CHAPTER XV
My arrival at Turin was the first and only moment of intoxication I have found in Italy. It is a city of palaces. After a change of dress (which, at the end of a long journey, is a great luxury) I walked out, and traversing several clean, spacious streets, came to a promenade outside the town, from which I saw the chain of Alps we had left behind us, rising like a range of marble pillars in the evening sky. Monte Viso and Mount Cenis resembled two pointed cones of ice, shooting up above all the rest. I could distinguish the broad and rapid Po, winding along at the other extremity of the walk, through vineyards and meadow grounds. The trees had on that deep sad foliage, which takes a mellower tinge from being prolonged into the midst of winter, and which I had only seen in pictures. A Monk was walking in a solitary grove at a little distance from the common path. The air was soft and balmy, and I felt transported to another climate—another earth—another sky. The winter was suddenly changed to spring. It was as if I had to begin my life anew. Several young Italian women were walking on the terrace, in English dresses, and with graceful downcast looks, in which you might fancy that you read the soul of the Decameron. It was a fine, serious grace, equally remote from French levity and English sullenness, but it was the last I saw of it. I have run the gauntlet of vulgar shapes and horrid faces ever since. The women in Italy (so far as I have seen hitherto) are detestably ugly. They are not even dark and swarthy, but a mixture of brown and red, coarse, marked with the small pox, with pug-features, awkward, ill-made, fierce, dirty, lazy, neither attempting nor hoping to please. Italian beauty (if there is, as I am credibly informed, such a thing) is retired, conventual, denied to the common gaze. It was and it remains a dream to me, a vision of the brain! I returned to the inn (the Pension Suisse) in high spirits, and made a most luxuriant dinner. We had a wild duck equal to what we had in Paris, and the grapes were the finest I ever tasted. Afterwards we went to the Opera, and saw a ballet of action (out-heroding Herod) with all the extravagance of incessant dumb-show and noise, the glittering of armour, the burning of castles, the clattering of horses on and off the stage, and heroines like furies in hysterics. Nothing at Bartholomew Fair was ever in worse taste, noisier, or finer. It was as if a whole people had buried their understandings, their imaginations, and their hearts in their senses; and as if the latter were so jaded and worn out, that they required to be inflamed, dazzled, and urged almost to a kind of frenzy-fever, to feel any thing. The house was crowded to excess, and dark, all but the stage, which shed a dim, ghastly light on the gilt boxes and the audience. Milton might easily have taken his idea of Pandemonium from the inside of an Italian Theatre, its heat, its gorgeousness, and its gloom. We were at the back of the pit, in which there was only standing room, and leaned against the first row of boxes, full of the Piedmontese Nobility, who talked fast and loud in their harsh guttural dialect, in spite of the repeated admonitions of ‘a gentle usher, Authority by name,’ who every five seconds hissed some lady of quality and high breeding whose voice was heard with an éclat above all the rest. No notice whatever was taken of the acting or the singing (which was any thing but Italian, unless Italian at present means a bad imitation of the French) till a comic dance attracted all eyes, and drew forth bursts of enthusiastic approbation. I do not know the performers’ names, but a short, squat fellow (a kind of pollard of the green-room) dressed in a brown linsey-woolsey doublet and hose, with round head, round shoulders, short arms and short legs, made love to a fine die-away lady, dressed up in the hoops, lappets and furbelows of the last age, and stumped, nodded, pulled and tugged at his mistress with laudable perseverance, and in determined opposition to the awkward, mawkish graces of an Adonis of a rival, with flowing locks, pink ribbons, yellow kerseymere breeches, and an insipid expression of the utmost distress. It was an admirable grotesque and fantastic piece of pantomime humour. The little fellow who played the Clown, certainly entered into the part with infinite adroitness and spirit. He merited the teres et rotundus of the poet. He bounded over the stage like a foot-ball, rolled himself up like a hedge-hog, stuck his arms in his sides like fins, rolled his eyes in his head like bullets—and the involuntary plaudits of the audience witnessed the success of his efforts at once to electrify and stultify them! The only annoyance I found at Turin was the number of beggars who are stuck against the walls like fixtures, and expose their diseased, distorted limbs, with no more remorse or feeling than if they did not belong to them, deafening you with one wearisome cry the whole day long.
We were fortunate enough to find a voiture going from Geneva to Florence, with an English lady and her niece—I bargained for the two remaining places for ten guineas, and the journey turned out pleasantly, I believe, to all parties; I am sure it did so to us. We were to be eight days on the road, and to stop two days to rest, once at Parma, and once at Bologna, to see the pictures. Having made this arrangement, I was proceeding over the bridge towards the Observatory that commands a view of the town and the whole surrounding country, and had quite forgotten that I had such a thing as a passport to take with me. I found, however, I had no fewer than four signatures to procure, besides the six that were already tacked to my passport, before I could proceed, and which I had some difficulty in obtaining in time to set out on the following morning. The hurry I was thrown into by this circumstance prevented me from seeing some fine Rembrandts, Spagnolettos and Caraccis, which I was told are to be found in the Palace of Prince Carignani and elsewhere. I received this piece of information from my friend the Spaniard, who called on me to inquire my proposed route, and to ‘testify,’ as he said, ‘his respect for the English character.’ Shall I own it? I who flout, rail at, and contemn the English, was more pleased with this compliment paid to me in my national character, than with any I ever received on the score of personal civility. My fellow-traveller was for Genoa and Milan; I for Florence: but we were to meet at Rome.
The next morning was clear and frosty, and the sun shone bright into the windows of the voiture, as we left Turin, and proceeded for some miles at a gentle pace along the banks of the Po. The road was level and excellent, and we met a number of market people with mules and yokes of oxen. There were some hills crowned with villas; some bits of traditional Italian scenery now and then; but in general you would not know but that you were in England, except from the greater clearness and lightness of the air. We breakfasted at the first town we came to, in two separate English groups, and I could not help being struck with the manner of our reception at an Italian inn, which had an air of indifference, insolence, and hollow swaggering about it, as much as to say, ‘Well, what do you think of us Italians? Whatever you think, we care very little about the matter!’ The French are a politer people than the Italians—the English are honester; but I may as well postpone these comparisons till my return. The room smoked, and the waiter insisted on having the windows and the door open, in spite of my remonstrances to the contrary. He flung in and out of the room as if he had a great opinion of himself, and wished to express it by a braggadocio air. The partridges, coffee, cheese and grapes, on which we breakfasted à la fourchette, were, however, excellent. I said so, but the acknowledgment seemed to be considered as superfluous by our attendant, who received five francs for his master, and one for himself, with an air of condescending patronage. In consequence of something being said about our passports, he relaxed in the solemnity of his deportment, and observed that ‘he had been once near being engaged as valet to an English gentleman, at Ostend; that he had but three hours to procure his passport, but while he was getting it, the ship sailed, and he lost his situation.’ Such was my first impression of Italian inns and waiters, and I have seen nothing since materially to alter it. They receive you with a mixture of familiarity and fierceness, and instead of expecting any great civility from them, they excite that sort of uncomfortable sensation as to the footing you are upon, that you are glad to get away without meeting with some affront. There is either a fawning sleekness, which looks like design, or an insolence, which looks as if they had you in their power. In Switzerland and Savoy you are waited on by women; in Italy by men. I cannot say I like the exchange. From Turin to Florence, only one girl entered the room, and she (not to mend the matter) was a very pretty one.—I was told at the office of Messrs. Bonnafoux at Turin, that travelling to Rome by a vetturino was highly dangerous, and that their Diligence was guarded by four carabineers, to defend it from the banditti. I saw none, nor the appearance of any thing that looked like a robber, except a bare-foot friar, who suddenly sprang out of a hedge by the road-side, with a somewhat wild and haggard appearance, which a little startled me. Instead of finding a thief concealed behind each bush, or a Salvator Rosa face scowling from a ruined hovel, or peeping from a jutting crag at every turn, there is an excellent turnpike-road all the way, three-fourths perfectly level, skirted with hedges, corn-fields, orchards and vineyards, populous with hamlets and villages, with labourers at work in the fields, and with crowds of peasants in gay, picturesque attire, and with healthy, cheerful, open, but manly countenances, passing along, either to or from the different market-towns. It was Carnival time; and as we travelled on, we were struck with the variety of rich dresses, red, yellow, and green, the high-plaited head-dresses of the women, some in the shape of helmets, with pins stuck in them like skewers, with gold crosses at their bosoms, and large muffs on their hands, who poured from the principal towns along the high-road, or turned off towards some village-spire in the distance, chequering the landscape with their gaily-tinted groups. They often turned back and laughed as we drove by them, or passed thoughtfully on without noticing us, but assuredly showed no signs of an intention to rob or murder us. Even in the Apennines, though the road is rugged and desolate, it is lined with farm-houses and towns at small distances; and there is but one house all the way that is stained by the recollection of a tragic catastrophe. How it may be farther south, I cannot say; but so far, the reports to alarm strangers are (to the best of my observation and conjecture) totally unfounded.
We had left the Alps behind us, the white tops of which we still saw scarcely distinguishable from ridges of rolling clouds, and that seemed to follow us like a formidable enemy, and almost enclose us in a semicircle; and we had the Apennines in front, that, gradually emerging from the horizon, opposed their undulating barrier to our future progress, with shadowy shapes of danger and Covigliaijo lurking in the midst of them. All the space between these two, for at least 150 miles (I should suppose) is one level cultivated plain, one continuous garden. This became more remarkably the case, as we entered the territories of Maria-Louisa (the little States of Parma and Placentia) when, for two whole days, we literally travelled through an uninterrupted succession of corn-fields, vineyards and orchards, all in the highest state of cultivation, with the hedges neatly clipped into a kind of trellis-work, and the vines hanging in festoons from tree to tree, or clinging ‘with marriageable arms’ round the branches of each regularly planted and friendly support. It was more like passing through a number of orchard-plots or garden-grounds in the neighbourhood of some great city (such as London) than making a journey through a wide and extensive tract of country. Not a common came in sight, nor a single foot of waste or indifferent ground. It became tedious at last from the richness, the neatness, and the uniformity; for the whole was worked up to an ideal model, and so exactly a counterpart of itself, that it was like looking out of a window at the same identical spot, instead of passing on to new objects every instant. We were saturated even with beauty and comfort, and were disposed to repeat the wish—
‘To-morrow to fresh fields and pastures new.’
A white square villa, or better sort of farm-house, sometimes stared on us from the end of a long, strait avenue of poplars, standing in ostentatious, unadorned nakedness, and in a stiff, meagre, and very singular taste. What is the cause of the predilection of the Italians for straight lines and unsheltered walls? Is it for the sake of security or vanity? The desire of seeing everything or of being seen by every one? The only thing that broke the uniformity of the scene, or gave an appearance of wretchedness or neglect to the country, was the number of dry beds of the torrents of melted snow and ice that came down from the mountains in the breaking up of the winter, and that stretched their wide, comfortless, unprofitable length across these valleys in their progress to the Adriatic. Some of them were half a mile in breadth, and had stately bridges over them, with innumerable arches—(the work, it seems, of Maria Louisa) some of which we crossed over, others we rode under. We approached the first of them by moonlight, and the effect of the long, white, glimmering, sepulchral arches was as ghastly then as it is dreary in the day-time. There is something almost preternatural in the sensation they excite, particularly when your nerves have been agitated and harassed during several days’ journey, and you are disposed to startle at everything in a questionable shape. You do not know what to make of them. They seem like the skeletons of bridges over the dry bones and dusty relics of rivers. It is as if some mighty concussion of the earth had swept away the water, and left the bridge standing in stiffened horror over it. It is a new species of desolation, as flat, dull, disheartening, and hopeless as can be imagined. Mr. Crabbe should travel post to Italy on purpose to describe it, and to add it to his list of prosaic horrors. While here, he might also try his hand upon an Italian vintage, and if he does not squeeze the juice and spirit out of it, and leave nothing but the husk and stalks, I am much mistaken. As we groped our way under the stony ribs of the first of these structures that we came to, one of the arches within which the moonlight fell, presented a momentary appearance of a woman in a white dress and hood, stooping to gather stones. I wish I had the petrific pencil of the ingenious artist above-named, that I might imbody this flitting shadow in a permanent form.
It was late on the fourth day (Saturday) before we reached Parma. Our two black, glossy, easy-going horses were tired of the sameness or length of the way; and our guide appeared to have forgotten it, for we entered the capital of the Archduchy without his being aware of it. We went to the Peacock Inn, where we were shewn into a very fine but faded apartment, and where we stopped the whole of the next day. Here, for the first time on our journey, we found a carpet, which, however, stuck to the tiled floor with dirt and age. There was a lofty bed, with a crimson silk canopy, a marble table, looking-glasses of all sizes and in every direction,[[37]] and excellent coffee, fruit, game, bread and wine at a moderate rate—that is to say, our supper the first night, our breakfast, dinner, and coffee the next day, and coffee the following morning, with lodging and fire, came to twenty-three francs. It would have cost more than double in England in the same circumstances. We had an exhilarating view from our window of the street and great square. It was full of noise and bustle. The people were standing in lounging attitudes by themselves, or talking loud in groups, and with great animation. The expression of character seemed to be natural and unaffected. Every one appeared to follow the bent of his own humour and feelings (good or bad) and I did not perceive any of that smirking grimace and varnish of affectation and self-complacency, which glitters in the face and manners of every Frenchman, and makes them so many enemies. If an individual is inordinately delighted with himself, do not others laugh at and take a dislike to him? Must it not be equally so with a nation enamoured of itself?—The women that I saw did not answer to my expectations. They had high shoulders, thick waists, and shambling feet, or that crapaudeux shape, which is odious to see or think of. The men looked better, and I saw little difference between them and the English, except a greater degree of fire and spirit. The priests had many of them (both here and at Turin) fine faces, with a jovial expression of good humour and good living, or of subtle thought and painful watching, studious to keep the good things that enriched the veins and pampered the pride of the brotherhood. Here we saw the whole market-place kneel down as the host passed by. Being Carnival time, high mass was celebrated at the principal churches, and Moses in Egypt was given at the Opera in the evening. The day before, as we entered Parma in the dusk, we saw a procession of flambeaux at a distance, which denoted a funeral. The processions are often joined by persons of the highest quality in disguise, who make a practice of performing penance, or expiating some offence by attending the obsequies of the dead. This custom may be ridiculed as superstitious by an excess of Protestant zeal; but the moralist will hardly blame what shews a sense of human infirmity, and owns something ‘serious in mortality;’ and is besides freed from the suspicion of ostentation or hypocrisy. Lord Glenallan, in ‘The Antiquary,’ has been censured on the same principle, as an excrescence of morbid and superannuated superstition. Honi soit qui mal y pense. When human nature is no longer liable to such misfortunes, our sympathy with them will then be superfluous—we may dry up our tears, and stifle our sighs. In the mean time, they who enlarge our sympathy with others, or deepen it for ourselves from lofty, imaginary sources, are the true teachers of morality, and benefactors of mankind, were they twenty times tools and Tories. It is not the shutting up of hospitals, but the opening of the human heart, that will lead to the regeneration of the world[[38]]!
It was at Parma I first noticed the women looking out of the windows (not one or two stragglers, but two or three from every house) where they hang like signs or pictures, stretching their necks out, or confined, like children by iron bars, often with cushions to lean upon, scaldalettos dangling from their hands (another vile custom). This seems to shew a prodigious predominance of the organ of sight, or a want of something to do or to think of. In France, the passion of the women is not to see, but to talk. In Hogarth, you perceive some symptoms of the same prurience of the optic nerve, and willingness to take in knowledge at the entrance of the eyes. It certainly has a great look of ignorance, indolence, and vulgarity. In summer time, perhaps, the practice might be natural—in winter, the habit is quite unaccountable. I thought, at first, it might be one of the abuses of the Carnival; but the Carnival is over, and the windows are still lined with eyes and heads—that do not like the trouble of putting on a cap.
We were told we could see her Majesty at mass, (so her dutiful subjects call the Archduchess) and we went to see the daughter of a sovereign, the self-devoted consort of one who only lost himself by taking upon him a degrading equality with Emperors and Kings. We had a Cicerone with us, who led us, without ceremony, to a place in the chapel, where we could command a full view of Maria Louisa, and which we made use of without much reserve. She knelt, or stood, in the middle of a small gallery, with attendants, male and female, on each side of her. We saw her distinctly for several minutes. She has full fair features, not handsome, but with a mild, unassuming expression, tinged with thoughtfulness. She appears about forty; she seemed to cast a wistful look at us, being strangers and English people—
‘Methought she looked at us—
So every one believes, that sees a Duchess!’—Old Play.
There are some not very pleasant rumours circulated of her. She must have had something of the heroine of the Cid about her. She married the man who had conquered her father. She is said to have leaned on the Duke of Wellington’s arm. After that, she might do whatever she pleased. Perhaps these stories are only circulated to degrade her; or, perhaps, a scheme may have been laid to degrade her in reality, by the persons nearest to her, and most interested in, but most jealous of, her honour! We were invited to see the cradle of the little Napoleon, which I declined; and we then went to see the new gallery which the Archduchess has built for her pictures, in which there is a bust of herself, by Canova. Here I saw a number of pictures, and among others the Correggios and the celebrated St. Jerome, which I had seen at Paris. I must have been out of tune; for my disappointment and my consequent mortification were extreme. I had never thought Correggio a God; but I had attributed this to my own inexperience and want of taste, and I hoped by this time to have ripened into that full idolatry of him expressed by Mengs and others. Instead of which, his pictures (they stood on the ground without frames, and in a bad light) appeared to be comparatively mean, feeble, and affected. There is the master-hand, no doubt, but tremulous with artificial airs—beauty and grace carried to a pitch of quaintness and conceit—the expression of joy or woe, but lost in a doting contemplation of its own ecstasy or agony, and after being raised to the height of truth and nature, hurried over the brink of refinement into effeminacy, by a craving after impossibilities, and a wanton dalliance with the ideal. Correggio has painted the wreathed smile of sweetness, but he does not stop till he has contorted it into affectation; he has expressed the utmost distress and despondency of soul, but it is the weakness of suffering without the strength. His pictures are so perfect and delicate, that ‘the sense aches at them;’ and in his efforts after refinement, he has worked himself up into a state of languid, nervous irritability, which is reflected back upon the spectator. These remarks appeared to me applicable in their full force to the St. Jerome, the Taking down from the Cross, and the Martyrdom of St. Placide, in which there is an executioner with his back turned, in a chiaro-scuro of the most marvellous clearness and beauty. In all these there is a want of manly firmness and simplicity. He might be supposed to have touched, at some period of his progress, on the highest point of excellence, and then to have spoiled all by a wish to go farther, without knowing how or why. Perhaps modesty, or an ignorance of what others had done, or of what the art could do, was at the foundation of this, and prevented him from knowing where to stop. Perhaps he had too refined and tender a susceptibility, or ideas of sanctity and sweetness beyond the power of his art to express; and in the attempt to reconcile the mechanical and ideal, failed from an excess of feeling! I saw nothing else to please me, and I was sorry I had come so far to have my faith in great names and immortal works misgive me. I was ready to exclaim, ‘Oh painting! I thought thee a substance, and I find thee a shadow!’ There was, however, a Crowning of the Virgin, a fresco (by Correggio) from the Church of St. Paul, which was full of majesty, sweetness, and grace; and in this, and the heads of boys and fawns, in the Chase of Diana, there is a freedom and breadth of execution, owing to the mode in which they were painted, and which makes them seem pure emanations of the mind, without anything overdone, finical, or little. The cupola of St. Paul’s, painted by Correggio in fresco, is quite destroyed, or the figures flutter in idle fragments from the walls. Most of the other pictures in this church were in a tawdry, meretricious style. I was beginning to think that painting was not calculated for churches, coloured surfaces not agreeing with solid pillars and masses of architecture, and also that Italian art was less severe, and more a puppet-show business than I had thought it. I was not a little tired of the painted shrines and paltry images of the Virgin at every hundred yards as we rode along. But if my thoughts were veering to this cheerless, attenuated speculation of nothingness and vanity, they were called back by the sight of the Farnese Theatre—the noblest and most striking monument I have seen of the golden age of Italy. It was built by one of the Farnese family about the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and would hold eight thousand spectators. It is cold, empty, silent as the receptacles of the dead. The walls, roofs, rafters, and even seats, remain perfect; but the tide of population and of wealth, the pomp and pride of patronage and power, seemed to have turned another way, and to have left it a deserted pile, that would, long ere this, have mouldered into ruin and decay, but that its original strength and vast proportions would not suffer it—a lasting proof of the magnificence of a former age, and of the degeneracy of this! The streets of Parma are beautiful, airy, clean, spacious; the churches elegant; and the walls around it picturesque and delightful. The walls and ramparts, with the gardens and vineyards close to them, have a most romantic effect; and we saw, on a flight of steps near one of the barriers, a group of men, women, and children, that for expression, composition, and colouring rivalled any thing in painting. We here also observed the extreme clearness and brilliancy of the southern atmosphere: the line of hills in the western horizon was distinguished from the sky by a tint so fine that it was barely perceptible.
Bologna is even superior to Parma. If its streets are less stately, its public buildings are more picturesque and varied; and its long arcades, its porticos, and silent walks are a perpetual feast to the eye and the imagination. At Parma (as well as Turin) you see a whole street at once, and have a magical and imposing effect produced once for all. At Bologna you meet with a number of surprises; new beauties unfold themselves, a perspective is gradually prolonged, or branches off by some retired and casual opening, winding its heedless way—the rus in urbe—where leisure might be supposed to dwell with learning. Here is the Falling Tower, and the Neptune of John of Bologna, in the great square. Going along, we met Professor Mezzofanti, who is said to understand thirty-eight languages, English among the rest. He was pointed out to us as a prodigious curiosity by our guide, (Signor Gatti) who has this pleasantry at his tongue’s end, that ‘there is one Raphael to paint, one Mezzofanti to understand languages, and one Signor Gatti to explain everything they wish to know to strangers.’ We went under the guidance of this accomplished person, and in company of our fellow-travellers, to the Academy, and to the collection of the Marquis Zampieri. In the last there is not a single picture worth seeing, except some old and curious ones of Giotto and Ghirlandaio. One cannot look at these performances (imperfect as they are, with nothing but the high endeavour, the fixed purpose stamped on them, like the attempts of a deformed person at grace) with sufficient veneration, when one considers what they must have cost their authors, or what they have enabled others to do. If Giotto could have seen the works of Raphael or Correggio, would he not have laughed or wept? Yet Raphael and Correggio should have bowed the head to him, for without those first rude beginners and dumb creators of the art, they themselves would never have been!—What amused us here was a sort of wild Meg Merrilies of a woman, in a grey coarse dress, and with grey matted hair, that sprang out of a dungeon of a porter’s lodge, and seizing upon Madame ——, dragged her by the arm up the staircase, with unrestrained familiarity and delight. We thought it was some one who presumed on old acquaintance, and was overjoyed at seeing Madame —— a second time. It was the mere spirit of good fellowship, and the excess of high animal spirits. No woman in England would dream of such an extravagance, who was not mad or drunk. She afterwards followed us about the rooms; and though she rather slunk behind, being somewhat abashed by our evident wish to shake her off, she still seemed to watch for an opportunity to dart upon some one, like an animal whose fondness you cannot get rid of by repeated repulses.[[39]] There is a childishness and want of self-control about the Italians, which has an appearance of folly or craziness. We passed a group of women on the road, and though there was something odd in their dress and manner, it was not for some time that we discovered that they were insane persons, walking out under the charge of keepers, from a greater degree of vacant vivacity, or thoughtful abstraction than usual.
To return. The Collection of Pictures in the Academy is worthy of Italy and of Bologna. It is chiefly of the Bolognese school; or in that fine, sombre, shadowy tone that seems reflected from sacred subjects or from legendary lore, that corresponds with crucifixions and martyrdoms, that points to skyey glories or hovers round conventual gloom. Here is the St. Cecilia of Raphael (of which the engraving conveys a faithful idea), several Caraccis, Domenichino’s St. Teresa, and his St. Peter Martyr, (a respectable, not a formidable rival of Titian’s) a Sampson, by Guido (an ill-chosen subject, finely coloured) and the Five Patron-Saints of Bologna, by the same, a very large, finely-painted and impressive picture, occupying the end of the Gallery. Four out of five of the Saints are admirable old Monkish heads (even their very cowls seem to think): the Dead Christ above has a fine monumental effect; and the whole picture, compared with this master’s general style, is like ‘the cathedral’s gloom and choir,’ compared with sunny smiles and the shepherd’s pipe upon the mountains. I left this Gallery, once more reconciled to my favourite art. Guido also gains upon me, because I continually see fine pictures of his. ‘By their works ye shall know them,’ is a fair rule for judging of painters or men.
There is a side pavement at Bologna, Modena, and most of the other towns in Italy, so that you do not walk, as in Paris, in continual dread of being run over. The shops have a neat appearance, and are well supplied with the ordinary necessaries of life, fruit, poultry, bread, onions or garlick, cheese and sausages. The butchers’ shops look much as they do in England. There is a technical description of the chief towns in Italy, which those who learn the Italian Grammar are told to get by heart—Genoa la superba, Bologna la dotta, Ravenna l’antica, Firense la bella, Roma la santa. Some of these I have seen, and others not; and those that I have not seen seem to me the finest. Does not this list convey as good an idea of these places as one can well have? It selects some one distinct feature of them, and that the best. Words may be said, after all, to be the finest things in the world. Things themselves are but a lower species of words, exhibiting the grossnesses and details of matter. Yet, if there be any country answering to the description or idea of it, it is Italy; and to this theory, I must add, the Alps are also a proud exception.