At Campo Formico, just before Udine is reached, Bonaparte and the Emperor of Austria signed the treaty, in October, 1797, by which Venice was so shamefully sacrificed by the French general to Austria. It was one of the deepest blots in the political history of Napoleon. The mean house in which this disastrous treaty was concluded is still pointed out.
It was in the Villa Passarino, near Udine, that this infamous treaty saw the light. Its gardens to-day are of the mixed formal and landscape variety, and great renown belongs to it because of the prominence of the Manins, its early owners. Borghetti restored the fabric in 1763, and it remains to-day a far more satisfactory structure to look at than many which are architecturally entitled to rank on a higher plane. Cypress and oak form the greater part of the verdure of the gardens.
Udine, of the picturesque name, is a city of twenty thousand inhabitants, once the capital of Friuli, and still surrounded by its ancient walls. In the centre is the castle, now a prison, built in 1517 by Giovanni Fontana on the height chosen by Attila to view the burning of Aquileja. Udine presents many features of resemblance in its buildings to the mother city, to whose rule it was so long subjected: it has its grand square, its Palazzo Publico, (1457)—a fine Gothic building on pointed arches instead of the Doge’s palace—the two columns, the winged lion of San Marco, and a campanile with two figures to strike the hours. Udine is indeed a little Venice, all but the canals and quays and the Adriatic’s waves.
South of Udine, on the marshy shore of the same series of lagoons which surround Venice itself, is Aquileja. Aquileja was in ancient times one of the most important provincial cities of Rome, and one of the chief bulwarks of Italy. Augustus often resided here, and its population was then estimated at 100,000. It was taken by Attila in 452, and reduced to ashes by that ferocious barbarian. It contains at present about 1,500 inhabitants, and even they have a hard time clinging to the shreds of life left them by a climate that is pestilential and damp.
From Venice and Treviso the Strada di Grande Communicazione runs to Vicenza and Verona, the former 63 kilometres from Treviso and the latter 50 kilometres farther on. At Vicenza the highroad is joined by another trunk-line from Padua, 32 kilometres to the southwest. All of these roads are practically flat and are good roads in good weather and bad roads—O! how bad!—in bad weather.
Few strangers stop off at Vicenza, on the line from Verona to Venice. Vicenza, then, is not lettered large in the guide books, and has only appeared of late in the public prints because of being the home of the romancer, Antonio Fogazzora. This makes it a literary shrine at all events, so we stopped to look it over. It was more than this; we first saw Vicenza by moonlight, and its silhouettes and shadows were as grimly ancient as if seen in a dream. Daylight discovered other charms. There were warm, lovable old Renaissance house fronts everywhere, with overhanging tiled roofs and advanced grilled balconies; and there was the Piazza dei Signori and its surrounding houses, almost entirely the work of the architect Palladio.