VERONA.
The road from Padua hither is a vile one; one can scarcely make twenty miles a-day in any part of the Venetian state. Its senators, accustomed to water carriage, have little care for us who go by land. The Palanzuola way is worse however, and I am glad once more to see sweet Verona.
Petruchio and Catharine might easily have met with all the adventures related by Grumio on their journey thither, but when once arrived she should have been contented. This city is as lovely as ever, more so than it was last April twelvemonth, when the spring was sullen and backward; every hill now glows with the gay produce of summer, and every valley smiles with plenty expected or pleasure possessed. The antiquities however look less respectable than when I left them; no amphitheatre will do after the Roman Colossæum, and our triumphal arch here looked so pitiful, I wondered what was come to it. So must it always happen to the performances of art, which we compare one against another, and find that as man made the best of them, so some man may in some moment make a better still: but the productions of nature are the works of God; we can only compare them with other things done by the same Almighty Master, whose power is equally discernible in all, from the fly’s antennæ to the elephant’s proboscis. Bozza’s collection gave birth to this last sentence; the farther one goes the more astonishing grows his musæum, the neglect of which is sure no credit to the present age. I find his cabinet much fuller than I left it, and adorned with many new specimens from the southern seas, besides flying-fish innumerable, beautifully preserved, and one predaceous creature caught in the very act of gorging his prey, a proof of their destruction being instant as that of the dwellers in Pompeia, who had their dinners dished when the eruption overwhelmed them.
We took leave of our learned friends here with concern, but hope to see them again, and tread the stucco floors so prettily mottled and variegated, they look like the cold mock turtle soup exactly, which London pastry-cooks keep in their shops, ready for immediate use.
What an odd thing is custom! here is weather to fry one in, yet after exercise, and in a state of the most violent perspiration, no consequences follow the use of iced beverages, except the sense of pleasure resulting from them at the moment. Should a Bath belle indulge in such luxury, after dancing down forty couple at Mr. Tyson’s ball, we should expect to hear next day of her surfeit at least, if not of her sudden death. Lying-in ladies take the same liberty with their constitutions, and say that no harm comes of it; and when I tell them how differently we manage in England, cry, “mi pare che dev’essere schiavitù grande in quel paese della benedetta libertà[37].” Fine muslin linen nicely got up is however, say they, one of the things to be produced only in Great Britain, and much do our Italian ladies admire it, though they look very charmingly with much less trouble taken. I lent one lady at some place, I remember, my maid, to shew her, as she so much wished it, how the operation of clear-starching was performed; but as soon as it began, she laughed at the superfluous fatigue, as she called it; and her servants crossed themselves in every corner of the room, with wonder that such niceties should be required.—Well they might! for I caught a great tall fellow ironing his lady’s best neck-handkerchief with the warming-pan here at Padua very quietly; and she was a woman of quality too, and looked as lovely, when the toilette was once performed, as if much more attention had been bestowed upon it.
PARMA.
We passed through Mantua the 18th of June, where nothing much attracted my notice, except a female figure in the street, veiled from head to foot, and covered wholly in black; she walked backward and forward along the same portion of the same street, from one to three o’clock, in the heat of the burning sun; her hand held out; but when I, more from curiosity than any better motive put money in it, she threw it silently away, and the beggars picked it up, while she held her hand again as before. This conduct, in any town of England, would be deemed madness or mischief; the woman would be carried before a magistrate to give an account of herself, should the mob forbear to uncase her till they came; or some charitable person would seize and carry her home, fill her pockets with money, and coax her out of the anecdotes of her past life to put in the Magazine; her print would be published, and many engravers struggle for its profits; the name at bottom, Annabella, or the Sable Matron; while novels would be written without end, and the circulating libraries would lend them out all the live-long day. Things are differently carried on however at Mantua: I asked one shopkeeper, and she gravely replied, “per divozione,” and took no further notice: another (to my inquiries, which appeared to him far odder than the woman’s conduct) said, The lady was possibly doing a little penance; that he had not minded her till I spoke, but that perhaps it might be some woman of fashion, who having refused a poor person roughly on some occasion, was condemned by her confessor to try for a couple of hours what begging was, and learn humanity from experience of evil. The idea charmed me; while the man coolly said, all this was only his conjecture; but that such things were done too often to attract attention; and hoped such virtue was not rare enough to excite wonder. My just applause of such sentiments was stopt by the laquais de place calling me to dinner; when he informed me, that he had asked about the person whose behaviour struck me so, and could now tell me all there was to be known; she was a lady of quality, he said, who had lost a dear friend on that day some years past, and that she wore black for two hours ever since upon its anniversary; but that she would now change her dress, and I should see her in the evening at the opera. My recollecting that if this were her case, I ought to have been keeping her company (as no one ever lost a friend so dear to them as was my incomparable mother, who likewise left me to mourn her loss on this day thirteen years), spoiled my appetite, and took from me all power of meeting the lady at the theatre.