Drive from Padua to Ferrara—Monselice—Rovigo—Ferrara: Cathedral—Castle—Gallery—Road to Bologna—Altedo—Bologna: Cathedral—San Petronio—San Domenico—San Giacomo—Sta. Maria Maggiore—San Francesco—San Stefano—Leaning Towers—Casa dei Mercanti—Domestic Remains—Academy—Modena: Cathedral—Parma: Cathedral—Correggio—The Baptistery—Piacenza: The Palazzo Publico—Cathedral—San Francesco—Sant’Antonino—San Giovanni in Canale—Asti: Cathedral—San Secondo—Campanili.
ANY one who has followed the route from Venice to Milan described in the last chapter will do well, instead of following it on a subsequent visit, to make a détour from Padua to Ferrara and Bologna and thence by Parma, Modena, and Piacenza to Milan. I shall give some notes of such a journey in this chapter, the towns visited on the road completing the subject which I have set before me in this volume, and leaving no important city north of the Apennines, save Ravenna, undescribed. This exception is serious; but the omission will be remedied naturally when, as I hope I soon shall, I ask my readers to go with me to the towns on the east coast of Italy.
The journey from Padua to Bologna is now, and I suppose always was, extremely uninteresting. The only objects on the road which possess much attraction for the artist are the towns I have mentioned, and these certainly much more repay a visit than do those on the parallel line of road which we have just travelled. Scenery there is none to speak of, and fortunately a railway makes the journey a quick one now; but when I first travelled it I retained no recollection at the end of the route save of long straight and dusty roads lined on either side with tall poplars, and wearisome to the last degree. At Monselice we found a picturesque town domineered over by the ruins of a large castle, whose walls climb the steep sides of the hill on which it stands. Here I saw a good and little altered Romanesque church, with pilasters in place of buttresses, and walls crowned with the usual eaves-arcade. At Rovigo, further on, there is one of the tall brick towers so common here, with its Ghibelline battlement perfect. Just before reaching Ferrara we crossed the Po—here a large, unbridged, and dreary-looking river, flowing rapidly between high artificial banks to the sea. Its bed is, I suppose, now quite above the level of the plain, and year by year the question becomes more urgent and yet more difficult of answer, what is to be done with it? Certainly there are rivers and rivers; and this great stream left none but painful and disagreeable impressions on my mind. At length, after ten hours and a half of the slowest of drivers and worst of vehicles, we reached Ferrara—a trajet now performed by railway in about an hour and a half, with advantage to every one’s time and temper, and no counter-balancing loss.
The entrance to the city through a dirty suburb of tumble-down houses was not prepossessing. I knew nothing of what I had to see, and my delight was therefore all the greater when we drove into the piazza in front of the Duomo, and I found myself gazing at a building which at first sight looked as though it had been brought straight from the North of Europe, and planted here in the thirteenth century as a warning against Italian fashions! Further examination proved that I was not far wrong in my first estimate of the west front; but it revealed also, I am sorry to say, that this and part of the south side were the only parts of the old cathedral which had been spared, when in the seventeenth century the whole of the church was gutted and converted into about as bad a Renaissance building as one could wish not to see.
The west front is a great screen, and does not and never did follow the line of the roofs. It has three gables of about equal height covered with arcading, which increases in depth and richness of moulding and shadow to the top, where there are very fine open arched galleries, stepped up to suit the raking lines of the gables. I know no Italian work which imitates so closely as this does the extreme richness which some of the Norman and English churches of the same period exhibit. The arches of the arcades are carried upon clusters of columns which are set with extraordinary profusion one behind the other. The centre of the three divisions of the west front is almost wholly filled with a very fine porch of three stages in height, and finished with gables on its front and sides. The lower stage of this porch, as indeed of the whole church, is round-arched, and belongs probably to the church consecrated here in 1135. The knotted shafts which carry the front wall rest on figures sitting on lions. The doorway is deeply recessed, and has figures of saints with scrolls.[67] The tympanum of the arch has a sculpture of S. George and the Dragon, and the lintel below it eight subjects, beginning with the Salutation, and ending with the Baptism, of Our Lord. At the top of this stage is an inscription which contains the date given above.
