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!’