An even darker trait in Ranuccio’s life is his capricious cruelty towards an illegitimate son, named Octavio, whose noble and brilliant qualities had won for him the love of all ranks in his father’s duchy. The duke of Parma had espoused the niece of Pope Clement the Eighth, Margaret Aldobrandini. His unfounded hatred to a wife who, on her side, could not love one whose severe and sombre exterior fitly accompanied a distrustful and avaricious disposition, long kept them separated, and Ranuccio during this time named Octavio his heir. As the youth grew up, he became daily and deservedly more popular, changing his father’s favour to fear and hatred, till, having heirs by his wife Margaret, he pretended a fear that the disappointed prince might interfere to put his brothers aside; seized on his person, and commanded that he should be immured in the fearful prison of La Rochetta at Parma, where he dragged through a few wretched years, and died mysteriously. His father, unjust and ferocious as he was, yet came to a peaceful end, leaving the dukedom to the second of Margaret’s sons, as the eldest proved deaf and dumb.
On our return from the Palazzo Pubblico, we passed the church of San Pietro, with its monastery attached to itself, and its convent on the opposite side of the street; the blank wall of the first facing the latter’s windows, barred, grated, and wired, like a prison or a mad-house, with precaution which seems excessive where the entrance is voluntary. On the whole, though we made the tour of all the other churches we found open, and wandered till we were weary among the desolate streets, the day we passed at Placentia seemed a long one. When night closed in, the silent town awoke, and parties walked up and down, singing with most enchanting voices: it is a pleasure peculiar to Italy.
4th October.
Left Placentia for Borgo San Donnino, issuing by the old gate and ruined fortifications. Piacenza received her name, in days of yore, from her pleasant environs,—now so changed that she requires new baptism: for the country, rich and flat, through which our broad, straight road passes, is interesting only where the vintagers are employed, and would be bare of trees but for those planted to receive the vines. Here and there we found shade from the sun under a pollarded oak, growing by the road-side, with the fruit and the festoons of light green hanging among its dark branches; far away we could distinguish the Apennines, but too distant to give boldness or beauty. At the entrance of Borgo St. Donnino is its quaint old church, guarded without by a strange assemblage of saints, beasts, and nondescript figures; and before arriving at the Angelo, which is at the extremity of the little town, we passed two fine establishments for mendicity, male and female, once a jesuits’ monastery. The Angelo is the cleanest inn, and kept by the most honest people we have had the fortune to find since crossing the frontier, the good woman, who lost her husband a year since, and the head waiter, who has lost an eye, vying with each other in civility, and proud of their beds and cookery: still as it rained pitilessly from our coming till night, we were reminded that travelling is a melancholy pleasure as we looked round the large desert rooms, examined over and over their vile frescoes, and were glad to talk to the waiter, and to hear his comments on Maria Louisa, and how with the higher classes of her subjects she is no longer popular since the movement which followed 1830, rousing their desire to be French rather than Austrians; but adored by the poor, to whom she is the kindest of sovereigns, and who feel her charity. The hospitals, good roads, and fine bridges of her small states, give proof of her care, and, saving three months spent yearly at Vienna, her whole time is passed in her duchy.
The violence of the rain prevented our visiting the ancient church and its curious tomb of the town’s patron, Saint Donnino, who was an officer of the Emperor Maximilian, and, having offended his lord by becoming Christian, fled hither, and was here beheaded in the year 304.
Alberoni’s first step to fortune was the place of chaplain to the bishop of St. Donnino.
The rain ceased, and we left the quiet inn, taking the long, straight, muddy road to Parma, passing, ere reaching the latter, the fine old castle of Guelfo, a part of which is a complete ruin, and the remainder with its ivied walls and square battlemented towers half concealed among old trees, though close to the road, forms a fine residence for the grand chambellan of Maria Louisa, whose family resides there throughout the year. You know that it was built by the Guelfo faction, in opposition to Castel Gibello, which lies between Parma and Placentia, though not on the road we have travelled. These fatal rallying words were first employed in 1140, at the battle of Winsburg, between Conrad the Third, the emperor, and Guelph the Sixth of Bavaria. A castle, which had been the nursery of the dukes of Swabia, was called Gibellin, and the Christian name of Guelph had long been one of predilection in the house of Bavaria. The latter sought the pope’s alliance. Even when the political animosity between them had died away, old affections and old hatreds continued to spring up in gratitude or in vengeance for benefits and injuries received by either’s ancestors. From Guelph the First, of Bavaria, sprang the house which gave monarchs to England.
Beyond Castel Guelfo, we crossed the fine bridge, which seems of endless length, commenced by Napoleon, and finished by Maria Louisa, across the desolate and desolating Taro, which, now shrunken and still, winds through its winter-bed, like a rivulet in a desert, and, shortly after, arrived at Parma, built on the river of the same name, which we traversed two or three times as we rode to the Paone, whither we had been recommended, and which, though a bad inn, we bear with patiently, as its owners are civil, and stabling excellent: for, under present circumstances, our own lodging is not that held first in importance. A portrait of the Santa Madonna hangs against the wall at the lower end of the stable,—the lamp, which burns before it, serving the double purpose of doing her honour and lighting the mangers.
The rain returned in torrents, not to be braved; and the windows of our dirty rooms command a view of only a small portion of the square. As I leaned out, looking at a dirty café just opposite, and in our own alley, and a yawning Italian woman, with her dark neck bare, as usual, enjoying, with her two elbows on a cushion, the “dolce far niente,” which so chafed ourselves, there passed beneath a long procession, headed by a few priests, and composed of men, who wore, over their usual dress, a species of friar’s cloak and cape of oilskin, with a silver badge, resembling a coffin plate, hung to the left side. They went silently along under the pouring rain, a bareheaded Capucin walking beside the last, and a crowd following. I asked a servant who they might be. They belonged, he said, some being clerical, some laymen, to the brotherhood of La Buona Morte, and were on their way to visit a criminal condemned the next morning to die. He was guilty, the waiter said, of a “brutto delitto,” and the story was, indeed, one exhibiting the unrestrained passions which are the heritage and curse of Italy.
He was a peasant thirty years of age, married to a wife of five and twenty, to whom he had been long attached, and father of an infant but a few weeks old. In the course of this summer he unhappily became acquainted with another and a depraved woman, but whom he determined to marry, and his resolution irrevocably formed, he returned home and from her presence one evening, deliberately sawed his wife’s head from her body with a pruning-knife; took measures for her burial which he believed would prevent discovery, and went from her corpse to her old father to mourn with him for her early death.