LETTER XXXVII.
RETURN TO VENICE—CITY OF LUCCA—A MAGNIFICENT WALL—A CULTIVATED AND LOVELY COUNTRY—A COMFORTABLE PALACE—THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF LUCCA—THE APPENINES—MOUNTAIN SCENERY—MODENA—VIEW OF AN IMMENSE PLAIN—VINEYARDS AND FIELDS—AUSTRIAN TROOPS—A PETTY DUKE AND A GREAT TYRANT—SUSPECTED TRAITORS—LADIES UNDER ARREST—MODENESE NOBILITY—SPLENDOR AND MEANNESS—CORREGIO'S BAG OF COPPER COIN—PICTURE GALLERY—CHIEF OF THE CONSPIRATORS—OPPRESSIVE LAWS—ANTIQUITY—MUSEUM—BOLOGNA—MANUSCRIPTS OF TASSO AND ARIOSTO—THE PO—AUSTRIAN CUSTOM-HOUSE—POLICE OFFICERS—DIFFICULTY ON BOARD THE STEAMBOAT—VENICE ONCE MORE, ETC.
After five or six weeks sejour at the baths of Lucca, the only exception to the pleasure of which was an attack of the "country fever," I am again on the road, with a pleasant party, bound for Venice; but passing by cities I had not seen, I have been from one place to another for a week, till I find myself to-day in Modena—a place I might as well not have seen at all as to have hurried through, as I was compelled to do a month or two since. To go back a little, however, our first stopping-place was the city of Lucca, about fifteen miles from the baths; a little, clean, beautiful gem of a town, with a wall three miles round only, and on the top of it a broad carriage road, giving you on every side views of the best cultivated and loveliest country in Italy. The traveller finds nothing so rural and quiet, nothing so happy-looking, in the whole land. The radius to the horizon is nowhere more than five or six miles; and the bright green farms and luxuriant vineyards stretch from the foot of the wall to the summits of the lovely mountains which form the theatre around. It is a very ancient town, but the duchy is so rich and flourishing that it bears none of the marks of decay, so common to even more modern towns in Italy. Here Cæsar is said to have stopped to deliberate on passing the Rubicon.
The palace of the Duke is the prettiest I ever saw. There is not a room in it you could not live in—and no feeling is less common than this in visiting palaces. It is furnished with splendor, too—but with such an eye to comfort, such taste and elegance, that you would respect the prince's affections that should order such a one. The Duke of Lucca, however, is never at home. He is a young man of twenty-eight or thirty, and spends his time and money in travelling, as caprice takes him. He has been now for a year at Vienna, where he spends the revenue of these rich plains most lavishly. The Duchess, too, travels always, but in a different direction, and the people complain loudly of the desertion. For many years they have now been both absent and parted. The Duke is a member of the royal family of Spain, and at the death of Maria Louisa of Parma, he becomes Duke of Parma, and the duchy goes to Tuscany.
From Lucca we crossed the Appenines, by a road seldom travelled, performing the hundred miles to Modena in three days. We suffered, as all must who leave the high roads in continental countries, more privations than the novelty was worth. The mountain scenery was fine, of course, but I think less so than that on the passes between Florence and Bologna, the account of which I wrote a few weeks since. We were too happy to get to Modena.
Modena lies in the vast campagna lying between the Appenines and the Adriatic—an immense plain looking like the sea as far as the eye can stretch from north to south. The view of it from the mountains in descending is magnificent beyond description. The capital of the little duchy lay in the midst of us, like a speck on a green carpet, and smaller towns and rivers varied its else unbroken surface of vineyards and fields. We reached the gates just as a fine sunset was reddening the ramparts and towers, and giving up our passports to the soldier on guard, rattled into the hotel.
The town is full of Austrian troops, and in our walk to the ducal palace we met scarce any one else. The streets look gloomy and neglected, and the people singularly dispirited and poor. This petty Duke of Modena is a man of about fifty, and said to be the greatest tyrant, after Don Miguel, in the world. The prisons are full of suspected traitors; one hundred and thirty of the best families of the duchy are banished for liberal opinions; three hundred and over are now under arrest (among them a considerable number of ladies); and many of the Modenese nobility are now serving in the galleys for conspiracy. He has been shot at eighteen times. The last man who attempted it, as I stated in a former letter, was executed the morning I passed through Modena on my return from Venice. With all this he is a fine soldier, and his capital looks in all respects like a garrison in the first style of discipline. He is just now absent at a chateau three miles in the country.
The palace is a union of splendor and meanness within. The endless succession of state apartments are gorgeously draped and ornamented, but the entrance halls and intermediate passages are furnished with an economy you would scarce find exceeded in the "worst inn's worst room." Modena is Corregio's birthplace, and it was from a Duke of Modena that he received the bag of copper coin which occasioned his death. It was, I think, the meagre reward of his celebrated "Night," and he broke a blood-vessel in carrying it to his house. The Duke has sold this picture, as well as every other sufficiently celebrated to bring a princely price. His gallery is a heap of trash, with but here and there a redeeming thing. Among others, there is a portrait of a boy, I think by Rembrandt, very intellectual and lofty, yet with all the youthfulness of fourteen; and a copy of "Giorgione's mistress," the "love in life" of the Manfrini palace, so admired by Lord Byron. There is also a remarkably fine crucifixion, I forget by whom.
The front of the palace is renowned for its beauty. In a street near it, we passed a house half battered down by cannon. It was the residence of the chief of a late conspiracy, who was betrayed a few hours before his plot was ripe. He refused to surrender, and, before the ducal troops had mastered his house, the revolt commenced and the Duke was driven from Modena. He returned in a week or two with some three thousand Austrians, and has kept possession by their assistance ever since. While we were waiting dinner at the hotel, I took up a volume of the Modenese law, and opened upon a statute forbidding all subjects of the duchy to live out of the Duke's territories under pain of the entire confiscation of their property. They are liable to arrest, also, if it is suspected that they are taking measures to remove. The alternatives are oppression here or poverty elsewhere, and the result is that the Duke has scarce a noble left in his realm.
Modena is a place of great antiquity. It was a strong-hold in the time of Cæsar, and after his death was occupied by Brutus, and besieged by Antony. There are no traces left, except some mutilated and uncertain relics in the museum.
We drove to Bologna the following morning, and I slept once more in Rogers's chamber at "the Pilgrim." I have described this city, which I passed on my way to Venice, so fully before, that I pass it over now with the mere mention. I should not forget, however, my acquaintance with a snuffy little librarian, who showed me the manuscripts of Tasso and Ariosto, with much amusing importance.
We crossed the Po to the Austrian custom-house. Our trunks were turned inside out, our papers and books examined, our passports studied for flaws—as usual. After two hours of vexation, we were permitted to go on board the steamboat, thanking Heaven that our troubles were over for a week or two, and giving Austria the common benediction she gets from travellers. The ropes were cast off from the pier when a police retainer came running to the boat, and ordered our whole party on shore, bag and baggage. Our passports, which had been retained to be sent on to Venice by the captain, were irregular. We had not passed by Florence, and they had not the signature of the Austrian ambassador. We were ordered imperatively back over the Po, with a flat assurance, that, without first going to Florence, we never could see Venice. To the ladies of the party, who had made themselves certain of seeing this romance of cities in twelve hours, it was a sad disappointment, and after seeing them safely seated in the return shallop, I thought I would go and make a desperate appeal to the commissary in person. My nominal commission as attaché to the Legation at Paris, served me in this case as it had often done before, and making myself and the honor of the American nation responsible for the innocent designs of a party of ladies upon Venice, the dirty and surly commissary signed our passports and permitted us to remand our baggage.
It was with unmingled pleasure that I saw again the towers and palaces of Venice rising from the sea. The splendid approach to the Piazzetta; the transfer to the gondola and its soft motion; the swift and still glide beneath the balconies of palaces, with whose history I was familiar; and the renewal of my own first impressions in the surprise and delight of others, made up, altogether, a moment of high happiness. There is nothing like—nothing equal to Venice. She is the city of the imagination—the realization of romance—the queen of splendor and softness and luxury. Allow all her decay—feel all her degradation—see the "Huns in her palaces," and the "Greek upon her mart," and, after all, she is alone in the world for beauty, and, spoiled as she has been by successive conquerors, almost for riches too. Her churches of marble, with their floors of precious stones, and walls of gold and mosaic; her ducal palace, with its world of art and massy magnificence; her private palaces, with their fronts of inland gems, and balconies and towers of inimitable workmanship and riches; her lovely islands and mirror-like canals—all distinguish her, and will till the sea rolls over her, as one of the wonders of time.