CHAPTER XXII
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.