The Asinelli tower was built in 1109, and its neighbour, which never achieved its completion, in the following year.
From Bologna to Modena is thirty-two kilometres and midway is Castel Franco or Forte Urbano, as it is variously known. It was formerly the Forum Gallorum of the Romans and still has its castel little changed from what it was in the days when Urban VIII built it.
Modena is mostly confounded by hurried travellers with Modane, though the latter is merely a railway junction where one is tumbled out in the middle of the night to make his peace with railway and customs officials.
Modena’s Palazzo Ducale, now the Palazzo Reale, was and is a vast, gaudy construction, not lovely but overpowering with a certain crude grandeur. A military school has now turned it to practical use. It never could have been good for much else. A picture gallery and Cæsar d’Este’s famous library are quartered in the Albergo Arti, built by the Duke Francesco III in the seventeenth century.
The library Biblioteca Estense was brought from Ferrara in 1598 by Cæsar d’Este on his expulsion by Clement VIII. It contained 100,000 volumes and 3,000 MSS. Three of the most learned men in Italy during the last century—Zaccaria, Tiraboschi and Muratori—were its librarians. Amongst the treasures were a gospel of the third century, a Dante with miniature of the fourteenth century, a collection of several hundred Provençal poems, etc.
Modena was the birthplace of Mary of Modena, the fascinating princess who became the Italian Queen of the English people, the consort of James II. She was an Italian Princess of the house of Este. Her mother was the Duchess Laura of Modena, daughter of Count Martinozzi and Margaret Mazarini, cousin of the great Cardinal Mazarin, and she was married, under his auspices, at the Chapel Royal of Compiègne, in 1655, by proxy, to Alfonso d’Este, hereditary Prince, and afterwards Duke Alfonso IV of Modena.
When Lord Peterborough, the envoy of the Duke of York, was shown the portrait of the Princess Mary he saw “a young Creature about Fourteen years of Age; but such a light of Beauty, such Characters of Ingenuity and Goodness as it surprised him, and fixt upon his Phancy that he had found his Mistress, and the Fortune of England.” He made every effort to meet her personally, but in vain; so he was introduced, “by means such as might seem accidental,” to the Abbé Rizzini, who was employed at Paris to negotiate the interests of the House of Este. This man attributed “many excellencies to Mary of Modena, yet he endeavoured to make them useless” to them by saying that she and her mother wished that she might take the veil. It was later learned that obstacles were put in the Duke of York’s way until he announced his willingness to become a Roman Catholic.
Reggio in Æmilia, passed on the road to Parma, is a snug little town, supposedly the birthplace of Ariosto. A house so marked compels popular admiration, but again it is possible that he was born within the citadel, since razed.
