Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of the hill on which
the village was stretched asleep in the tender sunshine, there was on
either side of the road a stream of living water. There was no other
barrier than this between the road and the fields (unless the vines
swinging from tree to tree formed a barrier), and, as if in graceful
excuse for the interposition of even these slender streams, Nature
had lavished such growth of wild flowers and wild berries on the banks
that it was like a garden avenue, through the fragrance and beauty of
which we rolled, delighted to silence, almost to sadness.
When we began to climb the hill to Arquà, and the driver stopped to
breathe his horse, I got out and finished the easy ascent on foot. The
great marvel to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on
which, turning back, I feasted my vision, should be there yet, and
always. It had the rare and saddening beauty of evanescence, and awoke
in me the memory of all beautiful scenery, so that I embroidered the
landscape with the silver threads of western streams, and bordered it
with Ohio hills. Ohio hills? When I looked again it was the storied
Euganean group. But what trans-oceanic bird, voyaging hither, dropped
from its mouth the blackberry which took root and grew and blossomed
and ripened, that I might taste Home in it on these classic hills?
I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road from his house just
above? I figured him coming to meet me with his book in his hand, in
his reverend poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that curious
kind of bandaging which he seems to have been fond of--looking, in a
word, for all the world like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures.
Drawing nearer, I discerned the apparition to be a robeless, laureless
lout, who belonged at the village inn. Yet this lout, though not
Petrarch, had merits. His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from
his knees down, had the tone of the richest bronze; he wore a mountain
cap with a long tasseled fall to the back of it; his face was comely
and his eye beautiful; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing
that a colt or young bullock could not have been better company. He
merely offered to guide us to Petrarch's house, and was silent, except
when spoken to, from that instant.
I am here tempted to say: Arquà is in the figure of a man stretched
upon the hill slope. The head, which is Petrarch's house, rests upon
the summit. The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in one
direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter. It is a very lank
and shambling figure, without elegance or much proportion, and the
attitude is the last wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout
up the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in the general
likeness of a street. World-old stone cottages crouch on either side;
here and there is a more ambitious house in decay; trees wave over
the street, and down its distance comes an occasional donkey-cart very
musically and leisurely. By all odds, Arquà and its kind of villages
are to be preferred to those hamlets of the plain which in Italy cling
to the white-hot highway without a tree to shelter them, and bake and
burn there in the merciless sun. Their houses of stuccoed stone are
crowded as thickly together as city houses, and these wretched little
villages do their worst to unite the discomforts of town and country
with a success dreadful to think of. In all countries villages are
hateful to the heart of civilized man. In the Lombard plains I wonder
that one stone of them rests upon another.
We reached Petrarch's house before the custodian had arrived to admit
us, and stood before the high stone wall which shuts in the front of
the house, and quite hides it from those without. This wall bears
the inscription, _Casa Petrarca_, and a marble tablet lettered to the
following effect:--
SE TI AGITA
SACRO AMORE DI PATRIA,
T'INCHINA A QUESTE MURA
OVE SPIRÒ LA GRAND' ANIMA,
IL CANTOR DEI SCIPIONI
E DI LAURA.
Which may be translated: "If thou art stirred by love of country,
bow to these walls, whence passed the great soul, the singer of the
Scipios and of Laura."
Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the youths of Arquà, who
had kindly attended our progress in gradually increasing numbers from
the moment we had entered the village. They were dear little girls and
boys, and mountain babies, all with sunburnt faces and the gentle and
the winning ways native to this race, which Nature loves better than
us of the North. The blonde pilgrim seemed to please them, and they
evidently took us for _Tedeschi_. You learn to submit to this fate
in Northern Italy, however ungracefully, for it is the one that
constantly befalls you outside of the greatest cities. The people know
about two varieties of foreigners--the Englishman and the German. If,
therefore, you have not _rosbif_ expressed in every lineament of your
countenance; if the soles of your boots are less than an inch thick,
and your clothes are not reduced in color to the invariable and
maddening tone of the English tweed,--you must resign yourself to be
a German. All this is grievous to the soul which loves to spread its
eagle in every land and to be known as American, with star-spangled
conspicuousness all over the world: but it cannot be helped. I vainly
tried to explain the geographical, political, and natural difference
between Tedeschi and Americani to the custodian of Petrarch's house.
She listened with amiability, shrugged her shoulders hopelessly, and
said, in her rude Venetian, "_Mi no so miga_" (I don't know at all).
Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celebrity of a poet on the
spot where he lived and died,--on his very hearthstone, as it were.
So I asked the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting his weight
from one foot to the other,--
"When did Petrarch live here?"
"Ah! I don't remember him."
"Who was he?"
"A poet, signor."
Certainly the first response was not encouraging, but the last
revealed that even to the heavy and clouded soul of this lout the
divine fame of the poet had penetrated--and he a lout in the village
where Petrarch lived and ought to be first forgotten. He did not
know when Petrarch had lived there,--a year ago, perhaps, or many
centuries,--but he knew that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of
doubt was lifted from my spirit, and I responded cheerfully to
some observations on the weather offered by a rustic matron who was
pitching manure on the little hill-slope near the house. When, at
last, the custodian came and opened the gate to us, we entered a
little grassy yard from which a flight of steps led to Petrarch's
door. A few flowers grew wild among the grass, and a fig-tree leaned
its boughs against the wall. The figs on it were green, though they
hung ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arquà. Some ivy clung
to the stones, and from this and the fig-tree, as we came away, we
plucked memorial leaves, and blended them with flowers which the youth
of Arquà picked and forced upon us for remembrance.
A quaint old door opened into the little stone house, and admitted us
to a kind of wide passage-way with rooms on either side; and at the
end opposite to which we entered, another door opened upon a balcony.
From this balcony we looked down on Petrarch's garden, which,
presently speaking, is but a narrow space with more fruit than flowers
in it. Did Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden? For me I
should better have liked a chair on the balcony, with the further and
lovelier prospect on every hand of village-roofs, sloping hills all
gray with olives, and the broad, blue Lombard plain, sweeping from
heaven to heaven below.
The walls of the passage-way are frescoed (now very faintly) in
illustration of the loves of Petrarch and Laura, with verses from the
sonnets inscribed to explain the illustrations. In all these Laura
prevails as a lady of a singularly long waist and stiff movements, and
Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily in his hand, contemplates
the flower in mingled botany and toothache. There is occasionally a
startling literalness in the way the painter has rendered some of
the verses. I remember with peculiar interest the illustration of a
lachrymose passage concerning a river of tears, wherein the weeping
Petrarch, stretched beneath a tree, had already started a small creek
of tears, which was rapidly swelling to a flood with the torrent from
his eyes. I attribute these frescos to a later date than that of the
poet's residence, but the portrait over the door of the bedroom inside
of the chamber, was of his own time, and taken from him--the custodian
said. As it seemed to look like all the Petrarchian portraits, I did
not remark it closely, but rather turned my attention to the walls of
the chamber, which were thickly over-scribbled with names. They were
nearly all Italian, and none English so far as I saw. This passion for
allying one's self to the great, by inscribing one's name on places
hallowed by them, is certainly very odd; and (I reflected as I added
our names to the rest) it is, without doubt, the most impertinent and
idiotic custom in the world. People have thus written themselves down,
to the contempt of sensible futurity, all over Petrarch's house.
The custodian insisted that the bedroom was just as in the poet's
time; some rooms beyond it had been restored; the kitchen at its
side was also repaired. Crossing the passage-way, we now entered the
dining-room, which was comparatively large and lofty, with a mighty
and generous fire-place at one end, occupying the whole space left by
a balcony-window. The floor was paved with tiles, and the window-panes
were round and small, and set in lead--like the floors and
window-panes of all the other rooms. A gaudy fresco, representing some
indelicate female deity, adorned the front of the fire-place, which
sloped expanding from the ceiling and terminated at the mouth without
a mantel-piece. The chimney was deep, and told of the cold winters
in the hills, of which, afterward, the landlady of the village inn
prattled less eloquently.
From this dining-room opens, to the right, the door of the room which
they call Petrarch's library; and above the door, set in a marble
frame, with a glass before it, is all that is mortal of Petrarch's
cat, except the hair. Whether or not the fur was found incompatible
with the process of embalming, and therefore removed, or whether it
has slowly dropped away with the lapse of centuries, I do not know;
but it is certain the cat is now quite hairless, and has the effect
of a wash-leather invention in the likeness of a young lamb. On the
marble slab below there is a Latin inscription, said to be by the
great poet himself, declaring this cat to have been "second only
to Laura." We may, therefore, believe its virtues to have been rare
enough; and cannot well figure to ourselves Petrarch sitting before
that wide-mouthed fire-place, without beholding also the gifted cat
that purrs softly at his feet and nestles on his knees, or, with
thickened tail and lifted back, parades, loftily round his chair in
the haughty and disdainful manner of cats.
In the library, protected against the predatory enthusiasm of visitors
by a heavy wire netting, are the desk and chair of Petrarch, which I
know of no form of words to describe perfectly. The front of the
desk is of a kind of mosaic in cubes of wood, most of which have been
carried away. The chair is wide-armed and carved, but the bottom is
gone, and it has been rudely repaired. The custodian said Petrarch
died in this chair while he sat writing at his desk in the little nook
lighted by a single window opening on the left from his library. He
loved to sit there. As I entered I found he had stepped out for a
moment, but I know he returned directly after I withdrew.
On one wall of the library (which is a simple oblong room, in nowise
remarkable) was a copy of verses in a frame, by Cesarotti, and on the
wall opposite a tribute from Alfieri, both _manu propriâ_. Over and
above these are many other scribblings; and hanging over the door of
the poet's little nook was a criminal French lithograph likeness of
"Pétrarque" when young.
Alfieri's verses are written in ink on the wall, while those of
Cesarotti are on paper, and framed, I do not remember any reference to
his visit to Petrarch's house in Alfieri's autobiography, though the
visit must have taken place in 1783, when he sojourned at Padua, and
"made the acquaintance of the celebrated Cesarotti, with whose lively
and courteous manners he was no less satisfied than he had always been
in reading his (Cesarotti's) most masterly version of 'Ossian.'" It is
probable that the friends visited the house together. At any rate,
I care to believe that while Cesarotti sat "composing" his tribute
comfortably at the table, Alfieri's impetuous soul was lifting his
tall body on tiptoe to scrawl its inspirations on the plastering.
Do you care, gentle reader, to be reminded that just before this visit
Alfieri had heard in Venice of the "peace between England and the
United Colonies," and that he then and there "wrote the fifth ode of
the 'America Libera,'" and thus finished that poem?
After copying these verses we returned to the dining-room, and while
one pilgrim strayed idly through the names in the visitor's book,
the other sketched Petrarch's cat, before mentioned, and Petrarch's
inkstand of bronze--a graceful little thing, having a cover surmounted
by a roguish cupid, while the lower part is supported on three lion's
claws, and just above the feet, at either of the three corners, is an
exquisite little female bust and head. Thus sketching and idling,
we held spell-bound our friends the youth of Arquà, as well as our
driver, who, having brought innumerable people to see the house of
Petrarch, now for the first time, with great astonishment, beheld the
inside of it himself.
As to the authenticity of the house I think there can be no doubt, and
as to the genuineness of the relics there, nothing in the world could
shake my faith in them, though Muratori certainly characterizes them
as "superstitions." The great poet was sixty-five years old when he
came to rest at Arquà, and when, in his own pathetic words, "there
remained to him only to consider and to desire how to make a good
end." He says further, at the close of his autobiography: "In one of
the Euganean hills, near to ten miles from the city of Padua, I have
built me a house, small but pleasant and decent, in the midst of
slopes clothed with vines and olives, abundantly sufficient for a
family not large and discreet. Here I lead my life, and although, as I
have said, infirm of body, yet tranquil of mind, without excitements,
without distractions, without cares, reading always, and writing and
praising God, and thanking God as well for evil as for good; which
evil, if I err not, is trial merely and not punishment. And all the
while I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my life, and
have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even forget my youthful sins;
wherefore, in this solitude, no words are so sweet to my lips as
these of the psalm: '_Delicta juventutis meoe, et ignorantias meas ne
memineris_.' And with every feeling of the heart I pray God, when it
please Him, to bridle my thoughts, so long unstable and erring; and
as they have vainly wandered to many things, to turn them all to
Him--only true, certain, immutable Good."
I venerate the house at Arquà because these sweet and solemn words
were written in it. We left its revered shelter (after taking a final
look from the balcony down upon "the slopes clothed with vines and
olives") and returned to the lower village, where, in the court of the
little church, we saw the tomb of Petrarch--"an ark of red stone, upon
four columns likewise of marble." The epitaph is this:--
"Frigida Francisci lapis hic tegit ossa Petrarcae;
Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam; sate Virgine, parce
Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce."
A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. The housekeeper of the
parish priest, who ran out to enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me
a wild local tradition of an attempt on the part of the Florentines
to steal the bones of Petrarch away from Arquà, in proof of which
she showed me a block of marble set into the ark, whence she said a
fragment had been removed by the Florentines. This local tradition I
afterwards found verified, with names and dates, in a little "Life of
Petrarch," by F. Leoni, published at Padua in 1843. It appears that
this curious attempt of the Florentines to do doubtful honor to the
great citizen whose hereditary civic rights they restored too late
(about the time he was drawing nigh his "good end" at Arquà), was made
for them by a certain monk of Portagruaro named Tommaso Martinelli. He
had a general instruction from his employers to bring away from Arquà
"any important thing of Petrarch's" that he could; and it occurred to
this ill-advised friar to "move his bones." He succeeded on a night of
the year 1630 in stealing the dead poet's arm. The theft being at once
discovered, the Venetian Republic rested not till the thief was also
discovered; but what became of the arm or of the sacrilegious monk
neither the Signor Leoni nor the old women of Arquà give any account.
The Republic removed the rest of Petrarch's body, which is now said to
be in the Royal Museum of Madrid.
I was willing to know more of this quaint village of Arquà, and I rang
at the parish priest's door to beg of him some account of the place,
if any were printed. But already at one o'clock he had gone to bed for
a nap, and must on no account be roused till four. It is but a quiet
life men lead in Arquà, and their souls are in drowsy hands. The
amount of sleep which this good man gives himself (if he goes to bed
at 9 P.M. and rises at 9 A.M., with a nap of three hours during the
day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a good digestion, and uneventful
days. As I turned this notion over in my mind, my longing to behold
his reverence increased, that I might read life at Arquà in the smooth
curves of his well-padded countenance. I thought it must be that
his "bowels of compassion were well-rounded," and, making sure of
absolution, I was half-minded, if I got speech with him, to improve
the occasion by confessing one or two of my blackest sins.
Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a second visit to Arquà,
I succeeded in finding this excellent ecclesiastic wide awake at two
o'clock in the afternoon, and that he granted me an interview at that
hour? Justice to him, I think, demands this admission of me. He was
not at all a fat priest, as I had prefigured him, but rather of a
spare person, and of a brisk and lively manner. At the village inn,
after listening half an hour to a discourse on nothing but white wine
from a young priest, who had stopped to drink a glass of it, I was
put in the way of seeing the priest of Arquà by the former's courtesy.
Happily enough, his reverence chanced to have the very thing I wanted
to see--no other than Leoni's "Life of Petrarch," to which I have
already referred. Courtesy is the blood in an Italian's veins, and I
need not say that the ecclesiastic of Arquà, seeing my interest in
the place, was very polite and obliging. But he continued to sleep
throughout our first stay in Arquà, and I did not see him then.
I strolled up and down the lazy, rambling streets, and chiefly devoted
myself to watching the young women who were washing clothes at the
stream running from the "Fountain of Petrarch." Their arms and legs
were bronzed and bare, and they chattered and laughed gayly at their
work. Their wash-tubs were formed by a long marble conduit from the
fountain; their wash-boards, by the inward-sloping conduit-sides; and
they thrashed and beat the garments clean upon the smooth stone. To
a girl, their waists were broad and their ankles thick. Above their
foreheads the hair was cut short, and their "back hair" was gathered
into a mass, and held together by converging circle of silver pins.
The Piazza della Fontana, in Arquà, is a place some fifty feet in
length and breadth, and seems to be a favorite place of public resort.
In the evening, doubtless, it is alive with gossipers, as now with
workers. It may be that then his reverence, risen from his nap,
saunters by, and pauses long enough to chuck a pretty girl under the
chin or pinch an urchin's cheek.
Our dinner was ready by the time I got back to the inn, and we sat
down to a chicken stewed in oil and a stoup of the white wine of
Arquà. It was a modest feast, but, being a friend to oil, I found it
savory, and the wine was both good and strong. While we lingered
over the repast we speculated somewhat carelessly whether Arquà had
retained among its simplicities the primitive Italian cheapness of
which you read much. When our landlord leaned over the table and made
out our account on it with a bit of chalk, the bill was as follows:--
Soldi.
Chicken 70
Bread 8
Wine 20
--
Total 98
It surely was not a costly dinner, yet I could have bought the same
chicken in Venice for half the money; which is but another proof that
the demand of the producer is often much larger than the supply of
the consumer, and that to buy poultry cheaply you must not purchase it
where raised,--
..."On misty mountain ground,
Its own vast shadow glory crowned,"--
but rather in a large city after it has been transported forty miles
or more. Not that we begrudged the thrifty inn-keeper his fee. We paid
it cheerfully, as well for his own sake as for that of his pleasant
and neat little wife, who kept the whole inn so sweet and clean; and
we bade them a most cordial farewell as we drove away from their door.