And these rivalries of Venice and her neighbour-towns, I recalled, were only part of the universal urban warfare—Genoa against Pisa, Siena against Florence, Gubbio against Perugia; these again breaking into smaller circles of contention, or intersected with larger, party against party, faction against faction, guild against guild, Guelph against Ghibelline, Montague against Capulet, Oddi against Baglioni, popolani against grandi, provinces against invaders, blood-feuds horrific, innumerable, the Guelph-Ghibelline contest alone involving 7200 revolutions and 700 massacres in its three centuries! And yet there is a reverse to the shield, and a iewelled scabbard to the sword.
I stood later in the Palazzo Malaspina of Pavia where, tradition says, the imprisoned Boëthius composed “The Consolations of Philosophy,” and here in a vestibule my eye was caught by a fragment of gilded gate hung aloft, and running to read the explanatory inscription, I found it—in translation—as follows:
“These Remnants of the Old Gates of Pavia
Thrice Trophies in Civil Wars
By a Magnanimous Thought Restored by Ravenna
Are To-day an Occasion for Rejoicing
Betwixt the Two Cities Desirous
Of Changing the Vestiges of the Old Discords
Into Pledges of Union & Patriotic Love
The XIII day of September MDCCCLXXVIII”