The Broletto, which stands near the cathedral in the centre of the city, is very interesting. It is raised upon open arches of stone, two at either end and five at the sides. In my sketch of it the southern end is shewn with the projecting Ringhiera in the second stage; the northern end is very singular, the tower rising out of one side, with the steep-pitched roof of the other half abutting against it. The detail of the windows is very good, the arch-stones in some of them increasing in depth towards the centre, with an effect of very great strength. All the windows are shafted. The dimensions of this building are forty-two feet from east to west, and sixty-four feet from north to south.
The only other ancient building which I could find was the church of Sta. Maria in Strada; the most elaborate example of late work in brick and terra-cotta that I have anywhere seen. The effect is not satisfactory; for when, as here, carvings are imitated and repeated in terra-cotta, and traceries entirely executed in it, one begins, I confess, to long much for a little of the fire and spirit which some mark of the individual artist might have given such an amount of elaborate decoration in stone. The west front is the only part of the church of any interest, the interior having been thoroughly modernized, and retaining no traces of its original character.
The door and windows in the lower stage have been interpolated, and besides this there is a strangely ugly window above them, about which—as this is the last of its class we shall see—I wish to say a word. In starting on a continental journey, between London and Croydon on the South-Eastern Railway you used to pass under several great semi-circular arched bridges. When first built, the engineer chose, in order to gratify some odd fancy, to prop these up by two piers of brickwork, dividing the arch into three, and putting the whole in great jeopardy. It is curious that this singularly supported and divided arch finds a counterpart in almost every large church in the North of Italy. It was the one great idea of the Renaissance builders, and, until they had taken out one of the old windows and inserted in its place one of these hideous contrivances, they were never satisfied. In Venice every church, even the noble church of the Frari, has them, and I believe scarcely a large church in the North of Italy is without at least this one evidence of the delicacy of taste which characterizes the Renaissance age!
The skill which is shewn in making and fitting together brickwork such as that in the front of this church is very great indeed, but, after all, I fear, rather mistaken, for the effect is most unsatisfactory, and every one must see that throughout the façade there is an evident attempt to satisfy the eye by the exceedingly elaborate character of the detail, rather than by the fitness of the thing itself, or by the beauty of the proportions. The insufficiency of the windows for the extent of wall is an obvious fault, and not less so is the fact which I am almost tired of referring to, that the whole front is sham and designed without any reference whatever to the wants of the building, to which it forms the street-front.
In the evening we left Monza for Camerlata, a village within about a mile of Como, availing ourselves again of the Milan and Como railway.
The Camerlata station was soon reached, and after some little delay we found ourselves ensconced in one of those long omnibuses so fashionable in Italy, and driving down a long hill, planted on either side with trees, towards Como. Above us, to the right and to the left, we could see, by the bright moonlight, the shapes of the mountains which hem in this arm of the fairest of lakes; whilst just above us, proudly perched upon a crag, were the ruins of a castle, which lent, when we saw it by daylight, an additional charm to the otherwise beautiful view.
Soon we were in the outskirts of the town; but it was long before we reached the borders of the lake, after following the windings of an almost interminable street, passing the guardhouse, and, to our sorrow, parting again for the last time with our passports, then crossing the piazza in which stand the Duomo and the Broletto side by side—for me the main attraction of the place—until at last we were fairly discharged at an hotel on the very edge of the water.
We had heard an Austrian band as we rolled across the piazza, and so without delay thither we returned in time to hear the last of Austrian music, and to revel by moonlight in the beauty of the many-coloured marble front of the fair Broletto. We stood listening to the music for about a quarter of an hour, when suddenly a word of command was given, the men who held the lanterns marched to the front, the band formed behind them four abreast, the lights were extinguished, and, suddenly breaking into a lively march, the band disappeared, and the crowd soon left us in quiet possession of the piazza, whose old houses still rang with the wild and clamorous echoes of the beautiful music.
We returned to our inn, and had infinite trouble in the attempt to find a voiturier to take us to the Lago Maggiore in time for the steamer on the morrow. The route by which I had fully intended to return was to go by the lake to Menaggio, thence to cross to Porlezza and by the Lake of Lugano, and then from Lugano across the Monte Cenere to Bellinzona; to my great annoyance I found, however, at Milan that, owing to the long-standing quarrel between the Emperor and the Confederation, no travellers were allowed to pass immediately from the Austrian into the Ticinese territory, or vice versâ, and we were obliged, therefore, to defer seeing the beautiful Lake of Lugano, to go instead to Laveno, and thence to Bellinzona, by the Lago Maggiore; and our difficulty at Como was to find any true account of the time that it would take us to reach Laveno, or of the time at which we were likely to find the steamer to Magadino. In the end it was decided that we should start at seven the next morning, and accordingly soon after five I was out in the piazza taking notes and sketches of my last Italian building, the Broletto of Como.
In general character this is somewhat similar to the Broletto at Bergamo, but in real beauty it is scarcely inferior to any one building I have seen in Italy. Towards the