To the savant and scholar the Ambrosian library in Milan is one of the special treasures of Europe. It contains some of the most rare and valuable manuscripts in the entire world,—some of Virgil’s with annotations from Petrarcha; a manuscript of Dante’s; drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, and other interesting matters of which no other copies exist.
The Magic Land is seen under its most bewitching spell in the region of the Italian lakes. The palace of Isola Bella; the charming gardens; the lake of Como, green-walled in hills whose luxuriant foliage and bloom form a framework for the white villas that cluster on their terraced slopes,—all form a very fairyland of ethereal, rose-embowered beauty. At night the lakes are a strange, unreal world of silver lights and shadows.
The completion of the Simplon tunnel has opened between Italy and Paris a route not only offering swifter facilities for transit, but adding another to the regions of beauty. This route has also still further increased the commercial importance of Milan, the portal and metropolis of Northern Italy. Milan has become the national centre of all scientific and technical pursuits, and it is fairly the Mecca for young men of Central and Southern Italy who are entering into the professions, or into civil and electrical engineering and other of the technical arts and industries.
Bologna, with her historic University, with the long covered arcades of the streets, the fountain, which is the work of Giovanni di Bologna, and the gallery where many of Guido’s best works are placed, has its individual interest for the tourist; and Verona, Pavia, Modena, Parma, and Turin all repay a visit from the leisurely saunterer in Italy.
Pisa offers to the visitor four interesting architectural monuments in the Duomo, the Baptistery, the Leaning Tower, and the Campo Santo, all of which are unique. The cathedral has unique designs in its black and white marbles that render it almost as much an object of artistic study as is the cathedral in Siena. The view from the summit of the Leaning Tower reveals the Mediterranean six miles in the distance, gleaming like a sea of silver. The Campo Santo dates from the thirteenth century, when the earth of which it is composed was brought (in 1228) from the holy places in Jerusalem, conveyed to the city (then a seaport) by fifty galleys sent out by the Republic of Pisa. The interior walls of the Campo Santo are covered with fresco paintings by Orcagna which are one of the artistic spectacles of the country in their extravagant portrayal of theological beliefs, so realistically presented in their dramatic scenes from Paradise and from Hades, as to leave nothing to the imagination. The fantasies in this emblematic sculpture of memorial monuments over a period of seven hundred years can be seen in the Campo Santo of Pisa,—a strange and often a most grotesque medley.
Genoa is well named La Superba. Her thoroughfares are streets of palaces. Her terraced gardens and villas, reached by the subterranean funicular street railway, are regions of unique and incomparable beauty, with the blue Mediterranean at their feet. Genoa is the paradise for walking. The streets are largely inaccessible to carriages, but the admirable street electric railway penetrates every locality. It passes in dark tunnels under the hills, reappears on the high terraces, and climbs every height. From the crest of one of these Corsica can often be seen. All the hill-slopes are a dream of pictorial grandeur, with their terraces, their palaces, their sculpture, fountains, and flowers. On the summit of almost every hill there is a fortress, and often ramparts which are silhouetted, in dark masses, against the sky. Orange groves abound on the terraces, often showing the golden fruit, buds, and blossoms all at the same time.
Genoa is fairly a metropolis of sculpture. The great families have themselves perpetuated in portrait statues rather than in painted portraits. In one of the grand ducal palaces in the Via Balbi the visitor may see, not only the life-size statues and the busts of the family ancestry, but one group comprising nine figures, where three generations are represented, in both sitting and standing poses, ingeniously combined.
The churches of Genoa are among the richest in Europe. That of the Annunziata, the special monument of the Lomellini family, glitters and gleams with its gold ceilings and rich frescoes. The cathedral has the special allurement of the emerald dish which King Solomon received as a gift from the Queen of Sheba. The little “street of the jewellers” is an alluring place,—so narrow that one can almost stand in the centre of the road and touch the shop windows on either hand, and these windows dazzle the eye with their fascinating glitter of gold and silver filigree work and their rich jewels.
CAMPO SANTO, GENOA