It would be pleasant and merciful, I think, if old towns, after having
served a certain number of centuries for the use and pride of men,
could be released to a gentle, unmolested decay. I, for my part, would
like to have the ducal cities of North Italy, such as Mantua, Modena,
Parma, and Ferrara, locked up quietly within their walls, and left to
crumble and totter and fall, without any harder presence to vex them
in their decrepitude than that of some gray custodian, who should come
to the gate with clanking keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if
he gave signs of a reverent sympathy, to look for a little while upon
the reserved and dignified desolation. It is a shame to tempt these
sad old cities into unnatural activity, when they long ago made their
peace with the world, and would fain be mixing their weary brick
and mortar with the earth's unbuilded dust; and it is hard for the
emotional traveller to restrain his sense of outrage at finding them
inhabited, and their rest broken by sounds of toil, traffic, and
idleness; at seeing places that would gladly have had done with
history still doomed to be parts of political systems, to read the
newspapers, and to expose railway guides and caricatures of the Pope
and of Napoleon in their shop windows.
Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a living nation against
her will, and I therefore marveled the more that she had become a
portion of the present kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had
its day long before ours; it had been a republic, and then subject to
lords; and then, its lords becoming dukes, it had led a life of gayety
and glory till its fall, and given the world such names and memories
as had fairly won it the right to rest forever from making history.
Its individual existence ended with that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when
the Pope declared it reverted to the Holy See; and I always fancied
that it must have received with a spectral, yet courtly kind of
surprise, those rights of man which bloody-handed France distributed
to the Italian cities in 1796; that it must have experienced a ghostly
bewilderment in its rapid transformation, thereafter, under Napoleon,
into part of the Cispadan Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the
Italian Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and that it must have sunk
back again under the rule of the Popes with gratitude and relief at
last--as phantoms are reputed to be glad when released from haunting
the world where they once dwelt. I speak of all this, not so much from
actual knowledge of facts as from personal feeling; for it seems to
me that if I were a city of the past, and must be inhabited at all,
I should choose just such priestly domination, assured that though
it consumed my substance, yet it would be well for my fame and final
repose. I should like to feel that my old churches were safe from
demolition: that my old convents and monasteries should always shelter
the pious indolence of friars and nuns. It would be pleasant to have
studious monks exploring quaint corners of my unphilosophized annals,
and gentle, snuff-taking abbés writing up episodes in the history of
my noble families, and dedicating them to the present heirs of past
renown; while the thinker and the reviewer should never penetrate
my archives. Being myself done with war, I should be glad to have my
people exempt, as they are under the Pope, from military service; and
I should hope that if the Legates taxed them, the taxes paid would be
as so many masses said to get my soul out of the purgatory of perished
capitals. Finally, I should trust that in the sanctified keeping of
the Legates my mortal part would rest as sweetly as bones laid in
hallowed earth brought from Jerusalem; and that under their serene
protection I should be forever secure from being in any way exhumed
and utilized by the ruthless hand of Progress.
However, as I said, this is a mere personal preference, and other old
cities might feel differently. Indeed, though disposed to condole with
Ferrara upon the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, I
could not deny, on better acquaintance with her, that she was still
almost entirely of the past. She has certainly missed that ideal
perfection of non-existence under the Popes which I have just
depicted, but she is practically almost as profoundly at rest under
the King of Italy. One may walk long through the longitude and
rectitude of many of her streets without the encounter of a single
face: the place, as a whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii,
where there are always strangers; perhaps the only cities in the world
worthy to compete with Ferrara in point of agreeable solitude are
Mantua and Herculaneum. It is the newer part of the town--the modern
quarter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was known--which is
loneliest; and whatever motion and cheerfulness are still felt in
Ferrara linger fondly about the ancient holds of life--about the
street before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and narrower
streets branching away from the piazza of the Duomo, where, on market
days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult. In the Ghetto we were almost
crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with an enterprise
that contrasted strangely with shopkeeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed,
surprise at the presence of strangers spending two days in Ferrara
when they could have got away sooner, was the only emotion which the
whole population agreed in expressing with any degree of energy, but
into this they seemed to throw their whole vitality. The Italians are
everywhere an artless race, so far as concerns the gratification of
their curiosity, from which no consideration of decency deters them.
Here in Ferrara they turned about and followed us with their eyes,
came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us at street-corners, and
openly and audibly debated whether we were English or German. We might
have thought this interest a tribute to something peculiar in our
dress or manner, had it not visibly attended other strangers who
arrived with us. It rose almost into a frenzy of craving to know more
of us all, when on the third day the whole city assembled before our
hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry, the departure
of the heavy-laden omnibus which bore us and our luggage from their
midst.