from among the olive woods, and rocks, and
hills, upon the margin of the Sea.
The Boat which started for Nice that night, at eight o’clock, was very
small, and so crowded with goods that there was scarcely room to move;
neither was there anything to cat on board, except bread; nor to drink,
except coffee. But being due at Nice at about eight or so in the
morning, this was of no consequence; so when we began to wink at the
bright stars, in involuntary acknowledgment of their winking at us, we
turned into our berths, in a crowded, but cool little cabin, and slept
soundly till morning.
The Boat, being as dull and dogged a little boat as ever was built, it
was within an hour of noon when we turned into Nice Harbour, where we
very little expected anything but breakfast. But we were laden with
wool. Wool must not remain in the Custom-house at Marseilles more than
twelve months at a stretch, without paying duty. It is the custom to
make fictitious removals of unsold wool to evade this law; to take it
somewhere when the twelve months are nearly out; bring it straight back
again; and warehouse it, as a new cargo, for nearly twelve months longer.
This wool of ours, had come originally from some place in the East. It
was recognised as Eastern produce, the moment we entered the harbour.
Accordingly, the gay little Sunday boats, full of holiday people, which
had come off to greet us, were warned away by the authorities; we were
declared in quarantine; and a great flag was solemnly run up to the
mast-head on the wharf, to make it known to all the town.
It was a very hot day indeed. We were unshaved, unwashed, undressed,
unfed, and could hardly enjoy the absurdity of lying blistering in a lazy
harbour, with the town looking on from a respectful distance, all manner
of whiskered men in cocked hats discussing our fate at a remote
guard-house, with gestures (we looked very hard at them through
telescopes) expressive of a week’s detention at least: and nothing
whatever the matter all the time. But even in this crisis the brave
Courier achieved a triumph. He telegraphed somebody (_I_ saw nobody)
either naturally connected with the hotel, or put _en rapport_ with the
establishment for that occasion only. The telegraph was answered, and in
half an hour or less, there came a loud shout from the guard-house. The
captain was wanted. Everybody helped the captain into his boat.
Everybody got his luggage, and said we were going. The captain rowed
away, and disappeared behind a little jutting corner of the
Galley-slaves’ Prison: and presently came back with something, very
sulkily. The brave Courier met him at the side, and received the
something as its rightful owner. It was a wicker basket, folded in a
linen cloth; and in it were two great bottles of wine, a roast fowl, some
salt fish chopped with garlic, a great loaf of bread, a dozen or so of
peaches, and a few other trifles. When we had selected our own
breakfast, the brave Courier invited a chosen party to partake of these
refreshments, and assured them that they need not be deterred by motives
of delicacy, as he would order a second basket to be furnished at their
expense. Which he did—no one knew how—and by-and-by, the captain being
again summoned, again sulkily returned with another something; over which
my popular attendant presided as before: carving with a clasp-knife, his
own personal property, something smaller than a Roman sword.
The whole party on board were made merry by these unexpected supplies;
but none more so than a loquacious little Frenchman, who got drunk in
five minutes, and a sturdy Cappuccíno Friar, who had taken everybody’s
fancy mightily, and was one of the best friars in the world, I verily
believe.
He had a free, open countenance; and a rich brown, flowing beard; and was
a remarkably handsome man, of about fifty. He had come up to us, early
in the morning, and inquired whether we were sure to be at Nice by
eleven; saying that he particularly wanted to know, because if we reached
it by that time he would have to perform Mass, and must deal with the
consecrated wafer, fasting; whereas, if there were no chance of his being
in time, he would immediately breakfast. He made this communication,
under the idea that the brave Courier was the captain; and indeed he
looked much more like it than anybody else on board. Being assured that
we should arrive in good time, he fasted, and talked, fasting, to
everybody, with the most charming good humour; answering jokes at the
expense of friars, with other jokes at the expense of laymen, and saying
that, friar as he was, he would engage to take up the two strongest men
on board, one after the other, with his teeth, and carry them along the
deck. Nobody gave him the opportunity, but I dare say he could have done
it; for he was a gallant, noble figure of a man, even in the Cappuccíno
dress, which is the ugliest and most ungainly that can well be.
All this had given great delight to the loquacious Frenchman, who
gradually patronised the Friar very much, and seemed to commiserate him
as one who might have been born a Frenchman himself, but for an
unfortunate destiny. Although his patronage was such as a mouse might
bestow upon a lion, he had a vast opinion of its condescension; and in
the warmth of that sentiment, occasionally rose on tiptoe, to slap the
Friar on the back.
When the baskets arrived: it being then too late for Mass: the Friar went
to work bravely: eating prodigiously of the cold meat and bread, drinking
deep draughts of the wine, smoking cigars, taking snuff, sustaining an
uninterrupted conversation with all hands, and occasionally running to
the boat’s side and hailing somebody on shore with the intelligence that
we _must_ be got out of this quarantine somehow or other, as he had to
take part in a great religious procession in the afternoon. After this,
he would come back, laughing lustily from pure good humour: while the
Frenchman wrinkled his small face into ten thousand creases, and said how
droll it was, and what a brave boy was that Friar! At length the heat of
the sun without, and the wine within, made the Frenchman sleepy. So, in
the noontide of his patronage of his gigantic protégé, he lay down among
the wool, and began to snore.
It was four o’clock before we were released; and the Frenchman, dirty and
woolly, and snuffy, was still sleeping when the Friar went ashore. As
soon as we were free, we all hurried away, to wash and dress, that we
might make a decent appearance at the procession; and I saw no more of
the Frenchman until we took up our station in the main street to see it
pass, when he squeezed himself into a front place, elaborately renovated;
threw back his little coat, to show a broad-barred velvet waistcoat,
sprinkled all over with stars; then adjusted himself and his cane so as
utterly to bewilder and transfix the Friar, when he should appear.
The procession was a very long one, and included an immense number of
people divided into small parties; each party chanting nasally, on its
own account, without reference to any other, and producing a most dismal
result. There were angels, crosses, Virgins carried on flat boards
surrounded by Cupids, crowns, saints, missals, infantry, tapers, monks,
nuns, relics, dignitaries of the church in green hats, walking under
crimson parasols: and, here and there, a species of sacred street-lamp
hoisted on a pole. We looked out anxiously for the Cappuccíni, and
presently their brown robes and corded girdles were seen coming on, in a
body.
I observed the little Frenchman chuckle over the idea that when the Friar
saw him in the broad-barred waistcoat, he would mentally exclaim, ‘Is
that my Patron! _That_ distinguished man!’ and would be covered with
confusion. Ah! never was the Frenchman so deceived. As our friend the
Cappuccíno advanced, with folded arms, he looked straight into the visage
of the little Frenchman, with a bland, serene, composed abstraction, not
to be described. There was not the faintest trace of recognition or
amusement on his features; not the smallest consciousness of bread and
meat, wine, snuff, or cigars. ‘C’est lui-même,’ I heard the little
Frenchman say, in some doubt. Oh yes, it was himself. It was not his
brother or his nephew, very like him. It was he. He walked in great
state: being one of the Superiors of the Order: and looked his part to
admiration. There never was anything so perfect of its kind as the
contemplative way in which he allowed his placid gaze to rest on us, his
late companions, as if he had never seen us in his life and didn’t see us
then. The Frenchman, quite humbled, took off his hat at last, but the
Friar still passed on, with the same imperturbable serenity; and the
broad-barred waistcoat, fading into the crowd, was seen no more.
The procession wound up with a discharge of musketry that shook all the
windows in the town. Next afternoon we started for Genoa, by the famed
Cornice road.
The half-French, half-Italian Vetturíno, who undertook, with his little
rattling carriage and pair, to convey us thither in three days, was a
careless, good-looking fellow, whose light-heartedness and singing
propensities knew no bounds as long as we went on smoothly. So long, he
had a word and a smile, and a flick of his whip, for all the peasant
girls, and odds and ends of the Sonnambula for all the echoes. So long,
he went jingling through every little village, with bells on his horses
and rings in his ears: a very meteor of gallantry and cheerfulness. But,
it was highly characteristic to see him under a slight reverse of
circumstances, when, in one part of the journey, we came to a narrow
place where a waggon had broken down and stopped up the road. His hands
were twined in his hair immediately, as if a combination of all the
direst accidents in life had suddenly fallen on his devoted head. He
swore in French, prayed in Italian, and went up and down, beating his
feet on the ground in a very ecstasy of despair. There were various
carters and mule-drivers assembled round the broken waggon, and at last
some man of an original turn of mind, proposed that a general and joint
effort should be made to get things to-rights again, and clear the way—an
idea which I verily believe would never have presented itself to our
friend, though we had remained there until now. It was done at no great
cost of labour; but at every pause in the doing, his hands were wound in
his hair again, as if there were no ray of hope to lighten his misery.
The moment he was on his box once more, and clattering briskly down hill,
he returned to the Sonnambula and the peasant girls, as if it were not in
the power of misfortune to depress him.
Much of the romance of the beautiful towns and villages on this beautiful
road, disappears when they are entered, for many of them are very
miserable. The streets are narrow, dark, and dirty; the inhabitants lean
and squalid; and the withered old women, with their wiry grey hair
twisted up into a knot on the top of the head, like a pad to carry loads
on, are so intensely ugly, both along the Riviera, and in Genoa, too,
that, seen straggling about in dim doorways with their spindles, or
crooning together in by-corners, they are like a population of
Witches—except that they certainly are not to be suspected of brooms or
any other instrument of cleanliness. Neither are the pig-skins, in
common use to hold wine, and hung out in the sun in all directions, by
any means ornamental, as they always preserve the form of very bloated
pigs, with their heads and legs cut off, dangling upside-down by their
own tails.
These towns, as they are seen in the approach, however: nestling, with
their clustering roofs and towers, among trees on steep hill-sides, or
built upon the brink of noble bays: are charming. The vegetation is,
everywhere, luxuriant and beautiful, and the Palm-tree makes a novel
feature in the novel scenery. In one town, San Remo—a most extraordinary
place, built on gloomy open arches, so that one might ramble underneath
the whole town—there are pretty terrace gardens; in other towns, there is
the clang of shipwrights’ hammers, and the building of small vessels on
the beach. In some of the broad bays, the fleets of Europe might ride at
anchor. In every case, each little group of houses presents, in the
distance, some enchanting confusion of picturesque and fanciful shapes.
The road itself—now high above the glittering sea, which breaks against
the foot of the precipice: now turning inland to sweep the shore of a
bay: now crossing the stony bed of a mountain stream: now low down on the
beach: now winding among riven rocks of many forms and colours: now
chequered by a solitary ruined tower, one of a chain of towers built, in
old time, to protect the coast from the invasions of the Barbary
Corsairs—presents new beauties every moment. When its own striking
scenery is passed, and it trails on through a long line of suburb, lying
on the flat sea-shore, to Genoa, then, the changing glimpses of that
noble city and its harbour, awaken a new source of interest; freshened by
every huge, unwieldy, half-inhabited old house in its outskirts: and
coming to its climax when the city gate is reached, and all Genoa with
its beautiful harbour, and neighbouring hills, bursts proudly on the
view.
TO PARMA, MODENA, AND BOLOGNA
I STROLLED away from Genoa on the 6th of November, bound for a good many
places (England among them), but first for Piacenza; for which town I
started in the _coupé_ of a machine something like a travelling caravan,
in company with the brave Courier, and a lady with a large dog, who
howled dolefully, at intervals, all night. It was very wet, and very
cold; very dark, and very dismal; we travelled at the rate of barely four
miles an hour, and stopped nowhere for refreshment. At ten o’clock next
morning, we changed coaches at Alessandria, where we were packed up in
another coach (the body whereof would have been small for a fly), in
company with a very old priest; a young Jesuit, his companion—who carried
their breviaries and other books, and who, in the exertion of getting
into the coach, had made a gash of pink leg between his black stocking
and his black knee-shorts, that reminded one of Hamlet in Ophelia’s
closet, only it was visible on both legs—a provincial Avvocáto; and a
gentleman with a red nose that had an uncommon and singular sheen upon
it, which I never observed in the human subject before. In this way we
travelled on, until four o’clock in the afternoon; the roads being still
very heavy, and the coach very slow. To mend the matter, the old priest
was troubled with cramps in his legs, so that he had to give a terrible
yell every ten minutes or so, and be hoisted out by the united efforts of
the company; the coach always stopping for him, with great gravity. This
disorder, and the roads, formed the main subject of conversation.
Finding, in the afternoon, that the _coupé_ had discharged two people,
and had only one passenger inside—a monstrous ugly Tuscan, with a great
purple moustache, of which no man could see the ends when he had his hat
on—I took advantage of its better accommodation, and in company with this
gentleman (who was very conversational and good-humoured) travelled on,
until nearly eleven o’clock at night, when the driver reported that he
couldn’t think of going any farther, and we accordingly made a halt at a
place called Stradella.
The inn was a series of strange galleries surrounding a yard where our
coach, and a waggon or two, and a lot of fowls, and firewood, were all
heaped up together, higgledy-piggledy; so that you didn’t know, and
couldn’t have taken your oath, which was a fowl and which was a cart. We
followed a sleepy man with a flaring torch, into a great, cold room,
where there were two immensely broad beds, on what looked like two
immensely broad deal dining-tables; another deal table of similar
dimensions in the middle of the bare floor; four windows; and two chairs.
Somebody said it was my room; and I walked up and down it, for half an
hour or so, staring at the Tuscan, the old priest, the young priest, and
the Avvocáto (Red-Nose lived in the town, and had gone home), who sat
upon their beds, and stared at me in return.
The rather dreary whimsicality of this stage of the proceedings, is
interrupted by an announcement from the Brave (he had been cooking) that
supper is ready; and to the priest’s chamber (the next room and the
counterpart of mine) we all adjourn. The first dish is a cabbage, boiled
with a great quantity of rice in a tureen full of water, and flavoured
with cheese. It is so hot, and we are so cold, that it appears almost
jolly. The second dish is some little bits of pork, fried with pigs’
kidneys. The third, two red fowls. The fourth, two little red turkeys.
The fifth, a huge stew of garlic and truffles, and I don’t know what
else; and this concludes the entertainment.
Before I can sit down in my own chamber, and think it of the dampest, the
door opens, and the Brave comes moving in, in the middle of such a
quantity of fuel that he looks like Birnam Wood taking a winter walk. He
kindles this heap in a twinkling, and produces a jorum of hot brandy and
water; for that bottle of his keeps company with the seasons, and now
holds nothing but the purest _eau de vie_. When he has accomplished this
feat, he retires for the night; and I hear him, for an hour afterwards,
and indeed until I fall asleep, making jokes in some outhouse (apparently
under the pillow), where he is smoking cigars with a party of
confidential friends. He never was in the house in his life before; but
he knows everybody everywhere, before he has been anywhere five minutes;
and is certain to have attracted to himself, in the meantime, the
enthusiastic devotion of the whole establishment.
This is at twelve o’clock at night. At four o’clock next morning, he is
up again, fresher than a full-blown rose; making blazing fires without
the least authority from the landlord; producing mugs of scalding coffee
when nobody else can get anything but cold water; and going out into the
dark streets, and roaring for fresh milk, on the chance of somebody with
a cow getting up to supply it. While the horses are ‘coming,’ I stumble
out into the town too. It seems to be all one little Piazza, with a cold
damp wind blowing in and out of the arches, alternately, in a sort of
pattern. But it is profoundly dark, and raining heavily; and I shouldn’t
know it to-morrow, if I were taken there to try. Which Heaven forbid.
The horses arrive in about an hour. In the interval, the driver swears;
sometimes Christian oaths, sometimes Pagan oaths. Sometimes, when it is
a long, compound oath, he begins with Christianity and merges into
Paganism. Various messengers are despatched; not so much after the
horses, as after each other; for the first messenger never comes back,
and all the rest imitate him. At length the horses appear, surrounded by
all the messengers; some kicking them, and some dragging them, and all
shouting abuse to them. Then, the old priest, the young priest, the
Avvocáto, the Tuscan, and all of us, take our places; and sleepy voices
proceeding from the doors of extraordinary hutches in divers parts of the
yard, cry out ‘Addio corrière mio! Buon’ viággio, corrière!’
Salutations which the courier, with his face one monstrous grin, returns
in like manner as we go jolting and wallowing away, through the mud.
At Piacenza, which was four or five hours’ journey from the inn at
Stradella, we broke up our little company before the hotel door, with
divers manifestations of friendly feeling on all sides. The old priest
was taken with the cramp again, before he had got half-way down the
street; and the young priest laid the bundle of books on a door-step,
while he dutifully rubbed the old gentleman’s legs. The client of the
Avvocáto was waiting for him at the yard-gate, and kissed him on each
cheek, with such a resounding smack, that I am afraid he had either a
very bad case, or a scantily-furnished purse. The Tuscan, with a cigar
in his mouth, went loitering off, carrying his hat in his hand that he
might the better trail up the ends of his dishevelled moustache. And the
brave Courier, as he and I strolled away to look about us, began
immediately to entertain me with the private histories and family affairs
of the whole party.
A brown, decayed, old town, Piacenza is. A deserted, solitary,
grass-grown place, with ruined ramparts; half filled-up trenches, which
afford a frowsy pasturage to the lean kine that wander about them; and
streets of stern houses, moodily frowning at the other houses over the
way. The sleepiest and shabbiest of soldiery go wandering about, with
the double curse of laziness and poverty, uncouthly wrinkling their
misfitting regimentals; the dirtiest of children play with their
impromptu toys (pigs and mud) in the feeblest of gutters; and the
gauntest of dogs trot in and out of the dullest of archways, in perpetual
search of something to eat, which they never seem to find. A mysterious
and solemn Palace, guarded by two colossal statues, twin Genii of the
place, stands gravely in the midst of the idle town; and the king with
the marble legs, who flourished in the time of the thousand and one
Nights, might live contentedly inside of it, and never have the energy,
in his upper half of flesh and blood, to want to come out.
What a strange, half-sorrowful and half-delicious doze it is, to ramble
through these places gone to sleep and basking in the sun! Each, in its
turn, appears to be, of all the mouldy, dreary, God-forgotten towns in
the wide world, the chief. Sitting on this hillock where a bastion used
to be, and where a noisy fortress was, in the time of the old Roman
station here, I became aware that I have never known till now, what it is
to be lazy. A dormouse must surely be in very much the same condition
before he retires under the wool in his cage; or a tortoise before he
buries himself.
I feel that I am getting rusty. That any attempt to think, would be
accompanied with a creaking noise. That there is nothing, anywhere, to
be done, or needing to be done. That there is no more human progress,
motion, effort, or advancement, of any kind beyond this. That the whole
scheme stopped here centuries ago, and laid down to rest until the Day of
Judgment.
Never while the brave Courier lives! Behold him jingling out of
Piacenza, and staggering this way, in the tallest posting-chaise ever
seen, so that he looks out of the front window as if he were peeping over
a garden wall; while the postilion, concentrated essence of all the
shabbiness of Italy, pauses for a moment in his animated conversation, to
touch his hat to a blunt-nosed little Virgin, hardly less shabby than
himself, enshrined in a plaster Punch’s show outside the town.
In Genoa, and thereabouts, they train the vines on trellis-work,
supported on square clumsy pillars, which, in themselves, are anything
but picturesque. But, here, they twine them around trees, and let them
trail among the hedges; and the vineyards are full of trees, regularly
planted for this purpose, each with its own vine twining and clustering
about it. Their leaves are now of the brightest gold and deepest red;
and never was anything so enchantingly graceful and full of beauty.
Through miles of these delightful forms and colours, the road winds its
way. The wild festoons, the elegant wreaths, and crowns, and garlands of
all shapes; the fairy nets flung over great trees, and making them
prisoners in sport; the tumbled heaps and mounds of exquisite shapes upon
the ground; how rich and beautiful they are! And every now and then, a
long, long line of trees, will be all bound and garlanded together: as if
they had taken hold of one another, and were coming dancing down the
field!
Parma has cheerful, stirring streets, for an Italian town; and
consequently is not so characteristic as many places of less note.
Always excepting the retired Piazza, where the Cathedral, Baptistery, and
Campanile—ancient buildings, of a sombre brown, embellished with
innumerable grotesque monsters and dreamy-looking creatures carved in
marble and red stone—are clustered in a noble and magnificent repose.
Their silent presence was only invaded, when I saw them, by the
twittering of the many birds that were flying in and out of the crevices
in the stones and little nooks in the architecture, where they had made
their nests. They were busy, rising from the cold shade of Temples made
with hands, into the sunny air of Heaven. Not so the worshippers within,
who were listening to the same drowsy chaunt, or kneeling before the same
kinds of images and tapers, or whispering, with their heads bowed down,
in the selfsame dark confessionals, as I had left in Genoa and everywhere
else.
The decayed and mutilated paintings with which this church is covered,
have, to my thinking, a remarkably mournful and depressing influence. It
is miserable to see great works of art—something of the Souls of
Painters—perishing and fading away, like human forms. This cathedral is
odorous with the rotting of Correggio’s frescoes in the Cupola. Heaven
knows how beautiful they may have been at one time. Connoisseurs fall
into raptures with them now; but such a labyrinth of arms and legs: such
heaps of foreshortened limbs, entangled and involved and jumbled
together: no operative surgeon, gone mad, could imagine in his wildest
delirium.
There is a very interesting subterranean church here: the roof supported
by marble pillars, behind each of which there seemed to be at least one
beggar in ambush: to say nothing of the tombs and secluded altars. From
every one of these lurking-places, such crowds of phantom-looking men and
women, leading other men and women with twisted limbs, or chattering
jaws, or paralytic gestures, or idiotic heads, or some other sad
infirmity, came hobbling out to beg, that if the ruined frescoes in the
cathedral above, had been suddenly animated, and had retired to this
lower church, they could hardly have made a greater confusion, or
exhibited a more confounding display of arms and legs.
There is Petrarch’s Monument, too; and there is the Baptistery, with its
beautiful arches and immense font; and there is a gallery containing some
very remarkable pictures, whereof a few were being copied by hairy-faced
artists, with little velvet caps more off their heads than on. There is
the Farnese Palace, too; and in it one of the dreariest spectacles of
decay that ever was seen—a grand, old, gloomy theatre, mouldering away.
It is a large wooden structure, of the horse-shoe shape; the lower seats
arranged upon the Roman plan, but above them, great heavy chambers;
rather than boxes, where the Nobles sat, remote in their proud state.
Such desolation as has fallen on this theatre, enhanced in the
spectator’s fancy by its gay intention and design, none but worms can be
familiar with. A hundred and ten years have passed, since any play was
acted here. The sky shines in through the gashes in the roof; the boxes
are dropping down, wasting away, and only tenanted by rats; damp and
mildew smear the faded colours, and make spectral maps upon the panels;
lean rags are dangling down where there were gay festoons on the
Proscenium; the stage has rotted so, that a narrow wooden gallery is
thrown across it, or it would sink beneath the tread, and bury the
visitor in the gloomy depth beneath. The desolation and decay impress
themselves on all the senses. The air has a mouldering smell, and an
earthy taste; any stray outer sounds that straggle in with some lost
sunbeam, are muffled and heavy; and the worm, the maggot, and the rot
have changed the surface of the wood beneath the touch, as time will seam
and roughen a smooth hand. If ever Ghosts act plays, they act them on
this ghostly stage.
It was most delicious weather, when we came into Modena, where the
darkness of the sombre colonnades over the footways skirting the main
street on either side, was made refreshing and agreeable by the bright
sky, so wonderfully blue. I passed from all the glory of the day, into a
dim cathedral, where High Mass was performing, feeble tapers were
burning, people were kneeling in all directions before all manner of
shrines, and officiating priests were crooning the usual chant, in the
usual, low, dull, drawling, melancholy tone.
Thinking how strange it was, to find, in every stagnant town, this same
Heart beating with the same monotonous pulsation, the centre of the same
torpid, listless system, I came out by another door, and was suddenly
scared to death by a blast from the shrillest trumpet that ever was
blown. Immediately, came tearing round the corner, an equestrian company
from Paris: marshalling themselves under the walls of the church, and
flouting, with their horses’ heels, the griffins, lions, tigers, and
other monsters in stone and marble, decorating its exterior. First,
there came a stately nobleman with a great deal of hair, and no hat,
bearing an enormous banner, on which was inscribed, MAZEPPA! TO-NIGHT!
Then, a Mexican chief, with a great pear-shaped club on his shoulder,
like Hercules. Then, six or eight Roman chariots: each with a beautiful
lady in extremely short petticoats, and unnaturally pink tights, erect
within: shedding beaming looks upon the crowd, in which there was a
latent expression of discomposure and anxiety, for which I couldn’t
account, until, as the open back of each chariot presented itself, I saw
the immense difficulty with which the pink legs maintained their
perpendicular, over the uneven pavement of the town: which gave me quite
a new idea of the ancient Romans and Britons. The procession was brought
to a close, by some dozen indomitable warriors of different nations,
riding two and two, and haughtily surveying the tame population of
Modena: among whom, however, they occasionally condescended to scatter
largesse in the form of a few handbills. After caracolling among the
lions and tigers, and proclaiming that evening’s entertainments with
blast of trumpet, it then filed off, by the other end of the square, and
left a new and greatly increased dulness behind.
When the procession had so entirely passed away, that the shrill trumpet
was mild in the distance, and the tail of the last horse was hopelessly
round the corner, the people who had come out of the church to stare at
it, went back again. But one old lady, kneeling on the pavement within,
near the door, had seen it all, and had been immensely interested,
without getting up; and this old lady’s eye, at that juncture, I happened
to catch: to our mutual confusion. She cut our embarrassment very short,
however, by crossing herself devoutly, and going down, at full length, on
her face, before a figure in a fancy petticoat and a gilt crown; which
was so like one of the procession-figures, that perhaps at this hour she
may think the whole appearance a celestial vision. Anyhow, I must
certainly have forgiven her her interest in the Circus, though I had been
her Father Confessor.
There was a little fiery-eyed old man with a crooked shoulder, in the
cathedral, who took it very ill that I made no effort to see the bucket
(kept in an old tower) which the people of Modena took away from the
people of Bologna in the fourteenth century, and about which there was
war made and a mock-heroic poem by TASSONE, too. Being quite content,
however, to look at the outside of the tower, and feast, in imagination,
on the bucket within; and preferring to loiter in the shade of the tall
Campanile, and about the cathedral; I have no personal knowledge of this
bucket, even at the present time.
Indeed, we were at Bologna, before the little old man (or the Guide-Book)
would have considered that we had half done justice to the wonders of
Modena. But it is such a delight to me to leave new scenes behind, and
still go on, encountering newer scenes—and, moreover, I have such a
perverse disposition in respect of sights that are cut, and dried, and
dictated—that I fear I sin against similar authorities in every place I
visit.
Be this as it may, in the pleasant Cemetery at Bologna, I found myself
walking next Sunday morning, among the stately marble tombs and
colonnades, in company with a crowd of Peasants, and escorted by a little
Cicerone of that town, who was excessively anxious for the honour of the
place, and most solicitous to divert my attention from the bad monuments:
whereas he was never tired of extolling the good ones. Seeing this
little man (a good-humoured little man he was, who seemed to have nothing
in his face but shining teeth and eyes) looking wistfully at a certain
plot of grass, I asked him who was buried there. ‘The poor people,
Signore,’ he said, with a shrug and a smile, and stopping to look back at
me—for he always went on a little before, and took off his hat to
introduce every new monument. ‘Only the poor, Signore! It’s very
cheerful. It’s very lively. How green it is, how cool! It’s like a
meadow! There are five,’—holding up all the fingers of his right hand to
express the number, which an Italian peasant will always do, if it be
within the compass of his ten fingers,—‘there are five of my little
children buried there, Signore; just there; a little to the right. Well!
Thanks to God! It’s very cheerful. How green it is, how cool it is!
It’s quite a meadow!’
He looked me very hard in the face, and seeing I was sorry for him, took
a pinch of snuff (every Cicerone takes snuff), and made a little bow;
partly in deprecation of his having alluded to such a subject, and partly
in memory of the children and of his favourite saint. It was as
unaffected and as perfectly natural a little bow, as ever man made.
Immediately afterwards, he took his hat off altogether, and begged to
introduce me to the next monument; and his eyes and his teeth shone
brighter than before.
THROUGH BOLOGNA AND FERRARA
THERE was such a very smart official in attendance at the Cemetery where
the little Cicerone had buried his children, that when the little
Cicerone suggested to me, in a whisper, that there would be no offence in
presenting this officer, in return for some slight extra service, with a
couple of pauls (about tenpence, English money), I looked incredulously
at his cocked hat, wash-leather gloves, well-made uniform, and dazzling
buttons, and rebuked the little Cicerone with a grave shake of the head.
For, in splendour of appearance, he was at least equal to the Deputy
Usher of the Black Rod; and the idea of his carrying, as Jeremy Diddler
would say, ‘such a thing as tenpence’ away with him, seemed monstrous.
He took it in excellent part, however, when I made bold to give it him,
and pulled off his cocked hat with a flourish that would have been a
bargain at double the money.
It seemed to be his duty to describe the monuments to the people—at all
events he was doing so; and when I compared him, like Gulliver in
Brobdingnag, ‘with the Institutions of my own beloved country, I could
not refrain from tears of pride and exultation.’ He had no pace at all;
no more than a tortoise. He loitered as the people loitered, that they
might gratify their curiosity; and positively allowed them, now and then,
to read the inscriptions on the tombs. He was neither shabby, nor
insolent, nor churlish, nor ignorant. He spoke his own language with
perfect propriety, and seemed to consider himself, in his way, a kind of
teacher of the people, and to entertain a just respect both for himself
and them. They would no more have such a man for a Verger in Westminster
Abbey, than they would let the people in (as they do at Bologna) to see
the monuments for nothing. {272}
Again, an ancient sombre town, under the brilliant sky; with heavy
arcades over the footways of the older streets, and lighter and more
cheerful archways in the newer portions of the town. Again, brown piles
of sacred buildings, with more birds flying in and out of chinks in the
stones; and more snarling monsters for the bases of the pillars. Again,
rich churches, drowsy Masses, curling incense, tinkling bells, priests in
bright vestments: pictures, tapers, laced altar cloths, crosses, images,
and artificial flowers.
There is a grave and learned air about the city, and a pleasant gloom
upon it, that would leave it, a distinct and separate impression in the
mind, among a crowd of cities, though it were not still further marked in
the traveller’s remembrance by the two brick leaning towers (sufficiently
unsightly in themselves, it must be acknowledged), inclining cross-wise
as if they were bowing stiffly to each other—a most extraordinary
termination to the perspective of some of the narrow streets. The
colleges, and churches too, and palaces: and above all the academy of
Fine Arts, where there are a host of interesting pictures, especially by
GUIDO, DOMENICHINO, and LUDOVICO CARACCI: give it a place of its own in
the memory. Even though these were not, and there were nothing else to
remember it by, the great Meridian on the pavement of the church of San
Petronio, where the sunbeams mark the time among the kneeling people,
would give it a fanciful and pleasant interest.
Bologna being very full of tourists, detained there by an inundation
which rendered the road to Florence impassable, I was quartered up at the
top of an hotel, in an out-of-the-way room which I never could find:
containing a bed, big enough for a boarding-school, which I couldn’t fall
asleep in. The chief among the waiters who visited this lonely retreat,
where there was no other company but the swallows in the broad eaves over
the window, was a man of one idea in connection with the English; and the
subject of this harmless monomania, was Lord Byron. I made the discovery
by accidentally remarking to him, at breakfast, that the matting with
which the floor was covered, was very comfortable at that season, when he
immediately replied that Milor Beeron had been much attached to that kind
of matting. Observing, at the same moment, that I took no milk, he
exclaimed with enthusiasm, that Milor Beeron had never touched it. At
first, I took it for granted, in my innocence, that he had been one of
the Beeron servants; but no, he said, no, he was in the habit of speaking
about my Lord, to English gentlemen; that was all. He knew all about
him, he said. In proof of it, he connected him with every possible
topic, from the Monte Pulciano wine at dinner (which was grown on an
estate he had owned), to the big bed itself, which was the very model of
his. When I left the inn, he coupled with his final bow in the yard, a
parting assurance that the road by which I was going, had been Milor
Beeron’s favourite ride; and before the horse’s feet had well begun to
clatter on the pavement, he ran briskly up-stairs again, I dare say to
tell some other Englishman in some other solitary room that the guest who
had just departed was Lord Beeron’s living image.
I had entered Bologna by night—almost midnight—and all along the road
thither, after our entrance into the Papal territory: which is not, in
any part, supremely well governed, Saint Peter’s keys being rather rusty
now; the driver had so worried about the danger of robbers in travelling
after dark, and had so infected the brave Courier, and the two had been
so constantly stopping and getting up and down to look after a
portmanteau which was tied on behind, that I should have felt almost
obliged to any one who would have had the goodness to take it away.
Hence it was stipulated, that, whenever we left Bologna, we should start
so as not to arrive at Ferrara later than eight at night; and a
delightful afternoon and evening journey it was, albeit through a flat
district which gradually became more marshy from the overflow of brooks
and rivers in the recent heavy rains.
At sunset, when I was walking on alone, while the horses rested, I
arrived upon a little scene, which, by one of those singular mental
operations of which we are all conscious, seemed perfectly familiar to
me, and which I see distinctly now. There was not much in it. In the
blood red light, there was a mournful sheet of water, just stirred by the
evening wind; upon its margin a few trees. In the foreground was a group
of silent peasant girls leaning over the parapet of a little bridge, and
looking, now up at the sky, now down into the water; in the distance, a
deep bell; the shade of approaching night on everything. If I had been
murdered there, in some former life, I could not have seemed to remember
the place more thoroughly, or with a more emphatic chilling of the blood;
and the mere remembrance of it acquired in that minute, is so
strengthened by the imaginary recollection, that I hardly think I could
forget it.
More solitary, more depopulated, more deserted, old Ferrara, than any
city of the solemn brotherhood! The grass so grows up in the silent
streets, that any one might make hay there, literally, while the sun
shines. But the sun shines with diminished cheerfulness in grim Ferrara;
and the people are so few who pass and re-pass through the places, that
the flesh of its inhabitants might be grass indeed, and growing in the
squares.
I wonder why the head coppersmith in an Italian town, always lives next
door to the Hotel, or opposite: making the visitor feel as if the beating
hammers were his own heart, palpitating with a deadly energy! I wonder
why jealous corridors surround the bedroom on all sides, and fill it with
unnecessary doors that can’t be shut, and will not open, and abut on
pitchy darkness! I wonder why it is not enough that these distrustful
genii stand agape at one’s dreams all night, but there must also be round
open portholes, high in the wall, suggestive, when a mouse or rat is
heard behind the wainscot, of a somebody scraping the wall with his toes,
in his endeavours to reach one of these portholes and look in! I wonder
why the faggots are so constructed, as to know of no effect but an agony
of heat when they are lighted and replenished, and an agony of cold and
suffocation at all other times! I wonder, above all, why it is the great
feature of domestic architecture in Italian inns, that all the fire goes
up the chimney, except the smoke!
The answer matters little. Coppersmiths, doors, portholes, smoke, and
faggots, are welcome to me. Give me the smiling face of the attendant,
man or woman; the courteous manner; the amiable desire to please and to
be pleased; the light-hearted, pleasant, simple air—so many jewels set in
dirt—and I am theirs again to-morrow!
ARIOSTO’S house, TASSO’S prison, a rare old Gothic cathedral, and more
churches of course, are the sights of Ferrara. But the long silent
streets, and the dismantled palaces, where ivy waves in lieu of banners,
and where rank weeds are slowly creeping up the long-untrodden stairs,
are the best sights of all.
The aspect of this dreary town, half an hour before sunrise one fine
morning, when I left it, was as picturesque as it seemed unreal and
spectral. It was no matter that the people were not yet out of bed; for
if they had all been up and busy, they would have made but little
difference in that desert of a place. It was best to see it, without a
single figure in the picture; a city of the dead, without one solitary
survivor. Pestilence might have ravaged streets, squares, and
market-places; and sack and siege have ruined the old houses, battered
down their doors and windows, and made breaches in their roofs. In one
part, a great tower rose into the air; the only landmark in the
melancholy view. In another, a prodigious castle, with a moat about it,
stood aloof: a sullen city in itself. In the black dungeons of this
castle, Parisina and her lover were beheaded in the dead of night. The
red light, beginning to shine when I looked back upon it, stained its
walls without, as they have, many a time, been stained within, in old
days; but for any sign of life they gave, the castle and the city might
have been avoided by all human creatures, from the moment when the axe
went down upon the last of the two lovers: and might have never vibrated
to another sound
Beyond the blow that to the block
Pierced through with forced and sullen shock.
Coming to the Po, which was greatly swollen, and running fiercely, we
crossed it by a floating bridge of boats, and so came into the Austrian
territory, and resumed our journey: through a country of which, for some
miles, a great part was under water. The brave Courier and the soldiery
had first quarrelled, for half an hour or more, over our eternal
passport. But this was a daily relaxation with the Brave, who was always
stricken deaf when shabby functionaries in uniform came, as they
constantly did come, plunging out of wooden boxes to look at it—or in
other words to beg—and who, stone deaf to my entreaties that the man
might have a trifle given him, and we resume our journey in peace, was
wont to sit reviling the functionary in broken English: while the
unfortunate man’s face was a portrait of mental agony framed in the coach
window, from his perfect ignorance of what was being said to his
disparagement.
There was a postilion, in the course of this day’s journey, as wild and
savagely good-looking a vagabond as you would desire to see. He was a
tall, stout-made, dark-complexioned fellow, with a profusion of shaggy
black hair hanging all over his face, and great black whiskers stretching
down his throat. His dress was a torn suit of rifle green, garnished
here and there with red; a steeple-crowned hat, innocent of nap, with a
broken and bedraggled feather stuck in the band; and a flaming red
neckerchief hanging on his shoulders. He was not in the saddle, but
reposed, quite at his ease, on a sort of low foot-board in front of the
postchaise, down amongst the horses’ tails—convenient for having his
brains kicked out, at any moment. To this Brigand, the brave Courier,
when we were at a reasonable trot, happened to suggest the practicability
of going faster. He received the proposal with a perfect yell of
derision; brandished his whip about his head (such a whip! it was more
like a home-made bow); flung up his heels, much higher than the horses;
and disappeared, in a paroxysm, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the
axle-tree. I fully expected to see him lying in the road, a hundred
yards behind, but up came the steeple-crowned hat again, next minute, and
he was seen reposing, as on a sofa, entertaining himself with the idea,
and crying, ‘Ha, ha! what next! Oh the devil! Faster too!
Shoo—hoo—o—o!’ (This last ejaculation, an inexpressibly defiant hoot.)
Being anxious to reach our immediate destination that night, I ventured,
by-and-by, to repeat the experiment on my own account. It produced
exactly the same effect. Round flew the whip with the same scornful
flourish, up came the heels, down went the steeple-crowned hat, and
presently he reappeared, reposing as before and saying to himself, ‘Ha
ha! what next! Faster too! Oh the devil! Shoo—hoo—o—o!’
AN ITALIAN DREAM
I HAD been travelling, for some days; resting very little in the night,
and never in the day. The rapid and unbroken succession of novelties
that had passed before me, came back like half-formed dreams; and a crowd
of objects wandered in the greatest confusion through my mind, as I
travelled on, by a solitary road. At intervals, some one among them
would stop, as it were, in its restless flitting to and fro, and enable
me to look at it, quite steadily, and behold it in full distinctness.
After a few moments, it would dissolve, like a view in a magic-lantern;
and while I saw some part of it quite plainly, and some faintly, and some
not at all, would show me another of the many places I had lately seen,
lingering behind it, and coming through it. This was no sooner visible
than, in its turn, it melted into something else.
At one moment, I was standing again, before the brown old rugged churches
of Modena. As I recognised the curious pillars with grim monsters for
their bases, I seemed to see them, standing by themselves in the quiet
square at Padua, where there were the staid old University, and the
figures, demurely gowned, grouped here and there in the open space about
it. Then, I was strolling in the outskirts of that pleasant city,
admiring the unusual neatness of the dwelling-houses, gardens, and
orchards, as I had seen them a few hours before. In their stead arose,
immediately, the two towers of Bologna; and the most obstinate of all
these objects, failed to hold its ground, a minute, before the monstrous
moated castle of Ferrara, which, like an illustration to a wild romance,
came back again in the red sunrise, lording it over the solitary,
grass-grown, withered town. In short, I had that incoherent but
delightful jumble in my brain, which travellers are apt to have, and are
indolently willing to encourage. Every shake of the coach in which I
sat, half dozing in the dark, appeared to jerk some new recollection out
of its place, and to jerk some other new recollection into it; and in
this state I fell asleep.
I was awakened after some time (as I thought) by the stopping of the
coach. It was now quite night, and we were at the waterside. There lay
here, a black boat, with a little house or cabin in it of the same
mournful colour. When I had taken my seat in this, the boat was paddled,
by two men, towards a great light, lying in the distance on the sea.
Ever and again, there was a dismal sigh of wind. It ruffled the water,
and rocked the boat, and sent the dark clouds flying before the stars. I
could not but think how strange it was, to be floating away at that hour:
leaving the land behind, and going on, towards this light upon the sea.
It soon began to burn brighter; and from being one light became a cluster
of tapers, twinkling and shining out of the water, as the boat approached
towards them by a dreamy kind of track, marked out upon the sea by posts
and piles.
We had floated on, five miles or so, over the dark water, when I heard it
rippling in my dream, against some obstruction near at hand. Looking out
attentively, I saw, through the gloom, a something black and massive—like
a shore, but lying close and flat upon the water, like a raft—which we
were gliding past. The chief of the two rowers said it was a
burial-place.
Full of the interest and wonder which a cemetery lying out there, in the
lonely sea, inspired, I turned to gaze upon it as it should recede in our
path, when it was quickly shut out from my view. Before I knew by what,
or how, I found that we were gliding up a street—a phantom street; the
houses rising on both sides, from the water, and the black boat gliding
on beneath their windows. Lights were shining from some of these
casements, plumbing the depth of the black stream with their reflected
rays, but all was profoundly silent.
So we advanced into this ghostly city, continuing to hold our course
through narrow streets and lanes, all filled and flowing with water.
Some of the corners where our way branched off, were so acute and narrow,
that it seemed impossible for the long slender boat to turn them; but the
rowers, with a low melodious cry of warning, sent it skimming on without
a pause. Sometimes, the rowers of another black boat like our own,
echoed the cry, and slackening their speed (as I thought we did ours)
would come flitting past us like a dark shadow. Other boats, of the same
sombre hue, were lying moored, I thought, to painted pillars, near to
dark mysterious doors that opened straight upon the water. Some of these
were empty; in some, the rowers lay asleep; towards one, I saw some
figures coming down a gloomy archway from the interior of a palace: gaily
dressed, and attended by torch-bearers. It was but a glimpse I had of
them; for a bridge, so low and close upon the boat that it seemed ready
to fall down and crush us: one of the many bridges that perplexed the
Dream: blotted them out, instantly. On we went, floating towards the
heart of this strange place—with water all about us where never water was
elsewhere—clusters of houses, churches, heaps of stately buildings
growing out of it—and, everywhere, the same extraordinary silence.
Presently, we shot across a broad and open stream; and passing, as I
thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps with which
it was illuminated showed long rows of arches and pillars, of ponderous
construction and great strength, but as light to the eye as garlands of
hoarfrost or gossamer—and where, for the first time, I saw people
walking—arrived at a flight of steps leading from the water to a large
mansion, where, having passed through corridors and galleries
innumerable, I lay down to rest; listening to the black boats stealing up
and down below the window on the rippling water, till I fell asleep.
The glory of the day that broke upon me in this Dream; its freshness,
motion, buoyancy; its sparkles of the sun in water; its clear blue sky
and rustling air; no waking words can tell. But, from my window, I
looked down on boats and barks; on masts, sails, cordage, flags; on
groups of busy sailors, working at the cargoes of these vessels; on wide
quays, strewn with bales, casks, merchandise of many kinds; on great
ships, lying near at hand in stately indolence; on islands, crowned with
gorgeous domes and turrets: and where golden crosses glittered in the
light, atop of wondrous churches, springing from the sea! Going down
upon the margin of the green sea, rolling on before the door, and filling
all the streets, I came upon a place of such surpassing beauty, and such
grandeur, that all the rest was poor and faded, in comparison with its
absorbing loveliness.
It was a great Piazza, as I thought; anchored, like all the rest, in the
deep ocean. On its broad bosom, was a Palace, more majestic and
magnificent in its old age, than all the buildings of the earth, in the
high prime and fulness of their youth. Cloisters and galleries: so
light, they might have been the work of fairy hands: so strong that
centuries had battered them in vain: wound round and round this palace,
and enfolded it with a Cathedral, gorgeous in the wild luxuriant fancies
of the East. At no great distance from its porch, a lofty tower,
standing by itself, and rearing its proud head, alone, into the sky,
looked out upon the Adriatic Sea. Near to the margin of the stream, were
two ill-omened pillars of red granite; one having on its top, a figure
with a sword and shield; the other, a winged lion. Not far from these
again, a second tower: richest of the rich in all its decorations: even
here, where all was rich: sustained aloft, a great orb, gleaming with
gold and deepest blue: the Twelve Signs painted on it, and a mimic sun
revolving in its course around them: while above, two bronze giants
hammered out the hours upon a sounding bell. An oblong square of lofty
houses of the whitest stone, surrounded by a light and beautiful arcade,
formed part of this enchanted scene; and, here and there, gay masts for
flags rose, tapering, from the pavement of the unsubstantial ground.
I thought I entered the Cathedral, and went in and out among its many
arches: traversing its whole extent. A grand and dreamy structure, of
immense proportions; golden with old mosaics; redolent of perfumes; dim
with the smoke of incense; costly in treasure of precious stones and
metals, glittering through iron bars; holy with the bodies of deceased
saints; rainbow-hued with windows of stained glass; dark with carved
woods and coloured marbles; obscure in its vast heights, and lengthened
distances; shining with silver lamps and winking lights; unreal,
fantastic, solemn, inconceivable throughout. I thought I entered the old
palace; pacing silent galleries and council-chambers, where the old
rulers of this mistress of the waters looked sternly out, in pictures,
from the walls, and where her high-prowed galleys, still victorious on
canvas, fought and conquered as of old. I thought I wandered through its
halls of state and triumph—bare and empty now!—and musing on its pride
and might, extinct: for that was past; all past: heard a voice say, ‘Some
tokens of its ancient rule and some consoling reasons for its downfall,
may be traced here, yet!’
I dreamed that I was led on, then, into some jealous rooms, communicating
with a prison near the palace; separated from it by a lofty bridge
crossing a narrow street; and called, I dreamed, The Bridge of Sighs.
But first I passed two jagged slits in a stone wall; the lions’
mouths—now toothless—where, in the distempered horror of my sleep, I
thought denunciations of innocent men to the old wicked Council, had been
dropped through, many a time, when the night was dark. So, when I saw
the council-room to which such prisoners were taken for examination, and
the door by which they passed out, when they were condemned—a door that
never closed upon a man with life and hope before him—my heart appeared
to die within me.
It was smitten harder though, when, torch in hand, I descended from the
cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal, awful,
horrible stone cells. They were quite dark. Each had a loop-hole in its
massive wall, where, in the old time, every day, a torch was placed—I
dreamed—to light the prisoner within, for half an hour. The captives, by
the glimmering of these brief rays, had scratched and cut inscriptions in
the blackened vaults. I saw them. For their labour with a rusty nail’s
point, had outlived their agony and them, through many generations.
One cell, I saw, in which no man remained for more than four-and-twenty
hours; being marked for dead before he entered it. Hard by, another, and
a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the confessor came—a monk
brown-robed, and hooded—ghastly in the day, and free bright air, but in
the midnight of that murky prison, Hope’s extinguisher, and Murder’s
herald. I had my foot upon the spot, where, at the same dread hour, the
shriven prisoner was strangled; and struck my hand upon the guilty
door—low-browed and stealthy—through which the lumpish sack was carried
out into a boat, and rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a
net.
Around this dungeon stronghold, and above some part of it: licking the
rough walls without, and smearing them with damp and slime within:
stuffing dank weeds and refuse into chinks and crevices, as if the very
stones and bars had mouths to stop: furnishing a smooth road for the
removal of the bodies of the secret victims of the State—a road so ready
that it went along with them, and ran before them, like a cruel
officer—flowed the same water that filled this Dream of mine, and made it
seem one, even at the time.
Descending from the palace by a staircase, called, I thought, the
Giant’s—I had some imaginary recollection of an old man abdicating,
coming, more slowly and more feebly, down it, when he heard the bell,
proclaiming his successor—I glided off, in one of the dark boats, until
we came to an old arsenal guarded by four marble lions. To make my Dream
more monstrous and unlikely, one of these had words and sentences upon
its body, inscribed there, at an unknown time, and in an unknown
language; so that their purport was a mystery to all men.
There was little sound of hammers in this place for building ships, and
little work in progress; for the greatness of the city was no more, as I
have said. Indeed, it seemed a very wreck found drifting on the sea; a
strange flag hoisted in its honourable stations, and strangers standing
at its helm. A splendid barge in which its ancient chief had gone forth,
pompously, at certain periods, to wed the ocean, lay here, I thought, no
more; but, in its place, there was a tiny model, made from recollection
like the city’s greatness; and it told of what had been (so are the
strong and weak confounded in the dust) almost as eloquently as the
massive pillars, arches, roofs, reared to overshadow stately ships that
had no other shadow now, upon the water or the earth.
An armoury was there yet. Plundered and despoiled; but an armoury. With
a fierce standard taken from the Turks, drooping in the dull air of its
cage. Rich suits of mail worn by great warriors were hoarded there;
crossbows and bolts; quivers full of arrows; spears; swords, daggers,
maces, shields, and heavy-headed axes. Plates of wrought steel and iron,
to make the gallant horse a monster cased in metal scales; and one
spring-weapon (easy to be carried in the breast) designed to do its
office noiselessly, and made for shooting men with poisoned darts.
One press or case I saw, full of accursed instruments of torture horribly
contrived to cramp, and pinch, and grind and crush men’s bones, and tear
and twist them with the torment of a thousand deaths. Before it, were
two iron helmets, with breast-pieces: made to close up tight and smooth
upon the heads of living sufferers; and fastened on to each, was a small
knob or anvil, where the directing devil could repose his elbow at his
ease, and listen, near the walled-up ear, to the lamentations and
confessions of the wretch within. There was that grim resemblance in
them to the human shape—they were such moulds of sweating faces, pained
and cramped—that it was difficult to think them empty; and terrible
distortions lingering within them, seemed to follow me, when, taking to
my boat again, I rowed off to a kind of garden or public walk in the sea,
where there were grass and trees. But I forgot them when I stood upon
its farthest brink—I stood there, in my dream—and looked, along the
ripple, to the setting sun; before me, in the sky and on the deep, a
crimson flush; and behind me the whole city resolving into streaks of red
and purple, on the water.
In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little heed of
time, and had but little understanding of its flight. But there were
days and nights in it; and when the sun was high, and when the rays of
lamps were crooked in the running water, I was still afloat, I thought:
plashing the slippery walls and houses with the cleavings of the tide, as
my black boat, borne upon it, skimmed along the streets.
Sometimes, alighting at the doors of churches and vast palaces, I
wandered on, from room to room, from aisle to aisle, through labyrinths
of rich altars, ancient monuments; decayed apartments where the
furniture, half awful, half grotesque, was mouldering away. Pictures
were there, replete with such enduring beauty and expression: with such
passion, truth and power: that they seemed so many young and fresh
realities among a host of spectres. I thought these, often intermingled
with the old days of the city: with its beauties, tyrants, captains,
patriots, merchants, counters, priests: nay, with its very stones, and
bricks, and public places; all of which lived again, about me, on the
walls. Then, coming down some marble staircase where the water lapped
and oozed against the lower steps, I passed into my boat again, and went
on in my dream.
Floating down narrow lanes, where carpenters, at work with plane and
chisel in their shops, tossed the light shaving straight upon the water,
where it lay like weed, or ebbed away before me in a tangled heap. Past
open doors, decayed and rotten from long steeping in the wet, through
which some scanty patch of vine shone green and bright, making unusual
shadows on the pavement with its trembling leaves. Past quays and
terraces, where women, gracefully veiled, were passing and repassing, and
where idlers were reclining in the sunshine, on flag-stones and on
flights of steps. Past bridges, where there were idlers too; loitering
and looking over. Below stone balconies, erected at a giddy height,
before the loftiest windows of the loftiest houses. Past plots of
garden, theatres, shrines, prodigious piles of
architecture—Gothic—Saracenic—fanciful with all the fancies of all times
and countries. Past buildings that were high, and low, and black, and
white, and straight, and crooked; mean and grand, crazy and strong.
Twining among a tangled lot of boats and barges, and shooting out at last
into a Grand Canal! There, in the errant fancy of my dream, I saw old
Shylock passing to and fro upon a bridge, all built upon with shops and
humming with the tongues of men; a form I seemed to know for Desdemona’s,
leaned down through a latticed blind to pluck a flower. And, in the
dream, I thought that Shakespeare’s spirit was abroad upon the water
somewhere: stealing through the city.
At night, when two votive lamps burnt before an image of the Virgin, in a
gallery outside the great cathedral, near the roof, I fancied that the
great piazza of the Winged Lion was a blaze of cheerful light, and that
its whole arcade was thronged with people; while crowds were diverting
themselves in splendid coffee-houses opening from it—which were never
shut, I thought, but open all night long. When the bronze giants struck
the hour of midnight on the bell, I thought the life and animation of the
city were all centred here; and as I rowed away, abreast the silent
quays, I only saw them dotted, here and there, with sleeping boatmen
wrapped up in their cloaks, and lying at full length upon the stones.
But close about the quays and churches, palaces and prisons sucking at
their walls, and welling up into the secret places of the town: crept the
water always. Noiseless and watchful: coiled round and round it, in its
many folds, like an old serpent: waiting for the time, I thought, when
people should look down into its depths for any stone of the old city
that had claimed to be its mistress.
Thus it floated me away, until I awoke in the old market-place at Verona.
I have, many and many a time, thought since, of this strange Dream upon
the water: half-wondering if it lie there yet, and if its name be VENICE.
BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE SIMPLON INTO
SWITZERLAND
I HAD been half afraid to go to Verona, lest it should at all put me out
of conceit with Romeo and Juliet. But, I was no sooner come into the old
market-place, than the misgiving vanished. It is so fanciful, quaint,
and picturesque a place, formed by such an extraordinary and rich variety
of fantastic buildings, that there could be nothing better at the core of
even this romantic town: scene of one of the most romantic and beautiful
of stories.
It was natural enough, to go straight from the Market-place, to the House
of the Capulets, now degenerated into a most miserable little inn. Noisy
vetturíni and muddy market-carts were disputing possession of the yard,
which was ankle-deep in dirt, with a brood of splashed and bespattered
geese; and there was a grim-visaged dog, viciously panting in a doorway,
who would certainly have had Romeo by the leg, the moment he put it over
the wall, if he had existed and been at large in those times. The
orchard fell into other hands, and was parted off many years ago; but
there used to be one attached to the house—or at all events there may
have, been,—and the hat (Cappêllo) the ancient cognizance of the family,
may still be seen, carved in stone, over the gateway of the yard. The
geese, the market-carts, their drivers, and the dog, were somewhat in the
way of the story, it must be confessed; and it would have been pleasanter
to have found the house empty, and to have been able to walk through the
disused rooms. But the hat was unspeakably comfortable; and the place
where the garden used to be, hardly less so. Besides, the house is a
distrustful, jealous-looking house as one would desire to see, though of
a very moderate size. So I was quite satisfied with it, as the veritable
mansion of old Capulet, and was correspondingly grateful in my
acknowledgments to an extremely unsentimental middle-aged lady, the
Padrona of the Hotel, who was lounging on the threshold looking at the
geese; and who at least resembled the Capulets in the one particular of
being very great indeed in the ‘Family’ way.
From Juliet’s home, to Juliet’s tomb, is a transition as natural to the
visitor, as to fair Juliet herself, or to the proudest Juliet that ever
has taught the torches to burn bright in any time. So, I went off, with
a guide, to an old, old garden, once belonging to an old, old convent, I
suppose; and being admitted, at a shattered gate, by a bright-eyed woman
who was washing clothes, went down some walks where fresh plants and
young flowers were prettily growing among fragments of old wall, and
ivy-coloured mounds; and was shown a little tank, or water-trough, which
the bright-eyed woman—drying her arms upon her ‘kerchief, called ‘La
tomba di Giulietta la sfortunáta.’ With the best disposition in the
world to believe, I could do no more than believe that the bright-eyed
woman believed; so I gave her that much credit, and her customary fee in
ready money. It was a pleasure, rather than a disappointment, that
Juliet’s resting-place was forgotten. However consolatory it may have
been to Yorick’s Ghost, to hear the feet upon the pavement overhead, and,
twenty times a day, the repetition of his name, it is better for Juliet
to lie out of the track of tourists, and to have no visitors but such as
come to graves in spring-rain, and sweet air, and sunshine.
Pleasant Verona! With its beautiful old palaces, and charming country in
the distance, seen from terrace walks, and stately, balustraded
galleries. With its Roman gates, still spanning the fair street, and
casting, on the sunlight of to-day, the shade of fifteen hundred years
ago. With its marble-fitted churches, lofty towers, rich architecture,
and quaint old quiet thoroughfares, where shouts of Montagues and
Capulets once resounded,
And made Verona’s ancient citizens
Cast by their grave, beseeming ornaments,
To wield old partizans.
With its fast-rushing river, picturesque old bridge, great castle, waving
cypresses, and prospect so delightful, and so cheerful! Pleasant Verona!
In the midst of it, in the Piazza di Brá—a spirit of old time among the
familiar realities of the passing hour—is the great Roman Amphitheatre.
So well preserved, and carefully maintained, that every row of seats is
there, unbroken. Over certain of the arches, the old Roman numerals may
yet be seen; and there are corridors, and staircases, and subterranean
passages for beasts, and winding ways, above ground and below, as when
the fierce thousands hurried in and out, intent upon the bloody shows of
the arena. Nestling in some of the shadows and hollow places of the
walls, now, are smiths with their forges, and a few small dealers of one
kind or other; and there are green weeds, and leaves, and grass, upon the
parapet. But little else is greatly changed.
When I had traversed all about it, with great interest, and had gone up
to the topmost round of seats, and turning from the lovely panorama
closed in by the distant Alps, looked down into the building, it seemed
to lie before me like the inside of a prodigious hat of plaited straw,
with an enormously broad brim and a shallow crown; the plaits being
represented by the four-and-forty rows of seats. The comparison is a
homely and fantastic one, in sober remembrance and on paper, but it was
irresistibly suggested at the moment, nevertheless.
An equestrian troop had been there, a short time before—the same troop, I
dare say, that appeared to the old lady in the church at Modena—and had
scooped out a little ring at one end of the area; where their
performances had taken place, and where the marks of their horses’ feet
were still fresh. I could not but picture to myself, a handful of
spectators gathered together on one or two of the old stone seats, and a
spangled Cavalier being gallant, or a Policinello funny, with the grim
walls looking on. Above all, I thought how strangely those Roman mutes
would gaze upon the favourite comic scene of the travelling English,
where a British nobleman (Lord John), with a very loose stomach: dressed
in a blue-tailed coat down to his heels, bright yellow breeches, and a
white hat: comes abroad, riding double on a rearing horse, with an
English lady (Lady Betsy) in a straw bonnet and green veil, and a red
spencer; and who always carries a gigantic reticule, and a put-up
parasol.
I walked through and through the town all the rest of the day, and could
have walked there until now, I think. In one place, there was a very
pretty modern theatre, where they had just performed the opera (always
popular in Verona) of Romeo and Juliet. In another there was a
collection, under a colonnade, of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan remains,
presided over by an ancient man who might have been an Etruscan relic
himself; for he was not strong enough to open the iron gate, when he had
unlocked it, and had neither voice enough to be audible when he described
the curiosities, nor sight enough to see them: he was so very old. In
another place, there was a gallery of pictures: so abominably bad, that
it was quite delightful to see them mouldering away. But anywhere: in
the churches, among the palaces, in the streets, on the bridge, or down
beside the river: it was always pleasant Verona, and in my remembrance
always will be.
I read Romeo and Juliet in my own room at the inn that night—of course,
no Englishman had ever read it there, before—and set out for Mantua next
day at sunrise, repeating to myself (in the _coupé_ of an omnibus, and
next to the conductor, who was reading the Mysteries of Paris),
There is no world without Verona’s walls
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence-banished is banished from the world,
And world’s exile is death—
which reminded me that Romeo was only banished five-and-twenty miles
after all, and rather disturbed my confidence in his energy and boldness.
Was the way to Mantua as beautiful, in his time, I wonder! Did it wind
through pasture land as green, bright with the same glancing streams, and
dotted with fresh clumps of graceful trees! Those purple mountains lay
on the horizon, then, for certain; and the dresses of these peasant
girls, who wear a great, knobbed, silver pin like an English
‘life-preserver’ through their hair behind, can hardly be much changed.
The hopeful feeling of so bright a morning, and so exquisite a sunrise,
can have been no stranger, even to an exiled lover’s breast; and Mantua
itself must have broken on him in the prospect, with its towers, and
walls, and water, pretty much as on a commonplace and matrimonial
omnibus. He made the same sharp twists and turns, perhaps, over two
rumbling drawbridges; passed through the like long, covered, wooden
bridge; and leaving the marshy water behind, approached the rusty gate of
stagnant Mantua.
If ever a man were suited to his place of residence, and his place of
residence to him, the lean Apothecary and Mantua came together in a
perfect fitness of things. It may have been more stirring then, perhaps.
If so, the Apothecary was a man in advance of his time, and knew what
Mantua would be, in eighteen hundred and forty-four. He fasted much, and
that assisted him in his foreknowledge.
I put up at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, and was in my own room
arranging plans with the brave Courier, when there came a modest little
tap at the door, which opened on an outer gallery surrounding a
court-yard; and an intensely shabby little man looked in, to inquire if
the gentleman would have a Cicerone to show the town. His face was so
very wistful and anxious, in the half-opened doorway, and there was so
much poverty expressed in his faded suit and little pinched hat, and in
the thread-bare worsted glove with which he held it—not expressed the
less, because these were evidently his genteel clothes, hastily slipped
on—that I would as soon have trodden on him as dismissed him. I engaged
him on the instant, and he stepped in directly.
While I finished the discussion in which I was engaged, he stood, beaming
by himself in a corner, making a feint of brushing my hat with his arm.
If his fee had been as many napoleons as it was francs, there could not
have shot over the twilight of his shabbiness such a gleam of sun, as
lighted up the whole man, now that he was hired.
‘Well!’ said I, when I was ready, ‘shall we go out now?’
‘If the gentleman pleases. It is a beautiful day. A little fresh, but
charming; altogether charming. The gentleman will allow me to open the
door. This is the Inn Yard. The court-yard of the Golden Lion! The
gentleman will please to mind his footing on the stairs.’
We were now in the street.
‘This is the street of the Golden Lion. This, the outside of the Golden
Lion. The interesting window up there, on the first Piano, where the
pane of glass is broken, is the window of the gentleman’s chamber!’
Having viewed all these remarkable objects, I inquired if there were much
to see in Mantua.
‘Well! Truly, no. Not much! So, so,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders
apologetically.
‘Many churches?’
‘No. Nearly all suppressed by the French.’
‘Monasteries or convents?’
‘No. The French again! Nearly all suppressed by Napoleon.’
‘Much business?’
‘Very little business.’
‘Many strangers?’
‘Ah Heaven!’
I thought he would have fainted.
‘Then, when we have seen the two large churches yonder, what shall we do
next?’ said I.
He looked up the street, and down the street, and rubbed his chin
timidly; and then said, glancing in my face as if a light had broken on
his mind, yet with a humble appeal to my forbearance that was perfectly
irresistible:
‘We can take a little turn about the town, Signore!’ (Si può far ’un
píccolo gíro della citta).
It was impossible to be anything but delighted with the proposal, so we
set off together in great good-humour. In the relief of his mind, he
opened his heart, and gave up as much of Mantua as a Cicerone could.
‘One must eat,’ he said; ‘but, bah! it was a dull place, without doubt!’
He made as much as possible of the Basilica of Santa Andrea—a noble
church—and of an inclosed portion of the pavement, about which tapers
were burning, and a few people kneeling, and under which is said to be
preserved the Sangreal of the old Romances. This church disposed of, and
another after it (the cathedral of San Pietro), we went to the Museum,
which was shut up. ‘It was all the same,’ he said. ‘Bah! There was not
much inside!’ Then, we went to see the Piazza del Diavolo, built by the
Devil (for no particular purpose) in a single night; then, the Piazza
Virgiliana; then, the statue of Virgil—_our_ Poet, my little friend said,
plucking up a spirit, for the moment, and putting his hat a little on one
side. Then, we went to a dismal sort of farm-yard, by which a
picture-gallery was approached. The moment the gate of this retreat was
opened, some five hundred geese came waddling round us, stretching out
their necks, and clamouring in the most hideous manner, as if they were
ejaculating, ‘Oh! here’s somebody come to see the Pictures! Don’t go up!
Don’t go up!’ While we went up, they waited very quietly about the door
in a crowd, cackling to one another occasionally, in a subdued tone; but
the instant we appeared again, their necks came out like telescopes, and
setting up a great noise, which meant, I have no doubt, ‘What, you would
go, would you! What do you think of it! How do you like it!’ they
attended us to the outer gate, and cast us forth, derisively, into
Mantua.
The geese who saved the Capitol, were, as compared to these, Pork to the
learned Pig. What a gallery it was! I would take their opinion on a
question of art, in preference to the discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Now that we were standing in the street, after being thus ignominiouly
escorted thither, my little friend was plainly reduced to the ‘píccolo
gíro,’ or little circuit of the town, he had formerly proposed. But my
suggestion that we should visit the Palazzo Tè (of which I had heard a
great deal, as a strange wild place) imparted new life to him, and away
we went.
The secret of the length of Midas’s ears, would have been more
extensively known, if that servant of his, who whispered it to the reeds,
had lived in Mantua, where there are reeds and rushes enough to have
published it to all the world. The Palazzo Tè stands in a swamp, among
this sort of vegetation; and is, indeed, as singular a place as I ever
saw.
Not for its dreariness, though it is very dreary. Not for its dampness,
though it is very damp. Nor for its desolate condition, though it is as
desolate and neglected as house can be. But chiefly for the
unaccountable nightmares with which its interior has been decorated
(among other subjects of more delicate execution), by Giulio Romano.
There is a leering Giant over a certain chimney-piece, and there are
dozens of Giants (Titans warring with Jove) on the walls of another room,
so inconceivably ugly and grotesque, that it is marvellous how any man
can have imagined such creatures. In the chamber in which they abound,
these monsters, with swollen faces and cracked cheeks, and every kind of
distortion of look and limb, are depicted as staggering under the weight
of falling buildings, and being overwhelmed in the ruins; upheaving
masses of rock, and burying themselves beneath; vainly striving to
sustain the pillars of heavy roofs that topple down upon their heads;
and, in a word, undergoing and doing every kind of mad and demoniacal
destruction. The figures are immensely large, and exaggerated to the
utmost pitch of uncouthness; the colouring is harsh and disagreeable; and
the whole effect more like (I should imagine) a violent rush of blood to
the head of the spectator, than any real picture set before him by the
hand of an artist. This apoplectic performance was shown by a
sickly-looking woman, whose appearance was referable, I dare say, to the
bad air of the marshes; but it was difficult to help feeling as if she
were too much haunted by the Giants, and they were frightening her to
death, all alone in that exhausted cistern of a Palace, among the reeds
and rushes, with the mists hovering about outside, and stalking round and
round it continually.
Our walk through Mantua showed us, in almost every street, some
suppressed church: now used for a warehouse, now for nothing at all: all
as crazy and dismantled as they could be, short of tumbling down bodily.
The marshy town was so intensely dull and flat, that the dirt upon it
seemed not to have come there in the ordinary course, but to have settled
and mantled on its surface as on standing water. And yet there were some
business-dealings going o
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