exclamation, "how much we may live in a day." Bologna is unlike any
other city we have ever seen, in a multitude of things. You walk all
over it under arcades, sheltered on either side from the sun, the
elegance and ornament of the lines of pillars depending on the wealth
of the owner of the particular house, but columns and arches, simple
or rich, everywhere. Imagine porticoes built on the front of every
house in Philadelphia or New York, so as to cover the sidewalks
completely, and, down the long perspective of every street, continued
lines of airy Corinthian, or simple Doric pillars, and you may faintly
conceive the impression of the streets of Bologna. With Lord Byron's
desire to forget everything English, I do not wonder at his selection
of this foreign city for a residence, so emphatically unlike, as it
is, to everything else in the world.
We inquired out the gallery after breakfast, and spent two or three
hours among the celebrated master-pieces of the _Carracci_, and the
famous painters of the Bolognese school. The collection is small, but
said to be more choice than any other in Italy. There certainly are
five or six among its forty or fifty gems, that deserve each a
pilgrimage. The pride of the place is the St. Cecilia, by Raphael.
This always beautiful personification of music, a woman of celestial
beauty, stands in the midst of a choir who have been interrupted in
their anthem by a song, issuing from a vision of angels in a cloud
from heaven. They have dropped their instruments, broken, upon the
ground, and are listening with rapt attention, all, except the saint,
with heads dropped upon their bosoms, overcome with the glory of the
revelation. She alone, with her harp hanging loosely from her fingers,
gazes up with the most serene and cloudless rapture beaming from her
countenance, yet with a look of full and angelic comprehension, and
understanding of the melody and its divine meaning. You feel that her
beauty is mortal, for it is all woman; but you see that, for the
moment, the spirit that breathes through, and mingles with the harmony
in the sky, is seraphic and immortal. If there ever was inspiration,
out of holy writ, it touched the pencil of Raphael.
It is tedious to read descriptions of pictures. I liked everything in
the gallery. The Bolognese style of color suits my eye. It is rich
and forcible, without startling or offending. Its delicious mellowness
of color, and vigor and triumphant power of conception, show two
separate triumphs of the art, which in the same hand are delightful.
The pictures of Ludovico Carracci especially fired my admiration. And
Domenichino, who died of a broken heart at Rome, because his
productions were neglected, is a painter who always touches me nearly.
His _Madonna del Rosario_ is crowded with beauty. Such children I
never saw in painting--the very ideals of infantile grace and
innocence. It is said of him, that, after painting his admirable
frescoes in the church of St. Andrew, at Rome, which, at the time,
were ridiculed unsparingly by the artists, he used to walk in on his
return from his studio, and gazing at them with a dejected air, remark
to his friend, that he "could not think they were _quite_ so bad--they
_might_ have been worse." How true it is, that, "the root of a great
name is in the dead body."
Guido's celebrated picture of the "Massacre of the Innocents," hangs
just opposite the St. Cecilia. It is a powerful and painful thing. The
marvel of it to me is the simplicity with which its wonderful effects
are produced, both of expression and color. The kneeling mother in the
foreground, with her dead children before her, is the most intense
representation of agony I ever saw. Yet the face is calm, her eyes
thrown up to heaven, but her lips undistorted, and the muscles of her
face, steeped as they are in suffering, still and natural. It is the
look of a soul overwhelmed--that has ceased to struggle because it is
full. Her gaze is on heaven, and in the abandonment of her limbs, and
the deep, but calm agony of her countenance, you see that nothing
between this and heaven can move her more. One suffers in seeing such
pictures. You go away exhausted, and with feelings harassed and
excited.
As we returned, we passed the gates of the university. On the walls
were pasted a sonnet printed with some flourish, in honor of _Camillo
Rosalpina_, the laureate of one of the academical classes.
We visited several of the churches in the afternoon. The cathedral and
the Duomo are glorious places--both. I wish I could convey, to minds
accustomed to the diminutive size and proportions of our churches in
America, an idea of the enormous and often almost supernatural
grandeur of those in Italy. Aisles in whose distance the figure of a
man is almost lost--pillars, whose bases you walk round in wonder,
stretching into the lofty vaults of the roof, as if they ended in the
sky--arches of gigantic dimensions, mingling and meeting with the fine
tracery of a cobweb--altars piled up on every side with gold, and
marble, and silver--private chapels ornamented with the wealth of
nobles, let into the sides, each large enough for a communion--and
through the whole extent of the interior, an unencumbered breadth of
floor, with here and there a solitary worshipper on his knees, or
prostrated on his face--figures so small in comparison with the
immense dome above them, that it seems as if, could distance drown a
prayer, they were as much lost as if they prayed under the open sky!
Without having even a leaning to the Catholic faith, I love to haunt
their churches, and I am not sure that the religious awe of the
sublime ceremonies and places of worship does not steal upon me daily.
Whenever I am heated, or fatigued, or out of spirits, I go into the
first cathedral, and sit down for an hour. They are always dark, and
cool, and quiet; and the distant tinkling of the bell from some
distant chapel and the grateful odor of the incense, and the low,
just audible murmur of prayer, settles on my feelings like a mist, and
softens and soothes and refreshes me, as nothing else will. The
Italian peasantry who come to the cities to sell or bargain, pass
their noons in these cool places. You see them on their knees asleep
against a pillar, or sitting in a corner, with their heads upon their
bosoms; and, if it were as a place of retreat and silence alone, the
churches are an inestimable blessing to them. It seems to me, that any
sincere Christian, of whatever faith, would find a pleasure in going
into a sacred place and sitting down in the heat of the day, to be
quiet and devotional for an hour. It would promote the objects of any
denomination in our country, I should think, if the churches were thus
left always open.
Under the cathedral of Bologna is a _subterranean confession-chapel_
--as singular and impressive a device as I ever saw. It is dark
like a cellar, the daylight faintly struggling through a painted
window above the altar, and the two solitary wax candles giving
a most ghastly intensity to the gloom. The floor is paved with
tombstones, the inscriptions and death's heads of which you feel under
your feet as you walk through. The roof is so vaulted that every tread
is reverberated endlessly in hollow tones. All around are the
confession-boxes, with the pierced plates, at which the priest within
puts his ear, worn with the lips of penitents, and at one of the sides
is a deep cave, far within which, as in a tomb, lies a representation
on limestone of our Saviour, bleeding as he came from the cross, with
the apostles, made of the same cadaverous material, hanging over him!
We have happened, by a fortunate chance, upon an extraordinary day in
Bologna--a _festa_, that occurs but once in ten years. We went out as
usual after breakfast this morning, and found the city had been
decorated over-night in the most splendid and singular manner. The
arcades of some four or five streets in the centre of the town were
covered with rich crimson damask, the pillars completely bound, and
the arches dressed and festooned with a degree of gorgeousness and
taste as costly as it was magnificent. The streets themselves were
covered with cloths stretched above the second stories of the houses
from one side to the other, keeping off the sun entirely, and making
in each street one long tent of a mile or more, with two lines of
crimson columns at the sides, and festoons of gauze, of different
colors, hung from window to window in every direction. It was by far
the most splendid scene I ever saw. The people were all there in their
gayest dresses, and we probably saw in the course of the day every
woman in Bologna. My friends, the painters, give it the palm for
beauty over all the cities they had seen. There was a grand procession
in the morning, and in the afternoon the bands of the Austrian army
made the round of the decorated streets, playing most delightfully
before the principal houses. In the evening there was an illumination,
and we wandered up and down till midnight through the fairy scene,
almost literally "dazzled and drunk with beauty."
The people of Bologna have a kind of earnest yet haughty courtesy,
very different from that of most of the Italians I have seen. They bow
to the stranger, as he enters the _cafe_; and if they rise before him,
the men raise their hats and the ladies smile and curtsy as they go
out; yet without the least familiarity which could authorize farther
approach to acquaintance. We have found the officers, whom we meet at
the eating-houses, particularly courteous. There is something
delightful in this universal acknowledgment of a stranger's claims on
courtesy and kindness. I could well wish it substituted in our
country, for the surly and selfish manners of people in public-houses
to each other. There is neither loss of dignity nor committal of
acquaintance in such attentions; and the manner in which a gentleman
steps forward to assist you in any difficulty of explanation in a
foreign tongue, or sends the waiter to you if you are neglected, or
hands you the newspaper or his snuff-box, or rises to give you room in
a crowded place, takes away, from me at least, all that painful sense
of solitude and neglect one feels as a stranger in a foreign land.
We go to Ferrara to-morrow, and thence by the Po to Venice. My letter
must close for the present.
LETTER XXXI.
VENICE--THE FESTA--GONDOLIERS--WOMEN--AN ITALIAN SUNSET--THE
LANDING--PRISONS OF THE DUCAL PALACE--THE CELLS DESCRIBED BY
BYRON--APARTMENT IN WHICH PRISONERS WERE STRANGLED--DUNGEONS
UNDER THE CANAL--SECRET GUILLOTINE--STATE CRIMINALS--BRIDGE OF
SIGHS--PASSAGE TO THE INQUISITION AND TO DEATH--CHURCH OF ST.
MARC--A NOBLEMAN IN POVERTY, ETC., ETC.
You will excuse me at present from a description of Venice. It is a
matter not to be hastily undertaken. It has also been already done a
thousand times; and I have just seen a beautiful sketch of it in the
public prints of the United States. I proceed with my letters.
The Venetian _festa_ is a gay affair, as you may imagine. If not so
beautiful and fanciful as the revels by moonlight, it was more
satisfactory, for we could see and be seen, those important
circumstances to one's individual share in the amusement. At four
o'clock in the afternoon, the links of the long bridge of boats across
the Giudecca were cut away, and the broad canal left clear for a mile
up and down. It was covered in a few minutes with gondolas, and all
the gayety and fashion of Venice fell into the broad promenade between
the city and the festal island. I should think five hundred were quite
within the number of gondolas. You can scarcely fancy the novelty and
agreeableness of this singular promenade. It was busy work for the
eyes to the right and left, with the great proportion of beauty, and
the rapid glide of their fairy-like boats. And the _quietness_ of the
thing was so delightful--no crowding, no dust, no noise but the dash
of oars and the ring of merry voices; and we sat so luxuriously upon
our deep cushions the while, threading the busy crowd rapidly and
silently, without a jar or touch of anything but the yielding element
that sustained us.
Two boats soon appeared with wreaths upon their prows, and these had
won the first and second prizes at the last year's _regatta_. The
private gondolas fell away from the middle of the canal, and left them
free space for a trial of their speed. They were the most airy things
I ever saw afloat, about forty feet long, and as slender and light as
they could well be, and hold together. Each boat had six oars, and the
crews stood with their faces to the beak of their craft; slight, but
muscular men, and with a skill and quickness at their oars which I had
never conceived. I realized the truth and the force of Cooper's
inimitable description of the race in the Bravo. The whole of his book
gives you the very air and spirit of Venice, and one thanks him
constantly for the lively interest which he has thrown over everything
in this bewitching city. The races of the rival boats to-day were not
a regular part of the _festa_, and were not regularly contested. The
gondoliers were exhibiting themselves merely, and the people soon
ceased to be interested in them.
We rowed up and down till dark, following here and there the boats
whose freights attracted us, and exclaiming every moment at some new
glimpse of beauty. There is really a surprising proportion of
loveliness in Venice. The women are all large, probably from never
walking, and other indolent habits consequent upon want of exercise;
and an oriental air, sleepy and passionate, is characteristic of the
whole race. One feels that he has come among an entirely new class of
women, and hence, probably, the far-famed fascination of Venice to
foreigners.
The sunset happened to be one of those so peculiar to Italy, and which
are richer and more enchanting in Venice than in any other part of it,
from the character of its scenery. It was a sunset without a cloud;
but at the horizon the sky was dyed of a deep orange, which softened
away toward the zenith almost imperceptibly, the whole west like a
wall of burning gold. The mingled softness and splendor of these skies
is indescribable. Everything is touched with the same hue. A mild,
yellow glow is all over the canals and buildings. The air seems filled
with glittering golden dust, and the lines of the architecture, and
the outlines of the distant islands, and the whole landscape about you
is mellowed and enriched with a new and glorious light. I have seen
one or two such sunsets in America; but there the sunsets are bolder
and clearer, and with much more sublimity--they have rarely the
voluptuous coloring of those in Italy.
It was delightful to glide along over a sea of light so richly tinted,
among those graceful gondolas, with their freights of gayety and
beauty. As the glow on the sky began to fade, they all turned their
prows toward San Marc, and dropping into a slower motion, the whole
procession moved on together to the stairs of the piazzetta; and by
the time the twilight was perceptible, the _cafes_ were crowded, and
the square was like one great _fete_. We passed the evening in
wandering up and down, never for an instant feeling like strangers,
and excited and amused till long after midnight.
After several days' delay, we received an answer this morning from the
authorities, with permission to see the bridge of sighs, and the
prisons of the ducal palace. We landed at the broad stairs, and
passing the desolate court, with its marble pillars and statues green
with damp and neglect, ascended the "giant's steps," and found the
warder waiting for us, with his enormous keys, at the door of a
private passage. At the bottom of a staircase we entered a close
gallery, from which the first range of cells opened. The doors were
broken down, and the guide holding his torch in them for a moment in
passing, showed us the same dismal interior in each--a mere cave, in
which you would hardly think it possible to breathe, with a raised
platform for a bed, and a small hole in the front wall to admit food
and what air could find its way through from the narrow passage. There
were eight of these; and descending another flight of damp steps, we
came to a second range, differing only from the first in their slimy
dampness. These are the cells of which Lord Byron gives a description
in the notes to the fourth canto of Childe Harold. He has transcribed,
if you remember, the inscription from the ceilings and walls of one
which was occupied successively by the victims of the Inquisition. The
letters are cut rudely enough, and must have been done entirely by
feeling, as there is no possibility of the penetration of a ray of
light. I copied them with some difficulty, forgetting that they were
in print, and, comparing them afterward with my copy of Childe Harold,
I found them exactly the same, and I refer you, therefore, to his
notes.
In a range of cells still below these, and almost suffocating from
their closeness, one was shown us in which prisoners were strangled.
The rope was passed through an iron grating of four bars, the
executioner standing outside the cell. The prisoner within sat upon a
stone, with his back to the grating, and the cord was passed round his
neck, and drawn till he was choked. The wall of the cell was covered
with blood, which had spattered against it with some violence. The
guide explained it by saying, that owing to the narrowness of the
passage the executioner had no room to draw the cord, and to expedite
his business his assistant at the same time plunged a dagger into the
neck of the victim. The blood had flowed widely over the wall, and ran
to the floor in streams. With the darkness of the place, the
difficulty I found in breathing, and the frightful reality of the
scenes before me, I never had in my life a comparable sensation of
horror.
At the end of the passage a door was walled up. It led, in the times
of the republic, to dungeons under the canal, in which the prisoner
died in eight days from his incarceration, at the farthest, from the
noisome dampness and unwholesome vapors of the place. The guide gave
us a harrowing description of the swelling of their bodies, and the
various agonies of their slow death. I hurried away from the place
with a sickness at my heart. In returning by the same way I passed the
turning, and stumbled over a raised stone across the passage. It was
the groove of a secret guillotine. Here many of the state and
inquisition victims were put to death in the darkness of a narrow
passage, shut out even in their last moment from the light and breath
of heaven. The frame of the instrument had been taken away; but the
pits in the wall, which had sustained the axe, were still there; and
the sink on the other side, where the head fell, to carry off the
blood. And these shocking executions took place directly before the
cells of the other prisoners, within twenty feet from the farthest. In
a cell close to this guillotine had been confined a state criminal for
sixteen years. He was released at last by the arrival of the French,
and on coming to the light in the square of San Marc was struck blind,
and died in a few days. In another cell we stopped to look at the
attempts of a prisoner upon its walls, interrupted, happily, by his
release. He had sawed several inches into the front wall, with some
miserable instrument, probably a nail. He had afterward abandoned
this, and had, with prodigious strength, taken up a block from the
floor; and, the guide assured us, had descended into the cell below.
It was curious to look around his pent prison, and see the patient
labor of years upon those rough walls, and imagine the workings of the
human mind in such a miserable lapse of existence.
We ascended to the light again, and the guide led us to a massive
door, with two locks, secured by heavy iron bars. It swung open with a
scream, and we mounted a winding stair, and
"Stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs."
Two windows of close grating looked on either side upon the long canal
below, and let in the only light to the covered passage. It is a
gloomy place within, beautifully as its light arch hangs in the air
from without. It was easy to employ the imagination as we stood on the
stone where Childe Harold had stood before us, and conjured up in
fancy the despair and agony that must have been pressed into the last
glance at light and life that had been sent through those barred
windows. Across this bridge the condemned were brought to receive
their sentence in the Chamber of the _Ten_, or to be confronted with
bloody inquisitors, and then were led back over it to die. The last
light that ever gladdened their eyes came through those close bars,
and the gay Giudecca in the distance, with its lively waters covered
with boats, must have made that farewell glance to a Venetian bitter
indeed. The side next the prison is now massively walled up. We
stayed, silently musing at the windows, till the old cicerone ventured
to remind us that his time was precious.
Ordering the gondola round to the stairs of the piazetta, we strolled
for the first time into the church of San Marc. The four famous bronze
horses stood with their dilated nostrils and fine action over the
porch, bringing back to us Andrea Doria, and his threat; and as I
remembered the ruined palace of the old admiral at Genoa, and glanced
at the Austrian soldier upon guard, in the very shadow of the winged
lion, I could not but feel most impressively the moral of the
contrast. The lesson was not attractive enough, however, to keep us in
a burning sun, and we put aside the heavy folds of the drapery and
entered. How deliciously cool are these churches in Italy! We walked
slowly up toward the distant altar. An old man rose from the base of
one of the pillars, and put out his hand for charity. It is an
incident that meets one at every step, and with half a glance at his
face I passed on. I was looking at the rich mosaic on the roof, but
his features lingered in my mind. They grew upon me still more
strongly; and as I became aware of the full expression of misery and
pride upon them, I turned about to see what had become of him. My two
friends had done each the very same thing, with the same feeling of
regret, and were talking of the old man when I came back to them. We
went to the door, and looked all about the square, but he was no where
to be seen. It is singular that he should have made the same
impression upon all of us, of an old Venetian nobleman in poverty.
Slight as my glance was, the noble expression of sadness about his
fine white head and strong features, are still indelible in my memory.
The prophecy which Byron puts into the mouth of the condemned Doge, is
still true in every particular:--
----"When the Hebrew's in thy palaces,
The Hun in thy high places, and the Greek
Walks o'er thy mart, and smiles on it for his;
When _thy patricians beg their bitter bread_," &c.
The church of San Marc is rich to excess, and its splendid mosaic
pavement is sunk into deep pits with age and the yielding foundations
on which its heavy pile is built. Its pictures are not so fine as
those of the other churches of Venice, but its age and historic
associations make it by far the most interesting.
LETTER XXXII.
VENICE--SCENES BY MOONLIGHT--THE CANALS--THE ARMENIAN
ISLAND--THE ISLAND OF THE INSANE--IMPROVEMENTS MADE BY
NAPOLEON--SHADED WALKS--PAVILION AND ARTIFICIAL
HILL--ANTIDOTES TO SADNESS--PARTIES ON THE CANALS--NARROW
STREETS AND SMALL BRIDGES--THE RIALTO--MERCHANTS AND
IDLERS--SHELL-WORK AND JEWELRY--POETRY AND HISTORY--GENERAL
VIEW OF THE CITY--THE FRIULI MOUNTAINS--THE SHORE OF ITALY--A
SILENT PANORAMA--THE ADRIATIC--PROMENADERS AND SITTERS, ETC.