Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber

by J. A. Wylie

FROM VERONA TO VENICE.

Interior of Verona—End of World seemingly near in Italy—The Monks and the Classics—A Cast-Iron Revolutionist—A Beautiful Glimpse—Railway Carriages—Railway Company—Tyrolese Alps—Dante's Patmos—Vicenza—Padua—The Lagunes—The Omnibus or Gondola—Silence of City—Sail through the Canals—Charon and his Boat—Piazza of Saint Mark.

The gates of Verona opened, and the enchantment was gone. He who would carry away the idea of a magnificent city, which the exterior of Verona suggests, must go round it, not through it. The first step within its walls is like the stroke of an enchanter's wand. The villa-begemmed city, with its ramparts and its cypress-trees, takes flight, and there rises before the traveller an old ruinous town, with dirty streets and a ragged and lazy population. It reminds one of what he meets in tales of eastern romance, where young and beautiful princesses are all at once transformed by malignant genuises into old and withered hags.

In truth, on entering an Italian town one feels as if the last trumpet were about to sound. The world, and all that is in it, seems old—very old. Man is old, his dwellings are old, his works are old, and the very earth seems old. All seems to betoken that it is the last age, and that the world is winding up its business, preparatory to the final closing of the drama. Commerce, the arts, empire,—all have taken their departure, and have left behind only the vestiges of their former presence. The Italians, living in a land which is but a sort of sepulchre, look as if they had voted that the world cannot outlast the present century, and that it is but a waste of labour to rebuild anything or repair anything. Accordingly, all is allowed to go to decay,—roads, bridges, castles, palaces; and the only thing which is in any degree cared for are their churches. Why make provision for posterity, when there is to be none? Why erect new houses, when those already built will last their time and the world's? Why repair their mouldering dwellings, or renew the falling fences of their fields, or replace their dying olives with young trees, or even patch their own ragged garments? The crack of doom will soon be upon them, and all will perish in the great conflagration. They account it the part of wisdom, then, to pass the interval in the least fatiguing and most agreeable manner possible. They sip their coffee, and take their stroll, and watch the shadows as they fall eastward from their purple hills. Why should they incur the toil of labouring or thinking in a world that is soon to pass away, and which is as good as ended already?

Of Verona I can say but little. My stay there, which was not much over the hour, afforded me no opportunity for observation. Its famous Amphitheatre, coeval with the great Coliseum at Rome, and the best preserved Roman Amphitheatre in the world, I had not time to visit. Its numerous churches, with their frescoes and paintings, I less regret not having seen. Its Biblioteca Capitolare, which is said to be an unwrought quarry of historic and patristic lore, I should have liked to visit. There, too, the monks of the middle ages were caught tripping. "Sophocles or Tacitus," in the words of Gibbon, "had been compelled to resign the parchment to missals, homilies, and the golden legend." The "Institutes of Caius," which were the foundation of the Institutes of Justinian, were discovered in this library palimpsested. A rumour had been spread that the author of the Pandects had reduced the "Institutes of Caius" to ashes, that posterity might not discover the source of his own great work. Gibbon ventured to contradict the scandal, and to point to the monks as the probable devastators. His sagacity was justified when Niebuhr discovered in the Biblioteca Capitolare of Verona these very Institutes beneath the homilies of St. Jerome. Verona yet retains one grand feature untouched by decay or time,—the river Adige,—which, passing underneath the walls, dashes through the city in a magnificent torrent, spanned by several noble bridges of ancient architecture, and turns in its course several large floating mills, which are anchored across the stream. The market-place, a large square, was profusely covered with the produce of the neighbouring plains. I purchased a roll of bread and a magnificent cluster of grapes, and lunched in fine style.

At Verona the railway resumes, and runs all the way to Venice. What a transition from the diligence—the lumbering, snail-paced diligence—to the rail. It is like passing by a single leap from the dark ages to modern times. Then only do you feel what you owe to Watt. In my humble opinion, the Pope should have put the steam-engine into the Index Expurgatorius. His priests in France have attended at the opening of railways, and blessed the engines. What! bless the steam-engine! Sprinkle holy water on the heads of Mazzini and Gavazzi. For what are these engines, but so many cast-iron Mazzinis and Gavazzis. The Pope should have anathematized the steam-engine. He should have cursed it after the approved pontifical fashion, in standing and in running, in watering and in coaling. He should have cursed it in the whole structure of its machinery,—in its funnel, in its boiler, in its piston, in its cranks, and in its stopcocks. I can see a hundred things which are sure to be crushed beneath its ponderous wheels. I can see it tearing ruthlessly onwards, and dashing through prejudices, opinions, usages, and time-honoured and venerated institutions, and sweeping all away like so many cobwebs. Was the Argus of the Vatican asleep when this wolf broke into the fold? But in he is, and the Pope's bulls will have enough to do to drive him out. But more of this anon.

The station of the railway is on the east of the town, in a spot of enchanting loveliness. It was the first and almost the only spot that realized the Italy of my dreams. It was in a style of beauty such as I had not before seen, and was perfect in its kind. The low lovely hills were ranged in crescent form, and were as faultless as if Grace herself had moulded them on her lathe. Their clothing was a deep rich purple. White villas, like pearls, sparkled upon them; and they were dotted with the cypress, which stood on their sides in silent, meditative, ethereal grace. The scene possessed not the sublime grandeur of Switzerland, nor the rugged picturesqueness of Scotland: its characteristic was the finished, spiritualized, voluptuous beauty of Italy. But hark! the railway-bell rings out its summons.

The carriages on the Verona and Venice Railway are not those strong-looking, crib-like machines which we have in England, and which seem built, as our jails and bridewells are, in anticipation that the inmates will do their best to get out. They are roomy and elegant saloons (though strong in their build), of about forty feet in length, and may contain two hundred passengers a-piece. They are fitted up with a tier of cushioned seats running round the carriage, and two sofa-seats running lengthways in the middle. At each end is a door by which the guard enters and departs, and passes along the whole train, as if it were a suit of apartments. So far as I could make out, I was the only Englese in the carriage, which was completely filled with the citizens and peasantry of the towns and rural districts which lay on our route,—the mountaineer of the Tyrol, the native of the plain, the inhabitant of the city of Verona, of Vicenza, of Venice. There was a greater amount of talk, and of vehement and eloquent gesture, than would have been seen in the same circumstances in England. The costume was varied and picturesque, and so too, but in a less degree, the countenance. There were in the carriage tall athletic forms, reared amid the breezes and vines of the Tyrol; and there were noble faces,—faces with rich complexions, and dark fiery eyes, which could gleam in love or burn in battle, and which bore the still farther appendage of moustache and beard, in which the wearer evidently took no little pride, and on which he bestowed no little pains. The company had somewhat the air of a masquerade. There was the Umbrian cloak, the cone-shaped beaver, the vest with its party-coloured lacings. There were the long loose robe and low-crowned hat of the priest, with its enormous brim, as if to shade the workings of his face beneath. There was the brown cloak of the friar; and there were hats and coats of the ordinary Frank fashion. The Leghorn bonnet is there unknown, as almost all over the Continent, unless among the young girls of Switzerland; and the head-gear of the women mostly was a plain cotton napkin, folded on the brow and pinned below the chin,—a custom positively ugly, which may become a mummy or a shaven head, but not for those who have ringlets to show. Some with better taste had discarded the napkin, and wore a smart cap. On the persons of not a few of the females was displayed a considerable amount of value, in the shape of gold chains, rings, and jewellery. This is an indication, not of wealth, but of poverty and stagnant trade. It was a custom much in use among oriental ladies before banks were established.

The plains eastward of Verona on the right were amazingly rich, and the uplands and heights on the left were crowned with fine castles and beautiful little temples. Yet the beauty and richness of the region could not soothe Dante for his lost Florence. For here was his "Patmos," if we may venture on imagery borrowed from the history of a greater seer; and here the visions of the Purgatorio had passed before his eye. After a few hours' riding, the fine hills of the Tyrolese Alps came quite up to us, disclosing, as they filed past, a continuous succession of charming views. When the twilight began to gather, and they stood in their rich drapery of purple shadows, their beauty became a thing indescribable. We saw Vicenza, where, of all the spots in Italy, the Reformation found the largest number of adherents, and where Palladio arose in the sixteenth century, to arrest for a while, by his genius, the decay of the architectural arts in Italy. We saw, too, the gray Padua looking at us through the sombre shadows of its own and the day's decline. We continued our course over the flat but rich country beyond; and as night fell we reached the edge of the Lagunes.

I looked out into the watery waste with the aid of the faint light, but I could see no city, and nothing whereon a city could stand. All was sea; and it seemed idle to seek a city, or any habitation of man, in the midst of these waters. But the engine with its great red eye could see farther into the dark; and it dashed fearlessly forward, and entered on the long bridge which I saw stretching on and away over the flood, till its farther end, like that of the bridge which Mirza saw in vision, was lost in a cloud. I could see, as we rode on, on the bosom of the flood beneath us, twinkling lights, which were probably lighthouses, and black dots, which we took for boats. After a five miles' run through scenery of this novel character, the train stopped, and we found that we had arrived, not in a cloud or in a quicksand, as there seemed some reason to fear, but in a spacious and elegant station, brilliantly lighted with gas, and reminding one, from its sudden apparition and its strange site, of the fabled palace of the Sicilian Fairy Queen, only not built, like hers, of sunshine and sea-mist. We were marched in file past, first the tribunal of the searchers, and next the tribunal of the passport officials; and then an Austrian gendarme opening to each, as he passed this ordeal, the door of the station-house, I stepped out, to have my first sight, as I hoped, of the Queen of the Adriatic.