I
We never would have seen the place if the idea had not beguiled us, at
Trent, of driving through the Dolomites to Bassano. And I doubt whether
we would have been so extravagant about it if we had not just come
from Germany. Is any quiver quite like that with which the returning
victim of Italy greets his first cypress, his first olive tree, his
first campanile? We formed imperishable ties with our _irredentista_
driver, chiefly because he told us that the inhabitants of his dark
little mountain city had turned the back of their statue of Dante to
the North. Moreover it was May; and I should perhaps confess that we
were too recently married to be altogether responsible. So when we
discovered the castle that afternoon as we jingled down the widening
gorge of the Val Sugana, we agreed that a princess must be shut up
in the tower. Whereupon, as if in confirmation of our insight, an
invisible dragon suddenly made himself heard behind the walls.
Otherwise there was no sign of habitation about the place. The rusty
wrought-iron gate through which we stopped to look, the weed-checkered
flagging within, the ruinous little chapel half averted from us at
the right, the cracked and discoloured shafts outlining the court, the
gaunt old pile of dark stone with its machicolated tower, formed a
picture of abandonment which the dog’s barking made a trifle uncanny.
But severe and even formidable as the castle was, in spite of its
neglect, it had the nobility of perfect proportion. It was not so much
a castle, indeed, as a castellated villa. The great arched windows of
the façade were scarcely of a period when Ezzelino da Romano scoured
these valleys o’ nights. Neither were the quarterfoils piercing the
parapet of the roof. I remember how exquisite the spring sky looked
through them, and between the square merlons of the tower. That element
of contrast, taken with all the other circumstances, gave the structure
a curious intensity of expression. There was something tragic in the
way it lifted itself against the light.
It was part of the effect, and of the incredible richness of Italy,
that our friend the driver could tell us nothing about the place. It
was merely a _castello qualunque_! Yet how little was it a _castello
qualunque_ we began to learn not long after we had started on, skirting
the wall that hid the princess’s dragon until her castle suddenly
revealed itself to us, at a turn of the road, under a second and more
romantic aspect. And this in spite of the fact that nothing more
romantic than a few strands of barbed wire closed what must once have
been the state entrance. Of course we stopped again--to look at the
semicircular recess in the wall, with its lichened stone seats and
couchant lions. Between them opened an avenue, I don’t know how many
hundred yards long, of cypresses I don’t know how many hundred years
old, that marched and dipped and rose again with such an air to the
steps of a balustrated terrace in front of the castle! This fairy
arcade, jewel-green with moss as if no one had trodden it for a century
and cross-lighted by a westering sun, seemed to lead to some palace of
enchantment rather than to the melancholy place we just had passed. So
different a face did the villa turn to us now, with a loggia lightening
its upper story and the Alps spreading a veil of magic behind it,
that even the tower lost its grimness in the golden air. We therefore
changed our minds about the princess. We decided that she was lying
asleep there as a princess should, waiting for her prince.