Leaving Milan—La Bicocca—Francis the First—Francis Sforza—Black
Bands of Giovanni de’ Medici—Lautrec—An intrigue—Samblançay—The
king prisoner—Samblançay falsely accused—Condemned to be hanged at
Montfaucon—His death deferred till dark, in expectation of the
king’s relenting—His last words resembling Wolsey’s—Lodi—The
Austrians—Imprecations—The serenade—Doubts as to the
road—Piacenza—A thirsty douanier—The cathedral—Alberoni—A
bell-ringer—The Farnese—Pier Luigi’s murder—Statues on the
piazza—Alessandro—His son Ranuccio—His danger in youth—His
escape—His cruelty—His treatment of his son—Borgo St.
Donnino—Maria Louisa—Castel Guelfo—Origin of names of Guelph and
Gibelline—Parma—Madonna in the stable—A lamp serving two
purposes—A procession seeking a criminal—Cambacérès—Ariosto—A
robber’s love of poetry—Correggio—Modena—The countess Matilda—The
Emperor Henry the Fourth—Canossa—Three days unsheltered in the
court-yard—Rubiera—Modena.
1st October.
Having watched torrents falling till eleven they subsided to a mild
rain, under which we started in weariness of San Marco; and about three
leagues from Milan, passed the village of La Bicocca, in whose château
Prospero Colonna had taken up his position when Lautrec, the French
general, was obliged by his Swiss troops to give battle. Francis the
First, who had lately lost Milan, had been obliged to negotiate with
each canton separately,—to distribute bribes and promise pensions,
and, to obtain their aid, to bear with their arrogance. Ten thousand
Swiss passed, in consequence, the Mount St. Bernard in the year 1522,
and with the French and Venetian troops encamped at about two miles
from Milan. The city was ably defended, though Francis Sforza had yet
been unable to re-enter his capital,—and by his chancellor’s order, an
eloquent monk, to arouse the zeal of the Milanese, preached against the
barbarians. The Milan army swelled its ranks with German mercenaries;
that of France obtained an unexpected reinforcement in the person of
Giovanni de’ Medici, who, rendered free by the death of Leo the Tenth,
arrived to profit by the higher pay and greater advantages the service
of France offered him, conducting three thousand foot and two hundred
horse beneath the mourning banners, adopted in memory of the deceased
Pope, giving them the name of Black Bands, which their prowess made so
celebrated. Lautrec had attacked and been obliged to raise the siege of
Pavia. The Swiss troops, in the belief that money, destined for their
pay, was arrived at Arona, implored their general to allow them to
force a passage thither; but Lautrec, aware that the distress of the
imperial army surpassed his own, and having already received entire
companies of deserters from the banner of Prospero Colonna, felt that
delays would best dissipate his army; but the Swiss replied, through
Albert de Stein: “To-morrow pay, or battle; or, after to-morrow,
dismissal: choose between.”
Forced to allow their departure, wanting funds to satisfy them, Lautrec
chose first to give battle. La Bicocca was surrounded by deep ditches,
to the right and left were canals, and behind it a stone bridge.
Defended by artillery and the Spanish harquebuss men, the position was
almost impregnable; yet the eight thousand Swiss insisted on attacking
it in front, while the Marshal of Foix turned the left flank, and
Lautrec the right of the Imperial army. The Swiss, notwithstanding
their bravery, forced back with great carnage, though protected in
their attack by Giovanni de’ Medici and his black bands, made their
retreat in good order. There were yet no uniforms worn, and the troops
were distinguished by the red cross of the Imperials, and the white
cross of France; and Lautrec, to penetrate more easily into Colonna’s
camp, obliged his soldiers to change, for the Italian, their national
colour. The Marshal of Foix, arrived at the bridge, defeated the
Milanese of Francis Sforza, and, supported, might have gained the
battle; but the impatient Swiss retreated in discomfiture ere yet he
had time to arrive, and Prospero Colonna, informed of Lautrec’s
stratagem, easily recognised the spurious red crosses from those of his
own soldiers, who wore, by his order, each a green branch as plume to
his helmet. The Swiss infantry, still unpaid, and having lost in this
unfortunate affair three thousand men, retired across the frontier.
Lautrec, anxious to justify himself in the eyes of Francis the First,
to tell him, with his own mouth, that to hold the Milanese territory
with men-at-arms left eighteen months without pay, and unsatisfied and
mutinous Swiss, was impossible, yielded the command, for a time, to the
Marshal of Foix, his brother, and hastened to the royal presence,
accompanied by two domestics only. The king refused him an audience;
but protected by the constable of Bourbon, he obtained one ere long,
and to the demand of Francis—“How can you justify my losses and your
conduct?” he made the simple reply: “Sire, by the lack of sums to pay
your armies.” It became evident, that of the three hundred thousand
crowns promised by the Surintendant des Finances, Samblançay, none had
reached him.
The king, surprised, summoned his minister, who acknowledged that the
sums, which were in truth destined for the troops in Italy, had been
demanded by, and remitted to the king’s mother, Louisa, duchess of
Angoulême. In his anger Francis reproached the duchess bitterly with
the loss of Milan, but the princess replied, that the monies received
from Samblançay were but a debt he owed her, as she had placed in his
hands funds proceeding from her revenues, and the fruit of her economy.
The Surintendant’s assurances to the contrary, his known character for
probity, and his habits of life, which kept him apart from all court
intrigues or passions, convinced the king, who was so attached to him
as to have contracted the habit of calling him “Father.” He
distinguished the innocent from the guilty; he said, “While we betray
ourselves, Fortune favours us in vain.” Samblançay remained in place,
but his fall was decided on by his enemy, the Chancellor Duprat, and
the Duchess Louisa of Angoulême, whom either avarice or her known
hatred to Lautrec, or these feelings united, had moved to such base
conduct.
In 1525, when Francis was about to quit France to reconquer his duchy
of Milan, Samblançay was required and dared refuse to advance the sums
needful, alleging that three hundred thousand crowns were already due
to him. He gave in his accounts, proved the truth of his assertions,
and lost place and favour. Francis departed; Louisa of Angoulême, once
more regent of the kingdom, made use of her power to crush Samblançay.
It was said that her receipt, signed by her hand, was abstracted by her
agent from among his papers, while one of his own clerks was brought
forward to accuse, of fraud and peculation, the most honest man of his
time. The king, who in the interval had, in February, 1525, lost the
battle of Pavia, and, conducted prisoner to Spain, been detained there
prisoner till January, 1526, at the close of the latter year, with
sorrow consented to his minister’s seclusion in the Bastille. His
vindictive mother craved that he should be brought to trial, and the
Chancellor Duprat presented, for the king’s signature, a list he held
ready of judges, who, chosen from the various parliaments of the
kingdom, were either placed by himself or devoted to him as having
shared in the profits of confiscations pronounced according to his
desire. The accused was interrogated, and Duprat, aware that by delay
and chicanery he could best blind the multitude, under various
pretexts, so lengthened the proceedings, that they filled four years.
On the 9th of August, 1527, he was condemned to be hanged at
Montfaucon, and on the 12th of the same month, conducted on foot from
the Bastille thither, passing through the Rue St. Denis, where, in
conformity to an ancient ceremony, criminals on their way to execution
were made stop at a monastery, and swallow there a glass of wine and
three crusts of bread, and kiss an old wooden crucifix preserved within
it. Samblançay submitted to this odious custom without a murmur; but,
arrived at the foot of the gibbet on which he was to die, he begged
that the hour of his death might be deferred, still clinging to the
belief that a pardon would arrive, and that the king, who had so loved
him, could not allow his suffering ignominiously in his old age.
Maillard, the lieutenant criminel, deferred the execution till darkness
succeeded the long summer day, and, not till all hope of the king’s
pity had departed, bade his prisoner make his last prayer. Samblançay
was calm and courageous. “It seemed,” said his contemporary, Marot,
“that himself was the judge and Maillard the condemned.” He exclaimed
only as he ascended the fatal ladder, “Would I had served God as I have
served the king!”
The road from Milan to Lodi would be melancholy even without the
recollection, that to the defeat of La Bicocca is bound the fate of
poor Samblançay,—the long straight road traversing a marshy flat with
a wet ditch on either side, dignified by the Milanese with the name of
rivers. Approaching Lodi, the face of the country is made gay by rich
pastures, for the meadows which surround it produce all the cheese
called Parmesan, only because the inhabitants of Parma first made a
trade of its exportation. Our passport examined again, as carefully as
on leaving Milan, we rode to La Posta through a town cleaner and
prettier than usual: the old innkeeper, at first exorbitant in his
demands, accepting the less startling prices we offered, but reminding
me of Shylock as he left the room, repeating, “what was in the
bond,”—dinner, tea, breakfast,—and adding, “Poco, poco, pochissimo,”
till we lost the sound of his step and voice in the corridor. We were
hardly installed, when there arrived an Austrian officer with an
orderly to take possession of the stables for an early hour to-morrow
morning, as a regiment will pass through, coming from Bresciano to join
the camp.
I was amused by the expression of hatred to the Germans in the faces of
their subjects, and the contrast between the fair, quiet, but
determined-looking officer issuing his peremptory command, and the
supple Italian, with his dark eyes and ferocious features, who received
it, and the moment his back was turned, raised his clenched hand to
invoke imprecations on the _Tedeschi_. “Accidenti in fiume, accidenti
per viaggio, accidenti ad ogni cavallo che stia in questa scuderia,”
till his master came out to soothe his ire by threatening to turn him
away, and then he gave it vent by beating a poor white goat, the pet of
the sick child.
As we had left behind rain and fog, we walked during the lovely evening
to the Pont de Lodi over the Adda, here broad and rapid. The same
wooden bridge exists which the Austrians (repulsed and driven back by
Bonaparte) crossed to Lodi, whither the latter followed in haste to
prevent its being broken by their pioneers.
Our guide mentioned with satisfaction the number of Tedeschi drowned in
the Adda. It flows between flat shores, and derived beauty when we saw
it only from a cloudless sunset, and the trees which fringe its banks,
and were reflected in its clear water. At night, sleeping with windows
open, as the heat was extreme, we were wakened by the first serenade
which had greeted us in Italy; the performers had splendid voices, and
sang in parts. The words of each stanza I could not distinguish, but
the burthen of each was—
“Son venuti, son venuti, cavalcando, cavalcando;”
and, whether the compliment was in burlesque or earnest, I have never
heard street music which so pleased me before. An hour or two after,
the two Austrian officers, who had preceded their comrades, and
occupied a room near ours, were serenaded also by a fine military band,
so that our rest was disturbed by sweet sounds almost through the whole
night, and we set off early to make room for the Tedeschi.
2nd October. Lodi to Piacenza.
A prettier and more shaded road through a country, almost entirely
pasture-land, and resembling the mildest parts of England. The little
wine they produce is much valued, but the chief supply comes from
Piedmont. We passed at Casal Pusterlengo the route which turns off to
Cremona, but, unfortunately, no one being in sight just then, we were
uncertain as to whether our instincts led right or wrong, and the
distance to the frontier seeming longer than it had been described, we
began to fear the necessity of turning back, beneath a sun whose heat
was intense to painfulness. A few carters passed us with their horses,
but I have learned to ask questions with discrimination, for the brutal
incivility of the common Italians I have never seen equalled. They
shout their disapprobation of our mode of travelling, their energy
seeming to expend itself in “sound and fury, signifying nothing;” drive
on us their cart-horses or oxen, or at least act like a waggoner we
came up with yesterday, and whom I requested to allow me room to pass
on the side where Fanny, who, to his amusement, was starting violently,
would be in no danger of arriving with me at the bottom of a twenty
feet deep ditch. He told me to manage as well as I could, as he did not
intend to move an inch. At last, fearing we might ride to Cremona, we
stopped at a cabin door in one of the dirty villages on our way. My
question was not very politely answered, and the whole family exclaimed
in chorus that we were wrong, and must turn back; perhaps in ignorance,
though I think in mischief, and, as I thought so then, we hesitated,
and a post-boy coming up with his horses, (a person always civil to
strangers, who may employ him,) desired us to ride on, as a few minutes
would bring us to the frontier.
This proving true, our passport was examined at the Cà Rossa, and we
were on the territory of the Archduchess Maria Louisa. The heat was
intense, and they detained us some time under the sun; the oxen,
dragging their waggon-loads of grapes, passed us by; and before the
village doors the men with their soiled and sunburned feet were
treading the wine-press as we had seen them doing in the fields also.
At last, Piacenza was in sight; the dark red city rising on the broad
plain beyond the broad Pô, with the one stone arch, the relic of a
Roman bridge, standing in its centre, on the deposit of sand and
stones; and the two bridges of boats which we were to cross, and which
should be a relic also, being extremely unsafe, the boats small, and
the decaying planks they sustain a succession of hill and dale, over
which our horses feared to advance. The toll is five sous per steed,
which, considering its state, is sufficient.
Having ridden in safety, but some dread, across this uneven and
trembling bridge, we left our passport at the gate, and the douaniers
came smilingly forward. “What is in this valise?” “Linen.” “And in
this?” “Linen also; will you look at it?”
The douanier smiled, and shook his head, but made an almost
imperceptible sign of thirst, and D—— gave a silver coin to satisfy
it. There is a frankness about this conduct which is exceedingly
agreeable. One is sure of giving in the right place, and without
offence, and also of saving trouble at small cost, for it happened that
the only change we possessed was an Austrian lira, which, translated,
means seventeen sous, three centimes; and though we were almost ashamed
to offer it, it seemed to content the custom-house officer perfectly.
The sombre streets of this saddest of towns led us to San Marco, an inn
neither good nor bad, though certainly better than its Milan namesake,
and having fine rooms and broad staircase, which common cleanliness
would make objects of admiration. Our sleeping chamber with its dome is
of such elegant form that I should like to transport it afar, but
spoiled with gaudy frescoes on wall and ceiling, by dirty floor, and
ragged furniture. The eating room, a noble hall, with a range of
pillars down its centre, and hung round with paintings for sale—some
few good, several curious; luxury and poverty, dirt and elegance,
everywhere blended—even in the yard, which is an abomination, yet
where a coved trellis-work forms a roof which a splendid vine covers
with its thick leaves, making the loveliest of ceilings.
We walked to the cathedral—a dark red heavy building, built almost
entirely of brick, with one high tower; an open gallery surmounting its
façade, which exhibits, one above the other, three ranges of porticoes,
the pillars of the lowest and central one springing from the loins of
guardian lions. Within, above the principal entrance, is some curious
carving. The church is large without being handsome; two thirds of the
roof, glaring with fresh whitewash, contrast with the dark grey
columns. The choir has its frescoes still; and there is a subterranean
church which we admired—sombre and solemn, its arched roof sustained
by numerous pillars, as light and elegant as those above are massive.
We were driven from the cathedral by two or three guides, who, next to
beggars, persecute strangers in Italy, following with a pertinacity
which defies repulse, forcing on you a new version of history, and
concluding each sentence by saying, with extended hand, “Le sue buone
grazie.”
In the cathedral, the famous Cardinal Alberoni (born at the village of
Firenzuola, which we shall pass through on our way, and a gardener’s
son) was clerk and bell-ringer. An open piazza surrounds the square,
which we left in search of the citadel, once the palace and stronghold
of Pier Luigi Farnese, who, invested with the duchy in the year 1545,
by his father Pope Paul the Third, built for his defence what proved
his tomb. Notwithstanding Paul’s affection for him, he was a man
stained with all vices, and capable of all crimes. The nobility of his
new states, who under the ecclesiastical sway had enjoyed great
independence, were bowed to the rank of vassals; and, making his laws
retrospective in their severity, (while he deprived them of arms,
limited their privileges, and forced them to reside within his city and
power,) he commanded a strict investigation of their past conduct, and
punished its derelictions with heavy fines or confiscation of property,
exercising the same tyranny of which he had given proof when five years
before he had been sent by the pope to subdue his revolted province of
Perugino, the birthplace of Raphael’s master; for having reduced it to
obedience, he devastated its territory, and put its chief citizens to
the most cruel deaths. The nobles of Placentia, roused to desperation,
at last conspired against him, demanding and obtaining the aid of
Ferdinand of Gonzagua, who detested Farnese also. It is said that a man
celebrated for divination of the future presented himself before Pier
Luigi to warn him of his fate, desiring him to examine one of his own
coins struck at Parma, as thereupon, and contained in the same word, he
would find the initials of the conspirators’ names and the destined
place of his assassination. The prophecy was little attended to at the
time, but it was afterwards observed, that as Plac—— signified
Placentia, it also contained the initials of Pallavicini, Landi,
Anguissola, and Confalonieri. On the 10th of September, 1547, between
thirty and forty conspirators, in peaceful garb, but with concealed
arms, arrived at the palace as if to pay their court to Farnese, who,
an old man before his time, lay in his sick chamber, incapable of
defence or exertion. While they guarded the approaches, and prevented
succour, Anguissola sought it and stabbed him. Apprized of his death by
the firing of two cannon, agreed on as a signal, Ferdinand of Gonzagua
despatched to Placentia a reinforcement of troops, and followed himself
to take possession in the emperor’s name.
It is said that they flung the corpse from the balcony into the piazza,
and guide-books aver the balcony is still shown; but of the windows of
the still unfinished exterior, which bears the ciphers of Pier Luigi
and his successor, and look on the square, not one opens on a balcony.
The inner courts are invisible to strangers, the citadel being
converted to a barrack, and the other side of the edifice looks on
gardens. A washerwoman, whose door stood open, allowed me to obtain a
view of it by entering her dirty territory, after we had made a long
and vain tour, for the purpose, among hot stone walls and ill-scented
alleys.
The old municipal palace, built in the thirteenth century, with its
quaint architecture, dark and imposing, forms one side of the place
which contains the two equestrian statues in bronze, and of colossal
size, of Alessandro and Ranuccio Farnese.
Opposite is the Palazzo del Governo, where, forming part of an effaced
inscription, I could distinguish the word Napoleone. Beneath the
arcades of the first fortress-looking palace, and around the pedestals
of the duke’s statues, were grouped the market-women, with their heaps
of fruit and baskets of flowers, as if they were offerings to
propitiate the stern warriors who frown above on their battle-steeds.
Engraved on each pedestal is an inscription, equally flattering, though
deserved differently.
Alessandro, brought up at the court of Philip the Second of Spain, soon
distinguished by his brilliant courage and military talent, became,
after the decease of Duke John of Austria, governor of the Netherlands,
and profiting by the religious dissensions there, won over to Spain
almost all the resident catholics. The United Provinces had called to
defend them the Duke of Anjou, brother of Henry the Third of France.
Alessandro, whose triumphs had continued almost uninterruptedly,
receiving news of the loss of his father Octavio, and become by this
event Duke of Parma and Placentia, solicited of the Spanish court
permission to return and take possession of his sovereignty. Philip
refusing the leave he asked, he prosecuted, with unabated success, the
war in Flanders, till that in France came to create a diversion. At the
sieges of Paris and Rouen the prince of Parma was opposed to Henry the
Fourth, and returning from the latter, he was wounded in the arm before
Caudebec, and died at Arras of the consequences of this neglected
injury, having never seen again the province of which he had become
master.
His son Ranuccio was his lieutenant in Flanders when he expired: though
he had shown courage in battle, he inherited none of his father’s
heroic qualities. In his early youth in Rome his life had been in
danger of closing violently. Pope Sixtus the Fifth, informed, that,
despite his severe order against concealed arms, young Ranuccio
secretly carried pistols, commanded his arrest, and it took place as he
entered the halls of the pontifical palace to seek an audience. The
Cardinal Farnese, his uncle, craved his liberation on the instant, but
in vain. Returning at nightfall to the presence of his holiness, he
renewed his solicitations even more earnestly. At ten o’clock the
inflexible pope sent to the castle of St. Angelo his mandate for the
young man’s execution. Unacquainted with the subject of the message,
the cardinal continued to implore, and at eleven obtained from the hand
of Sixtus a second order,—bearing that, on its receipt, Ranuccio
Farnese should be set free. Provided with this last, the cardinal
arrived breathless at the castle of St. Angelo, where, to his
astonishment and terror, he found his young relative kneeling before
his confessor, and heard that the execution had been deferred only on
his instant prayer for more time to reconcile himself with God. Whether
the pope had intended merely to terrify his prisoner to future
obedience, or whether he thought, in the hour which had elapsed, his
first command must have been fulfilled, the cardinal did not wait to
inquire, and the governor yielding up Ranuccio in the belief that
Sixtus had been softened, he forced him to depart from the papal states
without delay. Reigning as duke in Parma, Ranuccio strove to inspire
his subjects with fear of him, and aroused, instead, their hatred. When
apprised of the discontent of the nobles, he feigned belief in a
wide-spreading conspiracy, seized on the representatives of the first
families of his duchy, and rid himself of their future opposition by
secret trials and the block, while he dragged to the gibbet their
adherents and vassals.
An even darker trait in Ranuccio’s life is his capricious cruelty
towards an illegitimate son, named Octavio, whose noble and brilliant
qualities had won for him the love of all ranks in his father’s duchy.
The duke of Parma had espoused the niece of Pope Clement the Eighth,
Margaret Aldobrandini. His unfounded hatred to a wife who, on her side,
could not love one whose severe and sombre exterior fitly accompanied a
distrustful and avaricious disposition, long kept them separated, and
Ranuccio during this time named Octavio his heir. As the youth grew up,
he became daily and deservedly more popular, changing his father’s
favour to fear and hatred, till, having heirs by his wife Margaret, he
pretended a fear that the disappointed prince might interfere to put
his brothers aside; seized on his person, and commanded that he should
be immured in the fearful prison of La Rochetta at Parma, where he
dragged through a few wretched years, and died mysteriously. His
father, unjust and ferocious as he was, yet came to a peaceful end,
leaving the dukedom to the second of Margaret’s sons, as the eldest
proved deaf and dumb.
On our return from the Palazzo Pubblico, we passed the church of San
Pietro, with its monastery attached to itself, and its convent on the
opposite side of the street; the blank wall of the first facing the
latter’s windows, barred, grated, and wired, like a prison or a
mad-house, with precaution which seems excessive where the entrance is
voluntary. On the whole, though we made the tour of all the other
churches we found open, and wandered till we were weary among the
desolate streets, the day we passed at Placentia seemed a long one.
When night closed in, the silent town awoke, and parties walked up and
down, singing with most enchanting voices: it is a pleasure peculiar to
Italy.
4th October.
Left Placentia for Borgo San Donnino, issuing by the old gate and
ruined fortifications. Piacenza received her name, in days of yore,
from her pleasant environs,—now so changed that she requires new
baptism: for the country, rich and flat, through which our broad,
straight road passes, is interesting only where the vintagers are
employed, and would be bare of trees but for those planted to receive
the vines. Here and there we found shade from the sun under a pollarded
oak, growing by the road-side, with the fruit and the festoons of light
green hanging among its dark branches; far away we could distinguish
the Apennines, but too distant to give boldness or beauty. At the
entrance of Borgo St. Donnino is its quaint old church, guarded without
by a strange assemblage of saints, beasts, and nondescript figures; and
before arriving at the Angelo, which is at the extremity of the little
town, we passed two fine establishments for mendicity, male and female,
once a jesuits’ monastery. The Angelo is the cleanest inn, and kept by
the most honest people we have had the fortune to find since crossing
the frontier, the good woman, who lost her husband a year since, and
the head waiter, who has lost an eye, vying with each other in
civility, and proud of their beds and cookery: still as it rained
pitilessly from our coming till night, we were reminded that travelling
is a melancholy pleasure as we looked round the large desert rooms,
examined over and over their vile frescoes, and were glad to talk to
the waiter, and to hear his comments on Maria Louisa, and how with the
higher classes of her subjects she is no longer popular since the
movement which followed 1830, rousing their desire to be French rather
than Austrians; but adored by the poor, to whom she is the kindest of
sovereigns, and who feel her charity. The hospitals, good roads, and
fine bridges of her small states, give proof of her care, and, saving
three months spent yearly at Vienna, her whole time is passed in her
duchy.
The violence of the rain prevented our visiting the ancient church and
its curious tomb of the town’s patron, Saint Donnino, who was an
officer of the Emperor Maximilian, and, having offended his lord by
becoming Christian, fled hither, and was here beheaded in the year 304.
Alberoni’s first step to fortune was the place of chaplain to the
bishop of St. Donnino.
The rain ceased, and we left the quiet inn, taking the long, straight,
muddy road to Parma, passing, ere reaching the latter, the fine old
castle of Guelfo, a part of which is a complete ruin, and the remainder
with its ivied walls and square battlemented towers half concealed
among old trees, though close to the road, forms a fine residence for
the grand chambellan of Maria Louisa, whose family resides there
throughout the year. You know that it was built by the Guelfo faction,
in opposition to Castel Gibello, which lies between Parma and
Placentia, though not on the road we have travelled. These fatal
rallying words were first employed in 1140, at the battle of Winsburg,
between Conrad the Third, the emperor, and Guelph the Sixth of Bavaria.
A castle, which had been the nursery of the dukes of Swabia, was called
Gibellin, and the Christian name of Guelph had long been one of
predilection in the house of Bavaria. The latter sought the pope’s
alliance. Even when the political animosity between them had died away,
old affections and old hatreds continued to spring up in gratitude or
in vengeance for benefits and injuries received by either’s ancestors.
From Guelph the First, of Bavaria, sprang the house which gave monarchs
to England.
Beyond Castel Guelfo, we crossed the fine bridge, which seems of
endless length, commenced by Napoleon, and finished by Maria Louisa,
across the desolate and desolating Taro, which, now shrunken and still,
winds through its winter-bed, like a rivulet in a desert, and, shortly
after, arrived at Parma, built on the river of the same name, which we
traversed two or three times as we rode to the Paone, whither we had
been recommended, and which, though a bad inn, we bear with patiently,
as its owners are civil, and stabling excellent: for, under present
circumstances, our own lodging is not that held first in importance. A
portrait of the Santa Madonna hangs against the wall at the lower end
of the stable,—the lamp, which burns before it, serving the double
purpose of doing her honour and lighting the mangers.
The rain returned in torrents, not to be braved; and the windows of our
dirty rooms command a view of only a small portion of the square. As I
leaned out, looking at a dirty café just opposite, and in our own
alley, and a yawning Italian woman, with her dark neck bare, as usual,
enjoying, with her two elbows on a cushion, the “dolce far niente,”
which so chafed ourselves, there passed beneath a long procession,
headed by a few priests, and composed of men, who wore, over their
usual dress, a species of friar’s cloak and cape of oilskin, with a
silver badge, resembling a coffin plate, hung to the left side. They
went silently along under the pouring rain, a bareheaded Capucin
walking beside the last, and a crowd following. I asked a servant who
they might be. They belonged, he said, some being clerical, some
laymen, to the brotherhood of La Buona Morte, and were on their way to
visit a criminal condemned the next morning to die. He was guilty, the
waiter said, of a “brutto delitto,” and the story was, indeed, one
exhibiting the unrestrained passions which are the heritage and curse
of Italy.
He was a peasant thirty years of age, married to a wife of five and
twenty, to whom he had been long attached, and father of an infant but
a few weeks old. In the course of this summer he unhappily became
acquainted with another and a depraved woman, but whom he determined to
marry, and his resolution irrevocably formed, he returned home and from
her presence one evening, deliberately sawed his wife’s head from her
body with a pruning-knife; took measures for her burial which he
believed would prevent discovery, and went from her corpse to her old
father to mourn with him for her early death.
We shall leave at daybreak, and probably make no stay at Modena, as we
return by the same road, when I will satisfy my own curiosity, and any
you may feel likewise.
You know the anecdote of Cambacérès, told by Montgaillard. “On the 11th
of April, 1814, he put down his liveries and imperial representation,
and in a spirit of legitimacy, justice and humility, which cannot be
sufficiently praised, signed a deed of renunciation to the title of
Prince of Parma in presence of a notary! and remitted this deed to the
Austrian cabinet, so that the Empress Maria Louisa and the court of
Vienna will, on this head, have nothing to fear!!”
At the village of St. Ilario, at which we arrived after crossing a long
narrow bridge over the Enza, is the frontier. We were detained some
time, but the duke’s doganieri are the first and only who have a touch
of modesty about them, for they do not stretch forth the hand for coin.
Fed our horses at dirty Reggio, Ariosto’s birthplace; the poor noble,
the unsuccessful lawyer; the great but ill-recompensed poet, to whose
Orlando Furioso the Cardinal Ippolito d’Este said, “Master Louis,
whence gathered you together such fooleries?” but better appreciated by
the wild robber chief Pacchione, when Ariosto (sent by Duke Alfonso to
purge the mountainous district of Garfagnana of the lawless bands who
infested it, and having so legislated as to succeed, and in a brief
space of time to bow or soothe the turbulent to submission) was passing
on horseback, and with six or seven domestics only, along a narrow
pass, when at a sudden turn, and grouped in the shadow, he perceived a
number of men of suspicious appearance, and hurried by, knowing his
party’s inability to cope with theirs. The chief of the band, however,
who watched him go past, arrested his last follower by the bridle, and
inquired the name of the nobleman. The domestic replying “Ariosto,”
armed as he was, he joined the charger at a bound, and the poet checked
him suddenly, uncertain as to the motive of his haste and the action
which might follow.
The robber doffed his cap and bowed respectfully, asking pardon for
having failed to salute him on his passage as being then unacquainted
with the person of one whose fame was familiar to him, and having made
him the most polite offers, took his leave.
It was Ariosto, who, endowed with genius, not with fortune, engraved
over his small house the inscription:—
SMALL DWELLING SUITED TO ME, OBNOXIOUS TO NONE, IN
NO RESPECT MEAN, RAISED AT MINE OWN COST.
and who replied to the question, why he who, in his Orlando, could so
well describe splendid palaces with porticoed courts and marble halls,
had built a dwelling so humble? “It is easier to gather together words
than stones.”
On our left hand (the road conducting thither following the course of
the torrent Crossolo, which washes one side of the town) is the village
of Correggio, the birthplace and the home of Allegri, to whom it has
given a name which is not to die—the man who it is said had no master:
who studied nature in her grandeur and her grace; of whom a modern
writer has observed that his love of childhood, his study of its anger,
its joys and tears, so exact that he was wont to stop to sketch in his
walks the groups he met at play, gave him in its representation such
purity of conception, such brilliancy and delicacy of touch, that he
seemed to paint with the breath, while over his female forms there is
diffused a divinity, a celestial grace, belonging to beings of a higher
order, as if he had painted in prophecy. Never rich, ill paid for his
mighty works, having received but about £20 and his food during the six
months his labour lasted for the chef d’œuvre of his life, the St.
Jeronimo, he proceeded one day of 1534 to Parma to solicit that the
remainder of a sum due for the frescoes of the cupola of the cathedral
might be paid him, and received there £8 in copper money. Impatient to
bear it to his family at Correggio, he started on foot to carry it
thither, arrived heated and exhausted by the enormous weight, was
seized with acute fever and died at forty.
The appearance of the little city of Modena is most prepossessing,
regularly built and clean, with wide streets and handsome buildings, a
pleasant impression increased by the magnificent rooms and extreme
civility of our inn San Marco.
With Modena is connected much historical interest. The famous Countess
Matilda, the church’s most pious benefactress, and the pope’s most
attached adherent, was its sovereign in 1054, and in her strong castle
of Canossa near Reggio, she received Pope Gregory the Seventh, yielding
to him her powerful protection on the news that Henry the Fourth of
Germany, the excommunicated emperor, was on his way to seek a personal
interview with the pontiff, preferring so to do to awaiting the
decision of his holiness the following year at the diet-general of the
empire to be invoked at Augsburg for the purpose of his ban or
absolution. There exists a village of the same name, where the
impregnable fortress of Matilda arose at that time. The princes of the
empire had obliged the unfortunate Henry to consent to abjure the marks
of his rank as well as its power; to enter into no church, which, as a
man condemned by the church, his presence might sully; and to travel
without suite or dignity till such time as his fate should be decided.
Feeling that in the assembly of Augsburg that decision would be fatal,
notwithstanding the danger of traversing the Alps at that season
(Christmas), Henry the Fourth departed for Italy, accompanied by his
empress, and by Prince Conrad, then a boy, and who, in after days, was
to raise the standard of revolt against the father, whom Henry, his
second and best beloved son, was also, when most trusted, to betray,
usurp his empire, and imprison his person, and finally refuse to it the
rites of burial. The emperor arrived at Canossa, and presented himself
at the first gate, for the fortress was surrounded by a triple wall,
and the ground then covered with snow. He was allowed to wait a long
time and alone; the few who attended him being forbidden to approach;
and the gate being at last opened to him, he was wholly at the mercy of
his enemies, a consideration which did not subdue his courage or change
his purpose, for it is said of him, that in the sixty-six battles he
had fought, he had always, save when betrayed, come off victorious.
Admitted within the second court-yard of Canossa, he was bidden to put
off his shoes and the royal robes which he wore, assuming in their
stead a plain woollen tunic; and the monarch having obeyed, he was
allowed to remain in this court three days, though in the month of
January and in the Appennines, exposed to the severity of the weather,
and receiving food only late at night, as if forgotten by the proud
pontiff. The fourth morning Matilda interceded, and Gregory the Seventh
allowed himself to be softened, admitted the emperor to kiss his holy
foot, and gave him absolution on such humiliating terms, that they were
shortly after broken through, and Henry excommunicated once more.
Nicholas of Este, duke of Modena and Ferrara about 1400, was the
injured husband who beheaded Parisina; and Alfonso of Este, whose reign
commenced in 1505, was married to Lucretia Borgia, of infamous memory.
It was his brother the Cardinal Ippolito who was Ariosto’s unworthy
patron. Rival in a love-affair of his natural brother Don Giulio,
Ippolito heard its object, who was a lady of Ferrara, praise the beauty
of Don Giulio’s eyes, having preferred him for her lover. As his
brother returned from a hunting party, he was surrounded by assassins
guided to meet him by this unnatural relative, and the eyes, whose
lustre the fair lady of Ferrara had praised, torn from their sockets in
his presence.
Before arriving at Modena, and on the river Secchia, we rode through
the wretched town, and beneath the strong stern towers of the fortress
of Rubiera, within whose walls died Ottobon Terzi, who, from a
condottiere, striving to rise to be an independent sovereign, seized
successively on Parma, Reggio, and Modena, pillaged Placentia, beheaded
sixty-five citizens of Parma, but at last, desirous of peace, as the
Marquis of Este opposed to him the brave Attendolo Sforza, consented to
a conference at Rubiera. The chief and the noble arrived, each followed
by a few chosen knights, and among those of the latter was Attendolo.
Excited by sudden passion, or perhaps obeying a command unworthy of
him, in the midst of the peaceful discourse Sforza sprang forward and
stabbed Ottobon Terzi. Those who accompanied him fled, and the corpse
(transported thither and mutilated by the people’s fury) was dragged
through the streets of Modena.
So much for the striking traits of her history, we shall know her
features better on our return; for here, as at Parma, it has rained the
livelong day, and we leave early to-morrow. It is the first time since
I arrived on Italian ground, that the comfort of an inn has made me
wish to stop for repose.