I am afraid that the talk of the modern railway traveller, if he is
honest, must be a great deal of the custodians, the vetturini, and the
facchini, whose agreeable acquaintance constitutes his chief knowledge
of the population among which he journeys. We do not nowadays carry
letters recommending us to citizens of the different places. If we
did, consider the calamity we should be to the be-travelled Italian
communities we now bless! No, we buy our through-tickets, and we put
up at the hotels praised in the hand-book, and are very glad of a
little conversation with any native, however adulterated he be by
contact with the world to which we belong. I do not blush to own that
I love the whole rascal race which ministers to our curiosity and
preys upon us, and I am not ashamed to have spoken so often in this
book of the lowly and rapacious but interesting porters who opened to
me the different gates of that great realm of wonders, Italy. I doubt
if they can be much known to the dwellers in the land, though they
are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers; and if I have any
regret in the matter, it is that I did not more diligently study them
when I could. The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs; they are all
but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself, I remember
that years ago when I first visited Cambridge, there was an old man
appeared to me in the character of Genius of the College Grounds, who
showed me all the notable things in our city,--its treasures of art,
its monuments,--and ended by taking me into his wood-house, and sawing
me off from a wind-fallen branch of the Washington Elm a bit of the
sacred wood for a remembrancer. Where now is that old man? He
no longer exists for me, neither he nor his wood-house nor his
dwelling-house. Let me look for a month about the College Grounds, and
I shall not see him. But somewhere in the regions of traveller's faëry
he still lives, and he appears instantly to the new-comer; he has an
understanding with the dryads, who keep him supplied with boughs from
the Washington Elm, and his wood-house is full of them.
Among memorable custodians in Italy was one whom we saw at Pisa, where
we stopped on our way from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma,
and spent an hour in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. The beautiful old
town, which every one knows from the report of travellers, one yet
finds possessed of the incommunicable charm which keeps it forever
novel to the visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad Arno, it
mirrors in the flood architecture almost as fair and noble as that
glassed in the Canalazzo, and its other streets seemed as tranquil
as the canals of Venice. Those over which we drove, on the day of
our visit, were paved with broad flag-stones, and gave out scarcely a
sound under our wheels. It was Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet
the empty and silent city inspired us with no sense of desolation. The
palaces were in perfect repair; the pavements were clean; behind those
windows we felt that there must be a good deal of easy, comfortable
life. It is said that Pisa is one of the few places in Europe where
the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness--everywhere pursued by
Railways--still lingers, and that you find cheap apartments in those
well-preserved old palaces. No doubt it would be worth more to live in
Pisa than it would cost, for the history of the place would alone be
to any reasonable sojourner a perpetual recompense, and a princely
income far exceeding his expenditure. To be sure, the Tower of Famine,
with which we chiefly associate the name of Pisa, has been long razed
to the ground, and built piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but
you may still visit the dead wall which hides from view the place
where it stood; and you may thence drive on, as we did, to the great
Piazza where stands the unrivaledest group of architecture in
the world, after that of St. Mark's Place in Venice. There is the
wonderful Leaning Tower, there is the old and beautiful Duomo,
there is the noble Baptistery, there is the lovely Campo-Santo, and
there--somewhere lurking in portal or behind pillar, and keeping
out an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger--is the much-experienced
cicerone who shows you through the edifices. Yours is the
fourteen-thousandth American family to which he has had the honor of
acting as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfaction in
thus becoming a contribution to statistics.
We entered the Duomo, in our new friend's custody, and we saw the
things which it was well to see. There was mass, or some other
ceremony, transacting; but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as
possible, and there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship
with which travellers view objects of interest. Then we ascended the
Leaning Tower, skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by
an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to the tower's
inclination, but perhaps not receiving a full justification of the
Campanile's appearance in pictures, till we stood at its base, and saw
its vast bulk and height as it seemed to sway and threaten in the
blue sky above our heads. There the sensation was too terrible for
endurance,--even the architectural beauty of the tower could not save
it from being monstrous to us,--and we were glad to hurry away from it
to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the Campo Santo.
Here are the frescos painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and
ready against the time of your arrival in 1864, and you feel that you
are the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade
who peers through her fingers at the shameful condition of deboshed
father Noah, and seems to wink one eye of wicked amusement at you.
Turning afterward to any book written about Italy during the time
specified, you find your impression of exclusive possession of the
frescos erroneous, and your muse naturally despairs, where so many
muses have labored in vain, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo.
Yet it is most worthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched and
traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim cypresses out of the
sainted earth of Jerusalem; and those old paintings, made when Art
was--if ever--a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce
more effectively than their authors conceived the lessons of life and
death; for they are themselves becoming part of the triumphant decay
they represent. If it was awful once to look upon that strange scene
where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly upon three
dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace
of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet more
tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardly discernible in
their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy
bliss. Alas! Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears
and hopes: with dust he wipes out dust, and with decay he blots the
image of decay.
I assure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in
the Campo Santo at Pisa, but have written them out this morning in
Cambridge because there happens to be an east wind blowing. No
one could have been sad in the company of our cheerful and patient
cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth
American family away, still would not go till he had shown us that
monument to a dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo. This is the
mighty chain which the Pisans, in their old wars with the Genoese,
once stretched across the mouth of their harbor to prevent the
entrance of the hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great trouble
carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till 1860, when
Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored
to the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo,
an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient
foes. [I read in Mr. Norton's _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_,
that he saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, "the chains that
marked the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is
of course possible that our cicerone may have employed one of those
chains for the different historical purpose I have mentioned. It would
be a thousand pities, I think, if a monument of that sort should be
limited to the commemoration of one fact only.] It is not a very good
world,--_e pur si muove_.
The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our
guide ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in
reserve his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he
waited till we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures
by Nicolò Pisano before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious
species of howl. While we stood in some amazement at this, the
conscious structure of the dome caught the sound and prolonged it with
a variety and sweetness of which I could not have dreamed. The man
poured out in quick succession his musical wails, and then ceased,
and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in response. There was a
supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I despair of giving
any true idea: they were of such tender and exalted rapture that
we might well have thought them the voices of young-eyed cherubim,
singing as they passed through Paradise over that spot of earth where
we stood. They seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and soothed,
and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and
penitent and humbled.
We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of
which the marvelous echo made eloquence.
"Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had left the building,
"hear such music as that?"
"The papal choir does not equal it," we answered with one voice.
The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he
went on:
"Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the
President? No? Ah, what a fine man! You saw that he had his heart
actually in his hand! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told
him of the Baptistery echo, 'We have the finest echo in the world in
the Hall of Congress.' I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled
a little,--thus! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said he, 'There is no
other echo in the world besides this. You are right.' I am unique,"
pursued the cicerone, "for making this echo. But," he added with
a sigh, "it has been my ruin. The English have put me in all the
guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl twenty times a day. When our
Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the church, the tower, and the
Campo Santo. Says the king, 'Pfui!'"--here the cicerone gave that
sweeping outward motion with both hands by which Italians dismiss a
trifling subject--"'make me the echo!' I was forced," concluded the
cicerone with a strong sense of injury in his tone, "to howl half an
hour without ceasing."