LETTER XXXIV.
DEPARTURE FROM VENICE—A SUNSET SCENE—PADUA—SPLENDID HOTEL—MANNERS OF THE COUNTRY—VICENZA—MIDNIGHT—LADY RETURNING FROM A PARTY—VERONA—JULIET'S TOMB—THE TOMB OF THE CAPULETS—THE TOMBS OF THE SCALIGERS—TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA—A WALKING CHRONICLE—PALACE OF THE CAPULETS—ONLY COOL PLACE IN AN ITALIAN CITY—BANQUETING HALL OF THE CAPULETS—FACTS AND FICTION, ETC.
We pushed from the post-office stairs in a gondola with six oars at sunset. It was melancholy to leave Venice. A hasty farewell look, as we sped down the grand canal, at the gorgeous palaces, even less famous than beautiful—a glance at the disappearing Rialto, and we shot out into the Giudecca in a blaze of sunset glory. Oh how magnificently looked Venice in that light—rising behind us from the sea—all her superb towers and palaces, turrets and spires, fused into gold; and the waters about her, like a mirror of stained glass, without a ripple!
An hour and a half of hard rowing brought us to the nearest land. You should go to Venice to know how like a dream a reality may be. You will find it difficult to realize, when you smell once more the fresh earth and grass and flowers, and walk about and see fields and mountains, that this city upon the sea exists out of the imagination. You float to it and about it and from it, in their light craft, so aerially, that it seems a vision.
With a drive of two or three hours, half twilight, half moonlight, we entered Padua. It was too late to see the portrait of Petrarch, and I had not time to go to his tomb at Arqua, twelve miles distant, so, musing on Livy and Galileo, to both of whom Padua was a home, I inquired for a café. A new one had lately been built in the centre of the town, quite the largest and most thronged I ever saw. Eight or ten large, high-roofed halls were open, and filled with tables, at which sat more beauty and fashion than I supposed all Padua could have mustered. I walked through one after another, without finding a seat, and was about turning to go out, and seek a place of less pretension, when an elderly lady, who sat with a party of seven, eating ices, rose, with Italian courtesy, and offered me a chair at their table. I accepted it, and made the acquaintance of eight as agreeable and polished people as it has been my fortune to meet. We parted as if we had known each other as many weeks as minutes. I mention it as an instance of the manners of the country.
Three hours more, through spicy fields and on a road lined with the country-houses of the Venetian nobles, brought us to Vicenza. It was past midnight, and not a soul stirring in the bright moonlit streets. I remember it as a kind of city of the dead. As we passed out of the opposite gate, we detained for a moment a carriage, with servants in splendid liveries, and a lady inside returning from a party, in full dress. I have rarely seen so beautiful a head. The lamps shone strongly on a broad pearl fillet on her forehead, and lighted up features such as we do not often meet even in Italy. A gentleman leaned back in the corner of the carriage, fast asleep—probably her husband!
I breakfasted at Verona at seven. A humpbacked cicerone there took me to "Juliet's tomb." A very high wall, green with age, surrounds what was once a cemetery, just outside the city. An old woman answered the bell at the dilapidated gate, and, without saying a word, pointed to an empty granite sarcophagus, raised upon a rude pile of stones. "Questa?" asked I, with a doubtful look. "Questa," said the old woman. "Questa!" said the hunchback. And here, I was to believe, lay the gentle Juliet! There was a raised place in the sarcophagus, with a hollowed socket for the head, and it was about the measure for a woman! I ran my fingers through the cavity, and tried to imagine the dark curls that covered the hand of Father Lawrence as he laid her down in the trance, and fitted her beautiful head softly to the place. But where was "the tomb of the Capulets?" The beldame took me through a cabbage-garden, and drove off a donkey who was feeding on an artichoke that grew on the very spot. "Ecco!" said she, pointing to one of the slightly sunken spots on the surface. I deferred my belief, and paying an extra paul for the privilege of chipping off a fragment of the stone coffin, followed the cicerone.
The tombs of the Scaligers were more authentic. They stand in the centre of the town, with a highly ornamental railing about them, and are a perfect mockery of death with their splendor. If the poets and scholars whom these petty princes drew to their court had been buried in these airy tombs beside them, one would look at them with some interest. Now, one asks, "who were the Scaligers, that their bodies should be lifted high in air in the midst of a city, and kept for ages, in marble and precious stones?" With less ostentation, however, it were pleasant to be so disposed of after death, lifted thus into the sun, and in sight of moving and living creatures.
I inquired for the old palace of the Capulets. The cicerone knew nothing about it, and I dismissed her and went into a café. "Two gentlemen of Verona" sat on different sides; one reading, the other asleep, with his chin on his cane—an old, white-headed man, of about seventy. I sat down near the old gentleman, and by the time I had eaten my ice, he awoke. I addressed him in Italian, which I speak indifferently; but, stumbling for a word, he politely helped me out in French, and I went on in that language with my inquiries. He was the very man—a walking chronicle of Verona. He took up his hat and cane to conduct me to casa Capuletti, and on the way told me the true history, as I had heard it before, which differs but little, as you know, from Shakspeare's version. The whole story is in the annuals.
After a half hour's walk among the handsomer, and more modern parts of the city, we stopped opposite a house of an antique construction, but newly stuccoed and painted. A wheelwright occupied the lower story, and by the sign, the upper part was used as a tavern. "Impossible!" said I, as I looked at the fresh front and the staring sign. The old gentleman smiled, and kept his cane pointed at it in silence. "It is well authenticated," said he, after enjoying my astonishment a minute or two, "and the interior still bears marks of a palace." We went in and mounted the dirty staircase to a large hall on the second floor. The frescoes and cornices had not been touched, and I invited my kind old friend to an early dinner on the spot. He accepted, and we went back to the cathedral, and sat an hour in the only cool place in an Italian city. The best dinner the house could afford was ready when we returned, and a pleasanter one it has never been my fortune to sit down to; though, for the meats, I have eaten better. That I relished an hour in the very hall where the masque must have been held, to which Romeo ventured in the house of his enemy, to see the fair Juliet, you may easily believe. The wine was not so bad, either, that my imagination did not warm all fiction into fact; and another time, perhaps, I may describe my old friend and the dinner more particularly.