I
We never would have seen the place if the idea had not beguiled us, at Trent, of driving through the Dolomites to Bassano. And I doubt whether we would have been so extravagant about it if we had not just come from Germany. Is any quiver quite like that with which the returning victim of Italy greets his first cypress, his first olive tree, his first campanile? We formed imperishable ties with our irredentista driver, chiefly because he told us that the inhabitants of his dark little mountain city had turned the back of their statue of Dante to the North. Moreover it was May; and I should perhaps confess that we were too recently married to be altogether responsible. So when we discovered the castle that afternoon as we jingled down the widening gorge of the Val Sugana, we agreed that a princess must be shut up in the tower. Whereupon, as if in confirmation of our insight, an invisible dragon suddenly made himself heard behind the walls.
Otherwise there was no sign of habitation about the place. The rusty wrought-iron gate through which we stopped to look, the weed-checkered flagging within, the ruinous little chapel half averted from us at the right, the cracked and discoloured shafts outlining the court, the gaunt old pile of dark stone with its machicolated tower, formed a picture of abandonment which the dog’s barking made a trifle uncanny. But severe and even formidable as the castle was, in spite of its neglect, it had the nobility of perfect proportion. It was not so much a castle, indeed, as a castellated villa. The great arched windows of the façade were scarcely of a period when Ezzelino da Romano scoured these valleys o’ nights. Neither were the quarterfoils piercing the parapet of the roof. I remember how exquisite the spring sky looked through them, and between the square merlons of the tower. That element of contrast, taken with all the other circumstances, gave the structure a curious intensity of expression. There was something tragic in the way it lifted itself against the light.
It was part of the effect, and of the incredible richness of Italy, that our friend the driver could tell us nothing about the place. It was merely a castello qualunque! Yet how little was it a castello qualunque we began to learn not long after we had started on, skirting the wall that hid the princess’s dragon until her castle suddenly revealed itself to us, at a turn of the road, under a second and more romantic aspect. And this in spite of the fact that nothing more romantic than a few strands of barbed wire closed what must once have been the state entrance. Of course we stopped again—to look at the semicircular recess in the wall, with its lichened stone seats and couchant lions. Between them opened an avenue, I don’t know how many hundred yards long, of cypresses I don’t know how many hundred years old, that marched and dipped and rose again with such an air to the steps of a balustrated terrace in front of the castle! This fairy arcade, jewel-green with moss as if no one had trodden it for a century and cross-lighted by a westering sun, seemed to lead to some palace of enchantment rather than to the melancholy place we just had passed. So different a face did the villa turn to us now, with a loggia lightening its upper story and the Alps spreading a veil of magic behind it, that even the tower lost its grimness in the golden air. We therefore changed our minds about the princess. We decided that she was lying asleep there as a princess should, waiting for her prince.