I have already told, in recounting the story of our visit to the
Cimbri, how full of courtship we found the little city of Bassano on
the evening of our arrival there. Bassano is the birthplace of the
painter Jacopo da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to
treat scriptural story as accessory to mere landscape, and who had a
peculiar fondness for painting Entrances into the Ark, for in these he
could indulge without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired
from observation of local customs in his native town. This was
the theory offered by one who had imbibed the spirit of subtile
speculation from Ruskin, and I think it reasonable. At least it does
not conflict with the fact that there is at Bassano a most excellent
gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the works of Jacopo da Ponte,
and his four sons, who are here to be seen to better advantage than
anywhere else. As few strangers visit Bassano, the gallery is little
frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man, who will not
allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown them the
adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you
assure him of your indifference to these scientific _seccature_; he is
deaf and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a
hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when
he came to his last inquiry, "Have the Protestants the same God as the
Catholics?" we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle
the fact for himself.
Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom as we entered we
heard humming over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to
gather from the opening flowers of orthography. When we passed out,
the master gave these poor busy bees an atom of holiday, and they all
swarmed forth together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a
long, lank man, in a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap--exactly
like the schoolmaster in "The Deserted Village." We made a pretense of
asking him our way to somewhere, and went wrong, and came by accident
upon a wide flat space, bare as a brick-yard, beside which was
lettered on a fragment of the old city wall, "Giuoco di Palla." It
was evidently the playground of the whole city, and it gave us a
pleasanter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet conceived, to think
of its entire population playing ball there in the spring afternoons.
We respected Bassano as much for this as for her diligent remembrance
of her illustrious dead, of whom she has very great numbers. It
appeared to us that nearly every other house bore a tablet announcing
that "Here was born," or "Here died," some great or good man of whom
no one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough celebrity in Bassano
to supply the world; but as laurel is a thing that grows anywhere, I
covet rather from Bassano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions
of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where visible, is seen to
be of a pebbly rough-cast, but it is clad almost from the ground
in glossy ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast
shoulders of some giant warrior. The moat beneath is turned into a
lovely promenade bordered by quiet villas, with rococo shepherds and
shepherdesses in marble on their gates; where the wall is built to the
verge of the high ground on which the city stands, there is a swift
descent to the wide valley of the Brenta waving in corn and vines and
tobacco.
We went up the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, to visit the famous
cavern already mentioned, out of which, from the secret heart of the
hill, gushes one of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached
by passing through a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through
a sort of ante-grot, whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling
current through a succession of natural compartments with dome-like
roofs. From the hill overhead hang stalactites of all grotesque and
fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is embroidered with fantastic
designs wrought by the water in the silence and darkness of the
endless night. At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cavern
is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging to the centre of the
pool your attention is drawn to the dome above you, which contracts
into a shaft rising upward to a height as yet unmeasured and even
unpierced by light. From somewhere in its mysterious ascent, an
auroral boy, with a tallow candle, produces a so-called effect of
sunrise, and sheds a sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the
cavern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind creatures of
subterranean waters are to those of waves that laugh and dance above
ground. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy
influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on
the surface of the earth, why do people visit them? I do not know that
this is more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another.
The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives everywhere in this part of
Italy, and near the entrance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the
hill something like the apsis of a church, which is popularly believed
to have been the hiding-place of Cecilia da Baone, one of the many
unhappy wives of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino
family. It is not quite clear when Cecilia should have employed this
as a place of refuge, and it is certain that she was not the wife of
Ecelino da Romano, as the neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ecelino
il Monaco, his father; yet since her name is associated with the grot,
let us have her story, which is curiously illustrative of the life of
the best society in Italy during the thirteenth century. She was the
only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone
and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to the guardianship of
Spinabello da Xendrico. When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello
cast about him to find a suitable husband for her, and it appeared to
him that a match with the son of Tiso du Camposampiero promised
the greatest advantages. Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was
delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon
so important a matter, he confided it for advice to his brother-in-law
and closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. It had just happened that Balbo's
son, Ecelino il Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having
been recently divorced from his first wife, the lovely but light
Speronella; and Balbo falsely went to the greedy guardian of Cecilia,
and offering him better terms than he could hope for from Tiso,
secured Cecilia for his son. At this treachery the Camposampieri were
furious; but they dissembled their anger till the moment of revenge
arrived, when Cecilia's rejected suitor encountering her upon a
journey beyond the protection of her husband, violently dishonored his
successful rival. The unhappy lady returning to Ecelino at Bassano,
recounted her wrong, and was with a horrible injustice repudiated and
sent home, while her husband arranged schemes of vengeance in due time
consummated. Cecilia next married a Venetian noble, and being in
due time divorced, married yet again, and died the mother of a large
family of children.
This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was an _habitué_ of the
caffè in Bassano who could have given some of its particulars from
personal recollection. He was an old and smoothly shaven gentleman, in
a scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we saw every evening in a corner
of the caffè playing solitaire. He talked with no one, saluted no
one. He drank his glasses of water with anisette, and silently played
solitaire. There is no good reason to doubt that he had been doing the
same thing every evening for six hundred years.