I have already described the road between Florence and Bologna. I found
it much the same on returning; for barren rocks and mountains undergo
little alteration either in summer or winter. Indeed, of the two, I
prefer the effect in the most dreary season, for it is then most
complete and consistent with itself: on some kinds of scenery, as on
some characters, any attempt at the gay and pleasing sits ill, and is a
mere piece of affectation. There is so far a distinction between the
Apennines and Alps, that the latter are often covered with woods, and
with patches of the richest verdure, and are capable of all the gloom of
winter or the bloom of spring. The soil of the Apennines, on the
contrary, is as dry and _gritty_ as the rocks themselves, being nothing
but a collection of sand-heaps and ashes, and mocks at every idea that
is not of a repulsive and disagreeable kind. We stopped the first night
at Traversa, a miserable inn or almost hovel on the road side, in the
most desolate part of this track; and found amidst scenes, which the
imagination and the pen of travellers have peopled with ghastly phantoms
and the assassin’s midnight revelry, a kind but simple reception, and
the greatest sweetness of manners, prompted by the wish, but conscious
of being perhaps without the means to please. Courtesy in cities or
palaces goes for little, means little, for it may and must be put on; in
the cottage or on the mountain-side it is welcome to the heart, for it
comes from it. It then has its root in unsophisticated nature, without
the gloss of art, and shews us the original goodness of the soil or
germ, from which human affections and social intercourse in all their
ramifications spring. A little boy clung about its mother, wondering at
the strangers; but from the very thoughts of novelty and distance,
nestling more fondly in the bosom of home. What is the map of Europe,
what all the glories of it, what the possession of them, to that poor
little fellow’s dream, to his sidelong glance at that wide world of
fancy that circles his native rocks!
The second morning, we reached the last of the Apennines that overlook
Bologna, and saw stretched out beneath our feet a different scene, the
vast plain of Lombardy, and almost the whole of the North of Italy, like
a rich sea of boundless verdure, with towns and villas spotting it like
the sails of ships. A hazy inlet of the Adriatic appeared to the right
(probably the Gulph of Comachio). We strained our eyes in vain to catch
a doubtful view of the Alps, but they were still sunk below the horizon.
We presently descended into this plain (which formed a perfect contrast
to the country we had lately passed), and it answered fully to the
promise it had given us. We travelled for days, for weeks through it,
and found nothing but ripeness, plenty, and beauty. It may well be
called the Garden of Italy or of the World. The whole way from Bologna
to Venice, from Venice to Milan, it is literally so. But I
anticipate.—We went to our old inn at Bologna, which we liked better the
second time than the first; and had just time to snatch a glimpse of the
Guidos and Domenichinos at the Academy, which gleamed dark and beautiful
through the twilight. We set out early the next morning on our way to
Venice, turning off to Ferrara. It was a fine spring morning. The dew
was on the grass, and shone like diamonds in the sun. A refreshing
breeze fanned the light-green odorous branches of the trees, which
spread their shady screen on each side of the road, which lay before us
as straight as an arrow for miles. Venice was at the end of it; Padua,
Ferrara, midway. The prospect (both to the sense and to the imagination)
was exhilarating; and we enjoyed it for some hours, till we stopped to
breakfast at a smart-looking detached inn at a turning of the road,
called, I think, the _Albergo di Venezia_. This was one of the
pleasantest places we came to during the whole of our route. We were
shewn into a long saloon, into which the sun shone at one extremity, and
we looked out upon the green fields and trees at the other. There were
flowers in the room. An excellent breakfast of coffee, bread, butter,
eggs, and slices of Bologna sausages was served up with neatness and
attention. An elderly female, thin, without a cap, and with white
thread-stockings, watched at the door of a chamber not far from us, with
the patience of an eastern slave. The door opened, and a white robe was
handed out, which she aired carefully over a chaffing-dish with
mechanical indifference, and an infinite reduplication of the same
folds. It was our young landlady who was dressing for church within, and
who at length issued out, more remarkable for the correctness of her
costume than the beauty of her person. Some rustics below were playing
at a game, that from the incessant loud jarring noises of counting that
accompanied it, implied equally good lungs and nerves in the performers
and by-standers. At the tinkling of a village bell, all was in a moment
silent, and the entrance of a little chapel was crowded with old and
young, kneeling in postures of more or less earnest devotion. We walked
forward, delighted with the appearance of the country, and with the
simple manners of the inhabitants; nor could we have proceeded less than
four or five miles along an excellent footpath, but under a broiling
sun, before we saw any signs of our Vetturino, who was willing to take
this opportunity of easing his horses—a practice common with those sort
of gentry. Instead of a fellow-feeling with you, you find an instinctive
inclination in persons of this class all through Italy to cheat and
deceive you: the more easy or cordial you are with them, the greater is
their opinion of your folly and their own cunning, and the more are they
determined to repel or evade any advances to a fair understanding:
threaten, or treat them with indignity, and you have some check over
them; relax the reins a moment, and they are sure to play you some
scurvy trick.
At Ferrara we were put on short allowance, and as we found remonstrance
vain, we submitted in silence. We were the more mortified at this
treatment, as we had begun to hope for better things; but Mr. Henry
Waister, our Commissary on the occasion, was determined to make a good
thing of his three Napoleons a-day; he had strained a point in procuring
us a tolerable supper and breakfast at the two last stages, which must
serve for some time to come; and as he would not pay for our dinner, the
landlord would not let us have one, and there the matter rested. We
walked out in the evening, and found Ferrara enchanting. Of all the
places I have seen in Italy, it is the one by far I should most covet to
live in. It is the _ideal_ of an Italian city, once great, now a shadow
of itself. Whichever way you turn, you are struck with picturesque
beauty and faded splendours, but with nothing squalid, mean, or vulgar.
The grass grows in the well-paved streets. You look down long avenues of
buildings, or of garden walls, with summer-houses or fruit-trees
projecting over them, and airy palaces with dark portraits gleaming
through the grated windows—you turn, and a chapel bounds your view one
way, a broken arch another, at the end of the vacant, glimmering, fairy
perspective. You are in a dream, in the heart of a romance; you enjoy
the most perfect solitude, that of a city which was once filled with
‘the busy hum of men,’ and of which the tremulous fragments at every
step strike the sense, and call up reflection. In short, nothing is to
be seen of Ferrara, but the remains, graceful and romantic, of what it
was—no sordid object intercepts or sullies the retrospect of the past—it
is not degraded and patched up like Rome, with upstart improvements,
with earthenware and oil-shops; it is a classic vestige of antiquity,
drooping into peaceful decay, a sylvan suburb—
‘Where buttress, wall and tower
Seem fading fast away
From human thoughts and purposes,
To yield to some transforming power,
And blend with the surrounding trees.’
Here Ariosto lived—here Tasso occupied first a palace, and then a
dungeon. Verona has even a more sounding name; boasts a finer situation,
and contains the tomb of Juliet. But the same tender melancholy grace
does not hang upon its walls, nor hover round its precincts as round
those of Ferrara, inviting to endless leisure and pensive musing.
Ferrara, while it was an independent state, was a flourishing and
wealthy city, and contained 70,000 inhabitants; but from the time it
fell into the hands of the Popes, in 1597, it declined, and it has now
little more than an historical and poetical being.
From Ferrara we proceeded through Rovigo to Padua _the Learned_, where
we were more fortunate in our inn, and where, in the fine open square at
the entrance, I first perceived the rage for vulgar and flaunting
statuary, which distinguishes the Lombardo-Venetian States. The
traveller to Venice (who goes there to see the masterpieces of Titian or
Palladio’s admired designs), runs the gauntlet all the way along at
every town or villa he passes, of the most clumsy, affected, paltry,
sprawling figures, cut in stone, that ever disgraced the chisel. Even
their crucifixes and common Madonnas are in bad taste and proportion.
This inaptitude for the representation of forms in a people, whose eye
for colours transcended that of all the world besides, is striking as it
is curious: and it would be worth the study of a man’s whole life to
give a true and satisfactory solution of the mystery. Padua, though one
of the oldest towns in Italy, is still a place of some resort and
bustle; among other causes, from the number of Venetian families who are
in the habit of spending the summer months there. Soon after leaving it,
you begin to cross the canals and rivers which intersect this part of
the country bordering upon the sea, and for some miles you follow the
course of the Brenta along a flat, dusty, and unprofitable road. This is
a period of considerable and painful suspense, till you arrive at
Fusina, where you are put into a boat and rowed down one of the
_Lagunes_, where over banks of high rank grass and reeds, and between
solitary sentry-boxes at different intervals, you see Venice rising from
the sea. For an hour and a half, that it takes you to cross from the
last point of land to this Spouse of the Adriatic, its long line of
spires, towers, churches, wharfs is stretched along the water’s edge,
and you view it with a mixture of awe and incredulity. A city built in
the air would be something still more wonderful; but any other must
yield the palm to this for singularity and imposing effect. If it were
on the firm land, it would rank as one of the first cities in Europe for
magnificence, size, and beauty; as it is, it is without a rival. I do
not know what Lord Byron and Lady Morgan could mean by quarrelling about
the question who first called Venice ‘the Rome of the sea’—since it is
perfectly unique in its kind. If a parallel must be found for it, it is
more like Genoa shoved into the sea. Genoa stands _on_ the sea, this
_in_ it. The effect is certainly magical, dazzling, perplexing. You feel
at first a little giddy: you are not quite sure of your footing as on
the deck of a vessel. You enter its narrow, cheerful canals, and find
that instead of their being scooped out of the earth, you are gliding
amidst rows of palaces and under broad-arched bridges, piled on the
sea-green wave. You begin to think that you must cut your liquid way in
this manner through the whole city, and use oars instead of feet. You
land, and visit quays, squares, market-places, theatres, churches,
halls, palaces; ascend tall towers, and stroll through shady gardens,
without being once reminded that you are not on _terra firma_. The early
inhabitants of this side of Italy, driven by Attila and his hordes of
Huns from the land, sought shelter in the sea, built there for safety
and liberty, laid the first foundations of Venice in the rippling wave,
and commerce, wealth, luxury, arts, and crimson conquest crowned the
growing Republic;—
‘And Ocean smil’d,
Well pleased to see his wondrous child.’
Man, proud of his amphibious creation, spared no pains to aggrandize and
embellish it, even to extravagance and excess. The piles and blocks of
wood on which it stands are brought from the huge forests at Treviso and
Cadore: the stones that girt its circumference, and prop its walls, are
dug from the mountains of Istria and Dalmatia: the marbles that inlay
its palace-floors are hewn from the quarries near Verona. Venice is
loaded with ornament, like a rich city-heiress with jewels. It seems the
natural order of things. Her origin was a wonder: her end is to
surprise. The strong, implanted tendency of her genius must be to the
showy, the singular, the fantastic. Herself an anomaly, she reconciles
contradictions, liberty with aristocracy, commerce with nobility, the
want of titles with the pride of birth and heraldry. A violent birth in
nature, she lays greedy, perhaps ill-advised, hands on all the
artificial advantages that can supply her original defects. Use turns to
gaudy beauty; extreme hardship to intemperance in pleasure. From the
level uniform expanse that forever encircles her, she would obviously
affect the aspiring in forms, the quaint, the complicated, relief and
projection. The richness and foppery of her architecture arise from
this: its stability and excellence probably from another circumstance
counteracting this tendency to the buoyant and fluttering, _viz._, the
necessity of raising solid edifices on such slippery foundations, and of
not playing tricks with stone-walls upon the water. Her eye for colours
and costume she would bring with conquest from the East. The spirit,
intelligence, and activity of her men, she would derive from their
ancestors: the grace, the glowing animation and bounding step of her
women, from the sun and mountain-breeze! The want of simplicity and
severity in Venetian taste seems owing to this, that all here is
factitious and the work of art: redundancy again is an attribute of
commerce, whose eye is gross and large, and does not admit of the _too
much_; and as to irregularity and want of fixed principles, we may
account by analogy at least for these, from that element of which Venice
is the nominal bride, to which she owes her all, and the very essence of
which is caprice, uncertainty, and vicissitude!
‘And now from out the watery floor
A city rose, and well she wore
Her beauty, and stupendous walls,
And towers that touched the stars, and halls
Pillar’d with whitest marble, whence
Palace on lofty palace sprung:
And over all rich gardens hung,
Where, amongst silver water-falls,
Cedars and spice-trees, and green bowers,
And sweet winds playing with all the flowers
Of Persia and of Araby,
Walked princely shapes; some with an air
Like warriors; some like ladies fair
Listening ...
In supreme magnificence.’
This, which is a description of a dream of Babylon of old, by a living
poet, is realized almost literally in modern Venice.