Even those streets or buildings that are free from the Risorgimento are
pitted with records or statues. Padua records with equal pride how Dante
had his exile sweetened by the hospitality of Carrara da Giotto, and how
Giovanni Prati, the singer of to-day, lived in the Via del Santo. Verona
celebrates impartially Catullus and some minor poet whose name I forget,
if I ever knew it, “who by making sweet verses obtained a fame more than
Italian.” Ferrara has a positive leprosy of white plaques. Bassano is
not a great city, but “there is enough celebrity in Bassano,” writes Mr.
Howells, “to supply the whole world.” Things were apparently not always
thus; for when Childe Harold went on his pilgrimage he demanded to know
where Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were buried.
“Are they resolved to dust,
And have their country’s marbles naught to say?
Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust?”
Could her quarries possibly furnish forth one _more_ bust, was the
question that came to me on my later pilgrimage. Too much to say have
their country’s marbles. No poet could lodge a night at a house but for
all time his visit must be graven; every local lawyer or engineer is
become a world-wonder; it is recorded where “the inventor of the
perpetual electric motor” died; even an assassination must be
eternalised in a tablet. As for a room in which conspirators met to
smoke and plot, it is for ever glorified and sanctified.